Essays and ephemera
Arguably the best 21 minutes of comedy in the last two decades is the Rick James episode of Chappelle’s Show. I’m not going to quote it here because this is a PG-13 blog, but it’s a masterpiece. If you haven’t watched it in a while, go and watch it again because it holds up well after all these years.
Continue reading “How Chappelle’s Show Influenced My Demos”
A year ago this month I was asked to make a video of a demo for a customer. It sounded easy. Flash forward a day and I still wasn’t happy with the product, but I had a deadline, so I handed it off to the customer.
Flash forward to June. I’m sitting in that customer’s offices with their new CEO and my Regional Vice President of sales. We didn’t have an agenda, but I’m asked to pull up the video. I warn the two of them that this was my first video so it’s rough, but we watch it together. We pause every minute or so and chat. It’s summer and it’s hot outside, but I’m hot under my collar having to hear my voice in front of others. The most sobering thing about being a sales engineer is having to hear your own voice. The meeting ends and self-critiques about my videos aside, it was positive. Two days later we landed the new logo customer, and they’re now off doing some really awesome things on Salesforce.
I learned a lot from the first vide, but now that I’ve done a baker’s dozen videos this year, I learned a few lessons that I want to share. Since Martin Scorsese is probably my favorite director, I’m going to reference him and his movies exclusively in this post.
Continue reading “What I Learned from a Year of Making Demo Videos”