We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Hope Horner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hope, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
At Lemonlight, we’ve moved beyond setting ourselves apart from the norm. Our high-quality videos and innovative video production process have raised the bar and set a new industry standard. The path to creating and completing a video has historically been messy and clunky, what with the multiple moving parts and hand-offs from pre- to post-production, and we decided to change that. By creating a state-of-the-art video production platform that streamlines communication, hiring crews in dozens of cities across the globe, and providing our clients with strategic brainstorming sessions, we’ve upended the way videos are made.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Lemonlight was created because Daniel Marlow and Chad Rogers (fellow co-founders) and I saw how opaque the video production business was. We knew that video was the future of marketing, but that it was an expensive and confusing landscape for small businesses to navigate. Thus, Lemonlight was born in 2014 to provide small- and medium-sized businesses access to high-quality video content.
While we’ve grown immensely over the years to work with known Fortune 500 clients like Uber, Amazon, and AirBnB, we’re still connected to our roots and we continue to make dozens of videos for small businesses looking to scale and expand. Reflecting on the past eight years of Lemonlight’s growth, there are two things we’re most proud of: the way we’ve become pioneers in the video production space and the way we build relationships (with clients, amongst coworkers, and across our teams around the world). We developed our video production platform to improve the video production process for everyone involved and it has since successfully eliminated many of the communication and technical issues that were once commonplace. Creating a product that empowers clients and creatives alike is priceless to us, and the team we have behind the platform, in the Production room, and in the Editing room are all all-stars too. Lemonlight’s culture is special and we manage to build genuine, helpful, and personable relationships all while we develop calculated performance creative–that’s probably why our clients keep coming back to work with us and why our employees spend time with one another outside of the workplace: Lemonlight’s work and team are equally inspiring.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Lemonlight was self-funded. We bought a Squarespace website for $12 and a Mailchimp account for $100. We pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps as we got to work. It was a challenge for us to start a business on our own, without any outside capital, but we sold $30k in videos our first month and haven’t stopped growing and creating high-quality video content since then!
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
To quote HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah, “As a startup: first you fight death, next you fight stagnation, then you fight complexity. It’s a noble fight.”
Speaking candidly, Lemonlight fought death in our first few years in business–we had a small team and for nearly every payroll cycle, we had to write manual checks and hope that the entire team didn’t cash them the same day. We were literally living day-to-day back then.
Three years into the business, we made adjustments, acquired more clients, and raised our prices to reflect the value we provide, we were able to not only uncross our fingers, but also start making real moves to advance the video production space.
A healthy, happy company, today, our Lemonlight team is 100+ strong (and growing), we boast a portfolio of 16,000+ successful videos, and our video production platform is shaking up the industry. It wasn’t easy getting here, but we’re thriving and only excited for the future!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lemonlight.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lemonlightmedia/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lemonlight-media
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lemonlightmedia
Image Credits
Lemonlight