We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan & Amber a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan & Amber, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

Okay so our first client wasn’t actually our first client. Let me explain.

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Ryan accidentally became an influencer on TikTok by making a video that inexplicably and spontaneously went viral, shooting his audience into the hundreds of thousands, literally overnight. When he built a portfolio website, he shared it with his audience, and a few people slid into his DM’s (Is that still a phrase, or has it been phased out by the Skibidi Sigma Rizz Brigade?) to commission some projects.

One such project was a documentary featurette about a life-altering, emotional-barrier-smashing, inner-child-healing, weekend retreat (https://hpybx.com/videographer-dallas) called Essentials One.

We came. We filmed. We edited. We edited some more. We delivered.

Amber was all: “Why don’t we just do this all the time?”

So now we do.

Ryan & Amber, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

What problems do we solve for our clients? After doing this for only a year, we’ve already discovered that we make the most impact when we’re solving connection problems for them.

Of course, “marketing” means some form of connecting brands to their audiences. But we can just as well use marketing strategy to connect a business to itself. Sometimes front-line associates need to be connected to the company mission. Other times, teams need to be connected to…well, each other.

We’ve learned that just about any business problem that can be solved through human-centric storytelling is really a connection problem—and we’ve also seen that <i>most</i> business problems can be solved through human-centric storytelling.

And y’know what? We’re pretty proud of the fact that we’ve managed to figure that out in the midst of what has largely felt like chasing our tail and calling it running a business.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We’re still in diapers as a company, and we already have a “the shoot from hell” story.

We signed a client for a large event. We were super excited to help them and get our working relationship off to a great start. In the weeks leading up to the event, it was one thing after another going wrong, all the way down to the wire when one of us fell ill and we had to bring in an old filming buddy of Ryan’s to take over.

On the day of the shoot, we found out the client had sold more than ten times as many tickets as the venue could hold, so it became so crowded the fire marshal shut down the event and kicked everyone out early (oof)!

The organizer mentioned sending an apology email to all the participants (some of whom flew from other countries to attend), which we recommended getting on video to capture the human emotion and vulnerability. Hashtag pivot!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We mostly had (and continue having) to unlearn that any of this is simple. That may seem obvious, but it’s less so than one might think.

Wanna run ads? Gotta get some data on what kind of ads will work.

Wanna make a landing page? Gotta get some data on how to optimize it for conversion.

Wanna find leads? Gotta know where (and how) to find the qualified ones (and get clear on what makes them qualified).

But here’s the thing. You HAVE to be informed about these kinds of things, and you also HAVE to learn them from experience. It’s a weird balance to strike, between being guided by existing data, and using trial and error to create our own.

It’s throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, but doing our homework first on what spaghetti to throw, and how to throw it, and where, and when. Every decision could potentially be the wrong one, a waste of time, a waste of money, a complete failure, or a wildly unexpected success for reasons we can only learn by examining after the fact.

We have had to learn how to be comfortable knowing that we don’t (and can’t) KNOW that what we’re about to do will be the best move, and also get comfortable knowing that there’s no way to even know how far off our best guess is.

Even the simplest decisions have to be undergirded by all of this groundwork. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, but alltimes it’s unsimple. And that’s had to become our home base. We even have a joke that any sentence beginning with, “All we have to do is…” is fatally and intrinsically flawed.

I’m not sure we went into it assuming things would be simple, but nonetheless, discovering that they’re not has definitely felt very un-learny.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hpybx.com
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• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/happybox-productions/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hpybx