Douglas Duvall  00:00

Doug, Welcome to Creative context where we’re having conversations about creatives and the professionals who hire creatives. I’m Doug Duvall, owner of Motif Media, we do video production in Boston, and I have my co host with me.

Eric Wing  00:22

Yep, Eric Wing, located in Cambridge. Darby Digital is name of the business, and we work with businesses from a digital marketing strategy standpoint, web development and we’re getting into AI now, so a lot of things, but Yeah, happy to be here. It’s it’s nice to be back after the little break we had for for the holiday season. I

Douglas Duvall  00:46

really needed some time off, and I was talking to you this week, I completely unplugged for probably about 10 days, and Monday, I was really regretting not sort of checking in for an hour. Yeah.

Eric Wing  01:03

I know that feeling, yeah, but you had that time. I think, you know, if I could do it over again, I’d rather have, like, a really rough Monday and Tuesday and take off 10 days, honestly, like the fact that I checked in every day to make sure that I didn’t have a crazy Monday. In retrospect, it’s like, I can’t get that time back, right? So I think, I think kudos to you for just unplugging. It’s a hard thing to do in our society. It

Douglas Duvall  01:29

definitely is, and I feel like a lot happened from in those 10 days to just around the world, and you, unfortunately, had had a little mishap last night, right? Yeah, yeah.

Eric Wing  01:46

So I commute to I commute, I commute to the office from about just under four miles from my house to here. And and I love it for a lot of reasons, but the part that I don’t love is how motorists sometimes don’t see you. And imagine what is like when you’re sitting in traffic in a car and you feel like nobody’s paying attention. Imagine when you’re on a bike, you have that same feeling as magnify. So, yeah, I got hit by a car last night. You know, not to take it lightly, but a little banged up today, but, you know, working through it and just makes you stronger, and just makes me stronger. That’s the way I like to look at it. We’ll see well, I

Douglas Duvall  02:27

mean, that’s this kudos to you. You know, you got hit by a car last night, and you’re here to here to record. So, yeah,

Eric Wing  02:36

I am dedicated to the show. Okay?

Douglas Duvall  02:40

So we thought today, Eric and I are speaking. We just, we wanted to touch on our backgrounds, and, you know, kind of what got us to where we are today, and this is going to be kind of fluid, and we’ll just kind of talk about why we do the things we do. And I don’t really know where to start, whether you or me, but I guess I’ll kind of kick it off. But I’ve always been kind of, from a young age. I was drawn to movies and, you know, science fiction and sort of fantasy, you know, look Lord of the Rings style stuff and but the thing that really got me into video production was skateboarding videos. There was a show on MTV called jackass, those Millennials, Generation, yeah, and older, because that show really kind of clicked with me, like anybody can kind of do this, right, that that was kind of the appeal to that show is put the stunt stuff aside. You know, I never went down that road, but like, if you have a camera, right? This was pre YouTube as well, but it was kind of a precursor to YouTube. I think, I think a lot of people probably drew inspiration from that show, and skateboard movies were kind of a extension of that as well. And that’s what really sent me down the path of video production and why I went to school for it. Hmm,

Eric Wing  04:19

yeah, it’s interesting. I really like that you proposed this today because we’re gonna learn more about each other. In fact, my favorite all time skateboarding movie is gleaming the cube. Gleaming the cube Christian. Christian Slater must have been early 90s, late 80s. Check it out. Okay, I will. It’s a production. It’s not like a skater. It’s not like homegrown is, you know, it’s a Hollywood production. But, oh, okay, yeah, it’s during, during my younger years, I got into, I was, I was a skater, and I was on, like, but I was on those, like, wide boards in the 90s, like the big board. Words, like Mike McGill, like Yeah, Tony Hawk, like those guys, when they’re in their prime, the

Douglas Duvall  05:05

skateboard movie is kind of a my generation, where there’s so the big brands at the time, like zero skateboards, girl skateboards, chocolate, which is part of girl, but the sorry video, the titles are kind of escaping me at the moment, zero or die. I think that was a very popular one, Jamie Thomas, Jeff Rowley, those were kind of the guys when I when I was, I don’t know, you know, 1214, that, that kind of time, but those were the people we were looking up to,

Eric Wing  05:52

yeah, and here you are now, you’re, you’re, you’re using your video skills To help market businesses.

Douglas Duvall  05:59

Yeah, very far away from skateboarding at the moment, but

Eric Wing  06:04

yeah, for me, it was, gosh. So when I first started the company, it wasn’t called Darby at that time. We’re rewinding about 16 years, actually maybe 17. We just turned the calendar and it was just web, web design, web development. And the funny thing is, I came to that because of my love of music, and specifically live music of bands who allow and even encourage bootlegging. And so I was a huge collector of these live performances. And I would trade with people, you know, had these elaborate spreadsheets to list all of the shows that I have. And so I can, you know, complete my collection or whatever, right? So, and with organizing those on spreadsheet, I found that I was spending a lot of time like prettying up the spreadsheet. I really liked designing the spreadsheet, and this was also back where Apple used to do dot Mac. I don’t know if you remember that, like mobile me and you had iWeb, where you can make a website from the Mac directly. And so that spreadsheet turned into this, you know, for anyone that has used the iWeb tool, it was pretty ingenious of Apple to figure it out, but it’s pretty rudimentary web, web design stuff. But that’s that piqued my interest to the degree where I don’t know if I want to admit this or not, but I guess it was a long time ago, I just started telling people I made websites and people in what, you know, people kept hiring me to do websites, and I would, I would take a project and then spend two, three days figuring out how to do the thing I said I was going to do. And, you know, one thing led to another. You know, obviously now we do more than just web design, web development, and certainly we know what we’re doing. But yes, it’s funny how like you you kind of you come around to what you’re what you ultimately end up on, but the line’s not straight always, you know, like that, like that nature, what

Douglas Duvall  08:38

were you doing before Darby? Like, was it just not marketing at all? Like, what were you? Yeah,

Eric Wing  08:44

in fact, I knew nothing about marketing. My degree was in business and and was a was a focus on visual communication, so that, technically could be called marketing, but it’s like taking a lot of information and making it easy for people to understand through like design, was the way that I was using it, but I wasn’t even using it. I was my background was managing other people’s businesses. I was in corporate coffee for a while running, running multiple units for Pete’s coffee, which is primarily a California coffee brand that was that had a footprint here in Boston for a little while, but, but where things really started to get shook up was when I took a job at Apple in 2007 my first day was the launch of the iPhone. It was the hell of a first day. I’m like, is this what it’s like? No wonder if one I was losing all of my staff at the coffee shop in Newton. Everybody was the Natick. The Natick mall had just put the Apple store in and so they were recruiting like mad. And I lost, I think, three people to that Apple Store. And so I’m like, What is this apple all about? And I checked it out. I found and they also. They also recruited me, so it happened quick, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time, because it was right when I started to tell people I was a web designer and I had access to all the tools, and I had access to the people, a lot of my friends were I don’t know if Apple still does this, but the creative they would call creatives, like the you go in and you go in and you can sit with someone, and they’ll teach you how to use different applications on the Mac. Yeah. But anyway, I was able to hire people. I had some of the staff at Apple were some of my first employees, and we would snipe customers from the Apple floor. We weren’t supposed to do that. But you know, when word gets around and customers ask, you know, and, yeah, so that’s, that’s sort of the the track leading up to I had when I left Apple, was the first time I went into actual marketing. I was, I was a marketing manager. I had sort of leveraged the fact that I was doing web web design, I leveraged that into a marketing role with a publisher, and I became their marketing managers for like, their trade shows and stuff like that. And I was there for about four years before I just while I was growing up the company, and you get to that point where, where your side, your side gig, is producing the same amount of revenue as your full time job, and you have to make that decision. And I’m really glad that I made the decision to to not take the safe route. You know,

Douglas Duvall  11:38

it’s funny, you say Apple, they I remember launch of the iPhone. I was a senior in high school, 2007 I remember very kind of, it’s kind of seared my I drove by a AT T store in the line to get in to get their phones. I remember it. Yeah, the Apple recruited. I didn’t end up getting asked back to a final interview, but I was recruited by Apple at a college. Did they do big group interviews back then?

Eric Wing  12:16

Yeah, I was running. I would run them, yeah, like on Sunday nights, you do a big hiring workshop. I figure what they’re called, yeah,

Douglas Duvall  12:24

I did not perform well at that group meeting, and that was kind of the end of it. But that’s funny. I didn’t I did not know that you

Eric Wing  12:38

I owe a lot to Apple. In fact, this is gonna sound really, really incredible, but when I started my business out of my kitchen, I didn’t have internet. I started an internet business without internet in my house. And we’re not going back that far, but we are going back far enough where you could get by on that. I mean, I just used my neighbor’s Wi Fi. I remember those days? It just, you might not. Actually, that’s it. I do. I do pretty far back. We people didn’t protect their password. They didn’t protect their networks. You just jump on, like, like, why would I? I don’t know what that says about me, but I was a different person back then. But it’s a different time. Yeah, it’s a different time and but I owe a lot to Apple because, you know, I learned a lot. I, you know, I didn’t have my first computer until, I think it was 2004 and here I am working at Apple three years later. Like, how does that? How does that happen, right? So, the the quick, the quick catch up. I like to think of it as, like working at Apple, I got caught up real fast on technology and then started to outpace the common person, right? So, but generally, the people that I was hiring at Apple, they were, they were already outpacing all of their peers, right? They were kind of the the fan boys, fan people, fan people of Apple, and they knew more than I do. But, yeah, that really I owe a lot to all of that. If I oftentimes look back and if I hadn’t gone the apple route, you know, yeah, everyone does that, I feel like you always think back like, Oh, what if I had gone this way instead? But, but yeah, Apple. Apple was pretty great, pretty great short, short stand, also about four years, but just enough to, like, build a, you know, build up the knowledge base I needed, yeah. So, yeah,

Douglas Duvall  14:33

yeah. So I, I went to, I went to film school. And I guess, technically, it’s not film school, Fitchburg State. I guess it is because I did, I shot on 16 millimeter film, and that’s my degree. Was film productions. It’s they don’t have film anymore, I believe the last I heard. So it’s unfortunate, but it is kind of dead at this point. And. A lot of places that will develop it. I think it’s down. I think it’s down to one place in the US, the ABLE Cine is still open. Wow, I could be wrong, but it’s, it’s, that’s, that’s the big crux of it is, where do you get the film developed? And right out of college, I had that one interview with Apple, but thankfully, the company I interned at ended up hiring me, and I worked there about four years. This is a small ad agency, family owned, operated, still open to this day. I still, you know, they’re very much still a part of my life, not so much the day to day, but we check in with each other occasionally. They still hire, they hire motif to do some work as well, but in a lot of ways, that four years is kind of parallels to you working at Apple. It was like a master’s degree, right? Of learning, kind of the business side and the clients, a little bit of everything, right? Business clients equipment and that practical equipment, because we’re coming from film school, you know, we’d load up four or five cars with light stands and apple boxes and all the great, great stuff, and take all the time to pre light, do all this stuff, but in a in a commercial world like I worked at at this company, that was not the case. We’re trying to we’re trying to show up and get in and out within maybe two hours or four hours or whatever. We weren’t sort of rolling out the red carpet for a Hollywood esque production. So I kind of learned that side of things, and that segue to me kind of going out on my own and really starting at zero, and struggled with my own business for a number of years, and then got an opportunity to work at a corporation, doing video production for them. I think they’ve since been bought out. The company was called IDG. Ironically, they were a magazine that wrote about tech companies, right? So it was a magazine about technology, and they’ve refused to sort of move their asset from magazines to websites and blogs, gotcha. And unfortunately that, you know, that’s kind of, that was kind of the death of that company, in a weird way. So they played catch up, right? And, you know, they hired a bunch of video people, so they were late to the game, so to speak. So they kind of just threw money at, you know, new new media. But I went through a merger. I kept my job, but I just the corporate world is not for me, and got caught up with Nick again NS builders. Worked directly for Ennis builders, the construction company, for about four years, closer to five years, probably, and then we split out to motif. So it’s been a I’ve gotten a little bit of everything, the solo route for a number of years, the small ad agency, the corporation, and then sort of being the video guy slash tech guy, because since I know video, I know everything, right, I became the guy,

Eric Wing  18:42

yeah, that happens on my side. Still websites. Oh, can you tell you about this telecommunications issue I’m having? Yeah, we’re onboarding

Douglas Duvall  18:51

this guy today. Can you set up his email and his laptop and Sure, let me google it.

Eric Wing  18:57

Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. I think one of the things that I when I look back on my journey, I think my time in retail and sort of restaurant, you know, as a waiter, you know, I skipped over that part. But if I go back, be like college and like before running other people’s businesses. I, you know, I grew up in a small town in Maine, not a lot of opportunity for jobs unless you want to work on a farm or you want to work at the grocery store. And just from there up through my early My early life was always about customer service and pleasing and appeasing, and, you know, conflict resolution. And, you know, at Apple, I learned a lot about that kind of stuff, because people come in and they say all sorts of stuff when their phone is not working, or their computer busts or something. And what’s interesting is, I bring that. Then subconsciously, I just bring it into my day to day now, and I do think that’s one of our differentiators, is the way that we through my influence, through the team, and how we handle those similar situations. But now on the client side, right, like projects, for the most part, always go quite smooth, that sometimes they don’t. I think the difference between a successful, you know, company that is is reaching its potential and versus a company that may not be reaching its potential is, is conflict resolution. How do you you know? How do you handle the difficult conversation? Right? And that’s, that’s a lot of what I learned that I was, I took a couple years off, and I was out in Colorado, is decided I just wanted to snowboard and and now I have a lot of responsibility. And so what they say out there, they say, you, you go for the winners, you stay for the summers. Just beautiful. You know, I was as in the Rockies and but at that time, I learned the delicacy of of interacting with celebrities where I worked. A lot of the celebrities would stay there, because it was right at the base of Vail mountain, and all the nuances of that, and it taught me that you can’t have a this might sound obvious to anyone listening to this, and maybe to you, but you really can’t have a blanket approach to how you handle people. It really needs to be, you know, reading the room right, and understanding what is the message that you’re trying to communicate, and how would this person potentially with all of their with the context that they have. How will they receive it or not receive it, etc. And I think the the walking that fine line of giving good customer service, but also giving privacy and respect to people that were extremely famous in the 90s taught me that, and I didn’t realize it at the time. At the time, I’m like, calling home and saying, Hey, I just, you know, remember David Blaine? Remember that guy, a magician. He like, hangs himself upside down and like, you know, it’s like, I was like, star struck by realizing, now, looking back that like Melissa Etheridge and like Pat Sajak and like all these people that are like, I don’t even know if they’re around anymore, but you know that there’s a value in that, is my point. And it’s, it’s really cool when you, when you take time and kind of reflect back on, like, what are the skills I use on a daily basis, and where do they come from? You know, if you can, sometimes you don’t know, but sometimes you can draw that, that line back to stuff that we’re talking about today, you know, yeah, and so, you know, nowadays it’s like, you know, during the like, the first I’m curious about your first project. I’ll talk about mine. My first project was this, this customer at Apple, this guy, he, I knew nothing about this world of like, custom apparel. So he, he had a business. He was working out of his house. He would like you would go to him and say, you want, you know, softball shirts made or something. And he would work with his vendors to get the shirt made, like, the shirt, type, size, all that kind of stuff. And then he would essentially just be a middle man, and made him a website. And I remember that I would he lived pretty far away from me, and I would drive maybe over one hour to go have a meeting with him. And I don’t remember thinking twice about it, you know, because of that, like, raw excitement that you have that somebody is hiring you to to do a thing. I remember driving to Rhode Island for like, $500 a few times, right? Like, like, the things that you know, we were doing the early days, but that project, oh, gosh, I wish I could find it. I wish I could find that website now, but it was like a template in Dreamweaver Adobe’s, remember Dreamweaver? Yeah, I do, yeah. Gosh, what about you? What was your first project,

Douglas Duvall  24:25

first professional project. When I was an intern, they sort of threw me on a project that had a low budget or whatever, as for the YWCA in Worcester.

Eric Wing  24:38

Oh, hey, we’ve done work with them, have you? Yeah, it

Douglas Duvall  24:42

was for their 100 year I think it’s for their 100 year anniversary. Oh, wow. I don’t know if you remember or worked with them at the time. It sort of been 2011

Eric Wing  24:55

Yeah, maybe a little bit after that.

Douglas Duvall  24:57

So I made a video. The I guess it was for a presentation. I guess it really wasn’t for YouTube. It was for an audience. And my the my boss, I guess, was had a different vision for what I made, but he goes, You know what? Keep your version. Do my version as well. We’ll send it to the client, and we’ll let them decide they ended up picking my version, awesome, which you know, all right, but it did end up being kind of a success, and I think how I handled it ended up being probably why they hired me. But I think this ties back to something you said, I’m from, I’m from Maine as well. And I think that there’s something in Mainers about wanting to do a good job and please people. I just, I think it’s a very consistent thing. There’s another mutual connection between us, Asher Nichols. He’s a builder here, and I think he builds mostly in, like, Newton, that area, but he’s from Maine as well. And he definitely kind of has that same characteristic, I’d say. So there’s this weird, weird connection to Mainers, yeah, living in Massachusetts,

Eric Wing  26:17

and, like, how we met, yeah, the three of us, we’re doing work with Asher now, and I can see the main tendencies in him. I can see it. I don’t think I knew that he was from Maine, so that’s interesting.

Douglas Duvall  26:31

But the My First Project is a solo, you know, as my first solo business, I had moved back to Maine, but he was based in Norwood. And you were talking about driving, I would drive down to Norwood probably once a week, which is a two plus hour drive. Yes, sometimes it would be for an hour to get, like a voiceover from him, but not thinking anything of it, yeah, you know, just like you said,

Eric Wing  27:03

yeah, not even charging for our time, like I wasn’t even charging for the drive time,

Douglas Duvall  27:07

nothing or the voiceover. I’m just like, I need the voiceover. So,

Eric Wing  27:11

yeah, I want to come to get it. Yeah, come down and get it.

Douglas Duvall  27:14

Actually, he didn’t those early days. I did all that work for nothing because he had a T Shirt Company. And it was like, Cool. And I thought this was going to be like, Oh, once people see this, this is going to change every you know, yep. And it builders, is my other client, so I was driving down to Boston for him once a week. So I was driving down here constantly. And I eventually was like, I gotta, I gotta move back down here because it’s being crazy. But for a solid 10 months, I was making two to three trips a week to the Boston, Greater Boston area from,

Eric Wing  27:53

yeah, it’s a lot of time on the road. Lot of time on the road. Yeah, yeah. I a lot of similar stories. I was just just will, you know, and I wasn’t trying to, like, necessarily, build a portfolio. I was, but you know that example I told you about Rhode Island. I drove down to Rhode Island in the rain, during rush hour, to Providence for the for the chance to do a logo project that would value $500 I did get, I did get a nice meal out of it. I was a for a restaurant. I got a nice Italian meal out of it, but did not get the project. Yeah, you know. But it’s like, I remember, and it’s interesting, like, I still have it. I still have that, that like hunger, right? But it’s just more refined. Now it’s more of a mature, you know, still, still, still, I guess, still on the hunt. But I guess the difference is now I value my time more appropriately. I think there was a lot of free work in those early days there, like we’re talking about, a lot of travel. A lot of times I was, I was spending more money than I was making on projects, right? All that kind of stuff, taking them, taking the lumps, and I it. What’s amazing about it is and I see in other aspects of my life, and maybe you do too, but the that I don’t remember feeling like it was too much, or that I was doing anything extraordinary or outside of the norm. I just felt like, everyone does this so laser focused on, you know, getting the work. I want to do my job. I want to do, I want to have, I want to build a client base of clients. So, yeah, like I said, it’s still there. However, it’s like, you know, like when you mature in your. Career, even if you’re working for someone else, that starts to look different, right? Like, for sure, you have other responsibilities. And now I have, you know, employees to we can’t do as much free work anymore because I incur payroll costs. So if I want to do free work, I have to do it myself, and then I don’t have the time to do it. So it’s just a different, different angle,

Douglas Duvall  30:19

yeah, for sure. And one last quick note about free work. So that I was telling you about the T Shirt Company I drive down. It did for a vast majority of the work I did for him was for free, and he was, he was a cool guy. I don’t dislike him. He’s a very energetic, cool dude, and he’s like, I’ll get you your first, you know, 10 clients or whatever, like, I’ll get you those, and that’ll kind of be, you know, a trade effectively. So he, to his credit, he did get me two very, very good leads, but they both ended up wanting to get free work as well. In the world of free work, doing free work for one person, leads to them getting you doing free work for someone else. In my experience, yep. So I quickly learned like, Okay, I gotta, I gotta kind of change this model a little bit, yep, because, you know, I did it for another company. It was an exercise class thing. I did free work for them. And they’re like, we’re gonna get you the next client, whatever. And sure enough, their next referral. Like, you know, if we could do this first one for free, and I’m like, this is a very vicious cycle, yeah, at that point I literally, it was probably four months in of my, you know, my first business, I was just like, I’m done with this.

Eric Wing  31:55

Yeah, it’s amazing to hear that you had a very similar experience, I think because that’s the, that’s the energy that you’re putting out there, that we’re putting out there, and desperate.

Douglas Duvall  32:05

Like, I guess in my case, it’s like, I’m desperate, like, I want to build the portfolio. And they took advantage of that,

Eric Wing  32:11

yeah, and that’s how they refer you. That’s the first thing they say, because the customers, like, oh, how much do they cost? Like, why she didn’t charge me anything? I was

Douglas Duvall  32:19

supposed to tell you this, but yeah,

Eric Wing  32:21

yeah, exactly desperate. And then the next evolution of that is not charging enough, right? Like under, under charging. And then all the referrals expect the same, really reduced rate. I remember one time where I started to, started to feel like I needed to start transitioning. It was someone in a different networking group. Different networking group. I was in back, I don’t know, 2015, or something, and, and I said, I can’t believe we were doing that for this, but she, she goes, how much? How much is, How much for a website? And I’m like, oh, you know, 1200 bucks. And she’s like, Oh, $1,200 for the whole website, and like, Yeah. And she’s like, okay. And I’m like, oh, okay, something’s not right here. She was expecting, you know, yeah, and, and so, yeah, it’s just the I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t want to sound Woo, woo, with like, energy and things, but like it is, people can smell that on you, that desperation, or the the lack of confidence in yourself to to price to the market, right? And I think I still deal with it from here, from time to time. And I I also deal dealt with not so much anymore, because the energy that I’ve shifted the way that I do business, but got a lot of that like, oh, you know, you like you want to, we can’t pay you, but we can give you shares, or we can, you know, the exposure that you’re going to get from this project is going to open up all sorts of new doors for you, and we’re going to give referrals like people, I think, have the they have, they are well intentioned when they when they say that. But from our perspective, it’s like we’re not able to buy groceries with that type of promise, right? And that’s where I feel like a lot of young professionals get caught up in that cycle that you’ve very well outlined, like the free cycle. You know,

Douglas Duvall  34:29

I do. I, despite what I just what we’ve been talking about, I am a believer in bartering, meaning if, if you, if I desperately needed, like, if I needed a website and you needed video, like, let’s do $1 for dollar swap. I do $10,000 worth of video, you give me $10,000 worth of website. I am a believer in that. I think that’s, that’s the way the world ran before, yeah. Know, dollar bills and pieces of gold coin like, but it’s the theoretical right? The like you said, shares theoretical value. Yep, that probably, and the grand scheme of things never works out, yeah, yeah, in favor of you doing the upfront business,

Eric Wing  35:22

exactly, exactly. I know, yeah, we’re coming up on time. And I think the I think it was super interesting to learn more about your your journey to where you are now. And I know in our other videos, we talk about the work we how we’ve expanded beyond those, those early days. Certainly, I know my, my business, looks much different now than it did, you know, back in like, 2007 2008 you know, sure, but, um, but it’s cool to go back to the to the early, early days today,

Douglas Duvall  35:54

yeah, just likewise is. It’s always cool to kind of just see the progression. So yeah, we’re coming. We’re way over time today, but check us out. We’re on YouTube. We’re on Apple. Podcast, Spotify, anywhere you download podcasts, and if it’s not up yet, it’s coming soon. Creative context.net, I’m Doug Duvall with Motif Media,

Eric Wing  36:22

yep, Eric Wing with Darby Digital,

Douglas Duvall  36:26

and we will see you next week.