Let me tell you a story; Storymaker
On October, 2nd 2015 I left Modulus. Well, a lot of people that were there at the beginning of Modulus began to trickle out. The company had grown rapidly since the Progress acquisition. I think for a lot of us that left, it was about the next challenge. Building something from the ground up was a big part of the Modulus culture and something that brought everyone together.
Out of that same ideology and love of building comes Storymaker. I’ve always loved great stories, writing them, listening to them, and telling them. Creative has been a large part of my personal passion and history. The success of every product and person is due in part to the story at the foundation. The right story helps you connect on many different levels and in many different ways.
What people often miss is how much story writing/building goes into the development of great technology. Building the story is the difference between an okay product and one you love, and can’t live without. How often have you used similar products and felt yourself using one because you loved what it was about and you felt connected.
Building great technology is like writing a great story. That is the premise of Storymaker. The company was created to tell great stories through technology. This includes, the development of great software, marketing automation, and design implementation.
Over the last six months I had a lot of conversations with people that work in the creative, consulting, startup, and technology areas. My focus for these conversations were SMB’s and Startups. I chose these specific groups because this is where my passion lays. Many people told me to focus on the Enterprise space but I’m not passionate about the Enterprise space. Don’t get me wrong, I understand how much value exists in Enterprise but the whole point of starting your own business is to do what you’re passionate about.
So, lets talk about what I learned.
1. Most of these organizations are looking for technologies that won’t break the bank for them or their clients. They want stable and more often, open source solutions that are reliable and cost effective.
2. A lot of these organizations wanted to manage their own relationships. Most businesses want to manage the relationship but need help with the technology. They want a stable and reliable technology partner without having to hire an army of developers and weigh down payroll.
3. Results and reliability are the most important thing but price is really important too. Price sensitivity is very important. To compete with larger organizations, smaller organizations need help with maximizing margins and minimizing costs.
4. Most SMBs and Startups are looking for a reliable and often discrete partner. They want to have reliable resources but they don’t necessarily need their clients to know. **Discretion has become a powerful tool to Storymaker’s partners.**
Now, my head is full of awesome things I’ve learned from some very smart people. So what does Storymaker do?
1. Storymaker tells your story through technology. The development process is focused on your needs and vision. We wont alter or change what you want, we’ll provide the best feedback but at the end of the day, you’re the boss.
2. One point of contact for your entire project, you’ll deal with one product / project lead for the entire duration of your time with us.
3. No minimum hours or dollar amount to engage us. If we can help, we will.
4. Affordable, seriously. You’re going to love our prices. We try to keep our overhead as low as possible and pass the savings on to you.
How do our partners utilize our services?
1. Additional team members, we replicate your teams tools and standards, we’ll make sure customers or employees never feel like they’re working with a third party. We hold ourselves accountable to your standards and deadlines.
2. Design implementation, uh what? This is one of the coolest services we offer. Get the high level brand, design, and style guide done wherever you want and let our team implement the design. We’ll take the style guide and implement the details and tedious items at a fraction of the cost.
3. HubSpot setup and automation. We love HubSpot, it’s a great product. Let us set up and automate HubSpot for you. We’ll do reporting, campaigns, funnels, and everything else. We’ll even handle all your landing pages.
4. Deploy where you want, it doesn’t matter if you want to be hosted on Joyent, AWS, or Modulus; we’ll make sure your application can go anywhere.
The team is globally distributed, don’t let the fact that some team members are located around the world stop you. Regardless of location, we only employee the absolute best developers for the technologies we utilize.
Storymaker focuses on servicing partners as an extension of their existing organizations, seamlessly. Our mission is to provide partners access to reliable and affordable development, marketing automation, and design implementation services through calibration.
I’d love to hear your feedback in what you’re looking for in a technology partner and what the ideal relationship is for you.
Ghuffran Ali
**There is a website, it’s just not up yet because we’ve been working so hard to help our partners complete their projects on time.