On this episode of the podcast, we chat with the founder of Redboat animation studios and Brivvio, Adrian King. Adrian is a veteran of the animation industry who started his first business nearly 20 years ago after he became disenfranchised with not receiving the full fruits of his labour. His flagship company, Redboat, primarily works with government agencies and large businesses to create video content that helps explain complex concepts to the general public. Almost three years ago, however, Adrian noticed that many of his customers wanted simple brand elements in their videos and had to go to large animations studios to do so. After identifying this market gap, he began working on creating an iPhone application (Brivvio) that could help users, without technical experience, to create branded videos that looked professional.

Whilst discussing his professional journey, Adrian addresses the lack of security many business owners face compared to regular employees and how this is the price people must pay to ‘be their own boss’.Additionally, Adrian touches on the differences between starting his first small business versus starting his new and much more ambitious venture. Specifically, he discusses how founding Brivvio has required him to seek out capital from outside investors and guidance from the various accelerator programs in order to scale the business up rapidly. With this being said, one through-line Adrian has ensured all his businesses have is being purpose-driven. Throughout the episode, he highlights how his commitment to running purpose-led companies has helped him weed out bad clients, communicate authenticity to prospective customers, and ultimately achieve long-term viability. 

What we talk about

• Sacrificing stability in order to be your own boss


• Running a startup vs a small business


• The importance of being purpose-led

Links from this episode

https://www.redboat.com.au/ (Redbot’s website)

https://www.brivvio.com/ (Brivvio’s website)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianking/ (Adrian on LinkedIn)

Find us elsewhere

https://futuretri.be/ (Future Tribe Website)

https://www.instagram.com/futuretri.be/ (Future Tribe on Instagram)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/germainemuller/ (Germaine on LinkedIn)

https://www.instagram.com/germa_ne/ (Germaine on Instagram)

Transcript 

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically and as such, may contain various spelling and syntax errors

[00:00:52 ] Germaine: [00:00:52 ] Hello, Future Tribe. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. On this episode, I've got Adrian King from two different businesses. Actually tell us a little bit about what you do, Adrian. 

[00:01:56 ] Adrian: [00:01:56 ] Hey, Germaine. Uh, yeah, look, uh, I've got two businesses, which is, seems like a crazy thing to do, but, uh, you know, one, one of them is very new and one of them's I've been there for about 20 plus years and you know, the one I've been.

[00:02:06 ] Doing for most of my career has been animation and video production, more focused on the animation. And, uh, it's kind of led to the, the new business, which is really, really exciting. So the first one's called bread boats, which is the animation business, and we do a lot of animation for government, for technology, for science explaining tricky, complicated subject matter.

[00:02:27 ] Sometimes very, uh, abstract ideas or complex ideas and distilling them down into really condense, smart, concise messages that can be transmitted to huge audiences in an animated format. And so I've had this career 20 plus years in video. And animation production. And what happened was it led to this new business because I had a client come to me and say, Hey, can you put all this sort of animated intro bottle onto our videos for us?

[00:02:57 ] And we're going to make 30 videos every single week. And they're just a single shot of about 90 seconds. And we animated logo at the beginning and a call to action at the end and some branding on them. And I thought to myself, wow. That's really great bread and butter. I'm just going to make a killing out of doing this is great.

[00:03:15 ] Just like, but then it's going to be really boring, right? Somebody is going to be sitting down, it's working. I'm going to have one of my team members working on this stuff all week, punching out the stuff, and it's going to be how I've got to be able to automate this. Right. It's got to be something that I can find a way to make this simpler and faster.

[00:03:31 ] And that set me off on this path, which has now become revealed, which is a separate business. And, and that's, uh, the one that I'm kind of working pretty hard to promote at the moment, too. 

[00:03:41 ] Germaine: [00:03:41 ] Yeah, right. So red boat is a bit more of an established, um, business. And then you've got Brivvio how old is Brivvio?

[00:03:48 ] Adrian: [00:03:48 ] About a year and a half, but we only really released, uh, on the app store in February, on Valentine's day, this year. 

[00:03:56 ] Germaine: [00:03:56 ] So Breo is, uh, an iPhone or an iOS app at the moment. Isn't it? 

[00:04:00 ] Adrian: [00:04:00 ] Yeah. So Brivvio is an app and a, uh, it's kind of growing into a bit more of a platform, but at the moment you, you you'd download the app on the iPhone.

[00:04:08 ] And what it does is it enables anyone with zero training, zero skills. There are no how or anything like that. Pretty much anyone can do it to create branded and captioned videos really, really fast and really easily. So. Puts your tops and tail was you with your branding on it and add captions across the bottom.

[00:04:29 ] Germaine: [00:04:29 ] And then where does the footage come from? Is that, can you shoot, just shoot that on your iPhone? Or can you bring in different bits and pieces of footage or 

[00:04:37 ] Adrian: [00:04:37 ] a mix? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you can film within Brivvio so you can film a single shot. Let's say you want to do a 62nd or two minute video on your phone.

[00:04:47 ] You film it in Brivvio or you can import a video that you've created elsewhere. 

[00:04:51 ] Germaine: [00:04:51 ] Right. And we were sort of really jumping into the, to the meat of the episode already. But tell me a bit about how you, like, did you get a team together to build the app? I know maybe the craziest sort of dropped off a little bit now, but, um, a few years ago everyone wanted an app for everything and you know, there's different qualities of.

[00:05:11 ] Apps like there's and there's different types of apps. There's apps that you can download from an iOS store, but then there's, what's essentially a web app that you just use through a window on your phone. Tell me a little bit about how you put it together and who you use. 

[00:05:25 ] Adrian: [00:05:25 ] Yeah. Great question. Germane, because it was an Epic journey to get there.

[00:05:28 ] Like we were really spent a year and a half developing this and I have no idea how hard that was going to be to, you know, to do the development. Bit of technical background in my skillset as one of the creative and stuff with the animation. But, um, yeah, certainly a journey and we tried several different technologies to make it work, including progressive web apps and, you know, Mo like multi-platform, but we ended up having to rebuild the technology from scratch in order to make it work, um, because, uh, it requires a lot of heavy video processing.

[00:06:00 ] And so. Yeah. Some of, some of the initial attempts once a good, how it all started was I had this idea because this client said to me, we want to do this. I said, well, maybe I can automate this. And I had a bit of conversation with them. They said, yeah, that'd be great. If we could just kind of like upload the video and it just comes back to us.

[00:06:15 ] That'd be great and thought, right, I'm going to make this systematized. And because I'm sure other people are going to want this. And so I built a prototype. I mocked it up. I did a little bit of basic. Prototyping, you know, actually the first thing I did was I built, I did the lean startup method.

[00:06:33 ] Everybody's probably heard of the lean startup, if you haven't much definitely a book you should read. And so I did the lean stuff. I built a web form and I said, and it kind of mimicked the process of how to like field. So upload video here, putting your title, uh, uh, putting colors, choose a background and that kind of thing.

[00:06:51 ] And it didn't really do anything. It just pretended to be the process of putting, and I showed a few people, I said, yeah, great. I can use this. And so that was kind of my first sort of validation. So then I've built a proper prototype and brought a developer on to help with that. And we built this very, very rough prototype and I realized, you know, I probably need to get some funding to develop this properly.

[00:07:14 ] So. I started on that path. And I then met, uh, the Canberra innovation network and, uh, heard about the Griffin Accelerator. And so I applied to be to get on to that because they, they sort of mentor the people that get, uh, get into the accelerated program and then put a bit of funding into it. And. Uh, and I got in, we had to pitch it's a bit like shark tank except friendly.

[00:07:38 ] And this is like 20 i