In Big Enough, I tell the story of reaching a breaking point in 2008. Sachi and I were burned out and tired of ambiguity about where Common Craft was headed.
It was time to make a decision and start putting a plan into action. The path we chose that day was to focus all our efforts on building Common Craft around our original videos and phase out custom videos. Starting then, we placed a long- term bet that we could make Common Craft a company of our own design. We would be in the product business and earn a living based on our intellectual property.
Big Enough Chapter 6 – Designing for the Future
At the same time, I was writing a series of blog posts called “Being Lightweight” where I explained how we were thinking about Common Craft. In a post called Being Lightweight – Business Design, I shared 13 points related to a business that I would now call Big Enough. Here are a handful of those points:
Two People – We are dedicated to being a two-person company without employees. This is a fundamental constraint that guides nearly every decision. By making our size the priority, we have been forced to think hard about what is possible for two people and be prepared to focus on opportunities that work within this constraint.
Balance – We don’t believe in working 80 hours a week, 51 weeks a year so that you can vacation when you’re old. We work more hours than most, but we’re not bashful about making sure that we live a fun, interesting, and balanced life. Lightweight businesses make this easier.
Limited Layers – Each person who handles a product on the way to the consumer adds weight and removes reward. We look for the best ways to get our product from an idea to the customer as directly as possible. Outside of us, Common Craft doesn’t have salespeople, distributors, marketers, or support reps. We do it all, A-to-Z.
Supporting Two People – At the end of the day, we remember that we are two people. Sure, our model may not enable us to dominate markets or become a Fortune 500 company, but that’s not our goal. We need our business to support us and the life we want to live.
I provide these points as evidence that Big Enough isn’t a brainstorm, or a trend that we recently noticed. We’ve been at it for over 12 years and have stuck to the same constraints we agreed upon back then. Being lightweight and Big Enough is who we are.
Common Craft videos could not have become popular without YouTube. Starting in 2007, the site was our platform for sharing videos and it helped us reach millions of people. I’ll never forget uploading a new video and watching it get embedded on websites around the world.
When we uploaded our first video, RSS in Plain English, to YouTube, it took less than two days to see our first copy-cat. A guy in France created a version in French that was similar to ours and to his credit, he notified us and we said it was OK. He was inspired.
Over time, Common Craft copy-cats became common. Most of the time, they were people inspired by our work and experimenting with their own stories. We came to see it as an honor. We worked to protect our trademark and copyright, but didn’t try to prevent them from copying our style. Even today, we encourage people to use our style for their own videos. A search for “Common Craft Style” on YouTube yields thousands of results, mostly by students and teachers.
One of the side effects of using YouTube is the ease at which it’s possible to download and then re-upload a video to another account. This violates copyright law and YouTube’s terms of service. But it was difficult to stop. YouTube is full of people who steal other people’s videos and reupload them with ads so they can make money. Seeing it happen over and over was frustrating and often I would try to contact the account owner to ask them to remove our video. If they didn’t, I would have it taken down by YouTube on the basis of a copyright claim. In some cases, their accounts were suspended.
Sometimes trying to stop re-uploaders felt like I was removing a grain of sand from a beach. I could have spent weeks trying to remove the offending videos and still not have made a dent. I eventually assumed it was just part of using YouTube. This was a big reason we made commoncraft.com the home of our original videos.
Last week, thirteen years after we started using it, YouTube released a Copyright Match Tool that sniffs out copyright violating videos and provides them in a nice list. If you choose, you can select and report them, fifty videos at a time. Finally, there was a way to know how our videos were being used on other accounts and it was surprising.
The copyright tool found 1,164 Common Craft videos that were reuploaded to other accounts. When sorted by views, they added up to millions. The highest viewed video had 1.1 million views and others had hundreds of thousands. Many of the highest viewed videos had been edited to include a post-roll promotion for another company at the end. It was amazing and disheartening.
As someone who makes his living on intellectual property, I’m thankful that YouTube is taking this issue seriously and providing options. When reporting a video, you can send the account a warning to remove the video in seven days, or have it taken down immediately. For now, we’re giving the accounts a chance to do the right thing before a formal takedown happens. My hope is that the tool will discourage people in the future.
More than anything else, I’m confident that we made the right decision to move away from YouTube years ago. Platform risk is real.
The post below was sent as an issue of my newsletter, Ready for Rain.
Over the last six months, I’ve been mentally preparing to publish my second book. During that time, most of the writing was completed and the process was on track. It felt good to see it take shape. But lingering in the back of my mind was always a voice reminding me that publishing a book means more than just writing it. One of the real challenges, especially for a less established author like myself, is introducing the book to the world. For Big Enough, my next book, marketing the book is the hill I must soon climb.
For longtime authors like Stephen King or Seth Godin, book marketing is less of a challenge because they’ve spent many years establishing their brand of writing and honing their marketing. Their names are attached to a genre, style, and perspective. Their fans will reliably buy any book they publish because they know what to expect.
I don’t have that luxury. Big Enough is a book about our business and fans aren’t currently beating down my door to hear what I have to say about the subject. In that context, I’m relatively unknown. This means I have to give them a reason to be interested and that’s more difficult than it sounds.
I’ve been through this once before. When I published The Art of Explanation in 2012, it needed to be introduced to the world, too. It was my first book, so no one had any expectations regarding my writing. But I had a secret weapon. Starting in 2007, the “explainer” style videos Sachi and I produced at Common Craft became very well-known, with tens of millions of views. We were, to a small degree, internet famous. A book about explanation skills was very much on-brand and expected. It was obvious why I was the person to write it.
Given this history of video production, my name is most often connected to creativity, communication, and education. And that’s the challenge. In publishing Big Enough, I am re-introducing myself as not only a video producer but an entrepreneur who has a business-focused story to tell.
The question becomes: how? How, over the next four months, will I change that perception and position myself as the right person for writing this book?
This is, at heart, a marketing challenge and one that’s not absolutely required. I could write and publish the book without marketing it at all. In this case, the book would suddenly appear on Amazon and bookshelves without anyone expecting it. And it could work. Sometimes a book can do well by simply existing, but I am not willing to take that risk.
For Big Enough, I plan to throw myself at the marketing beast. My challenge is to learn how to market a book successfully. If I can develop a marketing strategy that fits with my style, I will have a head start for future books.
Here’s the ideal scenario… Over the next few months, I publish multiple articles, blog posts and videos that focus on the ideas in the book and point people to the book web page. I appear on podcasts and do interviews that promote it. I share links on social media that are retweeted and shared on Facebook. Popular blogs and newsletters write about the book and point people to the book’s web page and sign up to receive a free chapter and be notified when it drops. Slowly but surely, demand builds and people become interested. They tell friends. Readers have been primed for action and on the day it’s released, it makes a splash that puts it in front of even more people and momentum builds from there. That’s the ideal scenario.
For me, that day is May 5th, 2020. My focus between now and then will be on that splash, how high it can go, and how far the ripples will travel.
Making this happen, even to a small degree, is a challenge that I’m not taking lightly. I’m cautious about turning people away or making a bad impression by selling too hard. To get through it, I am summoning my gumption. It’s up to me, the author, to put myself out there and say, “Order my book. Read my articles. Post a review. Sign up for my emails. Share my posts, please?”
I don’t take naturally to self-promotion or promotion at all, really. But I also feel that my book is something people in my market will enjoy and want to know exists. It would be a mistake to put so much effort into it and just hope for the best. Instead, my plan is to promote it in a style that fits with me and I’m ready for the challenge. I’m ready to experiment and push myself. Most of all, I’m ready to learn.
This post originally appeared in my newsletter, Ready for Rain.
One of the side-effects of being known as an explainer is the tendency for people to pay close attention to how I explain ideas large and small. I can imagine them asking a question and then waiting to see what amazing analogy I can pull out of my hat. Of course, like asking a comedian to be funny, it doesn’t typically work that way. The explanations that support my livelihood take many hours to craft.
Now that I have a book coming out, I’m facing another kind of explanation challenge in the form of explaining Big Enough. It seems like every time I write about it, I take a slightly different path and I’m constantly wondering if I’ve stumbled upon the one explanation that works best.
Common Craft Co-founder Lee LeFever has a new book arriving in May 2020. The book is called Big Enough and it tells the story of building Common Craft to be an intentionally small company over the last decade. If you’re curious about the company behind the videos and saner, healthier approaches to entrepreneurship, you’ll love it
Like so many before it, this little promotion will come and go. And that’s the problem. I could craft the best, more productive summary and never know if it hit the mark. Further, because it’s for a specific audience, there’s no guarantee it will work in other contexts. Such is life as an explainer. I find solace in the fact that each time I write about the book, I’m practicing and hopefully, getting better each time.
The post below was sent as an issue of my newsletter, Ready for Rain.
In 2006, Sachi and I picked up a little handheld video camera while traveling and I learned to edit short travel videos on the road. The videos were not sophisticated or particularly well made, but they left an impression. Using this video camera and computer, I could make amateur videos.
As I was learning to work the controls and edit the footage, the technology world was changing quickly. YouTube was new and growing fast. Social media was starting to become popular and I was fascinated. I started blogging in 2003 and became an early adopter of Twitter and social networking. I had a very strong sense that these tools were going to be big.
Aside from us, these are the main characters in this story: do-it-yourself videos and social media.
In 2007, Sachi joined Common Craft, which was my one-person consulting practice at the time. My consulting was going well, but we both sensed that we could do more and talked endlessly about how Common Craft could be a part of the social media revolution. Above all, we wanted to identify a problem and solve it. We wanted our work to be useful.
Years earlier, I had developed a series of blog posts that were designed to explain online tools like wikis and social networking. Those posts were popular and I felt at home explaining technology. Looking back over these old posts, an idea emerged. What if we turned the blog posts into videos and shared them on YouTube? It seemed worth a try.
I started creating a DIY studio in our basement. I filmed myself explaining social media with markers while standing in front of a whiteboard. As I quickly learned, this type of video is much more difficult than it seems. I had zero experience on camera, we didn’t know how to light the space properly, and I couldn’t organize my thoughts on the fly. The memory of it still makes me cringe.
The failure of this first experiment was discouraging and caused me to lose faith that we could work with video. Maybe we needed training? Seeing my frustration, Sachi went into problem-solving mode and made a suggestion: what if we put the whiteboard on the floor, pointed the camera down onto it and used only hands, markers and paper cut-outs to explain an idea? By showing nothing but the whiteboard and our hands, the focus would be on the explanation, instead of me. It made sense.
Within a day or two, I had reconfigured our basement studio with the whiteboard on the floor. It was lit by a constellation of bedroom lamps that represented our best estimate of what an actual video producer would do in our shoes. We were making it up as we went along.
The first subject we chose to explain was something called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which makes it easy to subscribe to a website and be notified when new posts appear. RSS, at the time, was useful, free, and poorly understood. It was a problem we could solve.
We made the video in an afternoon, edited it the next day and in April of 2007, published RSS in Plain English on YouTube and the Common Craft blog. We thought the video was interesting and might get a few views. We hoped it could lead to more consulting or visibility for Common Craft. It was, after all, an experiment.
I had no idea at the time, but the moment I clicked “Publish” was the moment our lives changed in fundamental ways. From that point on, we started operating in uncharted territory.
Within minutes of RSS in Plain English hitting the web, it started to receive views and comments that flowed faster than we could read them. Bloggers around the world embedded the video on their blogs. Emails poured in. The video went viral and it felt like striking gold. We both lived in a state of shock for a few days. Despite it being poorly produced, the video was popular because it explained RSS in a way that everyone could understand. Watch below:
RSS in Plain English
Before we knew it, we were known as video producers and continued making videos that explained social media tools like wikis and social networking in the same style. Today, those videos are known as the first “explainer” videos of the YouTube era and we became known as the pioneers of that little genre. It seemed everyone had seen a Common Craft video.
The attention was overwhelming. Common Craft quickly transformed into a homemade video production studio and over a number of years, we were hired to create similar videos for Google, Intel, Ford, Microsoft, LEGO, Dropbox and many more.
We also continued to make our own videos that were purely educational. These videos, what we call our “original” videos, are Common Craft’s focus today.
And it all started with an experiment in making media by two people with no qualifications, very little experience, and a homemade studio. Since 2007, we’ve been on a mission to turn that initial spark into a career and a business that works for us. Today, thirteen years later, we’re still on that mission and as you’ve seen, it recently led us to Orcas Island, where we’ll continue to produce videos.
If you’re curious, we just published a new original video that explains the difference between online and local documents. Watch it here.
Since 2007, work on Common Craft videos has been a constant. We publish about 10 original videos a year, which means that video production is an enduring part of our work. Like any job, it can get less exciting after so much time, but I’m always thankful that it’s my job. Instead of saying, “I have to do it.” I prefer to say, “I get to do it.” It’s a good job to have.
One of my favorite parts of the process is drawing the artwork that appears in the videos; what we call cut-outs. Now that we have a library of over 3,000 cut-outs, I don’t have to draw every image from scratch. But there are certain illustrations that can make a video more original and creative and taking the time to get them right is my happy place.
A forthcoming video tells the story of two towns. The concept of a town (or two in this case) is one that could be drawn in a number of ways. I could draw an old west style storefront or neighborhood with driveways and sidewalks. How does one draw multiple towns?
I like to think about Common Craft cut-outs as symbols rather than realistic interpretations. Symbols are more timeless and flexible. They have personality and style. Below is a town symbol that’s currently in our library:
The same style, but a city instead:
For the forthcoming video, the new town images are still in production. Below is a draft that hasn’t yet been colored. If you look closely, you can see color swatches on the buildings. These indicate how the illustration will be colored when it’s finalized and turned into vector art. You’ll also see I’m leaving an open area in front of the buildings so the space can be used to add houses or whatever is needed. I’ll share the finished version once production is complete.
If you’re curious about Common Craft cut-outs, you can search the library.
I write books and run a company called Common Craft. I recently moved from Seattle to a rural island. Here, I write about online business, book publishing, modern home construction, and occasionally, dumb jokes.
I write books and run a company called Common Craft. I recently moved from Seattle to a rural island. Here, I write about online business, book publishing, modern home construction, and occasionally, dumb jokes. 
