THE THOUGHTFUL ENTREPRENEUR PODCAST
Embracing Innovation, Technology, and Customer-Centric Strategies
In a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show, host Josh Elledge, founder of UpMyInfluence.com, engaged in a compelling conversation with Dawid Sobieski, the creative force behind Plumcat Studio and Flux Verse. Their discussion explored the intricacies of entrepreneurship, offering listeners a wealth of actionable advice and expert insights. This blog post distills the key takeaways from their dialogue, providing a detailed guide to thoughtful entrepreneurship.
Josh and Dawid underscored the importance of authenticity in building a personal brand, emphasizing that your brand should genuinely reflect your values and mission. Consistency across all platforms is crucial for building trust and recognition. They also highlighted the significance of quality over quantity in networking, advocating for meaningful relationships over superficial connections. Offering value to your network without expecting immediate returns fosters goodwill and trust. Actionable tips include defining your core values, auditing your online presence, attending industry events, and engaging actively on social media.
Dawid stressed the need for adaptability and innovative thinking in the ever-evolving business landscape. Encouraging creativity within your team can lead to groundbreaking ideas and solutions. Both speakers discussed the effective use of technology to streamline operations and enhance productivity, advising entrepreneurs to stay updated with new tools and platforms. Additionally, understanding your audience and delivering exceptional value are pivotal for a customer-centric approach. Regularly conducting surveys and personalizing services based on customer data can significantly improve your offerings.
About Dawid Sobieski:
Dawid Sobieski, born in 1990 in Szczecin, Poland, grew up amid the transformative aftermath of communism's collapse. Inspired by his father's entrepreneurial spirit, Dawid pursued a Master's in Law before founding Plumcat during university. Starting with animation tutorials and a small ad project, his passion for creative storytelling blossomed into an international success story. Together with his wife, Dawid navigated early challenges in Barcelona, establishing Plumcat as a pioneer in remote work. Now based in Bansko, Bulgaria, Dawid leads Plumcat's global team, shaping its innovative animation and marketing ventures while indulging in hobbies like surfing and mountain biking.
Dawid Sobieski, co-founder of Plumcat, embarked on a journey from Poland's post-communist era to becoming a leader in animation and video marketing. Beginning with a humble animated ad in Szczecin, Dawid's dedication to creative excellence and remote work innovation propelled Plumcat onto the global stage. From Barcelona to Bansko, he and his wife have cultivated a diverse team across continents, delivering cutting-edge solutions to clients worldwide. Beyond business, Dawid finds joy in surfing, mountain biking, and composing music, embodying his lifelong passion for creativity and adventure.
About Plumcat Studio:
Fully remote design & animation studio that produces original content for international clients from various industries.
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Links Mentioned in this Episode:
Want to learn more? Check out Plumcat Studio website at https://plumcatstudio.com/
Check out Plumcat Studio on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/plumcat/
Check out Dawid Sobieski on LinkedIn at https://pl.linkedin.com/in/dawid-sobieski-350b12109
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Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us. Right now it's David Sobieski. David, you are the founder of Flux Verse and Plumb. Kat. Your websites are flux, Vizio and plumb Kat studio.com.
Speaker 1 (00:01:18) - David, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:01:21) - That's correct. Thanks. Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:01:25) - Yeah, yeah. Well, it's great to have you. Well, give us an overview of the work that you do with each plumb Kat and Flux verse.
Speaker 2 (00:01:31) - Right. So just to give you a little bit of context, I'm a co-founder of animation studio Plumb Kat and just recently a founder of Entirely New Venture, which is like Flux Verse, which is catering interactive product demos for SaaS companies mostly. So my background, surprisingly, is not really related with animation at all, but I can go to that a little bit later. But with with your question. So animation studio plumb CAD caters to mostly businesses, in tech sphere. we work closely with SaaS companies or fintech, catering to them with, high quality animated content, that they need to promote their brands, to build awareness, to generally explain any sort of concepts. we also worked in our, days with fortune 500 companies, but now we are steering more towards, just working with startups.
Speaker 2 (00:02:28) - that's with plumb. CAD. Flex verse is just a really entirely new venture. We just launching this service right now, which is very innovative. it touch bases like, the, pretty much the, the essence of it is just like it works on the premise of interactivity, which is, very important these days in creating engagement in, in users in general. And I think strongly believe this is the future of content in general.
Speaker 1 (00:02:57) - Yeah. so to our friend that's listening, you likely just want to go ahead and take a look at these two websites. What we're talking about is quite visual. And and David, I would say quite stunning. your animations are, are, are gorgeous. And then, you know, again with flex versus, boy, how cool would that be? to be able to have like, if you've got a SaaS product or again, you want to explain something visually. I highly recommend to a friend listening to go to flex versus Io and Plum Kat so you can see exactly what we're talking about, but would you mind maybe just sharing a bit about how you've evolved animation and interactive, kind of user experiences?
Speaker 3 (00:03:49) - well.
Speaker 2 (00:03:49) - I could start even from scratch. It depends how deep you want to go with that. so, my background is, like, surprisingly not related with animation at all, if this helps you give a little bit of context, but, so I was born in 90s in Poland. That was, the time the country just transferred from communism to the free market, which is really tough times back then. entering high school just myself in early 2000. I'm 34 now. unemployment rate in Poland was like very high. I was just like about around 20%. So the option, the option, for me was just like, I put a bet, like, I'm going to get the best education I can. Maybe that's the only way to pursue any sort of career. So I thought, maybe law was the law was a degree that I could benefit from the most. That was true. But I also discovered it's definitely the legal career, certainly not the so far from my interest that, I would be very unhappy to pursue that.
Speaker 2 (00:04:51) - And I also, luckily grew up in the family that was really strongly, had strong entrepreneurial, like, traditions, like borderline risk takers. I would say my dad started his own software companies in these days where I was saying, like 20% of unemployment having four kids at this time. but from him, I learned the freedom is the most important aspect and the value that I should be pursuing. just for the sake of, let me. Freedom. I connected this strongly with creativity. and I realized that this aligns with my passion. So I don't need to pursue any sort of career that's like, it's it that I could, you know, end up not liking the freedom was the value that I liked the most, and the creativity was coming from my background. Also this my passions. I used to play a lot of music, music production. I drew, I did video editing. So I back in these days, tools, to make animations that started to be more popular as the computer's power just improved.
Speaker 2 (00:05:56) - so there was just this increasing trend of treating web as a digital space. there was an emphasis on. Of, let's say, just not only information, but the design itself as well. Right? So, And I decided, like, maybe. Dropping this career and setting myself in animated world, I knew that I can create animations because this was the skill set that I had. And from this point on, I realized this was this would be the product. That would be definitely much more, approachable to those who would like to market their products, but they are not willing to pay like tons of money for live action videos, which were very expensive back in the days. So I started this as a totally freelance. But as soon I realized there were better people than myself, I was lucky just to to get clients at the time. but also like it was quite reckless. I had like, reckless, like reckless actions I took in my life. but maybe I was just young and it paid off to be reckless, but it helped me grow the business.
Speaker 2 (00:07:05) - to the extent that I just started hiring people who are actually really good at what they do. And, but also they value this thing that I value the most, which is freedom. So, yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:07:17) - Amazing. David, can you share a little bit about why animated explainer videos and why interactive videos are really important and or effective today?
Speaker 2 (00:07:30) - I would say Animated videos or in their essence, in their core. They have this ability to, present any sort of concept, the most abstract, even, in, in the very engaging and visually pleasant way. So this is something that live action videos, have really hard time to do. whereas we can obtain these, with like basically creativity is our only limitations and we can pull any sort of, any sort of concept that even the most difficult one, we can just picture this and translate it into animation. So that's really big advantage for all those tech companies or anything. Anyone who has like, really complex products and they would like to make them more approachable and understood by anyone.
Speaker 2 (00:08:22) - Also, the second thing is like you can go really bold with animation. So we've I strongly believe now the content should be really bold and all the brands they should be actually try to pursue anything that's, it touches the soul of humans in the sense of, sense of humor, tragic tragedy, something like that. So that, you're not just becoming one of these everyone who posts exactly the same thing. And with animation, you can really just make it work. Look at the series of Rick and Morty, for example, which is like, or family Guy, anything of this sort. This is so bored, like bold, controversial, but it definitely speaks to the audience. So this kind of content really speaks loudly, and it can be easily created with animation because there is no limitation we can show anyone, like we could show a geek on a broom if we would like to make Harry Potter eight, right? Like so from your company, it doesn't really matter. that's for animation. It's really, really powerful tool.
Speaker 2 (00:09:30) - And for interactive content, I would say that's very new. Just recently, started to, really take off, especially with the tools that that arise. first and my favorite personal is just recently, launched software, it's called Rive. This tool allows animators now to create, interactive animations that don't require coding, which would be essential. Just before the software was, was there on the market, you would have to have a team of developers to pull anything. It looks worse, right? Right. Now we can do it with no code. Pretty much no code there is needed for to create what we do. which makes it like. It's open to general audience pretty much. I strongly believe very, very soon in the future, we're going to have a TikTok style platform where we would scroll and instead of watching videos, you would have the audience engaged in playing interactive, games, content, whatever. So whatever creators would.
Speaker 3 (00:10:38) - Be.
Speaker 2 (00:10:38) - Willing to create with these, with these tools because it also makes, There's the users or like, whoever is there on, on online.
Speaker 2 (00:10:51) - is not the is not passive viewer is is actually active participant of whatever happens. And we should definitely, push this kind of concept more to drive engagement and, to build like relations with brands because we the only this way we can know what actually people think. They could leave comment, they could watch the video, but with interactivity you can just track where they click and what they feel pretty much.
Speaker 3 (00:11:18) - Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:11:19) - So it's it's never been, I would imagine, more cost effective like in the past. I think if you wanted a really well-designed animated explainer, you know, it was going to be pretty expensive. can you share just a little bit more about the accessibility of, you know, of now more companies being able to have such attractive and interactive kind of animated and kind of visual interactive, again, just kind of these great user experiences.
Speaker 3 (00:11:53) - Right. Thanks.
Speaker 2 (00:11:54) - I think actually really great question. And I would say back in the days, of course the technology, technological advancement is visible.
Speaker 2 (00:12:04) - We can see it right now more than ever, with all tools being created right now with AI, it's madness. And so back in the days, of course, there was less people and less, less people working on creating, creating those tools. The computing power was really, way lower than it is right now. So with all these aligned now you can see say that we can definitely speed up the process of creating animation, animated videos and interactive animation. So it definitely makes the price, price tag go down. and those kind of these kind of content is really accessible now to pretty much everyone. And there's of course there's like many aspects that we should, put into consideration, when asking for the video, like this from, either is it a freelancer agency, studio? but everyone, everyone can have it. But of course, there's like, certain limitations what you can have for a certain price. Right? Like, if you it's like with everything, you can have a really, premium experience, premium luxury animation, really high quality stuff that would cost you money.
Speaker 2 (00:13:17) - If you would like to have something basic that definitely is accessible to everyone right now, even with the tools like Canva, you can see that they are incorporating motion in their, content creation. So motion is everywhere. Now more than ever, we see companies, approaching us to us in another agency, studios, to create motion guidelines for their brands, which is like a basically for branding. This is the visual. The part of visual communication has never been taken into consideration. Now is really strongly, there and there are a lot of asks to create something that's like it's a resemblance of the brand in the motion world, which is so crucial. we worked, at some time with big tech company from fortune 500, and they had these guidelines back then already. But now we can see it's like it's definitely, small companies, they they ask for it. So they they want to be unique in the motion world as well, where they communicate things online. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:14:23) - Exciting. okay. So from someone that's listening or conversation right now, again, as I mentioned earlier, go to plum Cat studio.com.
Speaker 1 (00:14:32) - go to flex versus IO. The difference between the two. Again, plum Cat Studios a little bit more of kind of again, expert animation for your company and again, flex viewers, these are going to be interactive demos. and you can kind of play around and, and see just how cool these things are. But but again, the the the UX is just really, really enjoyable. Definitely very, very modern. So to our friend that's listening, go take a look at this. David, what else would you recommend other than people just going and seeing the gallery and seeing some of the work that you do? What, what what else should they do?
Speaker 2 (00:15:11) - in terms of, specify the.
Speaker 3 (00:15:14) - Question.
Speaker 4 (00:15:15) - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:15:16) - You know, we they heard a great interview with you. Now they're interested. And I wonder if you would be a good solutions provider for them, a good partner. what's next in this step?
Speaker 3 (00:15:27) - Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (00:15:28) - So in this sense, I think we are really trusted by brands worldwide.
Speaker 2 (00:15:33) - specifically, we work closely with us. Market. I strongly appreciate the business culture in the in America. never seen anything like that. That high to the level of communication, you know, appreciation. time, time, communication in general. So, this is a really good, good market to work. And I think, our studios both flex versus, as a service and Plunkett Studio. we are capable of working with, us, us companies, but also globally. So, working with us is definitely, we align to your workflow to your company. if you don't have any animation experience back then, we provide all the guidelines for you. because we have all the processes set in place right now, more, more and more companies actually are shifting from, request like request, based orders of just like having one explainer to actually building the whole animation team. and that's what we actually provide, as well, which means that we, we assign to you, like, motion designer, project manager, and designer.
Speaker 2 (00:16:49) - if you wish. and they work closely with your brand to help you, set up processes, just or just create content in general. But in future, if you willing to, hire your own team of animators, that's what you're going to have. Your, the groundwork is done then. so the process is pretty straightforward, like for ordering animations as well, because we have like, the process is very simple. There is a brief, after that is a kickoff call. and from this we take over, we've really streamlined process, of production. we take care of your script, design, storyboarding, style development, animation, post-production up until the very finalized, piece of content.
Speaker 1 (00:17:38) - David Sobieski, founder of plum Cat studio, found on the web at plum Cat studio. Com and flex versus. Oh, David, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:17:47) - Thanks, George. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:17:55) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence.
Speaker 1 (00:18:06) - Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence comm and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning. That's right, seven days a week you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.
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