The Company

Skyscope Creative is a startup video marketing agency based in the Greater Boston area, founded by Sam Shepler, Gabe Gerzon, and Alex Dunn in 2012.  Their mission is to provide creative marketing video for innovation companies, from growing startups to large technology firms.  With backgrounds in filmmaking and business strategy, they are devoted to producing cinematic video that delivers business results.

The Philosophy

Skyscope believe the best marketing videos communicate with a unique balance of style, story and strategy.  They find their work style of individual “sprints”  bracketed by team collaboration and dialogue is ideal for creative productivity.  Rather than rely on discipline, they believe in creating an optimal productivity environment… so they literally took things into their own hands and built their desks from scratch.  This allowed them to get an ideal set up in a small space on their bootstrapped budget.

The Space

The Features

• Independent personal workspaces
• A shared space to meet as a team and collaborate with a whiteboard
• A comfortable, casual space for meeting with clients and visitors
• A clean, modern style with a consistent aesthetic
• Built-in “overflow” space with future employees in mind

What We Love

• Total DYI workspace on a budget
• The collaboration area just a quick scoot away
• Built in “overflow” space – a great feature since they just hired 3 additional team members.

What part of their office do you like the best?

(Interested in having your company featured? Drop us a line at realperson@printfection.com.)

The Company

Weather Underground (wunderground.com) is committed to delivering the most reliable, accurate weather information possible. Their state-of-the-art technology monitors conditions and forecasts for locations around the world, so you’ll always find the weather information you need. In addition to providing free, real-time online weather information to millions of Web users around the world, wunderground.com also offers newspaper weather services and custom site weather packages.

The Philosophy

At wunderground, ideas are inspired through an open forum for creativity, constant collaboration, and even a groundhog. With Alan the Groundhog as the company’s mascot, wunderground adds a fun and engaging element to the science behind the weather. At their office, you’ll find laid-back workspaces with everyone sharing an element of their personalities through the décor- providing an excellent conversation started for any visitor. When the team isn’t inside reporting on the weather, they can be found enjoying it outside with a game of sand volleyball or lunch along the wharf.

The Space

The Features

• Located in China Basin across the street from AT&T Park
• Waterfront location
• Total of 9,000 sq. ft.
• Home to some very unique workspaces and Geek Desks
• Access to sand volleyball and basketball courts
• Company bicycles
• Tetris machine
• Office photos provided by their WunderPhoto Community

What We Love

• The views from the amazing waterfront location
• We love rockin’ it old school, awesome Tetris machine!
• The custom workspaces with Geek Desks

Thanks to Weather Underground for the sneak peak behind the weather! What part of their office do you like the best?

(Interested in having your company featured? Drop us a line at realperson@printfection.com.)

The Company

Founded in 2009, after graduating from the TechStars program, SendGrid has developed a cloud based service that solves the challenge of email delivery by delivering emails on behalf of companies. They currently have 5 offices and were kind enough to let us check out their latest here in Denver.

The Philosophy

SendGrid’s Denver office is comprised of a healthy mix of extroverted geeks, beer enthusiasts, and exercise fanatics from the support, sales, HR, compliance, marketing, executive, and developer relations teams. The two-story space’s six conference rooms are named after the Front Range 14ers. To prep for their weekend hikes, the Denver ‘Gridders get their P90x and CrossFit workouts on in the studio on the second floor.

When not working out, hacking, or troubleshooting, you’ll find the Denver crew downing smoothies mixed in the kitchen or sipping on some craft beers from the kegerator. Cookies are served on Tuesdays, and catered lunches are hosted every Friday. Food is most definitely fuel for SendGrid!

The new addition of a 5-panel Nana door brings lots of natural light into the space and on warmer days, you can catch the ‘Gridders working and eating out on the back patio. At SendGrid, happy employees are innovative employees—and happiness begins in the office!

The Space

The Features

• The studio: cross-functional work out room
• A patio: outside work and lunching space
• The kitchen: includes a fully stocked fridge and serves as the meeting area for weekly “all hands” meetings via a floor length drop-down screen
• Torreys: 12 person boardroom
• Electric adjustable height desks for sitting or standing while you work

What We Love

• The wonderful views from the patio and the new Nana doors!
• Cookies on Tuesdays
• Work out room (might need to work off some of those cookies)

Always fun to feature someone local! What part of their office do you like the best?

(Interested in having your company featured? Reach us at realperson@printfection.com.)

We recently gave Twitter ads (their new DIY platform) a whirl for the first time and so far I’m not thrilled with the lack of transparency or the results.  We’ve tried both Promoted Account advertising (where they suggest folks follow your account under “Who to follow”) and Promoted Tweets advertising (where they display a Tweet of your choosing in other people’s feeds).

Promoted Accounts

I was pretty excited about Promoted Accounts because in our B2B sales cycle things typically take 3-6 months before the possibility of a sale exists. So interacting with someone regularly on Twitter, by being included in their Tweet stream (after they followed our Promoted Account) would seem to be a good way to stay top of mind. But to be honest, we have yet to woo any new followers from Promoted Accounts. Currently Twitter is suggesting a $1.88 minimum bid and I’m not sure a Twitter follower is worth that to us. For the fairly short amount of time that we’ve been tracking, we’ve only had 2 very qualified leads register on our site as a result of hundreds of tweets. And just because someone follows you doesn’t mean they’ll even see all of your tweets, because their stream could be going by too fast or they might not even be on Twitter at the time you send it out.

That minimum bid also seems high particularly because I can’t see the type of companies or people that our account is being promoted to. Are they showing it to our followers’ followers or to tech companies or what? I’d love to be able to narrow my targets according to interests, or keywords in profiles, or types of company’s they work for or follow- anything really would help. Of course because I’ve set my bid so low, our account has been promoted to only a couple of people, none of whom have decided to follow us, so we haven’t been charged anything either- meaning at least we’re getting a bit of branding exposure for free. Though maybe not even to the correct target market.

Promoted Tweets

Highlights of the week include

• Kick-off Luncheon with renowned social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk, Mayor Hancock, and some of Denver’s best entrepreneurs talking about their startup journeys.
• A special Ignite Denver bringing 15 seconds, 20 slides, and an attitude to Denver’s startup community.
• Tech Cocktail, a national startup and tech media company and event planner, will be holding their first ever event in Denver.Startups, social, and a great party.
• 60+ community organized events across tech, business, design, and social entrepreneurship.

Don’t forget your swag

Like most people you’ve probably received a piece of promotional merchandise from a completely random company at some point, even if it was only a pen. If your experiences have been anything like mine, you’ve never given the merchandise or more importantly the company, a second thought if it wasn’t relevant to you.  As with any sort of marketing it’s crucial to identify people who actually impact your business before investing in them!

Customers

If you’re thinking about starting a company- do it in Denver. If you’re thinking about moving your startup- move it to Denver. Denver not only boasts the right economic and demographic conditions, but the startup movement here is building and you could get in on the ground level. Need more to be persuaded?

via mcbusy

1. Denver has lower costs of real estate and doing business than most cities, including SF and NYC. Also in terms of real estate there’s enough density to get ideas flowing, but enough space to not feel piled on top of one-another.
2. DTC’s Innovation Pavilion, which houses startups in addition to established companies and academic and government organizations offers entrepreneurs co-working space and internet for as little as $200 a month.
3. Denver is home to an impressive number of creatives (about 29.3% of the population). And Denver’s creative sector consists of more than 2,900 creative enterprises, employing approximately 19,000 people. Organizations like Create Denver exist to help foster and grow this creative energy.
4. Education levels are high, with 69.1% of the population having earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.
5. Denver is the fifth best place to live for young adults in the United States, a Kiplinger’s Personal Finance report said- which means you’ll have plenty of smart and eager future employees.
6. Denver has a vibrant and quickly growing startup ecosystem with over 500 companies already including Frontier Airlines, Sympoz, Mapquest, Photobucket, and more.
7. There are awesome support groups and community events like Denver Founders Network, Denver Tech Meetup, and Denver Startup Week.
8. People are down to earth, excited to be part of a movement that’s gaining momentum and not overly cocky- which means they’re interested in helping you.
9. Parties!!!! Hey, it’s important to take some time off from work to rejuvenate.
10. Denver brews more beer AND has more days of sunshine than any city in the country. It also boasts 4,529 restaurants. So you’ll surely eat, drink, and be merry.

We’re proud to declare Denver our home! Join us.

“One of the nation’s biggest music labels briefly signed Taylor Swift to a contract but let her go because she didn’t seem worth more than $15,000 a year.”

(via @swifttogomez)

Whether you work for a record label, a startup, a hospital, or a Hollywood studio, we’re all trying to spot the best performers but often times we don’t get it quite right.

The gap between the performance of good employees and great employees is huge (about 1 to 5). So if you want to create a great company you need to aim higher when it comes to hiring people. You need to find the people with break through potential, paying attention to not only what they can do today, but what they can learn tomorrow. Surely you’re on board with hiring great people, though “great” is vague and doesn’t really leave a clear path for discovery.

That’s where The Rare Find by George Anders comes in. George sought out the world’s savviest talent judges, ranging from Fortune 500 CEOs to Special Forces leaders to elite basketball scouts, to see what they do differently from the rest of us. Here’s what he reveals in his book:

1. Don’t ignore “the jagged resume”- people whose background appears to teeter on the edge between success and failure. If their strengths seem like they could play out well in your setting, and match the skills and qualities for the position, it’s generally worth the risk. Basically widen your view of talent.
2. Look extra hard for “talent that whispers”- the obscure, out-of-the-way candidates who most scouting systems overlook. Find inspirations that are hidden in plain sight by paying attention to the details near the bottom of resumes that may relate well to the job, or show grit. Exceptional talent doesn’t always look to be quite so exceptional, until you look much closer.
3. Be careful with “talent that shouts”- the spectacular but brash candidates who might have trouble with team spirit and loyalty. Don’t get star struck.

For example Facebook was able to higher awesome programmers using a creative method:

Well folks it’s that time of year again. The time when South By Southwest (SXSW) begins to fill your Twitter stream even though it’s months away. If you’re not familiar with the event, SXSW Interactive is an annual conference held in Austin, TX during March every year intended to foster creativity, innovation, and professional growth.

So why the fuss so early? It’s because voting for panels has officially begun! While thousands of panels are submitted each year only about 300 can actually happen due to space and time constraints, so crowd-voting combined with input from an advisory panel are used to select the best. I’ve curated 10 panels I think you’ll find interesting. If you like ‘em vote them up, so that they can actually happen!

(Via @stefrodriguezzz)

1. CEO at 21: Avoiding Pitfalls of Young Founders

• Featuring J.J. Colao Forbes, Nikhil Sethi Adaptly & Zach Sims Codecademy
• At an age when most college grads are happily taking orders on the bottommost corporate rung, CEOs Zach Sims and Nikhil Sethi (22 and 23 years-old, respectively) are leading fast growing businesses. In this panel, moderator J.J. Colao, a 25 year-old Forbes magazine reporter covering entrepreneurs, speaks with Sims and Sethi about their experiences running top-tier startups and their advice for the next crop of young founders.

2. The Future of Music Making 

• Featuring Ernst Nathorst-Böös Propellerhead, Prerna Gupta Khush (now part of Smule), Dan Walton Retronyms, Henrik Lenberg SoundCloud 
• All you need is a $4.99 app for your smartphone or tablet and you’re ready to create the next big hit. Or…? This panel takes the temperature on the rapidly changing music software space and asks whether the huge success of mobile apps will give us more great music in the future and if mobile music making is just a fun hobby or for serious music creators?

3. Pinning and Winning: Activating Social Contests

• Featuring Adriana Kampfner CMP.LY, Linda Goldstein Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLC, Ben Pickering Strutta, Erika Brookes Oracle
• This panel will take a look at changing platforms, new challenges and emerging best practices with regard to giveaways, sweeps and contests across Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and more.

4. Sweet Memes Are Made of This: How to Go Viral

• Featuring Michael Selvidge Twilio, Lian Amaris Songbird, Ricky Robinett Ordr.in, Peter Shankman Vocus Inc 
• Though virality can’t be guaranteed, there are a few ways to best position a creation to become a meme. From tactical tagging to tweeting at influencers, the panel will discuss the “how,” “when,” and “who” of strategic creation, so companies can target the best audience that will want and need to share their content.

5. Using an API vs Building in-house

• Featuring Jeff Lawson Twilio, John Collison Stripe, Jim Franklin SendGrid, Scott Kveton Urban Airship 
• Panelists from e-commerce platform Shopify, online payments processor Stripe, voice and SMS API Twilio, email deliverability leaders SendGrid, push notifications specialist Urban Airship and venture capital pioneers Bessemer Venture Partners will tackle the successful and not-so-successful ways that entrepreneurs today build and grow their businesses with APIs. Taken from their own experiences and partnerships, the panel will discuss dos and don’ts and debate when to build yourself or buy from someone else.

6. What’s So Funny About Innovation?

• Featuring Paul Valerio Method, Inc., Baratunde Thurston Cultivated Wit
• Join Paul Valerio, Principal at experience design firm, Method, and Baratunde Thurston, comedian and best-selling author, for a Q&A around comedy and how it can be used for brand, product, and service innovation.

7. What Technology Gets Us to the Jetsons?

• Featuring Peter Cook Bluetooth SIG 
• This session will discuss the different technologies connecting the M2M market – from Bluetooth to RFID, from Wi-Fi to Cellular – granularly discussing the technologies, their differentiators, what scenarios they are perfect for and what, from a technology standpoint, is still missing.

8. Sneakers & Technology pt 2: Experiences by Design

• Featuring Trevor Eld R/GA 
• As a continuation of Sneakers & Technology: A True Love Story, this panel will continue the discussion of the storied relationship between technological innovation and the sneaker industry. In this installment, we’ll be covering the amazing sneaker innovations from the past year, the experiences they’re creating, and how our lives are, and will be, affected by them.

9. The Startup Library: Reading like an Entrepreneur

• Featuring Kevin Smokler Self-Employed Will Schwalbe Cookstr 
• In this session, startup veterans/authors Will Schwalbe and Kevin Smokler will look at three reasons why entrepreneurs must hit the books–Canonical (i.e. which books to read and when), Neurological (the effect of reading on the entrepreneurial brain) and Contextual (how reading improves product vision, market understanding and issues of user experience). You’ll exit with your own reading list inspired by the reading lists of great entreprenerus as well as tools on maximizing reading time.

10. Is the Internet America’s Third Party?

• Featuring Maura Corbett Glen Echo Group, Mark Colwell Sen. Jerry Moran, Laurent Crenshaw Rep. Darrell Issa, Marvin Amori The Ammori Group
• In 2012, you had bitter, polarized Republicans and Democrats – and then you had the Internet. If any of that was in doubt, on January 18, 2012 the Internet officially arrived. SOPA and PIPA were the bills that may be discussed for years to come as the acronyms that changed it all. In the form of 3.9 million tweets, 2,000 people a second trying to call their Members and more than 5,000 people a minute signing petitions, netizens from across the nation spoke out.

Did I miss any you’re excited about? Please feel free to share!

I know what you’re thinking, sure t-shirts are great but can they really make an impact on my startup’s bottom line?

The resounding answer is YES!! Here are 5 ways you can effectively use t-shirts to grow profits:

1. Increase customer loyalty by asking long-term customers for their feedback on a survey and rewarding them with a t-shirt upon completion.
2. Grow your paying customers by offering a free t-shirt to anyone who signs up and uses your product.
3. Increase your following across social media channels using a t-shirt giveaway contest.
4. Outfit your team so that when you go to conferences your brand breaks through the clutter.
5. Reach out to potential clients, or up-sell current ones, by sending out care packages complete with t-shirts they’ll be stoked to wear.
6. BONUS: Tout a free swag item or t-shirt giveaway contest in your advertising to attract potential customers to your website.

Check out how we can help put your swag on autopilot here and join the thousands of other startups already using t-shirts. Want to see it to believe it? A quick search on the Internet will pull up tons of startups using swag.  Look what we found today:

1. Lijit hats

2. Zozi t-shirt

3. Sendgrid t-shirts

4. Jess3 t-shirt

5. Murfie baby tee

Pretty sweet right? Don’t get left in the dust, get started creating yours today.