my venture into
the world of tech
— Irmela de Villiers -
redefining tech for people who don't understand tech.
In the latter part of 2022 I found my way onto the prettysim.pl team.
My first words to Cor, the founder, was: “I know nothing about tech.” Him, being an openminded individual and always curious to try unusual approaches said as long as I’m curious to learn, a new perspective will be good for business.
And so started the steepest learning curve in my career. I had to familiarise myself with words like integration, JSONs, API’s, systems architecture. I had to figure out the perfect uses for no code apps like Softr, Make, Airtable… And then one day it all clicked.
My SIL was looking at our company website and gave me a call. What exactly was the services that we offered? The wording on the site was tailored to people who understand the tech world. The ones who already knows what they want automated and how their systems are supposed to fit together. I was the perfect person to start telling the story. The perfect mediator for company owners who wants something better for their business but don’t necessarily know which road to take. Those who don’t even know that they need prettysim.pl’s services.
So, the approach to our marketing and messaging shifted. We started taking an outcome approach, instead of explaining the process or instances where you could employ automation. We started looking at telling the stories of clients we helped in the past. Where they were, what we did and how it’s changed their operations. I told the stories. Summarised the outcomes. And started posting them online.
But, we ran into a problem. The stories were too big.
It took too many resources to create the stories for a simple post and with the nature of social media, the stories were too complex and simply wouldn’t add the value we knew it could. That’s when we started the development of the content machine and our first test case. We needed to milk it for all it was worth.
Each client goes through an unimaginable amount of phases and each of them could be valuable to the narrative. With me being super intrigued with documentaries, I could see the similarities in how these story could play out. An escalating problem within a company, different points of view, thought processes on process strategies, encountering obstacles and ultimately a solution and success story. I broke up the client story into 22 episodes to build a narrative with all the marks of a compelling show. The trick was that even if the narrative was mapped, the story took unexpected turns. I filmed interviews with all parties involved telling the story from their perspective, ran meeting transcripts through ai to determine crucial moments and finally animated important information that can help any company to enhance their operations.
Each episode has a generic foundation with great fundamental learnings that can be of value to any business. This meant the possibility of accompanying posts to each episode, blogs, carousels, quotes. Each of them adding to the image of the company and establishing them as thought leaders in their industry.
I’m extremely proud of the final result and we’ve also seen tangible changes in the engagement on our platform.