Shortcut Content: Special Projects

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “What kind of special projects do we do?

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Shayla: Thank you for joining us for the Shortcut Content podcast. I’m talking with founder Dave Young today. Dave, do you do special projects at Shortcut Content and, if so, what types would you consider?

Dave: Well, at Shortcut Content we’ve done a number of special projects that don’t fall really inside our core service, which is delivering weekly blogs and podcasts episodes. At a couple of locations, we’re doing video. And you maybe have seen some of the videos that we’re producing for ourselves, like for example with this interview. We’re recording it for podcast, but I’m also standing in front of our little studio and we’re going to make this into a video that we can put on Facebook, and YouTube and wherever else.

So we’ve got a few clients that we’re doing that for, where they’ve actually installed a studio, similar to what I’m standing in front of and we’re recording them that way, but other special projects have been kind of fun. We’ve done books. For example, at the Wizard Academy in Austin, Texas, we took the founder, Roy Williams, around on a tour of the campus. The campus is an amazing place and it’s full of amazing artwork. And rather than having all of it catalogued so that Roy could write the stories about them, I spent the day with him, walking around the campus over eight or nine hours with him micro phoned up and we just recorded the story of every painting, every sculpture, every piece of architectural significance so that they could then take the transcription of that, and turn it into the descriptions for a campus guidebook with photos of all that art. So that’s one of the special projects we’ve done.

Another one is for a guy who is doing a special version of Michael Gerber’s E-Myth. You may have seen that that book has versions for E-Myth chiropractors, E-Myth dentist, E-Myth roofer, all of those different categories and we’re helping one of those categories do a version of that book for his industry, kind of a hush-hush thing. I’m not going to tell you who it is, but he’s not a writer, but he knows all the stories and he knows all the things that he would write, if he had the time to actually sit down and do it. So we’re pulling those things out of him in the form of interviews.
We also wrote a book for a guy who took an online company from being a little hundred dollar a month bedroom based company to a multi-million dollar company and then sold it to one of his big competitors and through our interview process, we created the manuscript for the book that tells the story of how he grew that company.

And I think of the fun ones that we’re about to launch is that I’ve been doing podcasts with a guy, one of our clients, where we are doing a long-form podcast. So it will be a twenty minute a week podcast and we’re using the same work flow. So we’ll do a twenty minute talk about whatever topic he chooses and I’m interviewing him on these topics every time and then what we’re doing is we take the transcription of that twenty minute podcast and turn it into two or three blog posts for him as well. Again, we’re following the formula of Shortcut Content, we’re just doing it a little different way and our focus is going to primarily be on the podcast episode in long form as opposed to these shorter episodes where we’re just really trying to derive a blog post out of it.

So I’ve got a deep interest in doing some special projects for STEM scientists and I’ve been doing a little bit of research on how we can help a STEM scientist, even if they don’t have a budget. So if there are ways we can help find sponsorships or develop patron sites or things like that so that they can not only create the content, but in some ways, monetize it as well and help establish them as an expert in their field. So those kinds of special projects are things that we’ve been working on.

Shayla: So for special projects, someone’s not just going to find that pricing on the website. How do they go about figuring that out with you?

Dave: Well, we’ve got contact information and I’m happy to spend whatever time is necessary on the phone to discuss whatever project that you’d like to do, and come up with a price and a way that we can make that a Shortcut Content project.
Shayla: Alright. Go to shortcutcontent.com to find that contact information. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.