Printing Pixels with Martin Purmensky
Brent Peterson (00:02.274)
Welcome to this episode. Today I have Martin Purmensky Martin is the founder of The Video Cards and I will let Martin do an introduction, tell us your day to day role and then maybe tell us one of your passions in life.
Martin Purmensky (00:18.38)
Hey, Brian. So my name is Morten Purmensky, as you said, and I am the founder and owner of the Video Cards. We sell video brochures, video mailers, and any kind of display -based devices. We can get to it later what it is. When it comes to my passion, it's related to my previous...
previous business, love photography and I love to travel. So that kind of combines those two things together. I listened to one of your podcasts a few weeks ago where one lady was talking about travel as well. So yeah, when we can, we travel with family and I run around with my camera and probably right now in our dining room is this huge picture of Patagonia shot from Chile. So that was probably
highlight of our travel. That was absolutely beautiful and I would recommend it to anyone.
Brent Peterson (01:23.672)
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I have a passion for photography. I can't say that I do it enough, but I think with iPhones now it's so much easier. Yeah, to at least get some photos. And I used to travel to India a lot and then everybody liked to take photos of me. Like they wanted to their selfie with me. So tell us a little bit about, actually before we get started, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project.
And I'm just going to tell you a joke. All you have to do is give me a rating one through five. So here we go. Kudos to the person who invented denim jeans. They were genius.
Martin Purmensky (01:56.888)
Okay.
Martin Purmensky (02:06.72)
Okay, well, I would say it's four, it's pretty good. Yeah, I get it right away. Sometimes when jokes, I have to think about it. this one, yeah, four is good.
Brent Peterson (02:11.854)
Okay, good.
Brent Peterson (02:20.204)
Alright, yeah, that's important. I think a lot of times I do end up explaining the joke, but I'm happy that you got it.
Martin Purmensky (02:24.935)
Yeah. Yeah, if you have to explain it, it probably is not.
Brent Peterson (02:30.978)
So let's talk about, so I am familiar with your product or your type of product and maybe more in a commercial setting. I know that at many conferences at a booth, they would have a video type display that you would, or actually, you know, I think a Kinio or one of the PIM systems actually sent me a whole demo of their product in a video type card, which was pretty interesting. And it looked just like your product. wasn't.
personal photos, it was demo screenshots and how the product worked. I guess I'll be honest for that. I didn't think it was super effective and it's probably a very expensive use of their time and mail, but I can understand. Before I do, why don't you tell us a little bit about the background of your company and why you got into it.
Martin Purmensky (03:22.68)
Well, so you can hear the accent. am originally from Czechoslovakia. I studied to be in the printing industry. I actually for a while worked on an offset printer. then, know, fast forward, I met my wife. She was teaching English in my country in Czech Republic at the time. She imported me to the United States. I work in a...
mostly in creative field. I, for one resort company, did print, a lot of print website. I traveled the US to take pictures of their resorts and video as well. And in 2014, I got my first video brochure in my hands and I thought, my God, this is combination of everything I have ever done. It's a print, it's design, it's photography, it's video, and it's for marketing.
So I took it to a couple of friends I showed it and they thought that it's a great product for what it can do. The price at the time was expecting to fall, so it was more affordable than before. And so after a few years, initially I offered it as a part of my other business, but then I had to spin it out and I created the video cards. So we saw.
video brochures, video mails and so on. And what it is is a custom printed, custom printed brochure. And when you open it, there is a video. So I have one here. You can see that this was done for specifically for this company. And once you open it, there is a video that's playing. Obviously this has a lot of advantages. We are selling every year more of them and
probably the biggest growth was during the pandemic because if you have salespeople that cannot see face to face their clients, then the next good thing is to send them brochure and in a way, see them face to face, well, one way face to face, I guess, through the video brochure. It's easy to customize it. So you can upload even a specific video where it takes
Martin Purmensky (05:49.122)
can say something like, hey, Brent, this is Martin, and I want to introduce you to this new product. So during the pandemic, that got hugely popular, and the moment is still going. We continue, as I said, increased sales year after year.
Brent Peterson (06:08.674)
That's good. I guess I'd never thought about the ability to customize it per client and that would be very effective to really personalize it. Tell us a little bit about how that works and how effective that is.
Martin Purmensky (06:22.594)
So, you know, when you look at trends in marketing, lately a lot is said about customization and personalization. So in many cases, most of our clients are sending brochures that have the same video over and over on every brochure, right? But in some cases, we are uploading videos specifically for the person to which it's being sent.
So you can address in the video, you can address specifically, first of all, you can address the person to which this being sent, but also you can address the company that you think may, how they may benefit from the product or services you are selling, right? So again, if you offer generic brochure and it says, hello, my name is...
as opposed to hello brand, my name is Martin and I am sending this to your business, ABC, then of course it may have a different impact. Of course now with the AI, it's getting easier a little bit because we have one organization that wanted to send like thousand video brochures to potential donors or something. And they were interested to make it personalized for each person, but the guys said,
there's no way I can make my CEO or director whoever sit for thousand videos and say, hello, brand, hello, Jennifer, hello, Jo, and so on so on. And there are now services where you can upload one video, a database, and it will spit out a thousand video files each for a specific person, right? So in that case, the personalization will...
I would expect with this kind of technology going forward. But it doesn't have to be really. We have different clients where, say, we have one client that ordered 100 brochures and they send it to one single company, quite large company, very popular lately. But imagine that they really wanted to get that business, so they send it to 100 people, different one.
Martin Purmensky (08:47.234)
company to make sure that somebody don't know this. that's, you know, sometimes interesting to see how to just put all in one basket and really target that one company to be noticed.
Brent Peterson (09:06.606)
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Have you always been an entrepreneur? Is this a new venture? Second venture? Fourth venture? Tell us a little bit about how the journey you got to where you're at.
Martin Purmensky (09:16.366)
So when I came here, I work as I mentioned in the hospitality industry doing basically leading a creative department for one visual company. But even before I did, I had my own business. And afterwards, when in 2009, company went into brain traps, I utilized my network of people that I already knew within the industry and got.
hired for various projects. I traveled to Colorado, to Utah, to New Jersey to take pictures and videos of hotels and so on. So yeah, you know what, looking back, I always tried something on my own as opposed to being employed. In fact, in the last 25 years, I was employed for five years.
when I had other business with photography and creative services, but then when I saw the potential in the video cards, it was, know, I immediately knew that card will be much more lucrative than anything I have ever done before. yeah, I'm very proud of being from Czech Republic kind of perspective. We work even with White House Historical Association, which
I'm so proud of because I never thought I would be calling the White House lines or I reworked with Ferrari in San Francisco, we did brochures for Purell, Johns Hopkins, those are names that I'm still very humbled by that I get to come organizations and companies like that among my clients.
Brent Peterson (11:12.987)
How about, so you've mentioned some decent sized clients. Has it been difficult to scale what you're trying to do?
Martin Purmensky (11:13.484)
Thank you.
Martin Purmensky (11:21.1)
You know what, I am more kind of the careful kind of person. So it took me a couple of years to scale it. But still every year we increase and increase and increase. But I was kind of more careful about growing too fast because obviously there are some growing things, right? But once you acquire a client and they have a good experience and we tried really hard to
focus on customer support and just do really good work when it comes to supporting our clientele. Most clients come back year after year or sometimes we have like yesterday I got email from client that worked with us two years ago and they have another big order in pipeline. So scaling doesn't look well,
It's going well as far as that goes because at this point probably 25 % of our orders are from existing clients and they come back for the few projects. They may not have to come back for, as I said, two years or a whole year, but we do have few that come a couple of times with your order every year. So yeah, it's...
kind of starts rolling on itself, I would say.
Brent Peterson (12:53.254)
This podcast is sponsored by Entrepreneurs Organization. part of EO Minnesota. A big thing in the entrepreneurial world or at least in the EO world is EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System. Have you looked at any ways or do you use anything like a framework for your business operating system to function?
Martin Purmensky (13:15.499)
Not really, no, I do not work with anything like that. I am part of your organizations, but.
Brent Peterson (13:26.478)
From a day -to -day role, what do you see yourself? EOS has a visionary role and an integrator role, so the visionary would be the person that kind of just comes up with the conceptual ideas and the integrator is person that really gets things done. Do you see yourself more as a visionary or an integrator?
Martin Purmensky (13:41.742)
you
I do think that I'm visionary. The business takes a lot of time on my part and I'm trying to hire additional help here to help with the day by day tasks. But I had some ideas how we could create new devices, new ways how to improve the marketing or be it with the stands, example, that you see behind me.
or other devices where you can include the video component. So yes, my head is constantly spinning thinking about what new could be created with the technology.
Brent Peterson (14:36.334)
Is there any, so as a, one of my go -to reading books to kind of for business would be a book called Traction by Geno Wickman and it kind of lays out a framework maybe based on the Rockefeller habits. One of those things when your head is spinning is they call it the shiny object where you're, you get a little bit distracted and suddenly you've taken your eye off what you should be doing instead of you. How do you deal with situations like that?
Martin Purmensky (15:07.008)
I am trying exactly what you are saying. I'm experiencing because I start working on something and then, I should take care quickly of this. But I am listening to a lot of podcasts and, you know, self help and things like that. So I am trying desperately to stay on one task, finish it and then go to other one because it happened a couple of times when I started writing emails and I jumped to something else. And then at the end of the day, I
look under all my open windows and find the email that was never sent. So it's certainly something, know, multitasking all over the place, maybe a good thing you need to multitask, but at the same time, can be distracting when it comes to accomplish what everything you want to accomplish. So I am working on it very hard to stay focused on individual tasks as we go.
Brent Peterson (16:04.73)
earlier you mentioned you mentioned the use of AI in creating video. How have you applied artificial intelligence machine learning into your day -to -day business or have you used AI to help you to be more efficient in your day -to -day business?
Martin Purmensky (16:22.474)
Well, absolutely. tried to, I used some video to test. As we tried to expand to other markets, I created one video and then fed it into one video AI translator and I was blown away. Being from the Czech Republic, I could really check the quality of the translation and it was just perfect. It was amazing to me. I mean,
the voice changed of the model that I hired, but as far as the movement of the map and everything, was fantastic. When it comes to, of course, something like ChantGPD, we are using it in some cases to speed up writing of emails, get idea for blog posts and so on.
Now we started looking into creating a chart board that we are still creating a document to teach the chart board to learn everything that we know about video brochures. Because many times, even though it's on the website, people are asking, can I have video brochure with my own design? Well, yes, that's the whole concept. So if the chart board can really quickly answer questions like that, I think that would be extremely helpful.
And so far it works really well from the test that we have done. But I still have to go through some technical aspects of implementing it into the website. But certainly, it seems to me so hard to keep up because the technology is going so quickly ahead and every day there is like a new company that comes with something cool. you think, that sounds good, maybe I should implement it.
But here it is about, again, going from one thing to the other. It's just impossible to try everything. So we work with some selected tools in AI and so far it looks very promising.
Brent Peterson (18:33.262)
You mentioned just hiring people. think you're in Florida. And I guess in your business, it doesn't really matter where people are located, but in the technology space, have you been struggling trying to find the right people to fit the roles you're looking for?
Martin Purmensky (18:49.388)
You know, lately, yes, we just posted an ad for or job posting for a social media manager and it was kind of difficult to do. We have a ton of interest, but in some cases there was really no experience and
In some cases there was some experience, however, B2B social media is very different than if somebody is posting something from vacation. So we have some struggles and growing pains in Top of the Yard, but at the same time I worked with one lady that I found in Tampa and she's absolutely fantastic and a few others that are great support.
in the business. I'm so thankful that I found them because initially I was looking for somebody living in Orlando but even though some of our people are remote it's still working quite well.
Brent Peterson (19:58.862)
For your business coming up, as we go into this holiday season, you're a B2B, so maybe the Black Friday doesn't affect you as much, but do you have anything that you're excited about that's coming up in the next, say, half a year that you see as something that's going to help you or even your business, your particular market that's going to start helping you?
Martin Purmensky (20:00.502)
Thank
Martin Purmensky (20:10.178)
you
Martin Purmensky (20:22.914)
Well, you know, I am very excited about the next four months because in many ways we do the
We do in the last four months as much business as maybe first six months. It gets really busy. Companies have a lot of money to spend and if they can spend it on marketing, that is perfect. Typically, they want to send something, know, 2nd, January like the second week or something like that, but people return and are ready to work on the new year. So,
There is a lot of business and you can imagine how it just changed within week to week in the mid August where people came from vacation and suddenly like, my God, we have to pick up this video brochure project and we just got slammed. So right now we have a lot of orders and I assume that it will continue with like even video brochures for a holiday like.
thanking people for thanking companies for thank you for working with me or as a of holy gift. So that is the next three or four months will be quite exciting from the business standpoint.
Brent Peterson (21:45.464)
Yeah, I guess when I, when I asked that, didn't think the fact that you probably are supplying people that are supplying to D2C. So you're a little bit downstream from a regular retail vendor, but that those clients are your clients who are your B2B. So I guess I didn't quite make that connection when I asked the question, but I would imagine that your, your business then is cyclical in the sense that maybe up to running up to Black Friday, you're going to get busier. then as you said, or as you passed
the holidays and into quarter one. There's that ramp up to the, let's call it the conference season of the spring.
Martin Purmensky (22:24.494)
That's right. Yes. And you know, typically it kind of dies off there for two weeks at the end of December, like everywhere, right? But then it picks up again in January. But certainly, you know, we do have a lot of clients that like, we need to spend $50 ,000. What can we do? And we give them proposal for you can do this or that. And yeah, I like those kind of jobs because, you know, it's like,
Great, are thankful that you want to spend it with us. That's absolutely fantastic.
Brent Peterson (22:57.614)
Martin, we have a few minutes left. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want. What would you like to plug today?
Martin Purmensky (23:08.428)
Well, of course I would like to plug my business in. Many people don't know what video brochure is. So in fact, if I tell someone what it is, they think that it's some kind of service on YouTube where I upload video to promote a business like that. But then if I go to networking meetings and I show one device to someone, you can see how the wheel starts running.
And people are like, my god, this is great. How could we could use it in this way or that way? And hey, Jennifer, come check this out. Hey, Josh, look at this. This will be great for this project. So if you want to find out more about video brochures or video mailers, video stands, video boxes, what those are, go to the website, thevideobrush .com. And you can see some samples of our devices.
you will get idea how they can improve your marketing and sales and fundraising and so on.
Brent Peterson (24:18.69)
Yeah, and I'll just say that I did look through the website and it is very extensive and you have a lot of solutions for people to try and it's very interesting. I'm intrigued even by the little video boxes that you have. It's more than just a brochure. I like how you can insert video even in a book or a bookcase, like one solution you had where you give somebody a book and then you open
You open up the case and there's a video that kind of describes it. There's all kinds of things that people can do.
Martin Purmensky (24:48.267)
Bye.
Absolutely. Yeah, there's the video book. So you know people or our clients are buying it when they read this book and they want to send it to influencers So they send them the book and say hey, please read my book make little interaction on the video and there it is the book can be taken out of the box and you can read it and hopefully you go on social media to plug it for that person that wrote it so there are so many different ways how you can use it we have one with the chocolates
chocolate box where you can send chocolates to your client and say, here, thank you for working with me. Enjoy the chocolate or whatever you want to.
Brent Peterson (25:31.17)
Yeah, that's awesome. I need that.
Martin Purmensky (25:33.678)
Yeah, well, you know what? It's good solution only for the winter sending chocolates within summer that maybe especially here in Florida that maybe I like
Brent Peterson (25:40.43)
yeah. Yeah. You're around in Florida sometimes. Martin, it's been such a great conversation. It's thevideocards .com and how would they reach you if they want to contact you?
Martin Purmensky (25:56.236)
They can find me on LinkedIn where I'm trying to be quite active when the time allows. And so that would be probably the best, given the focus on B2B.
Martin Purmensky (26:08.738)
be all the things I never
Brent Peterson (26:10.978)
That's great and I will make sure I put all those into the show notes. Martin Praminski, it's been such a great honor to speak to you today. Thank you.
Martin Purmensky (26:18.136)
Thank you, Brent. I appreciate it.