How To Productize Your Passion
Do you have a brilliant business idea that you're truly passionate about?
Do you believe there are others out there who share that same passion?
If so, you're probably wondering how to transform that passion into a tangible product and make a profit doing what you love.
It’s the dream, right?
On this week’s episode of the podcast, we sat down with long-time friend and creative collaborator, Jonathan Kayser of Lens Distortions to talk about the remarkable journey from passion to profit and the niche Kaiser found within the film and photography industry.
The brand is known for creating premium music and effects tailored for video editors. Lens Distortions products have graced the screens of blockbuster movies, major TV shows, and high-end commercials.
However, it's not just the industry giants that Jonathan is focused on; his passion lies in empowering young creatives who are just beginning their journey. Kaiser has expanded Lens Distortions’ reach to include a downloadable app, for premium photo and video editing at your fingertips.
Tune in as we delve into the story behind Lens Distortions' success and gain valuable insights into the art of turning passion into profit.
Check out the episode where you listen to great podcasts and support us by sharing, liking, and subscribing!
Ep. 44:
How To Productize Your Passion
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders:
So you've got a business idea, you're passionate about it. You think there might be others out there that share the same passion as you, but how do you turn that passion into an actual product? Hey, welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design & Strategy. Today I'm talking with my longtime friend and creative collaborator, Jonathan Kayser. Almost 10 years ago, he took a crazy creative product idea and put it out into the world for others to purchase and enjoy, and so began the story of Lens Distortions, an amazing brand that creates premium music and effects for video editors. Lens Distortions products have been used in blockbuster movies, big TV shows, and high-end commercials, but it's the young creative who's just starting out that Jonathan is really focused on. If you want some practical tips and inspiration on how to take your passion project and turn it into a profitable product, stay tuned.
Jon, welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand. I'm excited to talk to you today about Lens Distortions, but before we begin, I want to kind of give a little bit of a disclaimer for everyone. Jon and I are good friends and we go way back. I was in his wedding, he was in my wedding and myself and Fruitful, we've had the opportunity of working on a number of branding projects with Jon, so I just want everyone to kind of know that. And so if we start kind of just getting into a lot of little personal stories and insider jokes, you've been warned.
Jonathan Kayser:
Good to see you, Ben. Man, those were the glory days. When did we first first meet?
Ben Lueders:
They really were.
Jonathan Kayser:
2006, 2007?
Ben Lueders:
2006. So yeah, I was 19 and we were both 19, I think, and you turned 20 and yeah, it's kind of a crazy, crazy road.
Jonathan Kayser:
It was fun. When I met you, you were this creative at large, like an illustrator, a musician. You kind of did everything. And I felt like at the time I didn't really do anything, but I was so inspired by you all the time that I wanted to hang around you. You're also a very fun guy so.
Ben Lueders:
Aw. Thank you, Jon. Thank you, Jon. Well, that's funny because I was very creatively inspired by you. I feel like you kind of dabbled in lots of things. At that time you were doing home remodeling and flipping, which is creative in its own way, but you were doing a lot of photography stuff. You were trying out your chops on web development and all kinds of different things, and I could hardly keep up with you. And so it was kind of fun that it was such a like, I think, special time in our development as creatives and right on the cusp of becoming professionals. We were both, I think, having really fun, creative ideas all the time. And what I really want to get into with you today on is how did you particularly harness that kind of passion and turn it into something that is so productized and professional and something that people actually want to pay for? And so your business is Lens Distortions. And before we get into the history of it, could you just kind of tell us what it is?
Jonathan Kayser:
So Lens Distortions is a company that basically we create really high-end creative ingredients for filmmakers. So our small team creates music, sound effects, visual assets. We create software that hopefully gives creatives a lot of leverage. And on top of that, we're also a brand, and we have a very kind of specific focus that we've kind of built our brand around, which is this idea that basically in an increasingly superficial and commoditized world, we want to empower creatives to do more meaningful work. And so that kind of ethos kind of bleeds into everything we do from creating music and sound effects and building out little software experiences in our mobile app. So as a brand, we really want to give people permission to do stuff that really matters, infuse more meaning and significance into things and not in epic ways. A lot of times it's really small ways that people may not notice, but makes it fun. So that's Lens Distortions.
Ben Lueders:
That's Lens Distortion. I think the funny thing is not only is that Lens Distortions, that is Jon Kayser in a nutshell. And I think what's so cool about your company is it's such a cool reflection of that creative heart that I encountered when I was 19 years old. The way that you described that is such a great correlation between those things. And so let's dive into it. Right now, if you go to lensdistortions.com, you're going to see they've got all kinds of, there's different products that they have. They're all kind of tailored to video creators. They even have a mobile app that is tailored more towards just creatives in general. But when it first started, how did Lens Distortions first start and why is it called Lens Distortions? I am sure, you get that all the time.
Jonathan Kayser:
So we started very, very humble beginnings. So I spent, I don't know about 10 years as a filmmaker, almost 10 years just doing commercial projects and taking almost any job that people would give me just to try to make ends meet. And over the years I was able to, I had the fortune of being able to work on some really cool projects for brands like ESPN and a infinite number of really, really small projects for small businesses down the street. And one thing, I'm kind of an obsessive person, and whether I was working on those really big projects or really, really small ones, I would kill myself to make them as good as I could. I wasn't just trying to copy what the videographer down the street was doing, I was trying to copy Chris Nolan and Steven Spielberg, and I wanted every single project to be Apple quality.
And so that, I don't know, that kind of attitude, we still kind of have around our business now. We try to only greenlight projects that we feel we can do really well. So back in the day when I was a filmmaker, I did a lot of visual effects and editing and stuff like that, and I had some people who were doing a big project in Iceland for an agency. And at the time there was this really cool trendy visual look where they would take shards of glass and put the glass in front of the lens and do these really artistic things. And my friends wanted to do that, but the agency was not so keen on shipping them across the world and then putting shards of glass in front of the lens. Great way to really mess up a video shoot.
So they were like, Hey Jon, any chance we could find a way to do this in post? I was like, oh, there's no way. It's too hard to get it to look that good. But I tinkered and experimented a lot and came up with some video overlays that really looked similar. And my friends ended up not even using it, but I thought hmm, I wonder if other people might like it. So I spun up a really kind of scrappy website and I made it into a little product called Lens Distortions because it distorted the lens with glass. And before long people started buying it and it was really fun. And I brought on a co-founder, Craig Nashleanas, to help me really expand and grow the business. And then over years we started adding more kind of visual products. And then, yeah, so that was the beginnings and it evolved quite a bit.
Ben Lueders:
Evolved from that.
Jonathan Kayser:
Over the last almost 10 years.
Ben Lueders:
Well, let's zoom into that beginning a little bit. On Growing a Fruitful Brand and here at Fruitful Design & Strategy, we talk about the importance of focus and niching down and knowing your customer. And as you and I were kind of talking through what we could get into in this conversation, I can't imagine a more niched product, like even as you're describing it. I remember when you first were telling me about this possible product, and I was like, I'm a very creative person. And I was like, what on earth are you talking about? Who's going to pay for shards of glass overlayed? It is such a focused thing, but I feel like you saw something that I didn't see. like you knew. Tell me, did you kind of see that, you must have seen that there are other people like you that might want to buy this?
Jonathan Kayser:
Yeah, I mean, we saw similar things kind of happening in totally different spaces, like in the fashion world, a lot of the fashion videos were doing these types of looks. The big car brands would do really similar, like you know the Mercedes-Benz logo where it's like [inaudible 00:10:43].
Ben Lueders:
That's great.
Jonathan Kayser:
And so we'd see these really big time brands doing this stuff and we thought, why can't everybody do that? And so we started building products that only the really, really, really big dogs would, things that they would do. And we started making it available to everybody and,
Ben Lueders:
Well then tell me,
Jonathan Kayser:
People loved it.
Ben Lueders:
Did any of the big dogs, were they interested in your product? Has anyone famous or noteworthy that you know of use Lens Distortions?
Jonathan Kayser:
Oh yeah. I mean over the years we kind of got to this point where we were doing that look kind of better than anyone. So the opening titles of Season one of Stranger Things has some very subtle light overlays from us all the way to the ending titles of the Batman movie that came out last year, Matt Reeves, Batman,
Ben Lueders:
Oh, wow.
Jonathan Kayser:
The entire ending credits are all our glass effects. And then we've seen our stuff used by Marvel films during the end credits. We've seen them in Tesla commercials, Mercedes-Benz commercials recently. It's really fun to see where these things go when you put them out there. But the thing that really gets us excited is when we find these 17 year old people still living at home with a laptop and a camera pushing themselves to do things at that exact same level. It's truly mind-blowing what people can do just on a laptop these days in terms of really cool videos and those people are our customers. So we're bringing those products from the high end thing to ordinary people who are trying to up their game.
Ben Lueders:
Talk about that for a minute, Jon. So I think that is one of the interesting things about really just the creative world in the last 10, 15 years is some of the technology that used to only be available to the richest of the rich or these really high end, that like it's now available to almost anybody. How did that revolution in technology and availability, how did that affect you kind of in your creative journey and in building Lens Distortions?
Jonathan Kayser:
I remember way back in the day, like when you and I first met each other and I was like, oh, I wish I could be a filmmaker someday. But it was too hard because a good camera was like 10 or $20,000 and you needed all of this complicated computer hardware. And right around that time, the Canon 5D came out,
Ben Lueders:
Yep.
Jonathan Kayser:
And you could shoot really cool video footage that had a depth of field in it, and Final Cut Pro was really going crazy at the time. And all these new tools just started becoming available and tons of people grabbed those tools and just started making stuff. And at the exact same time, you had Vimeo and YouTube creating platforms where you could actually get eyeballs on your work. And a really, really fun and creative community came out of that, especially on Vimeo back in the early days. And it was a really exciting time being able to, it's funny, even at that time no one had drones and I had some buddies who were young filmmakers and they ever so often would rent a helicopter and go shoot aerial stuff, and all the rest of us were so mind-blowing. We're like, oh, how did you get this footage? And now everybody has a drone.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Kayser:
And everyone can capture the most breathtaking footage you can imagine. So it's really cool, the world that we live in now. If you have any type of vision for what you want to do, there's not much stopping you.
Ben Lueders:
Well, and it seems like Lens Distortions has kind of followed that same journey, right, where your initial products were something, you're targeting towards more premium high end like the JJ Abrams of the world, and then now you're trying to make that available to like you said, this 17 year old creative who has a passion for filmmaking or a certain aesthetic. It seems like you're kind of marketing a bit to you like when I first met you, like this teenager with just a passion for the industry and wanting to make great work. And so maybe this would be a good time to kind of get into what Lens Distortions is now. One of the cool things that I've noticed is that it's not just about visual effects anymore. You guys have really expanded into sound effects and music. That's the most compelling part to me. I think your music is absolutely stunning. How did that come to be? Was that always part of the plan or, I know you're someone who is passionate about music, but how did that evolution kind of come to be?
Jonathan Kayser:
So it's funny you said back in the day, I was trying to explain to you what Lens Distortions was, way back in the day.
Ben Lueders:
Right.
Jonathan Kayser:
And it's one of those things that it's kind of hard to explain, but if you make a cool visual trailer for it and show someone that video, they're like, oh, oh, I get it. That looks cool. They may not Google it, but once you put it in front of them, they understood it. And so we would create these really, really high-end trailers to show off the products that we had and we would put so much effort into making these really cinematic kind of trailers. And a lot of stuff that went into that was sound effects. We put tons of sound effects in the videos.
And at the time it was really hard to find good sound effects. They were kind of kept under lock and key by these really big production houses that only wanted professional sound designers to use them. And there just wasn't a lot of options. So we found some collaborators to help us start building out sound effects mostly for ourselves, but we turned that into products, making that available to all of our customers, and that really took off. People absolutely loved our sound effects and we're not talking like cute little cartoon sounds.
Ben Lueders:
Dog barking and,
Jonathan Kayser:
No. Yeah, these are like the kind of sounds you hear in a movie trailer. Like this summer and then whooshes and all kinds of really fun things to make your edits feel dynamic. So then we kept making videos and people kept asking us, where do you get your music from? We're like, we do it the same way you do it. We have to comb through websites for hours and hours and hours just to find a good track that has the right ethos. And we kind of started getting tired of telling people that. So we thought, why don't we create our own music that kind of matches our style and what we're about?
So we started dipping our toes in there and having a lot of fun and learning a ton. We didn't know what we were doing. We just were figuring it out as we went. And we really fell in love with building music as a company. I pinched myself every single day. The people I get to work with, between our composers that make original stuff to our developers that build software, mashing all that up together into a product experience is really fun. So yeah, that's kind of how music came to be. We just slowly kind of expanded what would be useful to us, building that into products for our customers.
Raj:
(Singing).
Ben Lueders:
Subscribe and ring that bell. As we kind of think about the kind of controlling idea of this podcast being productizing your passion, I think one of the cool things about it is I see the controlling idea of kind of Lens Distortions is like, Hey, if I'm passionate about this, if this is something I want, if this is something I'm paying for, there's got to be others out there. And you don't have to have something that appeals to every person on earth. You just need to find your people. And so I am kind of curious, especially as I look at the early days of Lens Distortions, how did you find the people to market this to? Were these just people you already knew? Did you just kind of put a bunch of keywords in some Facebook ads and hope for the best? Or how did you kind of build kind of the community for your products?
Jonathan Kayser:
So the very first week that we launched the website, by we, I mean me on my laptop, basically I went on Vimeo and I just started commenting and watching people's videos and just starting conversations. And I think in the first couple of weeks I probably talked to 1000 people on Vimeo. I'm not even joking. I was doing it 12 hours a day, just starting conversations, showing interest in other people's projects and complimenting their videos. And that just kind of organically created some interest around the name Lens Distortions and the website and what we did.
And every single order that came in, I would personally try to look up that person on Vimeo or YouTube, watch some of their videos. Then I would send them an email thanking them for their order and mention one of the videos that I looked at from them and call out some of the things I liked about their videos. And people were so mind-blown by that. But if you have a small shop, if you sell flowers on the street, it's very easy to do that because people walk in face-to-face, you can talk to them, but on a website, there's no human connection. That's much harder to do. So in the early days, you kind of had to really make an effort to go out of the way to do that. And it was so fun and I met so many cool people through that. It was great.
Ben Lueders:
So in addition to sound effects, visual effects and amazing music library and you have a subscription basis that creatives can get this at, at lensdistortions.com, you also have a mobile app that is like, it's bonkers what this thing can do, but I'm really curious to know how the mobile app kind of came to be. And it seems to me that the audience for the app and the audience for some of your other products seems a little bit related but different. And so I'm kind of curious how you kind of manage that. So first though, kind of how did the mobile app come to be?
Jonathan Kayser:
So early on we were creating all these visual assets, and the way that we would do that is we take really high-end cinema lenses and shoot sunlight into them to create lens flares and things like that. And we created some insanely beautiful lens flares. I mean, some of them are so beautiful, you could just print them and just look at them because there's all these chromatic aberrations in them and detail. And that itself was a really fun process and people would add these to their photos. So we had a small contingent of photographers who were part of our customer base. And so we started, we realized it'd be really nice to have a mobile app to, it was a little clunky using these overlays in Photoshop. Photoshop is not known for being really elegant in its user interface. It's a massive learning curve.
Ben Lueders:
It's basically like,
Jonathan Kayser:
And we wanted to create,
Ben Lueders:
This [inaudible 00:24:21] that was like born in 1987 and people have just been piling features on top of it for literal decades. And so yes, I can imagine wanting to start clean.
Jonathan Kayser:
Yeah, and exactly. And we really care about giving people really elegant experience so that they don't have to worry about all the technical jargon. They just want to be creative and execute their vision and stuff. So again, just like our website, very humble beginnings. We created a very simple app that let people add some of these glass effects and then some lens flares. And then another thing people kept asking us, they kept saying, Hey, how do you color grade your videos? Because we had this very kind of cinematic tonal look to our color.
And so we made some more products. We made a product called Finishing LUTs that were basically these really subtle, very subtle color presets that kind of tie all of your shots around a cohesive look. And they were great for video and they're great for editing your photos on your phone. So we kept building out the mobile app, and over time it's really powerful now. I'm really proud of it. It's kind of like Photoshop in your pocket. And I think recently we've gotten some attention on the mobile app here and there. We recently got featured by Apple as app of the day, which is really exciting.
Ben Lueders:
So cool.
Jonathan Kayser:
And it's funny because we're in the middle of kind of rebuilding the entire mobile app right now to be way more video focused. And so there's some,
Ben Lueders:
Can you talk about that?
Jonathan Kayser:
Sure. I mean, we've got some major, major updates rolling out in the next, very soon, next couple months, and it's going to really help people do kind of high-end animation type stuff right on their phone. I get a lot of inspiration from the 3D world, people who do really high end animation and after effects or cinema 4D or Blender. And those are very technical, difficult software products to learn, but they give you such interesting things to look at. And so our mobile app has a really powerful engine inside of it, and we're going to be using that engine to help people do some really cool animation stuff.
Ben Lueders:
Wow.
Jonathan Kayser:
So of course we'll be aligning the audiences quite a bit more I think, in the future between our website and our mobile app. I think just this week we started teasing on Instagram that some of our music stuff will be available in the mobile app,
Ben Lueders:
Ooh.
Jonathan Kayser:
Which we're very excited about.
Ben Lueders:
That was actually going to be a follow-up question because that I didn't know. I have seen a little bit of a preview because full disclosure, I know the rest of Jon's team a bit, and I've seen some of this stuff kind of in progress, and it is amazing. I think there's going to be a lot of really cool use cases. And I think I see the mobile app as really, it's no wonder that it kind of comes from this rich history of attention to detail and high-end videographers, et cetera. But it really, I could see its use case being for creatives and marketers kind of across the board, and you said Photoshop in your pocket, but I think with some of the video animation kind of components, typography components, I think this app really is going to get Canva kind of shaken in its boots a little bit.
And I'm pretty excited about that. I think Canva has kind of become this tool that a lot of us graphic designers kind of roll our eyes because all of our clients try to do their own designs on Canva to show us. But it really is a powerful tool, and I think it's really neat to see you guys coming up with something that is so robust and also just so beautiful. Is it okay if I say that?
Jonathan Kayser:
Oh, thank you.
Ben Lueders:
I feel like that's the kind of difference, is you guys kind of come from this really high class elegant look initially and you're now opening that up to the public and it is much more accessible. It's not as maybe as stuffy or you don't have to have this kind of cinematic or epic kind of a project you're working on necessarily, but it's still, you've retained the beauty somehow. And I don't know, I think it's a really cool thing that you guys have achieved with the app.
Jonathan Kayser:
Thank you. I get a lot of inspiration from product designers who really care about the physicality of a product, whether it's like a camera and the buttons on it and the material that it's made out of, or the classic Apple packaging. When you unbox an Apple product and it just gives you that feeling.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah.
Jonathan Kayser:
It's so great. And we put so much thought into trying to do similar things in our mobile app with subtle animations in the UI and making the user experience as simple as possible and eliminating friction and trying to make it magical. We have a long ways to go and we're always trying to improve, but it's one of my favorite parts of my job, is kind of really dialing that kind of stuff.
Ben Lueders:
So we were talking about this offline, Jon and I were about watches. Jon loves nice watches. You can see he's got a beautiful watch, a Royal Oak behind him, a picture of one and a nice watch on his wrist as well. And he was showing me this coffee table book he has of just beautiful up close details of beautiful watches. And for some, this may sound, this might be the part that you fast-forward if you're maybe not a creative professional. Jon, how does the beautiful inner workings of a timeless timepiece, how can that inspire you as you build products?
Jonathan Kayser:
I think that there's this great quote from Steve Jobs where someone was asking him where ideas come from, and he basically said that ideas are basically connecting the dots between all these different life experiences that you have. And If you want to get better ideas, get more life experiences and think really deeply about them. And then ideas are formed when you connect those dots. So my job as a creative director is I have to really keep my creative reservoir filled, so to speak, with all kinds of random stuff. I mean, I won't bore you with the many crazy things I'm always curious about, but I think that for any person, whether you're in a creative field or you're wanting to start a business or create a product or you have a product idea, it is always so valuable to connect ideas together. I mean, imagine if you're a plumber who also is really good at public speaking, imagine the business ideas you could have just connecting those two things, right?
Ben Lueders:
Oh yeah.
Jonathan Kayser:
And so I always encourage people, like you should use your spare time to start learning some crazy, random things. Whatever you're curious about. Over covid, I had a lot of time just sitting in my basement and I thought, you know what? I would really love to learn Cinema 4D and Cinema 4D is this really kind of complicated animation software that lets you do photo realistic renderings. And I love product photography, especially when it's like 3D because oh it's so beautiful these days. So I was inspired by that.
So I took a bunch of online courses and I learned how to do it. And then we came up with this new product that we were creating called Sound Design Tracks. And Sound Design Tracks are basically, they kind of blur the line between music and sound effects. And so they have all these crazy whooshes and sounds that kind of would use them as music. And we were trying to come up with a way to visually explain this because it's kind of a amorphous topic. So I started, I had just learned Cinema 4D, and I had this book, this coffee table book about all these watches, and I thought, oh, I got all these ideas from all these cool photographs of watches. So I kind of created this 3D waveform graphic that had a lot of the, I don't know, characteristics of some of these watch parts, more of the texture and stuff. And now if you go to our homepage on our website, you'll see that 3D waveform right there. And so that's just an example of kind of like bolting all different types of ideas together.
Ben Lueders:
I'm really inspired. I'm inspired personally just talking to you right now, Jon. I feel like we're back in 2006 right here a little bit. So I hope that others are getting something out of this. If not just humoring you and I just kind of reminiscing what it means to be a creative.
Jonathan Kayser:
If you are kind of paying attention to things that are done really well around you, there are endless ways to draw inspiration from it. It doesn't matter what kind of business you have either, whether it's a creative business or not. Like I said, if you're a plumber, you could learn a lot from public speaking. Or back in 2019, I decided I wanted to take my wife and three kids at the time on a trip over to China for a couple weeks. And it was a bit of an ambitious trip, especially considering that my wife was six months pregnant.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, wow.
Jonathan Kayser:
And but it was going to be fun. It was going to be an experience, and I knew she, basically I decided we should probably stay at a nice hotel just so my wife is a little more comfortable. She was not feeling great. So we stayed at this really cool five star hotel. And I'll never forget this experience that we had. We got out of our cab and we walked into this hotel, and as soon as we walked through the doors, the staff greeted us by name. They were expecting us, and they knew our names and they were waiting for us.
Ben Lueders:
Wow.
Jonathan Kayser:
And just the fact that they were so intentional with that to us, it just blew my mind. And it made me realize, like why can't all businesses do stuff like that?
Ben Lueders:
Wow. Yeah. And so did you take that and like, oh man, I need to find a way to apply this or were you just like, man, everyone else needs to get their act together?
Jonathan Kayser:
Well, I mean, for one, I need to do a better job of remembering people's names. That's one lesson. But another is that if you are really orienting yourself around your customer to really make them feel special, they absolutely notice that. And that is so valuable.
Ben Lueders:
That actually might be a really good place to kind of wrap up, Jon, because I feel like it really ties into what you were saying in the origin of Lens Distortions in the beginning of taking that time to reach out and email, check out the work of the people who are using your product and to let them know what you thought about what they were creating. I feel like that really kind of shows kind of the heart of, your heart and also the heart of Lens Distortions. So Jon, if people want to find out more about what you're doing, these products, where should they go?
Jonathan Kayser:
I would love everyone to follow us on Instagram at Lens Distortions, swing by our website lensdistortions.com. And if you know anyone who is a video editor or a filmmaker or anything related to that, send them to our website. We want it to be a gold mine of great stuff for people who create videos.
Ben Lueders:
Well, it is a gold mine. Keep up the great work Jon. It's been so great to have you on, and we'll have to do this again. We'll have to do this again soon.
Jonathan Kayser:
Sounds good. Thanks Ben.
Raj:
In our last outro, it was just Ben by himself asking you to like and subscribe, which made it look like he didn't have any friends. Please like and subscribe so he has at least virtual friends.
Ben Lueders:
I have friends, Raj.
Raj:
I'm one of them.
