Stephanie Hurlburt

Any business books or blogs you recommend?

The way I learned was just talking to hundreds of potential customers and entrepreneurs, because my way of doing business isn't exactly super common, had to take a piece out of everyone's lessons and try to put it together.

The good thing is that this is normal in the business community. Completely normal. So long as you seem somewhat serious about an idea, people are really happy to sit down for coffee with you because it benefits them too, win-win to network.

It can also help to think about all the subsets of business and what would help you: marketing (content, influencer, traditional advertising, branding, website, design), sales (B2C, B2B, different strategies within each), networking, communication, PR, business models...

Genuine q What do u mean by study business exactly?

I feel like it really depends on your field! Some fields/niches are really well studied and you can flat out read about a way to go about things. But that wasn't true for us. I did hundreds of informational interviews with folks in similar spaces to try to figure it out

Also highly recommend looking into business communities with high knowledge sharing, Indie Hackers is an example (twitter and forum)

I'd love to know if you offered compensation to those who you interviewed with. I wanna have informational interviews with folks in a different area (design) and maybe can convince my company to pay for them.

As a policy I don't charge for one-time or infrequent chats that come with no obligations, and it seems a lot of people are on the same page. In business this attitude is common because chats tend to be win-win and not one-directional. In other fields it may be different.

Now, if I was going to ask for more than an hour, or if I really want to talk to them but they don't want to talk to me, or if I'm really counting on them to show up-- all these things lean toward payment being a good idea. Kinda like how you'd pay a speaker for a talk.

Another use case is customer interviews-- some companies will pay to have people fill out surveys for them in stuff, because that's very one-directional and not really building any relationship and they just wants loads of responses.

I could totally see a case for your company paying folks for info interviews! Payment would basically ensure you got the people you wanted and they all showed up ad they'd likely put in more effort too, kinda like hiring them for a speaking slot.

I foresee that eventually AAA PC/console game business adopt Basis as well. Now Basis is an open standard and better than the equivalents we use right now. Package size is important for AAA too (digital 10 GB+ download) and fast compressors improve iteration time.

For AAA, I personally think theyll keep adopting our single platform encoders that perform better than Basis on various axes at the trade off of not being cross platform. But who knows, as hardware progresses and such cross platform standard could make single platform more niche!

Patience is also a wonderful quality you possess ;-)

Congratulations! This is amazing, and this is the kind of impact I want to have. Doing this in three years is unbelievable! How did you approach this? Did you keep tweaking the business as you interviewed folks and learnt more about business?