China’s tech startups suck at storytelling. This startup wants to fix it.

“Technology companies in China, particularly startups, have no idea how to talk about the cool, magical parts of what they do.” That was the first thing Jim Fields said to me when I spoke with him last week about his new video production startup Relay. And he’s right. I’ve seen hundreds of Chinese tech startups pitch everywhere from live events to Kickstarter. Even when their tech is good, their storytelling can be a real problem.

For example: a couple weeks ago I ran across this Kickstarter campaign from a Shenzhen-based hardware startup. The product itself looks great, but the storytelling is – to be blunt – pretty awful. The video’s voiceover is poorly written and even more poorly delivered. You have to get nearly halfway through it to even learn what the product is. Even the name “Magic Mirror” is misleading, as there’s no mirror involved at all.

That kind of disaster is what Relay is hoping to help China’s tech companies avert.

What is Relay?

Relay is a Beijing-based creative production company that’s focused on video production for tech startups and disruptive brands (much like Sandwich Video, whose founder Jim says is “a friend”). In particular, Relay aims to help Chinese companies communicate effectively with Western audiences, who often play a key role in the success or failure of startup crowdfunding campaigns (for example). (That’s not to say that Relay only works with Chinese clients though; the company is based in Beijing but has connections all over the globe).

But unlike many creative agencies, Relay is just focused on video production. The startup will make your company’s Kickstarter video, launch video, or corporate documentary from start to finish, but they’re not going to promote it on social media for you or design your magazine ads. Relay does one thing – video – with the goal of doing that one thing very well.

As for how that’s going, you can judge for yourself. Here’s a video Relay produced for the Orbit social sharing drone, which recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Incidentally, Relay also produced the video for Hover Camera, which we wrote about previously:

Relay’s exclusively focused on video because the team thinks that serves startups better. Traditional advertising agencies offer a lot more services than Relay, but consequently they also cost a lot more. Especially for tech companies and startups, whose main goal may just be to effectively communicate what their technology does, the video can be a powerful tool all on its own. Relay offers great video without the “bloat” that comes with big creative agency contracts, said Jim.

Why Relay?

Jim, who is managing director at Relay, worked at creative production agency Studio Output before starting Relay. But time and time again, he said he saw that China’s tech companies were delivering in terms of product but missing wildly when it came to storytelling. “That’s something that just gets missed or omitted or done very poorly,” he said. “That’s where we saw a big opportunity.”

The Relay team was also itching to work more with startups because, as many of them had experienced in previous positions, working with big companies in Beijing can be frustrating. “Working with more traditional industries, things were really political and slow, and there were a lot of middlemen and a lot of barriers,” Jim said. At bigger companies, “you’re seven layers removed from the dalaoban [big boss] and there’s no way to communicate with them.” With startups, he said, Relay can “communicate directly with the CEO and with the person who has the vision, and find a way to explain that vision. We think that’s really exciting.”

Greta Bradford, Relay’s head of accounts and operations, said it’s not just about startups, though. Relay is looking for any clients who have cool products and are open to approaching their videos in a more fun, and creative way. “That makes the whole thing much more interesting for us,” she said. And that’s a big part of why they started Relay, too – the team is genuinely interested in China’s tech industry. Unlike most creative agencies, Relay will be at tech industry events like CES just for the fun of it. “It’s not just for business, it’s because we’re interested,” Greta said.

Surviving a startup

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