How Our Most Recent Loss, was Also a Win

If you’ve been following us for the last month, you might know that we made a video for Vimeo and Vocal.Media’s “Pay It Forward” contest. Well, Friday they announced the winners, and we weren’t in the top 3. The top 3 were really good videos, covering really good businesses doing important work, and ultimately if we had to lose, it’s a comfort losing to them.

The truth though, is that we may not have won, but we came out with a great sample video to show potential clients (please keep in mind when looking at the titling, that there were 15 fonts, and very limited customization options within Vimeo Create, which was the required editor for the contest). We worked with a food truck that not only had a great product and customer base, but an amazing visual appeal, with their dumplings looking absolutely delicious, and their truck having a great look to it.

In the couple of weeks since we released our video with them, we’ve managed to get more eyes on our video than ever before, which has been great as our content is becoming stronger and more professional. An unexpected, and interesting benefit of partnering with Chirba Chirba Dumpling Truck, is that the name “Chirba Chirba” translates to “Eat eat” in Mandarin, which has meant that all of our work in which we’ve been talking about Chirba Chirba, has been bringing us dozens of views on Baidu.com which is a Chinese search engine. It took me a while to figure out why, as I kept checking analytics we were getting so many views in China, and then when I went into Google Analytics to get even more specific details and saw that Baidu was feeding the views to us, I was absolutely puzzled, then I remembered that when I had been doing all of my research on Chirba Chirba in order to make their video the best that I could, that I had read in their about page on their website about how it translated.

We fully embrace happy accidents. Happy accidents, unexpected benefits, they’re important for us to navigate them well in order to pursue success. I’m a big fan of the old adage “Luck is when hard work meets opportunity,” well we’ve been putting in the hard work, so now as the opportunities pop up, we’re ready to take them.

I originally hoped that we could possibly win the contest, and the cash prize that it came with, and I thought “at least I’ll get another good sample video out of it.” I think that was the right attitude, but I couldn’t imagine that I would get such a gracious partner that helped to share the video as much as they did, and I didn’t count on getting some attention from their peers, or that somehow I would randomly hit a great keyword string in China, and start getting random views. I never could have expected it, and it’s been such a great experience. We may have lost, but I feel like I’m walking away with a lot more than a loser.