Stories Take Shape
By: Trevor O'Brien
Tags: Technology, Collaboration, Design, Storytelling

In 2017, after years of experience working on big social platforms like Twitter and YouTube, Jeremy and I decided to focus on a new mission together: to help people communicate with purpose to effect positive change. We set out to build a versatile set of collaborative, creative tools for visual communication in the workplace. Tools that help you and your teams create fresh presentations, detailed reports, custom social media campaigns, and quick, clear, eye-catching videos. A single space for your ideas to take shape in a beautiful way, wherever they need to go, with one familiar interface.

Over the past two years, we’ve built a team of inspiring makers and storytellers to work alongside us on that mission. Today, I’m very happy and very proud to tell you more about Projector, our visual storytelling company.

Work can feel like play

When we first met more than five years ago, Jeremy and I realized we had a lot in common. We shared a love for building tools and toys. We’d both begun our careers working on video games, where speed, production value, and seamless experiences were paramount. We wound up as product and engineering leaders at consumer internet companies, where of course, scale ruled above all. Instead of choosing one of these mindsets over the other, we believed our magic opportunities would be in bringing them together.

While we were at Twitter, we saw how consumer internet products were pushing (and being pulled) to make creative use of modern media faster, easier, and more expressive. Face filters and augmented reality stickers in Snapchat and Instagram set new expectations for everyday communications. It was becoming easier than ever to create and share beautifully designed mixed-media moments, and it was pure fun. The types of things you once needed a special effects department to produce were now accessible to everyone.

Inside the workplace, on the other hand, people struggled with legacy tools to communicate their big ideas effectively. Creating a compelling narrative for an audience at work was hard. Putting together a presentation felt like drudgery. Designing a PDF report for a partner or client was painstaking. Collecting feedback and sharing was anxiety-inducing. The disparity between this way of working and what we were seeing with consumer tools was striking.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Marshall McLuhan that we think about a lot: “We shape our tools; thereafter, our tools shape us.” For too long, visual communication in the workplace has been shaped by tools that either don’t feel up to the task, or that require designer-level expertise. We want to make this better. We want to reimagine visual communication in the workplace in a way that’s much more effective and a lot more fun.

Introducing Projector

Our first product is a creative toolset that will help you shape your ideas into beautiful visuals that can be shared in whichever format you need for your audience. With Projector, you’ll have one creative space where you can craft and share mixed-media presentations, documents and reports, Instagram stories, Tweets, Slack posts, and short videos. And all of our tools have been built with modern teams as our focus. They’re cloud-based, they’re fast, and they offer real-time multiplayer collaboration.

But there are a number of things that will make Projector feel truly different to you.

Design + collaboration: Projector offers beautiful typography, modern graphic design, and seamless editing experiences in addition to real-time collaboration for you and your teammates. You’ll no longer have to make the difficult choice between design and collaboration.

Story first: We know compelling visual stories begin with rough ideas before the first visuals are made. Filmmakers don’t start producing a movie by shooting the first scene on a whim. In the same way, the best presentations and reports often start as sketches on a whiteboard or bulleted lists in a document. In Projector, we offer a dedicated space for the ideas that give shape and structure to your story.

Playing with mixed media: Projector makes working with mixed-media flexible, fast, and fun. We’ve built integrations with world-class content catalogs to help you quickly find high-quality media that can elevate your story. And you don’t have to go hunting in a new tab to do it.

Pictures, GIFs, and videos bring life to your story, and working with them should be a happy thing. To help, we’ve made the tedious parts of working with media a whole lot easier so you can focus on the fun parts.

All the little things: We invest the time to get the little things right for you. We obsess over the different ways you’ll use our interfaces so we can tune them to be more reliable, useful, and convenient. It’s not the devil in the details, it’s the magic.

Wanna try it?

We’re rolling out invites to an early release of Projector over the coming months as we continue to improve the product and respond to feedback. If you’re interested in trying Projector and getting updates from us, please sign up here!

Thanks to our backers

We wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for our wonderful investors, board members, advisors, and supporters. We’ve raised $13M to date from Upfront Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Upside Partnership, Homebrew, and #Angels, along with an amazing group of angel investors.

There are several people who’ve been providing early feedback on the product, and we can’t thank them enough for taking the time to share their constructive thoughts to make Projector better.

Thank you all for your support! We’ll be back with more soon!

> Trevor