These Videos Will Give You the Summary of Big Business Books in Just 4 Minutes Along with providing some helpful advice to viewers, these videos are great content marketing for the company that produced them.
By Stephen J. Bronner Edited by Dan Bova
That Elon Musk biography and Peter Thiel's book on startups have been on your reading list for a while. Will you ever get to them?
For all you procrastinators, or for those who need a refresher, New York-based Board Studios has created a series of videos that summarize business books in four minutes. In them, an artist's hands are seen taking notes while a narrator offers the gist of books such as Thiel's Zero to One, Elon Musk and Holacracy.
"Many entrepreneurs have productivity issues. I was reading a lot of business books and wasn't able to get what I wanted out of them," says Kostas Papakonstantinou, founder of Board Studios. "It's something I wanted to have as a service, and we wanted to make sure we were delivering it to others."
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The advantage of Board's videos, Papakonstantinou says, is that he wrote the summaries, and he knows what details are important to entrepreneurs, since he's founded a handful of businesses. These are not only helpful to entrepreneurs and those who aspire to become one -- the videos serve as great content marketing for Board Studios, which provides video content for businesses.
"We get our brand out there. Many people love these videos, if you look at the YouTube comments," he says. "We send it to CEOs we want to start conversations with, [which has] resulted in business." He estimates the videos have led to about $100,000 in revenue for Board Studios. "It's something that's very encouraging for us," he adds. However, he says, the company has not yet figured out the right financial model for the series.
In addition to the time it takes Papakonstantinou to read the books and write scripts based on his notes, he estimates that each video takes about two weeks to produce. The four minutes of video encompasses eight painstaking hours of the artist drawing slowly, careful to avoid any mistakes.
Papakonstantinou says his advice for entrepreneurs and content creators is simple: Focus on quality over quantity.
"For someone to pay attention," he says, "you have to deliver a lot of value."
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Check out some of Board Studios's book summary videos here:
