Recently a friend paid a nice complement to our “people of indie restaurants” video series. He told me the videos are fantastic, and asked why we don’t have a YouTube channel for them. “Wil, I could just see tens of thousands of people watching those videos. They could go viral!” The funny thing is, that’s the opposite of what we hope will happen.

That may seem silly. After all, we make them to highlight people we think are awesome and inspiring. We spend time and money on them. We are proud of them. So, why wouldn’t we want tens of thousands of people, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of people to watch them???

Well, it goes back to focus. We have a clear focus at Schedulefly: build a brand independent restaurants admire and love. Now, if all we care about is independent restaurants, why would we want a gigantic general audience of people to view our videos? What’s the upside? Maybe they share the videos with restaurant people? I don’t know. All I can think of is people from all sorts of random businesses liking the videos, checking out our web site, seeing that have a scheduling software, thinking “Hey, we have scheduling problems, let’s try this!” and signing up for free trials. That’s the opposite of what we want.

Just as we’d rather have one restaurant sign up for a free trial over ten non-restaurants, we’d rather have 300 baristas watch our new video, The Barista, than 30,000 random people.

Wil

P.s. We have to house our videos somewhere, so we chose Vimeo over YouTube. Less traffic, no ads. And we also have them all here on our blog.