Graphos Project

Episode transcript:

Andreas:
Welcome to Product: Knowledge, the podcast about marketing products that improve people’s lives. I’m Andreas Schwabe, Director of Media Services at Graphos Product. Podcasts are big. There are about 30 million available, about 700,000 are active with new episodes.

Andreas:
There’s a podcast on virtually any topic you can imagine including podcasting. Podcasts about podcasting are a cork of the medium. They’re part education, part entertainment. Podcasting is a powerful way to create your own media property. Your business is an expert at what you do and sell, and the world is listening.

Andreas:
Podcasting is just complicated enough to introduce anxiety and resistance for those who might otherwise want to try sharing their voice. A new audio market segment of podcast recorders aims to address the complexity problem. Podcasting is complicated because more than one person is involved.

Andreas:
Getting audio into a computer is easy when it’s just one person, getting broadcast quality for several people who all need to hear at the same time is not. A podcast recorder, includes an audio mixing console, but may also include processing or effects, a phone connection for remote interviews, buttons to trigger interview audio or sound effects and multiple headphone outputs to share audio with studio guests.

Andreas:
Podcast recorders are about integrating a series of solutions into one device. Now this episode really is based on a story that unfolded here at Graphos Product. Not long ago we were looking for a flexible piece of hardware for an in-office studio space to record and produce podcasts and interviews.

Andreas:
There was only one all in one podcasting device on the market. The RODECaster Pro by Australian company RODE. Now RODE is known more for its microphones, but the Roadcaster is a beautiful device with some really helpful features. It’s extremely popular and already famous in the podcasting community.

Andreas:
Not long ago, a vital piece of equipment in my home studio failed and I set out to do the research to replace it. After several months of experience with the RODECaster Pro, I chose to buy a different device. The ZOOM L8. Now, on one hand the RODECaster has 20 buttons and a big colorful touchscreen. The ZOOM L-8 has over four times as many buttons and a small monochromal CD on pure aesthetics, the winner is clear.

Andreas:
The RODECaster Pro looks like it belongs on a death star console. It’s just that cool, but and it’s a big but, to even the mildest audio nerd. The more attractive device is actually the more complex looking one. The ZOOM L-8’s interface is a standard audio console that tells you everything you need to know about what’s happening without menu diving.

Andreas:
The RODECaster Pro is designed with simplicity first, the L-8, is an audio first device which rewards users with experience. We decided to turn the podcast recorder design conversation into a podcast. The conversation ranges from the reasons behind including or excluding certain features, always with the user in mind.

Andreas:
Just as with any production and recording, your source material is the most important thing. So we went to the source called Samuel Green, product specialist at ZOOM North America. We reached Samuel on Skype to talk about the decisions that go into creating a device for a market segment that’s familiar but completely new. To kick things off. We ask Samuel Green to talk about his role at ZOOM.

Samuel:
I come from a music recording background and my job here is really fun for me because I get to marry my love of getting nerdy with tech and business really. Because that’s what I do is try to make sure that the tech and the business talk to each other. And that comes in a couple of different forms and my job is to be an expert.

Samuel:
So, I know everything about our products. I try to know everything about our customers. I communicate what our customers are looking for, their feelings to our engineers and work with them to make sure we’re making the best products we can. And then internally, in our office I make sure the marketing is taking advantage of the great tech points we have.

Samuel:
Trade shows obviously is a big thing for me and going around to the various stores that sell our products and making sure their salespeople know everything about our products as well.

Andreas:
One of the things that I want to touch on is the scope in the reach of ZOOM in North America. Can you talk a bit about that? Because ZOOM for people like me is really ubiquitous and for others it might, they might not understand quite the scope of ZOOM.

Samuel:
Absolutely. So, ZOOM is a Japanese company headquarters in Tokyo, so that’s where all of the engineering and all of the international sales happen. I worked for ZOOM North America, that’s the office here in New York, and we handle distribution of ZOOM products in the US, Canada, Mexico, and some other territories.

Samuel:
So, any ZOOM product that’s bought in North America comes through our office. And being that we have the most ZOOM customers in the world, we obviously then have access to the customers telling us what they want and what they need. So, it’s incredibly important for us to be able to effectively communicate that back to the engineers on to make sure they’re making the best products.

Samuel:
And that same action is happening all over the world. You know, the UK distributor, the European distributor are all working within their specific territories to sell ZOOM, but also gather that information to make sure that we are staying on top of making the best products.

Andreas:
So you’re really taking, like when you go to a conference and you’re talking to people who are potential sellers and buyers, really it’s getting the feedback as well. Like you’re looking at what will be in the next iteration as well.

Samuel:
Absolutely. I mean, you can stand with a customer in front of a product and glean a lot more info about whether this product is going to work for them. Then you can just, you know, thinking about, Whoa, what does a filmmaker need with the DSLR? Well no, go talk to the DSLR user, and see the issues they’re running into and see is this product effectively solving all of those issues for the customer.

Samuel:
So, it’s especially in the last five to six years that you know, direct interaction with the customers has just become even more important for us to make sure we’re doing the best.

Andreas:
And are you still doing market research and having that study group work done?

Samuel:
Constantly and you know, not like a third party study group type of thing, but you know the digital age, we have a lot of resources we can use Facebook user groups have been huge for us. Gathering knowledge on what people are liking, what people aren’t liking.

Samuel:
And it’s not only our user groups, you can go to user groups or other products and other brands and see what are people liking about that. What are they not liking about that? And you know, the access to that direct customer information is easier now than it has ever been before.

Andreas:
There’s an advantage with audio production equipment because it is easily of all the things that I sort of get exposed to in the work that I do. It is the most involved vocal group. I mean if you have a mixer with a bad mic preamp or I’m like preamp that just isn’t up to snuff, you will absolutely hear endlessly about it.

Samuel:
I completely agree. And even within the audio community, it’s been funny for me to learn. You know, they’re always vocal no matter what you do, whether you’re a musician, videographer or a podcaster. But a couple of groups have stood out as particularly vocal. One of them is, our F series is our professional location sound series. And you talk about a customer who… They are going out and working with the rest of the film crew and they’ve got one shot to get it right.

Samuel:
And when they hand it in, not only does the audio have to be right, but there’s got to be metadata. There’s got to be time code. And if any aspect of that is difficult to pull off, the product is done. So, you know that customer, especially the Facebook groups have been useful. And podcasters as well have been very, very vocal about what problems they’re running into when they’re trying to record. And it’s been incredible for us to have easy access to finding out what they’re worried about.

Andreas:
What was the thing that pushed ZOOM towards saying, “Okay, we need to do a podcasting recorder.”

Samuel:
It was the fact that we’re figuring out how many of our 86 recorders were being used record podcasts. And you know, we like to call it the unintended consequence. We had another instance of that which are age four in 2008 when the DSLR craze hit, the product was designed for a musician. All of a sudden more than 50% of the users are videographers.

Samuel:
Well then let’s start putting videographer features at the same thing has happened again, the H-6. My God, there are a lot of these being used for podcasting and it’s not even designed for that. Imagine if we went back and we put in podcasting features. And that realization is when we really started thinking seriously, “Okay, what’s going to be our first product that has specific podcasting features?” And the yellow came out of that.

Andreas:
You know, when you’re designing a podcast recorder, what is literally the first thing that is the defining part of a podcast recorder? Cause I mean a digital mixer isn’t that different really. So, what’s that thing?

Samuel:
Right. So, I think there are three features that turn any old audio recorder into a podcast recorder. The first are sound pads. The second is the TRRS connection for hooking up your phone and doing an easy mix minus. And the third are headphone outputs. There’s got to be multiple headphone outputs. And he looked at a product like RH6 only one headphone output.

Samuel:
There were plenty of inputs, but there was no phone input, there was no sound pads. So, it was kind of customer is making it work in their situation using a headphone and figuring out other ways to get their phone in. So I think it’s those three features. Turn a recorder into a podcast recorder.

Andreas:
The L-8 has multiple personalities to me, actually it’s several devices in one. And these are actually really significant design choices because they’re things that actually were elements that caused me to decide to buy one, which is first of all, whose idea was the battery AA power?

Samuel:
The CEO of our companies in North America was the major factor in deciding to go for battery power on this unit.

Andreas:
So from my perspective as a consumer, it is literally, this solves so many problems with one feature that, and I know ZOOM is a brand well enough that as a consumer, that was the nudge. Like it’s a small nudge, but literally the beauty of the competitor, it pales into the practicality of just being able to pack this thing around.

Samuel:
And it’s perfectly in line with the general philosophy we have at ZOOM, which is any new product we make, and especially if it’s a product for a new market, there’s got to be a feature or something about it that makes you say, “Wow, that is different. And I want to seriously consider that product.” And there have been times when it’s simply been our knowledge of the recording technology and our ability to quickly implement that.

Samuel:
You know, sometimes it’s just a price thing and, but more often than not it’s one or two features that we feel. These are two things that people may or may not know they want but would make them seriously say, you know what, this product might be the right one for me.

Laurier:
There’s something you said there a minute ago, Samuel, you mentioned a new market and to me that’s really interesting, and really important. What do you do at ZOOM when you decide you’re going to target an entirely different market and this is the podcasting vertical, which is kind of this new category, and it’s new in the world in a sense as well.

Laurier:
How do you go about changing the way that you market when you move into whether it’s a larger targeting more of a mainstream market, or you’re targeting a specific interest group like podcasters, what changes?

Samuel:
So, I mean step one is learning and listening. You know, you can’t claim to be making products for our customer you don’t understand. And I’m not going to claim that we 100% understand podcasters yet. We’re still getting there. And I think podcasters too are still trying to perfect the perfect podcast recorder, and the podcast process is.

Samuel:
And that learning, it depends on the market. It comes from different places, you know, good. If we’re looking, you know, the other side of ZOOM is guitar effect pedals and you know, something over there or you know, a new kind of guitar effects pedal.

Samuel:
We kind of have a plethora of people we can call and we know we can talk to. But now, we come here to podcasting. This is a new market and we don’t have these people in our Rolodex. So, where do we go to learn about them? And you know, Facebook was a big one. YouTube is another big one. We started, we went to podcast movement this past year, shortly before the LH launch.

Samuel:
So you know, it’s one of those, we knew about it and we would’ve loved to talk about it, we just weren’t ready for it yet. So, that learning about the market is absolutely the number one place. And then not only do you need to learn what they want, but that learning process can also reveal to you how do you get the message to them?

Samuel:
What channels are they already looking at that you can poke your head in to make sure that they even know that you’re doing something they might be interested in?

Andreas:
Where did you hear, what were the pinch points and what did you sort of do to mitigate the difficulties around this as a technical product?

Samuel:
Where the big differences come in is the user interface and what specific audio processing you give to the customer and what do you either simplify or not even give to them to avoid confusion? You know our current philosophy about the podcast and customer is it’s diverse. It is amateur, it is professional, it is prosumer, it is everything in between.

Samuel:
People are all different sorts of level. And how do you give them power and not hold them back and yet try to keep it simple. And you know, it’s really for any specific customer, they’ll have an opinion on where the L-8 lies within, you know that spectrum and where in that spectrum they lie, and if it works for them.

Samuel:
But the important thing for us with the L-8 is, don’t hold back somebody that knows what they’re doing with audio. Make sure they have the EQ, make sure they have nice, easy to access mixing, so that they can do what they know to do. And then, you know, whatever decisions we can make to make that as simple as we can so that somebody who is trying to learn about this and get up to this can do that.

Samuel:
You know, people might be surprised how much conversation went on for every button and every knob and every fader and every output to make sure we’re nailing it as much as we can for both of those customers.

Laurier:
Yeah, and that’s really challenging when you have multiple consumer goals, right? Because you know, you’re trying to create this simplicity and accessibility within the device and to meet the goals of that prosumer to meet the goals of the novice who’s coming in and just wants things to be easy and not have too much clutter in front of them.

Laurier:
And you know, when you look at the road RODECaster Pro for example, one thing that I liked before I got to look at the L-8, and understand how it worked was just the simplicity of that. You just have these eight sliders and you know, a few great big buttons, one huge record button. But when you’re sacrificing, when you have that simplicity is accessibility. And you know, it’s juggling that balance between thinking about at a consumer wants in a car.

Laurier:
They don’t necessarily want anymore a massive instrument cluster with everything that you know, visible to them. At least they don’t seem to because they’re buying Tesla model threes now that have just one interface in a big tablet and everything is in there. But the other side of that is you lose accessibility.

Laurier:
And you have to, while you’re trying to accomplish something to have to tab through screens to get to where you want to go is a level of complexity that people who need to achieve a task don’t necessarily want.

Samuel:
Absolutely. And you know, I think one of the places on the LA where all of those things converged is the bottom right section where you have your recorder controls and your effects and everything. And you know, we created this system where you had eight task buttons, and then four menu buttons and those buttons determine what those action buttons were going to do.

Samuel:
And obviously, that’s something that’s very easily implemented on a touchscreen. But for us, for the L-8 you know, being the price it was going to be and everything, it was how that was really a struggle. How do we make that all of the processes that we’re giving you in this very small area of this recorder.

Samuel:
As simple as we can. And you know, the decision to kind of have all the world words there and have backlit words that are active right now-

Andreas:
Which is fantastic. It’s also good because it’s all at a glance. Like I hit a menu button, and I know what my controls are.

Samuel:
Absolutely and right. And you know you need this X function and it’s not there right now. Well, four button clicks and you’ll have seen every function you can do. And so, it’s got to be there.

Andreas:
I loved what you said about, you know, you had to design to avoid confusion. And there’s an interesting perceptual thing that happens when buying gear. And whenever friends say, “Can I take you and go buy a microphone or whatever they’re trying to get for themselves.”

Andreas:
There’s a thing that I’ve noticed that happens. They perceive complexity as complexity. They say, “Wow, this is complex and that’s complicated. That’s the end of it.” I see complexity as, Ooh, flexibility. Here are the things I can do with that. It’s capacity. What you know, how fast can I work, what’s my workflow, what does this allow me to do?

Andreas:
The L-8, is a workable functional production piece of gear and the Rode is more, if I’m just really starting and I don’t want to have to think about it too much.

Samuel:
So towards that complex. It’s just complex. It’s really intimidation. You’re intimidated by what you’re seeing, and you know the number of knobs and the number of buttons. That’s, where that intimidation comes and you know, even for the customer that is going to walk up and be intimidated. I, we hope that with just a little bit of learning, it’s not something you need to learn twice and there’s not going to be something there that is going to be conceptually something that you don’t understand.

Samuel:
Make sure if you do need to learn a little bit, make it easy and make it that once they know they’re going to be able to replicate that process. You know from now on.

Laurier:
The device, the L-8 for us, it’s really interesting when we have these product discussions, because it really is a study in that Complexity versus simplicity. And it’s also, there aren’t many consumer devices you buy that have this many things on them.

Laurier:
You know, this many functions, this many dials, switches and sliders, and I really… It really makes me want to dive into your world to see how those choices are made at the product development and design and engineering stages to get to the point where you are when you’re on the market now and you’ve taken those big risks.

Laurier:
And now you’re making the decisions in how to get to communicate what you’ve chosen to do to the audience. So they appreciate what you’ve created for them.

Samuel:
Absolutely. And obviously, and then once you release the product, you then, the first thing you think is, how can we make this better? And meaning how do we make this current product better and how do we make a future product better? And so that brings up, you know, there are two aspects to every piece of digital audio gear.

Samuel:
There’s the hardware aspect and there’s the software aspect or more technically for us firmware. So, the hardware you aren’t going to change once you release a product, you know the ins and outs are there. The knobs and faders that are available are there. And the software is one place where you can improve a current product.

Samuel:
So, in years past, you look at the Facebook user groups, you talk to people at trade shows, you look at YouTube videos, and you say, “Okay, are there features that aren’t there that people want? Is it a software thing that we could implement through a firmware update or is it a hardware thing that we need to take into consideration when we make the next generation?

Samuel:
And you know, we have these running lists, if you will. You know, I’ll email our engineers a few weeks after a product is released with 2020 comments I’ve gathered for, sometimes it’s,, this is working really great, that decision we made is working perfectly, but let’s not change that in the future. And this decision we made isn’t being perceived, quite likely.

Samuel:
Want to perceive and, and either we can change things or maybe we need to educate. We need a YouTube video out there explaining a particular thing. So, that that process for us of an actually improving a current product is very, very important to us. And beyond the fact that we want to make the best product.

Samuel:
One of the things we’ve learned over the last few years and kind of our conscience increase in our communication with between the customers and engineers is the amount of trust you can gain from a customer by listening and by implementing what they’re looking for, not telling them what they’re looking for has, it’s a loyal customer goldmine.

Samuel:
When they trust that you’re going to listen to them and make the product that they want, they’re going to trust the product that they have right now. Even more. So, that is very right now very, very important for us listening and thinking about it. How do we improve the products possibly now, or in the next generation.

Samuel:
And I will tell you, we already know things that we want to keep and things we want to change whenever he kind of, you know, the next generation of podcast recorders from ZOOM comes out.

Andreas:
To me, the sort of the unexpected success or failure is always the place that we can learn something because it’s unexpected. Like, “Why did that work?” This could get a little technical, so I’ll try to stay away from the technical aspect, but we introduced this field recorder that had 32 bit flow recording, which is at first you just didn’t go a higher quality.

Andreas:
No, that’s not really it. What it really means is it’s actually impossible to clip and it’s impossible to record too low no matter how low you record. You could raise the volume up.

Samuel:
With a 32 bit floating recorder. You essentially have no floor or ceiling to your recording levels. Like you can get the full dynamic range of whatever you’re hearing.

Andreas:
Correct. And the incredible things that happen as a result are one, you don’t need to set the gain at all, which you say that to an audio engineer they look at your cross side, you plug in a microphone, you won’t find a gain adjustment cause you just don’t need to do it.

Andreas:
As long as you plug in the microphone and you hit the record button, there’s literally nothing else you could do wrong because you have full manipulation power, all of that audio after. And we knew that was going to be a difficult concept to get the customers to understand. And it hasn’t been a struggle. It’s been fun. It’s been really fun to explain this technology to customers and see them think what that could do for their workflow and what that can do for the times that they’re out there and they know they can’t make a mistake.

Andreas:
So, I think now we, we feel that the base level of knowledge customers need to have to understand that particular technology at least within that market is getting there. And I think we learned a couple of lessons on how to do that even better next time when we’re trying to not just release a new feature but released a new technology.

Laurier:
Yeah. I have a feature question for you on the L-8 Samuel. Why no built in Bluetooth? Was that strictly a cost reduction decision?

Samuel:
Not strictly. That was definitely a factor in it. Our Bluetooth audio is tricky there. You have to contend with the fact that there is a latency in Bluetooth and it’s interesting latency because it is not consistent. It varies depending on the distance between the two devices.

Samuel:
It’s the reason why none of our recorders to this date have ever had the ability to have you connect Bluetooth headphones during a recording, you don’t have the luxury of dealing with latency. It’s not an option. Therefore Bluetooth isn’t an option for us.

Samuel:
We won’t let customers have that experience. So, you know definitely a cost thing. Definitely a latency thing and if you plug in the phone via an audio cable, the quality of it is going to be better. And so, we like that we gave people the best audio quality option that we could.

Laurier:
I love that answer because that’s a philosophical answer and you’re not allowing the customer to make decisions that are going to compromise the recording quality because a lot of people will do that. You know I asked that question thinking I like be able to being able to hook up with Bluetooth but you know if I take that shortcut and it’s going to compromise things without me necessarily being aware of it even, then maybe that’s the decision I shouldn’t be allowed to make very easily.

Andreas:
When was the price point set for the L-8?

Samuel:
Good question. You know cause every product or at least it does happen at a different time. For the L-8 specifically, it was early, it was definitely before we finalized, you know the form factor, what features it was going to have. I’ll say specifically the decision to have batteries in there was made before the price point.

Samuel:
I’m sorry, it was made after the price point discussion and when you do it that way, discussions need to be heard like can we implement that feature, can we add that in or out what have you. So, for this particular product, it was early on that we wanted to make a very, very accessible product and let’s make sure every decision we make from now on gets us to that end goal.

Samuel:
We just want people to feel that they can do it all and we want those that know that they can do everything, and those that don’t know to quickly and easily learn. And to that affect, you know, that goes beyond product development and marketing. Everything that goes into customer support our North American support is for guys that sit in my office and they pick up the phone when you call.

Samuel:
There’s no needing to hit a button. There’s no robot voice. We want you to know… To have confidence that you can learn about this product and we are here to help you. Every one of those guys has all of our products on their desk, and they’ll talk button to button with you.

Samuel:
So yeah, it goes beyond the product development side. It’s being there for your customer, making sure you’re empowering them to do everything that they want to do.

Laurier:
Do you have a kind of an elevator pitch for the L-8 compared to other products? How would you encapsulate this product when you’re telling somebody about it, they’d never heard of it before. They may be a little bit familiar with audio stuff, but let’s say it’s someone who is getting into podcasting and you want to tell them why they should look at the L-8?

Samuel:
So for a product like the L-8, and this varies wildly between our products, you talk about what a podcast is and what you need to record a podcast. You need inputs to plug your microphones and you need headphone outputs so that your speakers can hear themselves.

Samuel:
You need the phone connection so you can record interviews. And once you are agreed with what do we need now let’s talk about this product and how we address those needs. So, that is very different from something like a location sound field recorder where they know their needs, they want to know that you have the answer and you start with the answers, and allow them to connect that dot back to their work.

Andreas:
So we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about design features, we’ve talked about you know, the choices and marketing, how are sales and how many are you looking at selling? Like what’s your target for the next year or two?

Samuel:
So sales have been good. We’ve been really happy with it. You know, being in a new market, you don’t really know what to expect. We’re talking in the thousands that we’ve shipped so far since October. We set lofty goals for ourselves and we know that we have the dealer network and the knowledge and the customer base that we should be able to attain those things.

Andreas:
How much does ZOOM on reputation? Because all of the hardcore audio nerds I know, including a couple field recorders, one with Netflix, they’re really into ZOOM. Like there’s an affinity for ZOOM users. How much do you guys rely on that for marketing and designing your products?

Samuel:
It’s huge. I won’t say it’s everything, but it is big. We know that we have a loyal music customer fan base and we know that we have a loyal videographer fan base, and we rely on friends telling friends that they trust their ZOOM product, and that they trust the quality of it. And if we lose that, we think we would lose everything.

Samuel:
So, that plays into how quickly we react when something is going wrong. And I’ll tell them a story that, you know there’s , isn’t particularly a happy one for us. And that is our F-8, we had this issue where it had a white screen and it was on a very, very small percentage of products. But especially within that community, they talk a lot. And so, the word gets out and then all of a sudden everybody that has one starts questioning is it going to happen to mine?

Samuel:
Is it going to ruin a take for me? And we take that seriously. It was a warm bells going off all over the place in the US, and Europe and Japan. It was we need to fix this and we need to fix this fast. And you know, we implemented special customer service policies to make sure that we wouldn’t have happy customers in every case.

Samuel:
And in the case of that particular one, it was every single one of them gets replaced free of charge with a brand new product, no questions asked matter when you bought it. If you have that issue, you are getting a brand new unit. We don’t want anybody to ever feel that. And I’d like to think that how quick we reacted to that, and how thoroughly and you know, as easy as we could for the customer, it tries to save that trust.

Laurier:
To me that’s actually a really good story. That’s a positive story because it shows what ZOOM is made out of and it defines the brand, how you react to challenges like that, how you react to kind of a what could be a product catastrophe and a reputation catastrophe.

Laurier:
And Lexus is very good at responding to things like that. You know, you’re in that category of brands that if something is wrong, they fix it and you know, worry about the cost of fixing it later, and you know that pays dividends.

Andreas:
That’s it for this episode of Product: Knowledge and our conversation with ZOOM North America product specialist Samuel Green. We’ll have links to the ZOOM L-8 and RODECaster Pro in the episode notes. Visit graphosproduct.com where you can find out more about graphos, our services ideas or more podcasts and our blog.

Andreas:
All our podcasts are transcribed for the deaf and hard of hearing, or if you just prefer to read. Reach out on twitter @graphosproducts or email us through the form on graphosproduct.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Andreas Schwabe.