From How to Why – 10 years of Janno Media

Chapter 1 – Some of the gear, and half an idea

It’s fair to say that the feeling of ever-increasing double digits isn’t the same when it comes to human birthdays.

But it’s also fair to say that I’ve still got that new mountain bike feeling as Janno Media reaches its 10th.

Setting the company up back in 2012 was low risk punt.  I wasn’t betting the farm on it by any means.

Having left my job as a Press Officer at Nottingham Trent University on my 30th birthday,  I’d just finished a 6 month charity trek across the country for Cancer Research UK.  I was sat on my parent’s sofa.  No job, and a head full of ideas that filled the time between Discovery Channel binges of Mythbusters and trips to the Job Centre.

And then at some point a TV advert asked me if I was eligible to claim back PPI money that I might have once unwittingly paid for no reason, and I remembered that I probably had.

A phone call to HSBC confirmed it, and after filling out a questionnaire followed by a three week wait, a cheque for £3000.00 dropped through the letterbox.

I owned up to my parents that I’d had the windfall, half expecting Dad to insist on a contribution to food and board.  But he didn’t.

So I pushed my luck and declared an interest in using the money to fund a daft idea to create a video production company headquartered in their spare bedroom.  The proposal was pitched as a route out from under their roof.

Dad agreed it was a good idea.

Within a week, £3000.00 had been turned into a brand new iMac, one tripod, a DSLR camera and lens, and an audio recorder (think dictaphone) with a plug in microphone.

I’d achieved the status of “some of the gear, and half an idea.”

I obviously needed a name for the company, which is something that lots of people ask about, so now seems like a good time to explain that too.

At the time, my exceptionally chatty and inquisitive four year old cousin, George, was going through a phase of prefacing all his statements with “Do you know?”, which when uttered quickly by an eager four year old, sounds like “Janno.”

And that was it.  A simple two syllable sound, rooted in a memory for me and forever memorable as a name for others.

I built a website on WordPress, updated my LinkedIn profile, created a Facebook page and Twitter account, and surveyed the landscape of potential clients that would surely be wanting me to make videos for them.  Surely.

That all sounds incredibly amateur and naive when I read it back.  I know there was plenty of doubt around whether I knew what I was doing, and it’s fair to say that as far as running a business goes, I most certainly didn’t.

What I did have though, was a very firm belief in the value of video content for businesses and the huge market out there for those that were able to produce it.

In my previous job I’d championed the use of video content to improve our work in the Nottingham Trent University Press Office.  I was a video hobbyist with big ideas, blagging his boss out of budget for cameras and microphones, and cutting his teeth on iMovie – convinced of the potential of video to enhance the press releases that my colleagues and I were writing.  And it worked.

Combining that professional opportunity with a fascination in YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, I then watched in awe as the release of the first generation iPhone saw video jumping from our desktop to our pockets.

It was exciting.

But, could I make a business out of it?