After yesterday’s article on Techcrunch, we got a couple of questions about how we maintain focus on costs while growing. That’s probably a question that we’ll talk about a lot here on this blog this year, but there is one story that best sums it up. Vinny Caravella, who produces all of the video for Giant Bomb, has a great saying that keeps us in check when entering new projects. The first time I heard him use it was when we were discussing building out our video production architecture. As most of you know, if you want to produce a lot of video quickly at high quality that you will eventually run into some insane (by small company terms) bills quickly. It’s real easy, especially when you come from the big company mentality, to “buy” your way out of the problem. “Let’s just buy that $30,000 bank of HD transcoding servers and be done!” is easily rolled off the lips- until you stop and think for a second and realize, “holy (explicative), that’s $30,000!”. This is where Vinny’s brilliant truism on starting new projects diverted our potential misappropriation of funds.

“You know, you can do karate in your sweatpants. Why don’t we just get started with a few videos, see how it goes, and see if we really need those machines before we buy them.”

Um, yeah. That was so “Getting Real” that it should have been obvious. But it is so hard not to buy the bad ass karate kimino, golf clubs, road bike or laptop when jazzed about doing something new. I have a garage full of kick ass gear that’s never been used and should be showcased on eBay right now. The time vs. money battle is so lopsided to time that money should always be the last resort to problem solving for core features of your business.

We’re still tweaking on the problem, but we’re getting ‘er done without that fancy bank of boxes giving us “real time HD rendering”. That said, we’ve now seen such an uptick in traffic and interest in videos that spending $30k sounds more feasible than it did a few months ago….