By Ahmad Permessur

Rob, tell us more about yourself. Do you have experience in web hosting?

My name is Rob Moore, owner of DemoWolf, a flash tutorial production company. I am an engineer-turned-webhost. That is, I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and used to work for an engineering firm. About 10 years ago I started a small web hosting company in my spare time, which grew large enough within 1 year that I had to leave my engineering job to focus solely on my hosting business. Since I am more business oriented than technical, I often had difficulty with support issues, and soon realized that I was not the right person for running a hosting company, without some help anyways. I outsourced technical support, and even purchased flash tutorials to help cut down on suport tickets (which indeed helped!). In the end though, I decided to sell my hosting business to someone better suited for the job. I started producing my own tutorials, and knowing what issues web hosts and their customers were often faced with, decided to address those issues and launched DemoWolf in November 2005.

What inspired the idea of creating flash tutorials for the web hosting industry?

Well, I have to admit that the idea was not mine in the beginning. A couple years before starting up DemoWolf I was a customer of a competitor of ours, having purchased many flash tutorials for my own hosting business. I therefore already knew the benefits of having video tutorials available to customers. However, I saw a need for more professional looking tutorials, more choices for hosting companies in terms of customization, and tutorials that are kept more up to date. There seemed to be just one main competitor in the market, and their focus didn’t seem to be in producing tutorials that stood out. They all looked the same, and there didn’t seem to be a great deal of updates coming out for control panels that had new releases. I therefore decided to start DemoWolf. I figured that a tutorial production company that focuses on trying to make their customer’s tutorials be as customized as possible, and as professional as possible, we would be able to secure a large part of this market. We offer the ability for customers to choose custom colors for all text boxes within purchased tutorials, for example. We also offer voice tutorials (tutorials including voice over narration), which none of our competitors currently offer. It’s all about providing our customers with support solutions that help them stand out, and do so in a professional manner.

You’re currently focused on web hosting related tutorials. Do you have plans to cover tutorials for other industries?

Absolutely. However, there are still a lot of areas we want to cover within the hosting industry before we branch out. There are many new tutorial series coming out in the coming weeks and months, and we continue to release voice-audio versions of all our standard tutorials. We are about to release “Online Presentations” which will be geared more towards the higher-end market. These will essentially be professionally produced sales presentations that companies will be able distribute on CD or over the web, and will include tutorial elements as well as PowerPoint-like slide features. We will also be releasing “Interactive Demos” which are similar to our regular tutorials, but end-users will have choices to make within the tutorials, that will decide the direction the tutorial takes. For example, we will produce 1 tutorial that is really 4 tutorials in 1. The tutorial starts, then at some point the user will be presented with 4 choices. The tutorial will continue in a direction, based on the choice the end-user makes. There are all kinds of applications for Interactive Demos like these.
We do not want to spread ourselves to thin. We have many months ahead of us developing new tutorials for the hosting industry, so it doesn’t make good business sense for us to start soliciting business from other markets at this time. However, that isn’t to say we won’t work with other companies…. abut 60% of our business is currently in producing custom tutorials, and companies from other industries have hired us to create custom tutorials for their own proprietary applications.

What according to you is the biggest advantage of flash tutorials compared to conventional text-based manuals?

People learn much better and quicker by seeing and doing, than by reading. Sure, text-based tutorials have their place, but in my opinion, if someone can be “shown” how to perform a certain task, they are much more apt to remember how to do it (and do it correctly) than if they read it. Also, many tasks are difficult to describe in print, and in those cases flash tutorials are much better suited to getting the point across.

There are some known limitations with flash tutorials; for example, they cannot be searched or printed. Will you be addressing these issues and proposing a solution?

We like to suggest that companies mix flash tutorials in with their written knowledgebase of FAQ articles. If there is supporting text around links to these tutorials, customers should have no problem searching for, and finding solutions to their issues. I find it’s better to have links to flash tutorials from relevant positions throughout a website, rather than simply having one large page listing all available video tutorials. Many companies start out with putting links to all their tutorials on one page, but over time it’s good to put links to these tutorials in other places throughout the website as well. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have both…. the more options available to customers, the better

Based on the feedback and testimonials you’ve received from web hosts, how has your flash tutorials improved their customer support?

The big thing is the reduction in support costs. Our customers are reporting up to an 80% reduction in the number of support tickets they receive. This helps them in several ways:

• It saves them “time” as they do not have to answer as many tickets;
• It saves them “money” by reducing their support cost;
• It makes their customers happy, since they do not have to submit a ticket to get help, as they can get the help they need themselves by watching a tutorial. They also do not have to wait for the host to get back to them with an answer.
• Another less measurable benefit is the professional image having high quality flash tutorials available to your customers projects. Having custom-branded flash tutorials available on a web host’s website shows potential customers that the host has gone out of their way to provide solutions to potential questions, before they arise. This can go a long way in securing new hosting customers as they browse a host’s website. Also, since DemoWolf tutorials are branded with the host’s own company logo in the first and last frame of all tutorials produced, the host’s branding efforts are reinforced. The more your business’ logo is shown, the better it is for increasing brand awareness.

There are many providers of flash tutorials for the web hosting industry, how is DemoWolf different from its competitors?

“We’re #2! We’re #2!!” Ok, so that may not be a great slogan, but for now we are happy with that fact. The number one company in our industry got their start a full 3 years before we did, so we still have some catching up to do. However, our goals are being met, and we figure we will have the largest inventory of hosting related flash tutorials by the end of this year. We currently have over 1200 stock tutorials, ready to be branded for any hosting company, and we are adding 100-200 every month. But that’s just looking at the shear number of available tutorials. What’s also very important to realize is the quality of the tutorials, and how recently they’ve been produced. Are they out of date? Have there been new releases of control panels for which the tutorial producer does not yet have tutorials? After all, what is the use of having thousands of tutorials, if many of them are for old, out-dated application versions? We pride ourselves on keeping our tutorials up to date, and offering choices to customers that help them differentiate themselves (custom colors, voice narration, etc). We are the only tutorial production company that provides voice-audio tutorials for the hosting industry, and we are the fastest growing tutorial company in the industry.

Tell us about Demo Builder, the software you use to produce your tutorials. How does it differ from other flash demo software like Camstasia Studio and Viewlet Builder?

Demo Builder is a great application. We use it exclusively to build all our flash tutorials. It was developed by Tanida Inc, originally based out of Toronto, Canada, but now located in Romania. We have a unique relationship with the developers, since we probably use Demo Builder more than any of their other customers. We therefore have a partnership setup with them whereby we provide support to their customers when they need help. And unlike any other tutorial production company, we actually sell the application we use to build tutorials (Demo Builder), for those companies that wish to produce their own tutorials instead of hiring us to do it for them. This may sound strange…. after all, isn’t that like giving away potential business? Well, the answer is yes and no. We may be giving away potential custom tutorial business initially, but there are 3 benefits the way I see it:

• We are still selling a product for which we make a commission;
• We are always available to companies who invariably decide they’re better off focusing on their core business than producing tutorials…. and so many Demo Builder users come back to us for help, taking some of that work load off their hands. We are experts with Demo Builder, and so can likely work faster (and cheaper) than most companies who’s primary focus is something else;
• By promoting Demo Builder we are growing a community of people who use and love the application, and we’ll be able to draw on that expertise when the time comes. Shortly, we will be looking for new “developers” to help us with tutorial development, as we continue to expand our business.

You’re going to be exhibiting at HostingCon 2007. How important is this event for your company?

I see it as very important. HostingCon will be attended by many people in the hosting industry, and exhibiting at a tradeshow like this will help get the word out about what we’re doing. It’s all about exposure, meeting people in the industry, and showing the industry that we have solutions that can help hosting companies better support their customers, save them money, and increase their brand awareness and professional image. By exhibiting at HostingCon we’re also sending a message that we are here for the long term, and not just another internet startup/idea that may be gone in a month (we all know there are lots of those around

What objectives have you set for this conference?

We don’t have any specific sales objectives. It’s mainly about exposure which I just mentioned. We will however have some incentives at the show to entice companies to sign on while they’re there!

How do you envision support solutions in the near future? Are we going to see more and more multimedia-based solutions? Will it be the end of text-based documentations/manuals?

I don’t think video tutorials will ever fully replace text-based manuals. Some people just like to read information, and have a printable copy. But I do see support solutions moving more and more towards multimedia and more user-friendly ways to help customers. Specifically, I see Flash tutorials becoming more professional looking, and incorporating not just screen-capturing video, but actors/actresses helping customers on their desktops. I see more interactivity with customers finding their answers more quickly by answering some questions… instead of searching through countless tutorials (either text or voice). There are some applications that are doing this well now. Take Kayako for example. They provide a support system that attempts to answer a customer’s question before they’re even finished typing it (based on a knowledgebase the host would have prepared). I see more companies using systems like these, and incorporating flash tutorials within the results of these knowledgebase articles. It’s all about making things easier for the end-user.

What’s next for DemoWolf?

For now we will continue increasing our inventory of stock web hosting related tutorials. We have several new tutorial series about to be released including the new WebHost Manager for cPanel 11 (we released cPanel 11 X3 end-user tutorials last week), new tutorials for webmail programs, site builder programs, email headers, Word Press, detailed tutorials on Fantastico, billing automation applications like WHMCS, WHMAutoPilot, ModernBill and ClientExec, FileZilla, statistics programs, server diagnostic tutorials, any anything else we find our customers in need of. We will continue to release 100-200 new tutorials each month at least until the end of 2007. The order in which we release these tutorials will be dictated by demand, as customers let us know what they want to see from us. We will continue to grow our custom tutorial business with the new Interactive Demos and Online Presentations we’ll be releasing shortly. And, we will be unveiling a new affiliate program allowing companies that provide services to hosting providers to also benefit by promoting our services. This will also help our own branding efforts, which we will continue to work on for the rest of 2007. To help us achieve our goals, we will be looking to hire at least 2 new developers, and 1 or 2 new sales representatives before the end of the year.