Crafter aims to replace WhatsApp and how we want to do it for film crews to communicate
What are film crews using to communicate with their members and Why?
Yes,WhatsApp for a lot of three-person teams, a lot of 10-person teams, and a lot of 100-person teams.
We interviewed at least 50 film crews. Everyone complains about WhatsApp, and there are not many solutions to solve it. There’s something intrinsic to communicating with a larger number of people that’s going to be difficult to manage, especially given the amount of information we get. WhatsApp has gotten worse over the last 5 years or so. Five years ago, 5 to 10 percent of WhatsApp messages were unnecessary, and now it’s almost 70 percent. These are from different sources — WhatsApp marketing, order receipts, new delivery updates, group comments, forward messages, monthly statements, blah blah blah.
When you open your WhatsApp it’s a giant casserole of messages from family, friends, people you work with outside your organisation, and all those things we just mentioned above. It’s garbled. One of the advantages of using Crafter teams is that you tap on the app icon and it’s just the people at your movie production studio and just the people you work with. There’s a strong boundary there which aids in comprehension. It’s one less molecule of glucose in your brain to manage it all. But it adds up.
That was one of the big insights for us when one of our beta clients switched to Crafter teams — they just had work conversations in one place which made their life easier, more focused, and somewhat decent search.
Crafter teams is less and less like a chat app and more and more like a business communication app. What is it, really?
We go back and forth on our own one-sentence description. When we talk more evocatively we say “ It’s all your work communication in one place, instantly searchable, and available wherever you go.” On the marketing side we give a more concrete description like “It’s a business communication app.”
Our ambition is that it’s a foundational bit of technology for most film crews. Whatever it is that they do, screenwriting, music composition, art department, costumes, or even visual effects department, every department has to communicate with other teams, and messages are flying around everywhere.
The advantage of centralizing that — even if you forget search or iOS apps — the idea of centralizing that is a huge value over having messages fragmented into different inboxes. When someone joins your team next week, they will have historical archives available to them that they can fall back on, as opposed to starting at a company and having an empty inbox.
How do we address the differences between WhatsApp and Crafter Teams?
WhatsApp is the lowest common denominator. It’s the way we get communications from one person to another these days. There isn’t really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook or Instagram messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time if you’re sending a message to a human you don’t know that well you’re using WhatsApp.
In the last six years, with the massiveness of messaging apps and the introduction of 4g and now 5g, most people now have different subsets of contacts they don’t communicate with primarily through WhatsApp. Some use Snapchat with three people, and iMessage with four to five people, and Twitter for a few people, and a much smaller group of friends with Instagram. All personal conversation internally is through WhatsApp. It’s not something people are conscious of. When we asked a bunch of film artists about how they communicate with their spouse or children or colleagues or college friends, it’ll be different apps in different modes for different people. People are getting more and more used to it.
This is one of the reasons Crafter teams will be able to address. People are willing to accept one more framework — another app for communication with a specific subset of people.Work : We built exactly the same — Crafter teams for work communication for film crews.
Thanks
Navatej Kumar
Founder&CEO
Crafter,Inc.
