By Alex Shabliy
Anyone who has ever tried freelancing, in one form or another – knows about Upwork. What they also know is how tough the battlefield is – sleepless nights, competition and price dumping hitting you left, front and right.
But this comes with tiny wins, that eventually stack up and turn into huge wins – that when you feel like you’ve struck gold.
For Zelios – it all started with a few people, a couple of trusty PCs, and quite a big selection of services – from social media marketing, to design and finally our bread and butter – explainer videos and animation.
Our founder Vlad Abramov was helping out with animation between project Zoom calls, while I was sitting there with 3 browser windows, two pc screens and what felt like a million tabs. Those tabs had everything from client info, to call agendas, and outreach strategies we’ve just brainstormed.
All done within a large coworking space, where we had to share it with other people. And it also doubled as a kitchen – as the only operational microwave was in that room. So every time at lunch, I was sitting in way-too-small headphones, my ears sore, trying to make out what the client was saying, while listening to people heating up their food at the backdrop. 
Back then, it was all about illustrated explainer videos. The classic kind you see very rarely nowadays. That’s how we got our start working with SaaS, AI, Tech products – by making them more human, clear and approachable.
The one thing stayed consistent – the mantra of “if your product doesn’t capture attention, it doesn’t exist”
Our most popular Explainer Videos back in the day:
The Call-First Difference
I think looking back at what helped us stand out was the focus on doing hard things. The hard things like going out on calls, and having meaningful conversations with clients – as well as figuring the best strategic use of videos within their funnel.
It’s easy for creatives to just “let our work do the talking” – but that’s not how you build a sustainable business strategy. Quality is good, but even better is when you can match the unique situation of your customer, with a solution that would help them.
If done right, all of this feels like you are doing some magic tricks.
When people ask us tips about sales, our usual answer is: do something at an intersection of therapy session, and interrogation. Most importantly, don’t lose a thin balance between the two.
PHOTO FROM A CALL OR ILLUSTRATED GRAPHIC (ALIGN WITH VLAD)
Even that alone helped us quickly gather a group of loyal return buyers that were flooding us with new and new explainer video requests, and then quickly teaching us about the importance of the full funnel approach, because they ordered MoFu and BoFu content like consequent tutorial and how to videos, for their businesses.
For reference, that’s the top 1% of Upwork freelancers, out of 18+ million.
We even have 1 arbitration battle won – in a California court, no less!
From Ambitious Startups to Global Brands
Of course today, while we have a big and reputable profile on Upwork, it’s now not the main source of our leads and potential partnerships, as the scale and scope of the agency has moved well beyond the Upwork projects.
But some of the standout projects we’ve build with our Upwork clients, are:
- UNSW – Yes! We built a variety of animated videos for this University based in Sydney. We’ve empowered their learning courses, with easily digestible, and just fun to watch video content.
- Supahub – Our most viewed YouTube video started as a communication via Upwork, and has extended and grew into a years long collaboration.
- BioLytical – Helping with instructional video – first during the tough Covid-19 period, with the antigen test instructional video.
And then expanding our cooperation into other videos as well.
We’ve seen for ourselves what the marketing demands and wants – literally on the marketplace. From educational videos, to promotional and advertising formats.
We’ve seen people who treat the video as an afterthought, just a “good to have” – and also those who build their whole strategy and funnel around the video.
And we’ve also seen how a clunky product with clear messaging has outperformed a far superior competitor.
Where We’re Going
When you are in a creative field like animation, you rarely have time to stop and reflect – your attention is singularly focused on the future: future deadlines, future clients, future work with existing clients, future styles, and improvements to the workflows.
Before, we took on almost every request that had enough money to work with us (and the bar was low, at that time).
Today, we only onboard a limited number of clients per cycle, and almost exclusively focus on SaaS, AI, Tech and adjacent fields.
We’ve had our fair share of short, 5 day timelines – as well as 6+ month video projects, that started with strategic sessions and exploration of client’s funnels.
But no matter the size, scope, or ambition – our mission rings through even through the years – turning complexity into clarity, and clarity into conversion.
The photos in the article are provided by https://zelios.agency/about/ and are used with permission.
