SNEAK ATTACK – we punk'd our software company

Being a small operation and working in an impoverished industry, the arts, we don't have access to the same enterprise level tools we're used to from corporate. We are two full-timers managing a portfolio of businesses and a team of contractors and sweat-equity partners.

This makes us particularly reliant on the tools available for companies of our size. Without a good software stack to maximise the efficiency of our business backend, we'd struggle to get much done in the limited hours of the week. We're competing for the same consumer attention and money as large companies so ours is a tough gig.

All of this makes us especially grateful when we have a next level customer service experience with one of our suppliers.

And this is why we punk'd our software company.

Our key annual event, global acting competition World Monologue Games, has just launched a new Challenges program. Our first activity under this program is Last Man Standing, where actors receive a script every day at midnight and have 24h to learn, film and submit in order to stay in the race.

Last Man Standing presented us with a unique technical problem. It doesn't sound like much, but producing a functional leaderboard that updates itself in real time based on whether or not the actors submit was an enormous challenge — it required three database layers, four automations, dozens of custom fields and three APIs.

We use a tool called Ontraport (a relation-database-backed CRM & CMS) to power much of our businesses. To ensure our proposed architecture was optimal and to brainstorm a solution to the leaderboard problem*, we set up a support call with Ontraport to talk them through the plan. They confirmed that the design was solid and we spent an hour (much longer than our allotted call) nutting over potential solutions. Their engineers went off and did a separate brainstorm after the call to try to bring it all home.

In a world where most companies fight against honoring warranties or gouge every drop of blood out of customers, we were blown away by this level of support.

So Lisa and I organised a SNEAK ATTACK.

We set up a call with Ontraport's VP of customer support. We explained that we wanted to surprise the engineers. Together, we came up with an epic plan to get these guys their favourite drinks and baked goods and get them to attend a fake meeting where the VP punked them with the surprise.

If Ontraport's product wasn't as good as it is, and if their support didn't care enough to go this extra mile, World Monologue Games would be far poorer for it.

This is a toast to those companies which actually care about their customers.

You can see a recording of our sneak attack here. Worth it!

Pete Malicki is the Managing Director and Head of Content at Undo Redo Entertainment. They run World Monologue Games, World Monologue Film Festival, Arts Business Academy, the Creative Industries Future Leaders Incubator (CIFLI), The Monologue Project, an upcoming content platform (currently under NDA), Undo Redo Press, and sister company Undo Redo Solutions.

* For those who are technical or especially curious, the problem with the Last Man Standing leaderboard is that records on the same table (i.e. those of our participants) don't interact with each other in Ontraport. You can automate between parent and child records (e.g. participant to submission) but not sideways between participants. There's no native way to count submissions made between participants and thus determine how many have finished before or after you.

The solution we came up with was to create a new database object and connect all of the contacts to a single record with a numeral field, which increments with every submission. At the end of the 24h period, anyone who didn't submit would have the reference number transferred from the reference record to their participant record, and that number is their placement in the event. The reference then resets to 1 so it's accurate for the next day's participants.

We also added a nerd cherry to the cake by using two APIs to make an equals sign appear if more than one person drops out of the race in a single day, so you get "=23" instead of just plain old boring "23". #nerdlife