Behind the Scope

The creative industry spends a lot of time romanticizing passion.That's how we got here. But there's a version of that passion that can make you bad at pricing your work, bad at setting boundaries, and bad at building a business around it. And there's another version that stops being about the client altogether and starts being about you.

Sandro Siller, founder of Wort Weit Wien, was building his copywriting business right as ChatGPT hit. We get into what kind of creatives are at risk for being replaced by AI. Why selling output alone was never going to be enough, and why most creatives don't actually have a process worth selling (yet?). We also talk about why Sandro completely restructured his business around education and consulting instead of chasing the same clients with the same pitch in a market that had fundamentally changed.

Guest Links:
Website: https://www.wortweitwien.at
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandrosiller/

In this episode, we sit down with Julia Weithaler, founder of To Be Honest, a Vienna-based design studio built entirely around working with purpose-driven, values-aligned clients. We get into what that actually looks like in practice, and whether it's realistic to think you can hold your values and keep your business alive at the same time.

We get into the gray areas, and discuss the industry's obsession with performing progressive values while doing none of the work. Imperfect action is still better than no action. But we get into where the line is.

Guest links:
Website: https://tobehonest.studio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tbh.designstudio

No context. No curiosity about the brief, the client, the requirements, or what the person was actually trying to solve. Just a verdict stated as fact, and dressed up as professional opinion.

We've been watching this play out for a while. The way creatives pile on other creatives online. The way critique gets weaponized without any of the information that would make it useful. The way opinions get presented as objective truth by people who weren't in the room, didn't read the brief, and have no idea what they're looking at.

Lorenzo is the founder of Eat Butter First, and in this episode he gets into the messy, practical reality of building an agency that runs on freelance talent. How do you find the right people? How do you know when someone is actually a fit versus just available? And how do you budget for a team when every project looks different?

We get into all of it: the hiring mistakes, the relationship dynamics between agencies and freelancers, why passion and fit matter more than most people admit, and how to stay adaptable when you're operating in industries that move as fast as social media and hospitality.

Guest links:
Website: https://www.eatbutterfirst.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eat.butter.first/