The Cinchy TV Experiment: How Building a Media Engine Accelerated Category Creation

“Enterprise buyers don’t watch video.” This was the conventional wisdom that Cinchy faced when they proposed building their own media platform. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dan DeMers shared how rejecting this assumption and building Cinchy TV transformed their category creation efforts and sales process.

The Vision Behind Cinchy TV Long before launching Cinchy, Dan saw the shift in content consumption happening. “We’ve had this vision from even before the company was formalized of just seeing even my kids who watch videos and the evolution of long form videos to extreme short forms,” he explains. This observation sparked an idea: what if enterprise content could be as engaging as consumer content?

Building a Content Destination Instead of creating a traditional enterprise website, Cinchy built two distinct properties. As Dan describes it, “Cinchy TV is almost like an alternate site to Cinchy.com. And of course, you can navigate back and forth, but.com is for the let’s call it an old school site, but TV is what I’d call it, a new school site, which is where you can binge watch on all things data collaboration.”

Breaking the Enterprise Content Mold The decision to focus heavily on video content wasn’t without skeptics. “Enterprise buyers aren’t going to watch video. I heard that so many times,” Dan recalls. His response challenged the fundamental assumption behind this criticism: “Well, wait a minute, aren’t these humans? If they’re humans, they watch video. Sorry. And if they don’t, when they retire, someone else will, I guess. There’s no question about it. It’s like they live on a different planet and they’re a different species or something.”

Creating a Content Factory To support this vision, Cinchy established what Dan calls “Cinchy Studios,” their internal content factory. “That’s our content factory to the point where Cinchy TV is actually built using Cinchy. So you can watch the making of Cinchy TV. It’s one of the original series there.”

The Impact on Sales The investment in video content transformed their sales process. “When we started to get inbound prospects… they would hit our site and they would go to Cinchy TV and they would talk about how they would watch literally hundreds of hours of the content, like it was crazy,” Dan shares.

This level of engagement had a dramatic effect on sales conversations. As Dan explains, “The best lead that we could ever get is one that stumbled upon us, went to our site, watched an initial video, and then many hours of content watching later, they reached out to us and they’re already educated, they already know the story. They’ve already seen the platform. Right. And that’s a huge time saver when you think of sales cycles and processes and overheads and whatnot.”

The Show, Don’t Tell Philosophy Underlying Cinchy’s content strategy is a fundamental belief in demonstration over declaration. “We have a philosophy of show not tell because no one wants to be told, they want to be shown,” Dan explains. This approach extends beyond just product demonstrations to include featuring their own team: “We do these avatars. We have an artist that does renders for every employee and even select customers and stuff like that. And they’re featured everywhere.”

Lessons for B2B Founders Cinchy’s media experiment offers several key insights for B2B founders:

1. Trust that enterprise buyers consume content like consumers
2. Build content that educates before it sells
3. Create a destination, not just marketing assets
4. Show, don’t tell – especially in category creation

The biggest lesson? Don’t let conventional wisdom about enterprise buyers limit your marketing innovation. As Dan puts it, “That’s the future.” For founders creating new categories, building your own media engine might be the most efficient path to market education and sales acceleration.

The success of Cinchy TV suggests that the future of enterprise marketing might look more like Netflix than traditional B2B content marketing – and the companies that recognize this shift first will have a significant advantage in their category creation efforts.