Subscribe to podcast via iTunes!

Visit EntrepreneurOnFire.com!

What does it take to be an Entrepreneur? Join us as Lee LeFever shares his Entrepreneurial mindset and an inside glance at his journey of becoming a successful Entrepreneur.

Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and author of The Art of Explanation. In 2007 he saw an opportunity to explain technology using short and simple animated videos. Since then his company inspired the explainer video industry, earned over 50 million online views and is now focused on helping others become better explainers.

Click to tweet! ➪➪➪ Inspiring interview with Lee LeFever! EntrepreneurOnFire.com/LeeLeFever @JohnLeeDumas

Sponsor

Support EntrepreneurOnFire and snag a free audio book from Audible.com. CLICK HERE!

Success Quote

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

Business Failure

Lee thought he could hand the reins of his service over to an outside source and sit back and reel in the bucks. The reality was not so pretty, and he had to take control quickly to save the day.

Entrepreneurial AHA Moment

People who have knowledge don’t necessarily have the skills to “explain” that knowledge in a manner that can be understood by the masses. Enter Lee LeFever, enter CommonCraft.com

Current Business

Lee has some exciting things going on at CommonCraft right now. Can you say leverage? Can you say scalability?

Small Business Resource

Lee of Common Craft just released a book called The Art of Explanation. The book includes QR codes to reference the videos that Common Craft makes to explain things, so that people can scan the code and view the video online.

Here's something I wrote for the Springbox blog about seeing Cave of Forgotten Dreams at SXSW 2011:

Everybody goes to SXSW to see The Next Big Thing. We go to interactive to discover the next Twitter. We go to music to hear the next Arcade Fire. We go to film to see the next Hurt Locker.

SXSW is two weeks we spend trying to look into the future, but my favorite two hours at SXSW 2011 were spent looking into the past.

30,000 years into the past.

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 3-D film that documents a rare look inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France — home to the oldest known cave paintings on Earth. I was lucky enough to catch the SXSW Film premiere. As a person who spends the majority of his time making marks to create meaning, it was impossible for me to take in those ancient paintings and not become emotional thinking about the way marks can last, the way they can travel through time and connect human beings.

Cut to one week ago. I was sitting in a bar with my friend Lee LeFever, the co-creator of Common Craft, a company that makes explanation videos “in plain English.” We were talking about the web and the common misconception that it is something ephemeral, something that is not permanent, something that doesn’t last. Lee told me that the most-watched, most-popular videos on the Common Craft site are videos that they posted in 2007. Videos about technology that are four years old, people still watch them and share them with friends, because the content is still strong and still valuable. As Rob Walker wrote in an article about the popular podcast Radiolab, “[sometimes] the value of a media product does not come from being fast. It comes from being timeless.”

“The most permanent medium is the digital one.” That’s something that Benjamin Palmer, CEO of The Barbarian Group, said in a recent interview. (When I think about the Chauvet caves, I’m reminded of the double meaning of “digital” expounded by cartoonist Lynda Barry: “This may be the digital age, but our hands are the original digital devices.”)

O conceito de um Feed ou RSS pode parecer meio complicado para algumas pessoas, mas nesse video feito pelo "Lee LeFever no Common Craft Show", explica de forma simples e clara todos os conceitos e funcionamentos dessa ferramenta.

A big influence on me as someone trying to educate others about software and technology was Lee Lefever at Commoncraft.

I'm already beginning to see his influence in commercials now with the homemade cut up and animate approach to explaining complex issues........like Zombies.