Pros
Let me start this off by saying one thing very clearly: The leaders of this company, including the two founders, are really nice guys. (And leadership is mainly made up of men.) The employees at Shootsta are swell folks, too. Nice people. But management and how they run the company has something to be desired.
Cons
I’ll follow that by saying the company is unfortunately not well-managed and that can create a lot of grief for employees. During the pandemic, it has also created a culture of fear for many of the salespeople. What Shootsta basically provides is video production in the cloud, it’s a bit of a SaaS service, and this appeals mainly to enterprise companies but is a much harder sell to companies that are smaller. And selling their services — not executing the creative work -- is what Shootsta really focuses on. That may seem like a disconnect because at the heart of the company are a bunch of creatives advising people how to create content and a bunch of editors putting it all together, but creatives aren’t terribly important. The focus is clearly on sales. Shootsta calls salespeople business development managers (BDMs) and hires them and fires them frequently. Some have risen to leadership positions but many have been a revolving door, not hitting what are increasingly hard-to-hit KPIs (especially given the pandemic) and are then let go with almost no notice. Then they hire some more. (But leave a train wreck of recently laid off people in their wake.) The company also tends to be cheap overall. An example of this in the pre-COVID days was sometimes making BDMs bunk together in the same hotel room. Also, the benefits they provide are not well-funded by the company and thus cost employees quite a bit if they want any decent coverages. What Shootsta provides is a “nice-to-have” but not a necessity. Companies who hire a savvy creative can get the services they provide done by other means without it costing a great deal more.
