About Us

Image
Flow principal Matt Naylor with a famous person.
Image
Flow principal David Rice, famous person just out of frame.

We've written and rewritten this dozens of times over the years, striving for the perfect paragraph that says it all. It's always the same hand-wringing: should we write in first or third person? How narrow and specialized can we describe our expertise, while still signaling our appetite for new challenges? Is there any way around having to call ourselves storytellers? What exactly does "boutique" mean, anyway?

For a look back at how we've answered some of these questions over the years, we turned to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We invite you to peek behind the curtain and decide if we're the right fit.

sounds fun, I'm in
no thanks, get to the point
Image

2009

Back when a seven-minute Facebook video was not only viable, but innovative, our inaugural project was a mini-documentary for Procter & Gamble's Downy brand. We knew we were on to something when the brand manager called to ask for a :30 version to replace their Big Agency™ scripted spot. We hence proclaimed ourselves the "premiere creator of branded documentary content." The claim was technically true, if only because nobody else described the product in such stilted terms.

2012

Our work with Downy Touch of Comfort, Tide Loads of Hope, and Pantene Beautiful Lengths had given us firm footing in the cause marketing space, so we backed off a touch, saying simply "we make films that forge the emotional connection." The would-be catchphrase may have been more palatable without the definite article.

2015

Briefly called ourselves The Real Stories Agency - until a client pointed out they'd hired us precisely because we weren't an agency.

2016

For this next iteration, we adopted a more philosophical tone. "People are inherently good," we optimistically conjectured; our stated mission hereafter would be to tell stories that "inspire all of us to be better, more empathetic people." Note, this was before the 2016 election.

2020

After a decade calling ourself Flow Nonfiction, we determined the name had been constraining our pursuit of projects not so neatly classified. We had also grown weary of customer service interactions wherein we were routinely mistaken for a book publisher called Flown on Fiction.

Indeed the rebrand came just in time for the runaway success of co-founder Matt Naylor's fictional screenplay, #Alive, which topped the Netflix charts and became one of the Covid era's highest grossing theatrical releases.

*YOU ARE HERE*

/recursion
What services do you offer?

From evergreen nonprofit fundraising shorts, to consumer-facing cause marketing spots, to single-use critical business pitch videos, our work has directly generated tens of millions of dollars for our clients. We offer internal entertainment properties like company podcasts and photo essays, which reinforce shareholder confidence and fuel employee retention. And our flagship multi-part series for fintech giant Deluxe and veterans’ nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project have set the standard for brand entertainment in a distribution model that places it alongside original programming on Hulu, Netflix, and MSNBC.

What does it cost?

We cost a little more than a typical production company and significantly less than a typical agency. 

Where are you based?

We are in Austin and San Francisco.

talk to us