Josiah Ati, CEO & Technical Director of Inkinetic Studios
Josiah is the CEO and technical director of Inkinetic Studios. He has a passion for all technology and started his journey into the world of digital media back in 2019 while volunteering at a local organization. Since then, he has launched a startup and had a very successful freelance career.
In 2023, he decided to launch Inkinetic Studios with his wife, Rebecca, combining his technical expertise with her creative genius. His core value involves the belief that there is nothing that he cannot learn or achieve if he puts his mind to it. He enjoys troubleshooting and is obsessed with finding the answer to a problem before he steps away from the computer. He is a passionate go-getter who does whatever it takes to get the job done.
Table of Contents
Where Did Inkinetic Begin?
What’s a Great Inkinetic Project?
What Are Some of the Misconceptions About WordPress & Modern Websites?
Can a Business Have Animation and a Fast Website?
Closing Thoughts
Josiah, we’re lucky to count you and your wife, Rebecca, as part of the broader Sales Funnel Professor family and love what you all bring to the table via your firm, Inkinetic, in terms of creativity, but you also have a unique approach in that you all jointly have a strong technical background.
In particular, you’re always exploring new technology at the intersection of engineering and marketing. We look forward to learning more about what you’re up to in that regard.
You also have a really interesting background and personal interests, including digital nomading. We look forward to learning more about that as well.
That said, let’s get to the good stuff:
Where Did Inkinetic Begin?
Q: To kick us off, tell us about yourself, Josiah? What’s your engineering background?
A: My passion for engineering was ignited in the early 2010s when I saw a robotic fish made of wood and plastic invented by a friend of my dad. I was instantly captivated and immediately realigned my dreams from wanting to be a medical doctor to aiming to become a Mechatronics Engineer.
This new passion gave me the motivation and vigor needed to earn my Bachelor’s in Mechatronics Engineering in 2021.
It also pushed me to invent a smart waste management system, aptly called “Intellibin”, which led me to become the first-place (tie) winner in the 2021 Nigerian National Engineering Project Competition.
Q: How did you connect your tech & engineering experience to the world of digital media?
A: As I was wrapping up my Bachelor’s, I noticed that a lot of the time, valuable projects invented by students end up being left in a lab or workshop somewhere collecting dust. This sparked in me a desire to not see such beautiful ideas and innovations created by great minds go to waste. That desire led me to incorporate a media and engineering agency in the same year with a few engineering colleagues of mine. I took a deeper dive into leadership, employee relations, customer relations, accounting, and more.
I also diversified my skills by taking on more professional video editing to help market our products and boost the media section. This brought me deeper into video editing and introduced me to the world of design and animation. I learned quickly that I am not someone who can stay content with any position where I am not learning something new or taking on new challenges. This realization pushed me to leap outside of my comfort zone and move to independent freelance to expand my opportunities toward international markets. I delved deeper into the world of complex editing, cinematography, and animation, always looking for unique places where my previous experiences and passions overlapped with my work.
Q: You and your wife, Rebecca, recently launched your own firm: Inkinetic. Tell us about the journey. What inspired you?
A: Originally when we were both managing our independent businesses, I always consulted her to help review the design and aesthetics of my videos and she consulted me anytime she had a technical illustration to help ensure that it was up to spec. We noticed over time there was a pattern in the type of projects that we both enjoyed working on and both sets of clients could greatly benefit from our combined skills. We wanted to focus on our strengths and bring a unique combination of my engineering background and her artistic background. Thus Inkinetic Studios was formed with the vision to create illustrations, animations, & videos that are technically correct and aesthetically pleasing.
Q: Being digital business owners has afforded you the ability to travel widely. Tell us about your digital nomad experience so far? What stops have you made? What should someone who might be considering doing something similar consider?
A: My digital nomad journey started in December 2022 when I decided to take a huge leap of faith and leave everything behind to start a life of travels with my wife. Travelling around the world had been a lifelong dream of mine, and I was excited to start the journey in Cape Verde.
So far, I’ve had the opportunity to visit 5 different islands with my favorite being the island of Santo Antao. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to so far.
If you’re considering becoming a digital nomad, I’ll advise that you just take a dive in and see. One of the philosophies I’ve been basing my life on recently is the idea that sometimes you have to start to know. If you don’t take that risk or first step, you’ll never know what’s waiting for you on the other side and if you don’t like what’s on the other side, then, at least you’ve figured out what you don’t like.
Also, try to make friends with locals. The best experiences I had in the different islands came through the locals showing me a more authentic less touristy/curated experience. A driver on the Island of Sal took me to his favorite local restaurant and also to his favorite resting spot when we had a delayed flight. I have a lot of other tips to give, but I’ll save those for another time.
What’s a Great Inkinetic Project?
Q: What types of projects does Inkinetic like to work on?
A: Our major focus is on projects involving engineering, education, science, technology, and history. We love working with businesses in industries such as manufacturing, construction, automotive, transportation, railway, airline, maritime, agriculture, food science, chemical science, physical science, metalworking/steel and more. We feel these are industries that usually do not get to benefit from beautiful communicative media due to the level of complexity they need to portray in their projects which might be hard to find in a typical design agency.
Q: On top of your role as CEO, you list your title as Technical Director…what does that mean to you? How does your firm differ from a “pure” creative agency?
A: One of the things I learned while studying engineering was how to apply creative problems to challenging and technical tasks. So, just like how I created Intellibin by connecting various electronic components, as the Technical Director, I work on creating the building blocks of the projects we take on. I ensure that the foundation is solid. For example, recently we were creating a bridge illustration and my job was to figure out exactly what kind of bridge we are creating, what machines and components go into it, the stages of building and more.
If there is any step in the process that requires technical proficiency which might be outside of a normal artist’s repertoire, it’s my job to fill that gap so that the artists on our team can keep creating without limits. So, if they create an illustration in a style that isn’t usually animated, I put in the research to find a way to make it move. If a client wants that animation to display on their website but only upon scrolling, I find what bits of code we need to implement and do any necessary testing. My typical workday includes some motion design, animating some illustrations thrown at me by the designers, video editing, web development, and reviewing artwork for quality control. This combined with leading research into new ways to create useful products representing our illustrator’s work as the CEO perfectly fulfills my passions. It also allows my wife to not get stressed by the paperwork and focus on excelling at what she does best.
Q: How do you stay current on emerging tech?
A: I would say my top resources are YouTube and Google News. Since 2015 I’ve been obsessed with tech YouTube and some of my favorites are channels like LinusTechTips, MrWhosetheBoss, and Marques Brownlee alongside some tech news channels. I watch all the major tech releases and watch a lot of engineering videos as well because I am a very curious person, always trying to understand the deep ends of things and I love learning in my free time as well.
Q: You all jointly have a unique talent for providing creative assets for extremely technical firms and complex software concepts. You’ve knocked it out of the park on a number of SFP-led projects. How do you approach those types of challenges?
A: It all starts with Rebecca and I going through the project brief to come up with a way of tackling the challenge. We have to utilize a lot of planning and organization to ensure a perfect collaborative blend of our skills so that the incredibly complex projects can receive a seamless workflow. We never let any task go without assigning someone to be the primary lead so that there is no room for anything to slip through the cracks. If it’s more of a design challenge, I leave it in the hands of Rebecca, and if it’s more of a technical or motion-related challenge, I take it on and assign each sub-challenge to the team based on their expertise.
What Are Some of the Misconceptions About WordPress & Modern Websites?
Q: For our clients, we’re often building digital sales funnels and using SEO and PPC as top-of-funnel sources sending qualified traffic to be monetized on a WordPress site…what are some misconceptions about WordPress?
A: I started working with WordPress in 2018 and I’ve heard a lot of misconceptions since then, which I find puzzling given the fact that WordPress powers over 43.1% percent of the internet.
Some of these include things like “WordPress is slow” and “WordPress is too simple and limited.” All of these things are based on the expertise of the developers handling the website. This is why it is so important to hire a WordPress expert like Sales Funnel Professor to set up your website correctly.
Professor’s Note
In addition to misconceptions about speed and capabilities, businesses often end up stuck with a WordPress Blackbox, wherein an unscrupulous software developer has hard-coded pages so they can’t be edited in the page editor, and thus, require even more hard-coding to fix.
Blackbox sites are opaque to their owners and expensive to maintain. Luckily, they can be recovered.
Q: For everything Google, site speed is critical, especially on Mobile. If you have a slow site, you’re penalized in where you appear in search results and are less competitive in paid auctions because Google views your on-page experience as poor. Historically, what has been the culprit and the solution?
A: In my opinion, it mostly comes down to heavy plugins and heavy animations. Because of the level of options WordPress provides, it’s easy to accidentally overstuff your website with lots of unnecessary plugins that drastically slow down the performance of the entire website. Also, as websites are evolving, it’s becoming more and more necessary to have more interactive parts of your websites. However, videos are usually heavy and gifs are even more heavy. I recently exported a 15s animation as a GIF and because it had a lot of uncompressed textures and elements, it ended up being over 715 MB as a GIF. It was unusable.
Can a Business Have Animation & a Fast Website?
Q: You’ve recently been exploring some technology that allows for animation while keeping load times “in the green” from Google’s perspective…tell us about that…
A: I was really bothered by how impossible it is to use GIFs without greatly sacrificing performance and was wondering how major companies manage to get fluid animations on their websites without slow performance. I went down a rabbit hole and found out about Lottie Animations. I sincerely believe that was the best thing I found this year. It is amazing. It takes your animation and converts it to pure code in a JSON format making it really lightweight. Sometimes as light as JPEG or WebP files.
Q: What are some use cases for this type of animation?
A: There are so many use cases such as hero image animations, scrolling animations, parallax animations, animated elements, animated scroll-down elements, animated popups, animated buttons, backgrounds, and much more. It’s so versatile.
Closing Thoughts
Q: As you’re well aware, business vocabulary gets more obscure and complex every year. We’ ’ve been compiling a free sales and marketing jargon encyclopedia here at Sales Funnel Professor. What’s a phrase you’d like to add to the list?
A: Lottie: a lesser-known file format that uses JSON to allow for embedded animation within a small file so that the page can still load quickly.
A Big Thank You to Josiah Ati!
For Further Reading: Top of Funnel: Organic Social Strategies
