Why We Stopped Marketing and Made a Video Nobody Asked For

The Israel-Iran conflict escalated in early March. Within days, the cancellations started. Not a trickle. A wave. European source markets pulled bookings across Sri Lanka, and DMC operators who had spent weeks building itineraries and chasing confirmations watched their pipelines empty overnight.

We are a small team building an operations platform for DMCs. Nalinda, our co-founder, lived through COVID as a DMC operator. He lived through Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic crisis. We have seen what happens when companies keep selling into a crisis that has nothing to do with their product and everything to do with the world falling apart around their customers.

So we stopped. Pulled back on the content calendar. Paused the posts we had queued. And did something that had nothing to do with Localflow.

The conversation started on WhatsApp

On March 19th, I messaged Imran Furkan. Imran is someone I have known for years. He is also a geo-political and economic analyst, CEO of Tresync in Australia, and an independent director of Softlogic Holdings, Odel, Asiri Hospitals, and Maharaja Foods. He sits on the board of the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute. When black swan events happen, advising companies and governments on what comes next is literally his job.

I told him what was happening to the DMC community. The cancellations. The silence from source markets. The operators sitting on empty calendars with no framework for how to think about it.

His response was immediate: these operators need a geo-political lens on what is happening, not just survival instinct. Let’s talk about it publicly.

So I called Nalinda. And we decided to record a conversation.

What we were not going to do

We set three ground rules early.

• No slides. No product pitch. No polished corporate webinar with a registration page and a two-week lead time. The crisis was happening now. The content had to match that pace.

• No silver lining performance. If the honest answer was that some businesses would not survive this, we were going to say that. DMC owners can smell manufactured optimism. They have had enough of it.

• No generic crisis advice. “Preserve cash” and “pivot your model” are not useful to a DMC owner staring at an empty pipeline. We wanted to go specific. What does this geo-political situation actually mean for travel demand? How long do these disruptions historically last? What did Nalinda actually do during COVID and the economic crisis to keep a business alive? What should an operator be doing this week, not in six months?

How we actually made it

Five days from the first WhatsApp message to a published video. I am sharing the production details because they might be useful if you ever need to produce something fast with a small team and no budget.

We used Riverside.fm. It records locally on each participant’s machine, which means the audio and video quality does not depend on anyone’s internet connection. Nalinda was in Finland. The rest of us were in Sri Lanka.

On the 24th, we recorded. Dharmesh sat with Imran in the room and hosted the conversation, facilitating it throughout. I was behind the laptop running the Riverside session, keeping track of the flow and making sure we covered the ground we needed to cover. Nalinda joined remotely.

The setup in Sri Lanka: a MacBook running Riverside, an iPhone connected as the primary camera, an iPad mirroring the MacBook screen so Dharmesh and Imran could see what was happening in the session, and a ring light. That was it.

Nalinda’s setup was even simpler. He used his iPhone to record and his laptop to keep track of the screen. His phone stand was a Kukula Pahana (a traditional Sri Lankan oil lamp). I am not making that up.

The conversation ran about 45 minutes.

After the recording: edit, title cards, chapter markers, upload. We built animated section cards using Playwright (a browser automation tool that turned out to produce cleaner results than traditional video conversion). Added chapter timestamps to the YouTube description so viewers could jump straight to the section most relevant to them.

The video went live on Localflow’s YouTube channel as “When the Bookings Stop: A conversation for Sri Lanka’s DMC community.”

The thinking behind it

I want to be honest about why we did this, because there is a strategic layer underneath the community layer, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

We believe that in a niche, relationship-driven market like DMC travel, the brands that show up during the hard moments are the ones people remember when the buying moments return. That belief is baked into how we think about content at Localflow. Industry first, product second. Not as a slogan. As an operating principle.

When the cancellations hit, we could have kept running the content calendar as planned. Product posts. Conversion content. Trial CTAs. All perfectly reasonable things for a SaaS company to do. But it would have felt tone-deaf. The community we are trying to serve was in pain, and the right thing to do was to be useful, not to sell.

The video has zero product mentions. No Localflow demo. No trial link. Nalinda is in the conversation as a 20-year DMC veteran, not as a co-founder. Imran is there because his expertise is exactly what the moment demanded.

Whether that decision pays off commercially, I do not know yet. But it felt right. And sometimes that is enough of a reason.

What I would share with other founders

A few things I noticed from doing this, in case they are useful.

• Speed over polish. Five days from WhatsApp message to published video. If we had tried to produce a proper webinar with registration pages, promotional emails, and a two-week build-up, the moment would have passed. Crisis content has a window. Miss it and you are just adding to the noise.

• Your relationships are your production capability. I could message Imran because I knew him. Nalinda could speak to the crisis because he had survived three of them. Dharmesh could host the conversation because he has spent years facilitating exactly these kinds of discussions across industries. We did not need to hire anyone, brief anyone, or wait for anyone’s approval. A founding team, one phone call, a ring light, and a traditional oil lamp repurposed as a phone stand. That was the whole production.

• The hardest part is choosing not to sell. When you are an early-stage company and every month matters, pausing your marketing to produce something with no CTA feels uncomfortable. It should. That discomfort is the signal that you are making a decision based on what the community needs rather than what the spreadsheet needs. I am not saying it is always the right call. I am saying it was the right call for this moment.

What happened after

We shared the video through WhatsApp channels, LinkedIn, and directly with DMC operators in Nalinda’s network. The messages that came back were not about the production quality or the branding. They were versions of: “This is exactly the conversation we needed to hear.”

That was the only metric that mattered.

The bookings will come back. They always do. When they do, we would like to be the team that DMC owners remember as having shown up during the hard part. Whether we succeed at that is not up to us. It is up to them.