Dan Solo left his job with the NSW Ambulance Service, frustrated with the difficulties of working in a large organisation, but says he’s now experienced first-hand just how fast you need to move in a startup.
His current startup, Fillim, helps film-makers distribute content online, allowing film-makers to keep more of any money they make.
“You need to move quick enough so you don’t run out of runway,” says Solo.
“Our entire development — from concept to beta — took six months. Compared with other startups, that is pretty good, but it’s still the thing that could see us fall.”
Solo explains that every minute, hour, or day is important for a startup, where funds and resources are limited. Starting without a tech co-founder is one mistake that delayed the startup by six months.
“We could have built an MVP in three weeks if we had started with a tech co-founder.”
Lessons learnt: get the scope right
Because Solo and co-founder Paul Voulas locked in an upfront scope with their outsourced developer, it became near impossible to negotiate any changes required later.
Solo highlights how difficult things got: “we wanted the preview box on the site to link through to videos. It would have been a four-word change with the Rails platform”.
The developer wouldn’t do it, as it wasn’t included in the original scope. Fillim now has a permanent developer working on the platform.
Fillim connects filmmakers with film-lovers, allowing them to keep more of the income they make than they could with traditional distributors. Solo says a film-maker would normally have to spend 30% of their budget on distribution.
It was only after some experimenting that the current business eventuated. It started as Nerdi, a site to distribute education content. Nerdi is still up and running, but the team are focussing their energy on Fillim.
Acquiring users: a matter of perspective
Despite adding roughly 4,500 users to the site each month nowadays, Solo says he find it hard to ever be fully satisfied.
Early on, a filmmaker asked Solo how many views the videos on the site had received; “at the time there were six-thousand views,” says Solo, “he said ‘that’s amazing’. I said ‘that’s terrible’.”
Although Solo says he’s realised “every startup wants to grow faster than they are.”
Social media tips
Twitter and Facebook have been good tools for communicating with the right community. While Facebook offers a “more engaged” audience, Twitter allows you to “communicate more”.
Solo says tweetadder has been useful, for finding the right people to follow (i.e., filmmakers, producers, distributors). People are more likely to follow you back if you follow them, especially if you’re content is relevant to them.
“We’ve grown from 32 followers in April to around 7100 now.”
Startup tips from Solo:
- Listen to everyone but make your own call. As a paramedic, Solo often found himself in situations where there were multiple views. He says, like with a startup, you need to surround yourself with good people and make a decision after taking all the information onto account;
- Make that runway as long as it can be. You’re always running on limited time as a startup. Solo says he has learnt how important it was to do things quickly, so that your ‘runway’ doesn’t end sooner than it needs to;
- Your best advocates are your people. Solo says one of the biggest constraints for Fillim is the limited number of people working on the platform. With each staff member they’ve added to the team, Solo says the benefits have been exponential. You’re getting an extra person spruiking your startup.