When Laurence Wolf first launched Brand Honee, he decided he wouldn’t drink again until the video competition platform had been running for 100 days. He’ll open a beer this weekend, following four months of work trying to get users and convince brands to launch competitions, all on a shoestring budget.
It’s been tough, and Wolf is refreshingly honest about the experience. He says starting a company is hard — not physically tiring, but mentally draining, always on your mind. He goes to sleep thinking about it, and wakes up thinking about it.
“You just have to focus on what’s important, growing the user base,” says Wolf, co-founder of Brand Honee. “When you understand that’s what drives the business, you just need to focus on that.”
The idea for Brand Honee came about when Wolf was Marketing Director at Novartis, the international drug company, and trying to market a product for Herpes sufferers. Because drug companies in Australia are prevented from marketing direct to consumers, Wolf decided to run a competition allowing the public to make a film to de-stigmatise the disease, and help promote Novartis’ product. The competition received 120 entries. It’s not a new model though. Wolf says startups like Genero have proven the concept, and Brand Honee just translates this to an Australian market.
Wolf took the concept and decided to build a platform which any brand could use to create content and promote itself. Brand Honee now has 350 registered filmmakers. More than 15% of those filmmakers have entered more than one of the five competitions which have run so far.
“I’ve been really hard on myself. It’s not high volume, but I guess that’s pretty good engagement.”
One of the most disappointing, or distracting, trends Wolf has noticed is the increasing hype around startups in Australia — and not in a useful way. Instead, there seems to be increasing numbers of startup events, with more talking heads who aren’t able to offer any useful advice. He says he’s become frustrated with most of the conferences and networking events, because they don’t offer much value to improving your actual business.
Wolf says he has met with a bunch of angels and VCs in Australia, but found it to be a lengthy process, and a waste of time, at least in the early stages.
“Pitching is fine if you have a product with some traction and have been around for a while, but all an investor is going to do is scale you up. If you’re trying to chase investment without good revenue, then there’s no point.”
He suggests it’s a bit of a lose-lose situation — when you need the money to grow and acquire users you can’t raise investment, and when you’ve got revenue and are profitable, you don’t really need it.
The site has launched five video competitions so far, but the biggest challenge has been growing the user base. Plenty of people have told Wolf that the two-sided marketplace is tough to crack, and the advice holds true. But if Brand Honee can achieve critical mass, Wolf believes the model will work.
“The asset isn’t the technology, it’s the community. For no agency is this part of the core business.”
Brand Honee is currently based out of Blue Chilli, which provides technical development and business support for equity and a fee. It’s been a better experience with Blue Chilli than the initial developers, which were outsourced overseas. In hindsight, he says, development could probably have been done considerably cheaper, but working with Blue Chilli meant the site was up-and-running in a short period of time.
Wolf had a negative media experience with one prominent Australian tech publication, which posed a series of questions via email, and then published an article predicting the business would “bust”. Wolf thought the questions were a precursor to an actual interview, and was surprised to see the somewhat critical story on the website.
Wolf, an American, has noticed a big cultural difference here, and says so-called the tall-poppy syndrome prevails. That’s not to say it’s better in the U.S., where the opposite is true and hype dominates the tech newscycle.
“When there’s over hype it’s a lot further to fall. But it’s definitely an Aussie thing, that no-one actually wants to see you succeed.”
Brand Honee has run a series of five test projects with various brands, and will soon start collecting revenue, when it starts charging a fee to list a project, in the coming weeks. A brand or agency which lists a project then provides a prize, which Brand Honee will hold, to the winning entrant.
“We’ve had some great entries now. On average, we’ve had about 10-12 entries per contest.”
Wolf has had a mixed experience with marketing and hasn’t found a ‘silver bullet’; no one method has been significantly more effective than any others. He says engaging a PR agency in recent weeks was a mistake. The agency was brought on due to its relationships with filmmakers and film communities — it had managed publicity for a number of film festivals. But Wolf knew pretty quickly there wouldn’t be a pay off. Better to have tried, than not though. He likes the fail-fast analogy: you’re better to have tried something early and failed small, than fail big later. So far, he says, the best way to get filmmakers on the platform has been by directly targeting film schools like AFTRS, the Sydney Film School and COFA.
For brands, so far the most effective approach has been cold-calling and speaking to the marketing person. It’s a long sales process, but with a few case studies now, it’s getting easier. Wolf hopes that eventually marketing agencies will start coming to the site directly.
“The target is primarily marketing agencies as they’ll be managing a brand’s profile. Unless a company has an in-house it’s most likely it will be an agency managing the brand.
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