By Roger Jackson
Previously: Movie Live on VoD…Now What?
Ted Hope recently asked me to write about what we might have done differently at Kinonation with the benefit of a year’s hindsight. Mistakes made, lessons learned, what worked, what didn’t…
1. Big, Fat Assumptions
Most startups ventures are premised on one or more big, fat assumptions…which may or may not be accurate, even if you’re convinced they are. Kinonation is based on the assumptions that it’s really hard to get indie films widespread VoD distribution…and that there’s a huge backlog of films whose producers want help with this problem…and that the VoD outlets are actually interested in running indie films…and they have the audience to watch them. Most start-up assumptions can be tested fast & cheaply, before a single line of code is written, before anyone is hired, before a company is formed. You MUST test them, because you may well be wrong. We did this pretty effectively, in large part thanks to Ted’s blog, which allowed us to write about what we were doing, invite filmmakers to comment and submit films…and discover if there was an embarrassing silence! Since we got a ton of filmmaker interest right away, we tested the next assumption: did the major VoD outlets even care? I simply called them up and asked if they’d consider cherry-picking films from our growing catalog. The response was an enthusiastic yes…they loved the idea of automated upload, storage, transcode & delivery…as long as we could actually pull it off!
2. Open Source
We’ve built much of Kinonation using open source computer code called Drupal. Open source code has many advantages — it’s free to use, it’s been extensively tested and de-bugged by thousands of global users, and it’s robust. The downside is that often we’ve had to compromise — some feature doesn’t work quite how we’d like, or isn’t entirely intuitive for users. Hence, #3…
3. The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
We definitely wasted some time writing custom Drupal code for Kinonation, when we could have achieved 75% of the same objectives using “off the shelf” code. It was a classic example of the notion that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” That is, your pursuit of a truly excellent product means you keep refining and tweaking it…and you never get it out there, or at best it’s late. No one said it better than Urs Holzle, the head of engineering at Google who led the team that built Google Search. His mantra: “good enough is good enough.” Amazing, but so true with any startup, which even Google was in those days.
4. Social Media
Kinonation should have got into the groove on social media much faster. It’s easy to build a half-assed Facebook page and send out the occasional Tweet. Much harder to stay on top of it, and do it in a smart way that creates genuine buzz. Finally, in late June we starting using an outside expert to build our Facebook presence — and it’s already looking great, with films & filmmakers immediately flagged up as they go live on Hulu, Viewster, Amazon, etc. We’d really like it if you Liked us!
5. Listen, but Sometimes Ignore
We’ve lost count of the people who tell us we’re crazy to accept ANY feature film or documentary. You must curate, they say. Set the bar high, or you’ll be overwhelmed with films that are un-watchable and un-sellable. Part of your catalog will be garbage, they say. We disagree. We’re sticking to our guns on this one. We built the system to give every filmmaker the chance to get their feature into video-on-demand distribution. Some will get selected by the outlets, and some will not. That’s fine, but we think it’s up to our customers and their audience to be the “curators” of film content, not us.
6. Under Promise, Over Deliver
It’s really easy to “over-promise” and tell people what they want to hear, rather than what’s actually realistic. I’ve certainly been guilty of that sometimes in the past year. Start-ups have to learn to push back a little, ask people to temper their expectations. There are never enough resources to do everything that customers want, so it’s important to set the tone early by under-promising, then (hopefully) over-delivering.
7. No Distractions
Time-wasting distractions are an unexpected challenges for a start-up that has (thankfully) attracted interest from media, investors, festivals, etc. Lots of people want to meet and talk, usually to get informed and generally kick the tires. But this can easily eat up a day every week and dilute the focus on getting things done and hitting milestones. Thus you must get comfortable with diplomatically but firmly saying “No.” This took me a while to learn.
8. Love the Competition
Competitors are good — they validate what you’re doing. If there’s no competition it may be because there’s no need for what you’re doing. We learned quite quickly that “competition” is far from a black & white notion. There are hundreds of players in the video-on-demand space, but everyone has a different angle and often a different business model. Some VoD outlets that are our clients — we supply films to them — also aggregate and deliver movies to other outlets. Thus for start-ups like us, there’s actually huge opportunity at the nexus of competition and cooperation. Co-opertition, if you like.
9. Track Everything
A few months after we started Kinonation, we’d attracted forty or fifty films, and I knew the name of every filmmaker…had generally emailed or talked to them personally. Then the numbers started to grow, rapidly. The complex matrix of films, film assets, filmmakers, outlets, countries, etc. suddenly got big. We scrambled to upgrade our rudimentary tracking system, which back then was just a big spreadsheet. So a lesson learned is to get the boring but tracking in place early, so you can handle any level of growth.
10. Passion
Finally, never lose touch with the passion that drove you to work like crazy for uncertain reward. It’s really easy to get bogged down in technology, chasing investors, working on deals. Don’t lose sight of the core mission. The driving passion at Kinonation is getting feature films & documentaries seen and enjoyed by a global on-demand audience. Like any start-up we have a seemingly endless To-Do list of deals and technology features. But the real satisfaction is, for example, seeing this: the Kinonation films now live and being watched thousands of times and generating revenue on major on-demand outlets.
Next Up: Post # 32: Hulu, not Zulu…
Roger Jackson is a producer and the co-founder of film distribution start-up KinoNation. He was Vice President, Content for digital film pioneer iFilm.com and has produced short films in Los Angeles, documentaries in Darfur, Palestine and Bangladesh, a reality series for VH1 and one rather bad movie for FuelTV. You can reach him at roger@kinonation.com.
