Understanding your product, your market – your business!

Former ICEHOUSE resident, Mediacrab.com is a spin-off company from Heyward’s other business Making Movies, a Queenstown-based screen production service company. Mediacrab was established to house and sell a new web-based cataloguing system, LogIt (pronounced “log it”), developed by Making Movies to catalogue tapes, shots and other media assets.

Knowing your market

Being from a production company and having originally developed LogIt for Making Movies, Heyward and his colleagues assumed other production companies would be the main market for LogIt. And an early sale to South Pacific Pictures for its hit television show New Zealand Idol appeared to confirm this assumption. But the reality was somewhat different, says Heyward, and most New Zealand production companies are   not digitally literate or able to afford new technologies.

But Heyward and his team were sure they had a product that would sell,  and so they sought help and became a virtual resident of The  ICEHOUSE. “And then the education process began,” he says.

Assigned a mentor, experienced in the production and business world, and encouraged to attend The ICEHOUSE courses and seminars and engage with its network of entrepreneurs, the Making Movies team  “learnt the vocabulary of the business space: market validation; product validation; and all the associated considerations to do with going to market and making things happen in software development. We evaluated everything. [The ICEHOUSE] made us address the sale of the thing”

Through past work for Tourism New Zealand, the Making Movies team realised there might be another market for their product in government departments. But it was  The ICEHOUSE, which turned that thought into a reality, says Heyward.

Learning the business of sales

The ICEHOUSE helped form Mediacrab, forcing LogIt away from its screen production roots and into the commercial arena. It also showed the new company how to simplify what it was selling into an “elevator pitch” and to price it correctly, targeting  each new potential customer to maximise the possibility of success, says Heyward. “We learnt about value propositions and how to close in on a customer and identify their point of pain and address it in a sales pitch. The ICEHOUSE showed us how important it was to follow a process.”

Just being a part of  The ICEHOUSE also helped open doors, says Heyward. “It gave us a degree of credibility. It said we weren’t just people off the street.”

Mediacrab soon had a  new-found market among government departments, and the team, with renewed confidence and buoyed by  The ICEHOUSE’s network of successful entrepreneurs, began exploring other potential markets,  including the corporate world, adapting LogIt to suit as required.
And in just a couple of years, in what’s considered to be well-populated product space, LogIt’s sales have increased by 100% year-on-year with 100% repeat sign-up business, says Heyward.

A new found knowledge

Previously the company had had little or no engagement with the corporate world, or even the government, he says. “We were just cowboys from the wild west of film making.” But now there’s an understanding of how things work. “We now understand the processes, how government works, the budget cycles and the validation that occurs within the corporate world. We understand the nature of competition.”

There were some hard lessons on the way, including the realisation that a background in screen production had little relevance in this new commercial world and could even be seen as negative, admits Heyward. “That was something we just didn’t understand at first. The ICEHOUSE helped us come to that realisation, to understand the importance of brand clarity and the nature of the animal we are and who we engage with.”

The whole learning experience has given the company’s directors far more confidence, he says, and the company  is  now seeking other products to build on the success of LogIt. “That’s one of the other advantages. Although  The ICEHOUSE’s education process was quite specific about our product, it has also been quite broad about the nature of being an entrepreneur.”

But next time round they’ll do things a little differently, says Heyward. “A lot of what we did with LogIt was based on assumption. Now we’d validate, validate, validate – validate the market and the product before we did anything.”
 

Need help understanding your market?

Contact Ken Erskine, Director, Start-Ups, 09 308 6213 or 021 848 383 or by email.