Back in 2010 I joined the founding team to build a crowd-sourced video editing platform with the goal of getting people to edit their countless hours of home movie footage into short clips they will actually watch instead of them sit on a tape or hard drive somewhere.
We built the whole platform, had the economics all worked out. Did a number of innovative things like connect to a royalty free music API, and Dropbox's API before that was ever released to the public.
In the end it failed because the average consumer did not have fast enough internet in 2010. Most people simply could not upload their files to us, even after we implemented a dropbox integration. Gigs of video files just took too long and people lost interest.
In hindsight, we should have seen that coming and started out by partnering with a digitization service that could handle various formats like tapes, and we should have also done some form of shipping raw media so that consumers wouldn't have to upload files to us. I think we would have succeeded in that case.
Back in 2010 I joined the founding team to build a crowd-sourced video editing platform with the goal of getting people to edit their countless hours of home movie footage into short clips they will actually watch instead of them sit on a tape or hard drive somewhere.
We built the whole platform, had the economics all worked out. Did a number of innovative things like connect to a royalty free music API, and Dropbox's API before that was ever released to the public.
In the end it failed because the average consumer did not have fast enough internet in 2010. Most people simply could not upload their files to us, even after we implemented a dropbox integration. Gigs of video files just took too long and people lost interest.
In hindsight, we should have seen that coming and started out by partnering with a digitization service that could handle various formats like tapes, and we should have also done some form of shipping raw media so that consumers wouldn't have to upload files to us. I think we would have succeeded in that case.