festivilia

A free chrome extension that lights up when there is a discount code for your film submission on Filmfreeway

Hahahaha.. I was wondering that myself.

So I need to have a Dropbox account to be able to use Dropbox Transfer. And Firefox requires me to sign up to be able to use Firefox Send.

Why not MiDrive Transfer. https://transfer.midrive.io

I really don't understand why I have to sign up on a service to transfer a file in 2019. Users will be more motivated to do any other thing after they have done what they came to the platform to do. This is one of the selling points for MiDrive Transfer.

Also, you can actually send via a link to others. So when you send a file via email, there is also a link you can send outside the email to another party to download the files

Lol.. well, we have some monetisation ideas. If you tested the platform, you will notice a gif when your upload is complete, we are considering using that space for brand advertisment. We have other ideas too and like I said, they are all still skechy but our focus right now is to see that this is a valuable platform for everyone

Lol..

Lol. Fair point. But I feel there is a very thin line between your 2 statements. Fortunately, it helped us with progress

Loud it for those at the back sir!!!

Thanks!

Apologies!!! It's https://transfer.midrive.io

"It's practically stupid to start another File Transfer Service in 2019". That was what almost all my friends said when I told them about MiDrive Transfer.

I decided to build it because I was frustrated with using other services. I felt a little more latitude should be given to the basic users.

2 months after the thought, I launched MiDrive Transfer (https://transfer.midrive.io). Transfer large files for free. Full featured include

Free for all to use.

Doesn't require you to sign-up

No ads

Up to 10GB file size for free (compared to 2GB for other platforms)

30 days expiry date (compared to 7 days for other platforms)

Simple and responsive

Everything that added up as a premium feature on other platforms was simply free. e.g. Password Protection.

Well technically, it's not the same thing. Irokotv is a VOD platform for Nollywood films with an already hungry potential customer base especially for Nigerians in diaspora.

90 percent of IrokoTv's diehard core customers don't even know what a short film is or have an interest in watching one. Except you are a filmmaker or have a deep interest in the film industry, you most likely don't know what a short film is, it's usefulness or why it's important.. lol

this was our mistake. we should have targeted countries with very active short film community.

Hi! Thank you for your comment. first of all, well it's easy to say I didn't bring any tangible skill to the table because I wasn't a developer. lol. Considering the fact that I was performing the all-suficiency role aside being the developer obviously. My number 1 job was to get contents which is technically the most important drive of the platform. I remember my CTO agreed to join me and work for free only if I could get him 100 premium short films in 2 weeks. You can imagine the level of convincing I had to do to fellow filmmakers to give a simmingly unknown video platform their precious contents for free! I met the target and 12 days and like they say, the rest is history.. lol

I was also the marketing guy, making pitches and going for startup competitions, exhibitions, film festivals and every other thing you can think of for us to grow. When I had spent all my savings, I had to convince an investor to fund a startup that didn't have the desired traction and making zero profit. I was a desperate young entrepreneur.. Alas, it was a bad decision eventually but it was a life saver at that time.

About the mobile payment integration angle. Am sure you will understand how difficult it is to partner with a telco without the required numbers they want to see. Mobile money is popular in eastern Africa but not in the west where most of our customers were and a few from USA. our best bet was carrier billing but like I mentioned earlier, you don't just contact a telco and ask for partnership! I know a few friends whose startups are very successful and it had taken them almost a year to get a meeting with the right person in the telco company!!!

we eventually found fortumo but we closed shop before we could implement. It's really easy for you to criticize but you have no idea how hard it was for us to run a startup with less than 0.1 percent chance of survival for 2 years. lol.

Thanks for the comment again.

I guess you were faster than time itself.. lol. All your challenges are almost non existence today. Our only challenge then was internet speed which is still a challenge Ironically but generally, it's a better environment today even though it's an over-saturated industry.

You deserve a medal my friend! Thank you for the analysis and suggestion. You are right about the fact that YouTube would have been a life saver for us.

Building a VOD platform is a very expensive venture indeed and I am most likely not going to try to build another one again.. lol but I will take your advice under consideration on building a community and Curation service for short filmmakers. As a matter of fact, because of the mild success of my current venture (festivilia.com) we are already thinking towards something similar. Perherps in the nearest future but right now, we are solely dedicated to helping filmmakers get the best from their films through effective festival distribution.

Thank you so much for your suggestion. Business is indeed a marathon. My advice to any wannapreneur is that, if your idea can't generate revenue from the word go, and you don't have a ton of ready cash in the bank, you better rethink and remodel before launching. This is what Hubrif taught me and I used that lesson to fastrack festivilia into a profit making venture today.

Hi. This is Tobi Cofounder of Hubrif. Well, you have a point but honestly, we think building the platform at the earliest stage using the already solid foundation of YouTube would have been a better business sense. This is because we would have saved a ton of our cash on other avenues as to how to grow the platform most especially marketing, instead, we spent all those money on independent cloud storage for the contents.

In the long run, you are right by saying it wasn't a suitable solution but in the short run, it would have worked out fine for us while we figure out our long term strategy. Considering the fact that this was the exact same strategy Irokotv used to become who they are now. They started with a YouTube channel and after gaining enough loyal subscriber base, they then built an independent platform today they are what they are.

Hi! This is Tobi Cofounder of the now defunct Hubrif. Thank you for your critical analysis. When you said we would have been better off creating contents for YouTube and growing our subscriber base, well you are very right. we realised this too late. Thinking about it now, I usually ask myself what I was thinking then.. lol

my mentality then was that we never wanted to have anything to do with YouTube. So setting up a channel didn't even come to mind. We just wanted to build an independent platform from the ground up and we regretted too late.

Glad you could find us! We will be very excited to watch and review your film. Feel free to try out the service.

Festivilia allows filmmakers get into over 500 film festivals just by filling one submission form. This automatically saves filmmakers the stress of submitting blindly to film festivals by matching and submitting their film to only film festivals that are a perfect match for the film thereby increasing their chances of selection, saving them time and money.

Started as a result of my own frustration in having to comb through numerous film festivals rules and regulations from the other submission platforms available before deciding which is a perfect fit for my film. I will rather prefer to use my time for other valuable things. Unfortunately, that can't happen because I have to do all the work, so the idea of Festivilia was born to help other filmmakers like myself spend less time scouting and submitting to film festivals and focus on creating more amazing films.

Festivilia covers festivals both from major submission platforms like Filmfreeway, Withoutabox, Shortfilmdepot etc, as well as the growing number of festivals that request direct submission. It’s an independent database made by filmmakers for filmmakers. Our team is constantly researching and reviewing festivals and only adds competitions worth submitting to!

Will love hear feedbacks from the community