Festivilia
Film festival submission done the right way
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been brooding over how to add value to the number one film festival submission platform in the world today. Virtually 90% of filmmakers all over the world uses filmfreeway to submit their films to festivals today and this means they have to constantly visit the platform daily, weekly or monthly to check out new festivals open for submission.
I believe this activity can be automated and so I decided to build a feature that will enable filmmakers using filmfreeway to automate their submissions. It's ridiculously affordable and filmmakers can better use their time for other productive activities.
For the past few weeks now, I have had festival directors reach out to me about registering their festival with Festivilia. We noticed this was after the successful integration of our live chat feature which has skyrocketed our user engagement! After about 20 of such requests, I decided it's time to add a section where festivals can register.
Because we still curate film festivals, this means that registering as a festival means they are automatically now part of our growing list of festival partners. We will vet the credibility of the festival and decide if it's a good fit for us.
This has been fun so far! It's interesting to see how far we have developed and grown so far
Today, I successfully integrated a live chat feature on the platform for better conversion.
I noticed we usually get a few leads any time we get featured in an article or an interview. there will be a spike but after then, it just falls down to a few 100 users per month. I understand Pageviews isn't a better metric to rate ones success but I also believe the more faces we are shown too, the more leads we might have. I am now learning about keywords, social media marketing, blogging etc to help with our google ranking.
Any help to make Festivilia a better product will be highly appreciated.
I sent a press release to a tech blog (Disrupt Africa) to get the word out there. I honestly wasn't expecting much from the press release but to my surprise, Festivilia got picked up by some of the major tech blogs in Nigeria (Konbini, SMEAfrica, Ventures Africa, StartupNG etc) and film/media news online outlets (Screen Africa)
In 5 days I had 3 signed up clients for the premium package. At that time, My pricing was very wrong. I was charging $19.99 for the premium plan because I felt no one will pay more than that. Well, after 11 months of running Festivilia now, I can boldly say I undervalued my product and we are in a more stable pricing tier now.
It took me approximately 8 weeks to build and launch my MVP. I am not a developer but I knew I could make use of free tools online to get the job done. With a combination of a free website builder (Mobirise), Airtable Forms, a seamless payment gateway (Flutterwave and Paystack) and Google Sheet. I was all done and ready to receive my first client.
I have always had problem with filling numerous submission forms of film festivals to submit my film to festivals. With an acceptance rate of less than 5%, I find the whole process very inefficient and time wasting.
Over time, other submission platforms like filmfreeway and withoutabox made the process less frustrating by building a marketplace for filmmakers and film festival alike, but I realized the issue of time spent on these platforms sieving through different festivals rules and regulations to see which festivals your film is a perfect match for hasnt been closed to being solved.
I didnt want to spend 100 of hours monthly doing this activity but would rather find a platform that can help me do all the hard work (Source for the right festivals and submit on my behalf) and I pay for the service. There was non in-existence. I decided to solve my problem myself. This birthed the idea for Festivilia.
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