Reely

THE IDEA AND PRODUCT
Reely is a gig-based video editing service for your iPhone video clips, available via an app. After investing $77,000 of personal savings to bring it to market, I am now raising $250,000 at market entry.

Here is our website: http://www.reelyfilms.com
Here is a product demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=texV_FqFFiE

Reely lets anyone have their video clips hand-crafted into a compelling film by a real film editor, instead of by automation. Moms have thousands of video clips on their phones. Photos can go into albums and slideshows, but videos have no easy equivalent. Learning to edit is hard, and automated attempts are boring. Reely is an app that connects clips from regular people to editors who can make their lives into mini-movies.

In the app, pick up to 10 minutes of video from your iPhone. Next, your group of videos goes to our site for editors, who are notified when new jobs are available. Editors download your clips and weave straw into gold. Once a job is completed, editors upload an emotive mini-film, which goes back into the app and notifies customers to download.

You might think of it as the DoorDash of video editing: the company doesn't assume overhead for computers or software, edit jobs are gigs, and the video is delivered to the customer's hand.

While there are other video editing services, they are all aimed at segments of the professional market.  For everyday people, the options are to struggle to learn, or, like most people do: nothing.  Yet, these video clips are highly valued by our customers.

What makes Reely different is that we are starting with a base of highly-trained, work-from-home film editors!  I have personally trained just shy of 3,000 women to shoot and edit video through my online workshops over the past 8 years, through Everyday Film School.  This school grew out of a DSLR filmmaking workshop for photographers I created when tons of people asked me how I made the videos I loved making of our own family.  It's a passion of mine that, through teaching, has grown into opportunities for hundreds of other women.

PROGRESS
Reely has been in TestFlight the past few months, gained paid users, and are growing, even in beta.  All we have to do is enable a couple of login and payment APIs and we're good to go to the App Store.

VALUE
We are Default alive right now, profitable in 6 months, on our own bootstrapped funding.  But I know my market well, because I'm part of my own target demographic: millennial moms.  I know we have to move quickly. 

NEEDS
What we need funds for are the following:
--To hire our hourly-paid developer full-time so he is not distracted by any other freelance projects.
--Our biggest development needs right now are to automate acquisition of video clips from the customer's camera roll so they get an edited video once they have a certain amount of time in their camera roll, automatically.  The second is to create subscription models and more automation of social sharing.
--Creating a more robust customer acquisition and care process.
--To pay our intern $3,000 for 12 weeks of work to help with email and social media efforts.
--To fund physical video books to send as thank-yous to early adopters.  (Meanwhile we are partnering with my friends Ashley and Zack who founded Heirloom video books to send those: https://sendheirloom.com/
--Market research surveys to gain larger, quantitative insights on our customers. We have TONS of qualitative feedback from our dozens and dozens of customer interviews and live, in-person app beta testing.
--To pay the founder (me), who has been living without a second income for 19 months while raising 4 kids to bring this product to market.
--Legal fees to write custom privacy policies and terms of use.
--Incorporation as an S-Corp in Delaware
--Freelance consulting on pricing model and market strategy from experienced Product Manager Jeff Cole.

TEAM
Right now, I am the sole founder. 

Our developer is a talented full-stack developer, Mumtaz Hussain, on hourly pay, though I'd like to hire him full-time as soon as I have funding. He was looking for full-time work when I hired him. We work extremely well together. We have a cycle now: I talk to users, sometimes he gets on calls with me and the editor or users, Mumtaz and I have a Monday meeting, I get Mumtaz's feedback on the reality of building features or fixes, we make decisions in 1-2 hours on what to do, and I go back out and test what he's cooked up the previous week. Repeat.

Our designer is Kylie LaCour, who created all the design, colors, art, and some of the UX.  I found Kylie because she'd worked on a project with someone Katie Carter, who owns a marketing agency called Saint Friend, and when I have $35,000 to spend, I want to hire them for a re-brand and a better website.