Elevator Pitch: Wipster

Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. This week, we’re talking with Kristen Lunman from Wipster.

In 128 words or less, explain your business idea.

Video is becoming central to doing business, and central to successful marketing. Done well, it has the potential to reach millions, effectively and efficiently. Wipster makes the business of creating video successful.

We’ve started by solving the frustrating video review and approval process. Teams can chat to each other about video work-in-progress where it makes sense — right on top of the video. Video collaboration is now a joy!

We’ll continue to remove barriers that slow companies down from using video to tell their story. The vision is that with Wipster, marketers will be able to develop their video campaigns, collaborate with video producers, and track the video’s ROI all with the tap of a finger.

What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?

We were fortunate enough to participate in the Lightning Lab, New Zealand’s digital accelerator run out of Wellington. This intensive program helped refine the vision, launch a minimum viable product, and pave the way to Seed investment. We now place huge importance on our growing base of customers to help augment the product. We also undertake research with the marketing community to understand their pain points in the video making process. It’s critical you solve a big problem for a large enough group of people; finance typically follows!

What’s the biggest challenge facing your business?

The challenge is the nature of a startup — you are this tiny movement that is trying to carve a path and capture attention in a very noisy world with very few resources. We each wear many hats and almost everything we do is a test and unfortunately, failure is common. From campaigns that didn’t work to third party outages, it’s important to keep the team’s spirits up when faced with adversity — you brush yourself off and start again on a daily basis.

How do you differentiate your business from your competitors?

It’s all about our end users. From designing the product to fostering a community, we make them central to everything we do. Users don’t want to feel like they are ‘using software’ and expect instant value when they use an app. Wipster has a relentless focus on simplicity and making video review a ‘joyful’ experience for users. We are also building a killer community of Wipster advocates, spreading the joy around the world.

What one phone, tablet or PC application could you not live without?

Slack. It’s the bomb.

What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?

Listen and respond to the loudest critics of your product, they’ll end up being your biggest advocates!

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