Opportunity
What are the macro trends that support this? Angel Studios, Legion M and Skyforce validated the idea that communities can fund film. However, this does not extend to emerging markets.
How big is the market? The film industry is global and massive. The market size, measured by revenue, of the Movie & Video Production industry was $31.3bn in 2022.
Why now? Open finance (Stripe), cross border payments (many vendors), global film distribution (film hub), maturity of blockchain (many vendors) combined with fiscal transparency offered by Open Collective can be used in a simple app that allows one to finance film for a part of the backend.
Customers
Who is this targeting? This is a three sided marketplace offering filmmakers a place to find funds, film financiers a place to make money and film distributors content.
Who would be your early adopters? Once built our early adopters would be filmmakers in Nigeria.
Problem
What problems do your customers experience? Our target customer in Nollywood makes films without proper distribution, licensing and production values. Additionally although films are popular, they attract lower screening compensation from the likes of Netflix. The ability to have a film made across the world is problem. One that I have felt personally.
How big is the problem? Persons with an idea for a film have more tools today, but paying actors and managing distribution remain elusive. The arrival of AI in 2022 only made filmmaking worse, as now prospective screenwriters, artists and talent have to worry about being replaced by artificial intelligence and unlicensed intellectual property theft.
Solution
How does this solve your customer's problems? We make filmmaking easy. A producing team simply has to send invite emails to all involved parties. These parties sign an attachment to the project. Valid estimates for all related production costs are given to BackEndDeal.com. Our platform then offers the completed film to its subsidiary for product placement deals. This subsidiary will hold any money received in escrow. The producing team commits to making the film and gives us exclusive rights to distribution. We kick financing to the public via a marketplace. Accredited and Non-accredited investors can buy into the film for a share of the profits. We shop the film through FlimHub, MoviePass and KweliTV for an 80/20 split. We are responsible for giving each entity their portion of distribution.
How is it unique? We use the model of Open Collective.com. Open Collective.com functions as a fiscal intermediary for non-profits. Anyone needing to get paid submits a bill to Open Collective and Open Collective distributes the money, logs the transaction and records everything for tax purposes. We would do the same thing, giving much needed transparency to the opaque film industry
Existing Alternatives
How do people accomplish this today? In Nigeria most people bootstrap or raise money. In the US studios pay for most of costs. Slated, Angel Studios, Legion M and Skyforce all finance film in some form. There are many smaller players, but the reach is limited.
Who are your competitors? Slated, Angel Studios, Legion M and Skyforce.
How will you be different? A fun easy to understand marketplace that celebrates films, leans on peoples track record from IMDB and offers a share of the film profits will be a viable business (in our humble opinion). We learned a lot from WeFunder in coming up with this idea, however most crowdfunding film ideas do not have a mechanism to track profit sharing. Most other platforms do not appear to focus on product placement as a way of reducing costs. Additionally we believe that we can partner with many emerging companies in the film industry like Wrapbook, post-production houses to provide a tech pipeline to streamline and lower filmmaking costs.