inter|meedium

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  inter|medium website visuals

Inspiration

During the crisis the performing arts sector is clearly hit rather bad, leaving the theaters empty and thus taking away the daily job of the actor too. Well, in our country this is being mitigated so that on some occations the unemployed actors are offered gigs at various other places - grave diggers, city security officers, etc. For the inter|medium team this whole response doesn't fit with the 21st century opportunities. As the Founders of inter|medium are active in the startup (support organisation) sector, the issue quite fast cleared to us - startups receive a lot of courses in pitching, negotiations, etc. But how about learning these from actors that have been fine tuning his/her stage skills most of his/her life?

What it does

inter|medium is a platform for artists to create online interactive courses and lectures on topics of common need. Not only artists from performance art field where the inspiration came about but also the ones practicing other art forms. a platform, a medium that would in turn provide them an opportunity to capitalise on their knowledge and skills in forms of lectures and courses.

For that we encourage artists to think about what is the daily work they do in what they feel very comfortable and is rather a unique value for the artist. They have had privilege to deal with personal development topics in depth and therefore they are the best people giving lectures on topics that many of us need at some point in their lives, but haven't have time to study in such volume. Imagine (1) famous actors giving stage speech, negotiations, humour and body language reading courses, (2) moderns artists providing creative approach to home décor and interior design, (3) writers teaching creative writing, (4) architects concentrating on how to set up presentation with nice visuals (they usually laugh when other people present their ideas, since the visuals are very unprofessional).

We have two parties in our win-win equasion on how to do it.

Propositions for our double-sided market:

ARTISTS 1) Provides artists with additional income Receiving ticket fees from the people that would love to peak behind the velvet curtain would sum up quite nicely for the artist for an additional income during the crisis period. We've estimated that annual income of an active mentor could be on average 23 500 euros bruto (one 20€ lecture per week for 12 months, we charge 15% from sales).

2) Gives artists means of capacity building in coaching, lecturing, thinking through their strenghts, selling themselves etc. We help artists to put their skills in a pre-made formula or "package" to sell it as a course/seminar in an online setting. Giving these lectures and courses creates an opportunity for the artist to learn something he/she hasn't learned, but now finds herself in a situation where he/she needs it the most - how to structure their skillsets into lectures and courses and basic skills in doing business.

STUDENTS 1) Provides out-of-the-box solutions and tips and tricks in fields students want to develop themselves We have increasing number of admissions to adult learning courses in Europe link that means people are more and more interested in self-development. And artists deal with self-development topics during whole of their studies and further career, so they have experiences to share. We believe that artists can look at the topics mostly learned today by mentors from other fields from different viewpoint and therefore the knowledge aqcuired from their courses and lectures could also make the student standing out when she deploys it.

2) Meet the idols It is not only knowledge artists bring about to the learning experience, but also the uniqueness of their personas. They share personal stories and most probably (at least during crisis) are giving courses and seminars conveniently in their home atmosphere.

How we built it

We've built a simple yet stunning and fit for our audience website (will be published this week with 3 or 4 first lectures that take place in the middle of May), found suitable and neccessary integrations for directing payments and for webinars. We're pursuing with a MVP to validate the idea first in Estonian market. The most important in this plan is getting the first people right, the so-called domain managers. Currently we have secured the actors domain and have 2 actors known in our country who are pursuing with disseminating the idea to other actors. From the musicians side we have secured the best rock-band people in Estonia, as well as have many-many leads though actors. From the arts (contemporary), we have secured the main Estonian contemporary arts centre. The idea itself came to us a bit over a week ago and we've been running on a very welcoming wave of positive and optimistic feedback.

Challenges we ran into (and what to do with these)

1) How to engage artists who have not been thinking of how to give lectures to a general public as mentors?: Several people have said they cannot teach. How to encourage them? :: The artists might not think that they are so knowledgable and might be shy or modest to teach, but we have developed some guidelines for them to show that every professional can share their knowledge if they wish, but first we need visionary artists who are willing to put their images on our label. 2) How to ensure customer lock-in so that mentors would not make their courses independently of our platform? If a mentor has given a lecture then it’s easy for him to start using the same format without being in our platform. :: We have to provide lot's of value for mentors, from whom it has to be much earlier to come to our platform and get marketing and course/lecture format, ticketing etc done by us without minimum fuzz. 3) How could we protect ourselves legally from false claims when we’re an online platform? Eg. Somebody says the video was of bad quality when it wasn’t? And actually we’d like to not take legal responsibility for bad connections of mentors too. :: We had great feedback from hackatons' legal mentors, but we'll have to show our terms of service to an IT lawyer so that we'd take minimum responsibility as possible, since we are dependent on many factors we can't control in the MVP phase (e.g. outsourced technology and mentor's content). 4) Technology-wise we don't own the ticketing and online-courses platforms, but outsource these and this makes up dependent on our partners. :: In the longer run, as soon as possible we'd like to have a holistic platform with our own learning system and ticketing. 5) How to scale? Right now our platform is nation-based (in Estonian), since cultural activity of countries are in their language. :: Probably we need to partner or employ people from other countries who are inside the art-world there and capable of preparing the market. For the scaling up to work we need a platform where all the functions are integrated and on what most actions are automated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With a week: 1) we’ve managed to put together a strong core team with artists, professional CEO and MBA in the team. 2) we’ve set up a webpage with integrations with ticketing and payment and video-confrences platforms. 3) We have received interest from 15 artists to carry out the courses via our platform. 4) We have developed a business plan and preliminary financial projections.

What we learned

1) We got great insights from our mentor who had been working deeply with artists for years and knows the pitfalls in this field. He helped to set our focus on helping the artists in capacity building, next to finances, too. 2) We learned about legal issues we're facing and how to solve these best. 3) We learned not to sell ourselves too low (mentor said it would need to be around 15% that we charge. Now we charge 15% after corona and 6% during) 4) We learned that we need to have our own platforms for ticketing and streaming platform to really be able to have great UX and scale up to other markets (more autonomous). And also otherwise we have to take responsibility over other platforms quality. And some Final Cut pro ;)

What's next for inter|meedium

1) screen the first 10 courses/seminars for quality and topics that would match our need for a strong marketing campaign during the second half of May 2020. 2) Building a scalable product in Estonia and finding contacts (country leads) who would be keen to launch the same platform in their country with their specific contacts. 3) We learn from the feedback of Estonian mentors and clients and better our platform to fast scale-up to new countries 4) To work on our vision to revolutionize education by providing online INTERACTIVE learning (management) system 5) Implemnt data-centered business model, where data is a financial asset (With data we'll do marketing, best content providing, finding out best course model, selling analysis to education providers and developers) 6) Scale up to new segments. Added categories to arts help people losing jobs have smooth landing in other sectors, too.