Next Media Accelerator: Advertising videos and websites made easy. And a cinema app.

In our mini-series about the new Next Media Accelerator participants we present today: Shuut from Tallinn, heysite from Cologne and Cinuru from Potsdam. These startups answer questions about how to make promotional videos and build websites as easily as possible and how an app can help art house cinemas.

Shuut – marketing for everyone with mobile phone videos

Laura Lõhmus from Estonia worked for several years for the family’s hairdressing salon and also took care of marketing. In this function she met Dane Tall when she worked for the TV marketer Wide Media. Television advertising is not a realistic option for small and medium-sized businesses for a number of reasons, but such companies would still like to advertise with moving images. Today, videos can be distributed relatively easily, cost-effectively and purposefully via the social media.

The question remains how such clips can be produced with as little technical and financial effort as possible. The answer is provided by the Shuut app conceived by Laura and Dane. Shuut even helps to solve three problems. First, it acts as a digital director that guides users in creating the video. Second, the results can be published directly to Fachebook and Instagram. Thirdly, the app also provides analysis data on the success of the campaign. It’s all on your cell phone.

With this idea, Shuut made it into the Estonian support program Elevator Startups, which has good connections to the Next Media Accelerator, so that Hamburg is now the next stop after Tallinn. The app is currently only available for iOS, a new version is about to be released. A freemium model is then planned with a subscription fee and fees per post, depending on the scope of services.

heysite – the easiest way to build websites

There are several kits for websites. Everyone claims, of course, to be particularly comfortable and at the same time quick and easy. In terms of speed and simplicity, heysite definitely takes the cake. This Cologne startup promises that users can create a website within a minute. The result is accordingly simple and straightforward, but that is also the point.

A heysite is not meant for a blog or online shop, but for a special event or a one-time campaign. The website consists of a large background image or gif, a small logo, a headline, a subline and up to three linked buttons. These are the elements that users can design invidually, plus four standard buttons for sharing in social media and by e-mail. This minimalist concept appeals to private individuals who want to announce their wedding celebration, for example, but also to commercial customers.

Patrick Bartels and Dominic Müller from the founding team are always surprised at the variety of ways customers use the service. Among them are a car rental company from Indonesia and a real estate agent from Texas. heysite started one and a half years ago, the team also includes Stephan Kinganamchira and Michael Kröll. At present, the construction of websites is still free for everyone, in future users will pay for analysis data and for the creation of more than three individual pages. In addition, a white-label solution where the name heysite no longer appears in the URL is being considered.

Cinuru – an app for cinemas and film fans

Germany is not necessarily known as a country of enthusiastic moviegoers. While the average number of cinema admissions per inhabitant in France and Great Britain over the past 20 years has been 2.8 per year, here in Germany it is only 1.7, making it all the more important for smaller and art-house cinemas to have a direct line to their visitors. The app from Cinuru can help here.

Already the address of Cinuru gives an idea that there are real film fans behind it. In August-Bebel-Straße 26-53 in Potsdam is the legendary Studio Babelsberg, where countless classics of German and American film were shot. The team of five consists equally of media professionals and software experts. Founder Jannis Funk has already produced films and earned his doctorate on the subject of data analytics. The Cinuru app is also about collecting and evaluating data.

Users can rate the films they watch, answer questions about films and collect points for discounts, for example, through interaction. This results in a profile of their cinematic preferences and interests. Cinema owners have the opportunity to draw conclusions for their programming from the collected data and to provide their customers with suitable film tips. Distributors and studios can also benefit from the data. These would be potential future business partners for Cinuru. At the moment, about a dozen cinemas use the app for customer retention. The startup founded in April 2017 would already pay off with 80 – 90 customers. Support has already been provided by the Hasso Plattner Seed Fund. Not a bad address either.