Overnight successes take a long time in coming!

We continue our rotating Startupbootcamp blog series - our ten teams take turn sharing their thoughts and experiences.  This entry is by James Hobbis co-founder of Gruvi.tv.

Overnight Success

Overnight successes takes a long time in coming, and here at Gruvi we are not counting on it happening tomorrow. What is Gruvi? Well it’s a community wrapped around an application on Facebook. The app encourages people out of their home and into the movies with their friends.

Based on the movies that they like already Gruvi will recommend others. My co-founder, Ben Johnson, knows a thing or three about the film industry, having spent the last two years selling online marketing services to the film industry. In the course of doing that he realised that the industry valued social media but had not figured out how to use it effectively. We feel that we have some good ideas for improvements. Step one build a Facebook application. Step two, go viral...

We know one thing and we are betting on a second. We know that it is an uphill struggle to create a paradigm shift in user behaviour. Today at Startupbootcamp we met two of the founders of Lovefilm.dk, Ari Wegter and Josh Mortensen. Lovefilm, as I'm sure you are aware, posts DVDs to your door and charges no overdue fees. It’s easy - select, receive, watch and return. But it took a lot of creativity and a lot of marketing muscle to instill this new habit and win over DVD watchers.

Contrast that with YouTube - watch a movie, have another suggested to you, watch a movie, have another suggested to you... Before you know you've lost an hour. What YouTube does so well is to keep on capturing your attention by constantly recommending your next video fix. No paradigm shift just taping into a habit.

At Gruvi we've established that there is an equally insatiable appetite for movie trailers. The more trailers that you present to users, the more they want to watch. That is great, but it doesn't necessarily get bums on movie theatre seats. There is quite a journey from liking a trailer to organising a night out and buying the tickets.

So here is our bet...

We bet that when the trailer finishes, sometimes that is the moment when you actually would like to be able reach out to your friends and set up a night in the cinema. So we want to make this as painless as possible. Once your friends receive an invitation to a movie through Gruvi, we'll focus on delivering such a fantastic service that they will want to use it to set up their next trip to the movies too. We just need to make sure that the user is delighted by their first experience.

We will launch the first little bit of Gruvi on Friday night, please come and try it and let us know “What do you think should happen next?”

- James Hobbis
p.s. follow Gruvi on Facebook.