Tessellation Studios
Goal
Build a new video platform and secure $250,000 in funding from institutional investors.
Challenge
In 2014, amidst the proliferation of Facebook, Snapchat, Periscope, Instagram, and YouTube, millennials had dozens of ways to engage with video content. Yet, no one was leveraging the strengths of each platform to build a single cohesive world. We identified an opportunity to create a platform answering the question, “How could we tell a story where users could follow their favorite characters and interact with them like any friend on social media?”
Process
Our concept was to develop a world centered around a fictional indie band striving to make it big, allowing people to create original content that lived on various platforms or sort and organize it by plot points and characters on our own platform.
Over the next year, we hired a CTO, Head of Story, and Head of Social Media to start building and launching our platform and content prototypes. We also negotiated band partnerships with over a dozen artists, including Yellowcard and State Champs, to write original music and perform private shows as part of our marketing once funding was secured.
With the prototype ready, the partnerships in place, and our deck polished, we began pitching to institutional investors.
Solution
The prototype represented only stage one of what we envisioned, and we wanted investors to see exactly what their money would help finance. Thus, we built a video showcasing the platform’s potential and used it as a roadmap to develop our product over the next eighteen months.
It worked, and we secured a $250,000 seed round led by JH Partners (the private equity firm that took Pete’s Coffee and Bare Essentials public). We then spent the next year creating original content, attracting fans, and trying to raise the next round of funding. Sadly, we never secured that next round, but we are proud of the amazing content we created to attract pop punk fans.
You can check out some of that content below!