EditMate: Crowdsourced professional post-production for user generated video

These days, everyone is a videographer. We all have handheld video cameras in our pockets – they're called smartphones. And while anyone can shoot footage of reasonable quality, turning it into a compelling clip is a specialist skill.

EditMate provides professional video post-production in the cloud, with high quality at a low cost. Why would you stuff about trying to teach yourself to be a video editor to produce a barely passable product, when for a few hundred dollars you could get a professionally produced product? Think of it as UberBLACK for video editing – they have experienced video editors scattered all over the world, just waiting to turn your pile of mpeg into a beautifully crafted clip.

EditMate was born when Scott Stratford was working in Sales at a full service video production company. He was regularly approached by potential clients who had their own self-shot footage they wanted turned into beautiful videos at a lower price point than his company could offer. Boston-based cofounder Rachel King was working as a producer and doing small editing jobs on the side, for friends with young startups that were shooting their own content since they couldn't afford a traditional production company. One day it clicked – there was a significant unmet market need, and an opportunity for a scalable business.

So the two did the only sensible thing in the circumstances. They booked a trip to Bali, and spent the next three months living on the cheap, surfing, scheming, and setting up what was to become EditMate using contract software developers. They launched in January of this year, and have tripled their throughput in five months. Much of the growth comes from repeat business from happy customers.

That might sound a bit glib, but these guys are both lean and smart. The first version of their system is built on WordPress (just like the blog you're currently reading) – there's no point in prematurely optimising your infrastructure before your business model is settled. And although the company is registered in New Zealand and was gestated in Bali, the centre of gravity is now firmly in the US. Scott moved to Boston, and is learning as much as he can as quickly as he can about the US market. He's avoiding the mistake that many Kiwi startups make wasting time in New Zealand learning how to distribute to a market of 4m people, when you could be out in the wide wide world learning how to distribute in markets that are orders of magnitude larger. They're making sure they have their business model right in the US before expanding to the rest of the world. Big tick.

New Zealand and Australia are still very important to the team though. "Australia is a great market for us – they seem to just 'get' the importance of curated user generated content," says Scott. And a significant chunk of their sales still comes out of Aotearoa.

They haven't needed to take on any investment – they're successfully bootstrapping, and if they can keep on tripling every five months, they'll be delighted with organic growth.

EditMate are focusing on the B2B market. Business models in video production haven't kept pace with technological progress. For businesses, there's no real need in many cases to have a professional camera crew come in, and charge an arm and a leg for end-to-end theatre-quality video when you just want an explainer clip to whack onto your home page. While there is some competition in the crowdsourced video market, nearly all of it is aimed at consumers.

Their latest feature is a mobile app which lets you crowdsource the camera work. As an example, if you're running an event, you can get your participants to install the app, shoot their own video, and it automatically gets uploaded into the cloud where it's ready for processing by the EditMate crew. Nek minnit, voila, you have a professionally edited record of the event which can be used as a teaser, a promo clip, blog post, and many other uses.

EditMate is a great example of a business that takes away the pain of doing small, infrequent specialist jobs, instantaneously, using the cloud. They're also a great example of a Kiwi business going global from day one, optimising the right things at the right times.