David White's technology for distributing films online has spawned a whole new business venture. Photo / Mark Mitchell
David White's technology for distributing films online has spawned a whole new business venture. Photo / Mark Mitchell
IndieReign (and Shift72) IndieReign founder David White would prefer to forget his pitch at last year's Angel Summit. "I did a shocking presentation," he says. "I was straight to the bar after that."
But he must have done something right, because he netted far more than the $200,000 he was chasingfor his independent film distribution company - landing $500,000 and closing off his first major capital-raising round with $1 million in the bag - $250,000 more than he originally targeted.
Since then the company has honed its tools and grown considerably, adding 10 new staff to the four it had at the time of the Summit. Independent film producers are uploading five new films a day to its site, so it has finally cracked the content side of the equation, allowing it to focus on marketing itself to consumers, says White. "One seven-minute short film sold thousands of copies within hours of launching. So we've also proved people will buy short film content as much as they will buy feature films."
The company's growth has also fuelled a whole new business area as others in the film industry grasp the potential of IndieReign's technology for their own businesses. "We're seeing a lot of demand for our actual platform - the technology itself. So we're now working with US distributors and producers who are keen to use our technology to power their own digital sales."
To separate this new business-to-business part of the company, White is launching a new company called Shift72, which he says could one day be bigger than IndieReign.
"It gives us a revenue stream across multiple different channels. We've now got all these brands we can clip the ticket on." And coming along for the ride, with an unexpected new investment in their portfolios, are IndieReign's investors.
