- Even ordinary short videos for self-promotion and business promotion cannot be created hastily anymore — the competition won’t allow it 😉 You need to hire freelancers who will help create content of decent quality.
- Scriptwriters, directors, cinematographers, editors, sound engineers, visual effects creators, and even makeup artists ☹️ But where can you find such skilled specialists for reasonable prices?
- This is actually an excellent niche to create a community and marketplace similar to this startup:
Project essence
Nova is an application that helps freelance creatives build their careers.
By “creatives,” we mean directors, cinematographers, photographers, editors, producers, videographers, stylists, makeup artists, designers of various specializations, sound engineers, and everyone else involved in creating and implementing beautiful images, videos, and websites. These can be individuals or small agencies.
The first function of the application is professional networking to establish useful connections within the industry.
For ease of communication, the app allows users to organize contacts into different lists (for example, by specialty) so that they can quickly find the right and verified people in the future.
The second function is the ability to find work in one’s specialty in the desired cities and on the necessary days when there is no other engagement. For this purpose, the app offers the possibility to publish job listings and respond to them.
The third function is the publication of portfolios with examples of completed works. This is necessary both to confirm one’s own status and to be invited to work based on what one can do.
Nova started as a private Instagram group for posting job announcements for creatives. It proved to be in such demand that in less than a year, the group gained 19 thousand subscribers. But most importantly, during this time, the group managed to fulfill 8 thousand job requests, for which creatives received almost $10 million in total.
Inspired by these results, the founders of the group launched the separate Nova app on March 16 and announced the raising of the first $1.75 million in investments.
By this point, about 50 corporate clients had joined the community, regularly needing to find freelancers to create their promotional materials. Apparently, the startup plans to monetize around job postings, as participation in the community is free for freelancers.
What’s interesting
It’s clear that participation in the community is particularly interesting for aspiring creatives who need to seek any opportunities to work, build their portfolios, and earn money.
However, the founder of Nova claims that it is no less interesting for experienced creatives who need to find team members for shooting the next video or creating other works.
This is a very important point, indicating that creative work is no longer the domain of loners, as creating competitively relevant creative works requires the involvement of professionals from different specialties.
However, the problem is that people “behind the scenes” — directors, cinematographers, stylists, editors, visual effects creators, etc. — remain out of sight. If it’s a typical video for a blog, they’re not even in the credits because there aren’t any 😉
So, it’s very difficult to find these people. But Nova can help solve this problem.
A similar community for professionals in the same professions was created by the startup Husslup. However, this startup sees its clients as production companies and studios — unlike Nova, which mainly targets business clients. Husslup raised $2.7 million.
Another startup, Impact has focused on the entertainment industry with a similar community. It raised $15 million in investments.
If we consider only the American content creation market, it will grow to $9 billion by 2027. Moreover, an increasing share of content will be video content, which requires a greater variety of specialists. Therefore, the relevance of finding such specialists will only increase.
Unless they are all replaced by AI by that time, of course 😉
Where to go
But hell knows if AI can completely replace them. Personally, I believe that the emergence of AI will only raise the bar for what is considered professionalism.
Roughly speaking, if before the advent of Instagram, a professional photo artist was considered someone who could edit a photo in Photoshop using standard plugins — then after Instagram, everyone could create such quality photos on their phone. And a professional photo artist came to be considered someone who could edit photos better than Instagram 😉
The same goes here. The emergence of AI will not replace creative specialists but will lead to the emergence of a new generation of professionals — who will learn to use AI to create works of a qualitatively new level and significantly faster than before.
As proof of this trend, one can cite the example of the startup Hive3, which I wrote about in the fall of last year. Initially, it started hosting contests for creating graphic and video works commissioned by brands with the main condition — that participants use AI in creating these works. And now it has also begun to gather such people into a community. This startup raised $10 million in investments.
Therefore, the general direction of movement is the creation of communities and marketplaces for freelancers who can use AI to improve the quality and speed of their work output.
In principle, this can work not only in the creative sphere. Last summer, I wrote about the startup Gushwork, which created precisely such a marketplace for outsourcing companies’ business processes — for freelancers to handle them, but exclusively using AI tools.
It raised $2.1 million in investments, but now, admittedly, it has significantly narrowed its focus to creating SEO materials for promoting clients’ websites. However, I do not believe that this is a sign that the general idea of a freelance marketplace armed with AI is an unworkable theme.
Although it is not excluded that in the creative field, this may be more in demand. Therefore, a more specific direction of possible movement is the creation of similar communities and marketplaces for creative freelancers. Something like what could result from the fusion of today’s Nova and Hive3 😉