A Cape Town startup is celebrating its third birthday by expanding its operations into Australia and employing a chief marketing officer (CMO) to grow new revenue streams.
Blink Tower was founded by Elodie Kleynhans and Adrian Burger after an unsuccessful venture with Soccer Babes, a football news and gossip platform which was designed to leverage on the popularity of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
On the failed venture, Kleynhans said: “It was a classic example of a startup spending an entire year on a launch and then launching and failing.
“We were then left with either going into full-time jobs or starting something new.”
The pair set up a production company making all kinds of videos “doing whatever we needed to do to make money”, but were subsequently advised to focus on one area and with Burger’s expertise in animations – now 26, he had been using Flash since he was 16 – they went with explainer videos.
Their first explainer video client was Virtual Mobile Technologies, which was launching a new product called Ramp, with the deal being signed three years ago today.
After that they targeted Vodacom by creating an explainer video for their launch of mobile money platform M-Pesa in South Africa. At this point they had had no contact with Vodacom, but saw that they seemed to be struggling to get people to understand M-Pesa.
Having researched the platform they created a video which took around three days and then began pushing it out to their networks in the hope it would find its way to the right person at Vodacom.
Impressed, Vodacom commissioned another eight videos with Blink Tower before ending the relationship by going with another company after issuing a public tender.
Burger said: “Working with them gave us a huge amount of credence. There is no bad blood there whatsoever.”
The duo have built a consistent client group, with regular business from the United States, Europe and Qatar, in the three years since and now have five full-time staffers, including Burger, Kleynhans and her older brother Henk, who started today as CMO working from Australia.
Henk’s responsibilities will be to explore new revenue streams, while they have also already registered the name and set up an Australian website.
In a bid to make the businesses scalable, the trio now aim to provide a service which will not only produce the explainer videos, but place them in front of the right people for their clients.
Burger added: “We know we can make great videos, now it is about getting them seen by the right people.”
Concerning the challenges involved in producing videos for clients all over the world, the duo said they had found it tricky to begin with when making non-English videos.
Burger said: “It is difficult to find voice artists in languages that are not your own. We are constantly searching to find the good ones and keeping them quite close.
“We also rely on our clients so we will send them samples of voice artists we have found and they can provide their own feedback.”
