Delectus
In the context of Ad & PR Lab, our last project for this semester regarded startup entrepreneurship. With useful guidelines from our Startup Lab mentors and close cooperation with Antenna Music and Blueground, we were called to select one of the two to complete their respective innovation challenge. We decided to go with Antenna’s challenge because it included the making of a full functioning startup, and we felt that we were being given more freedom to use our creativity to build an idea. In addition, our team’s interests were strongly connected to music, podcasts and audio production so the challenge seemed ideal.
Our idea was shaped when a member of the team played a video game based on choices, but ended up disappointed when he realised that his choices ultimately led him to a pre-designated ending. He felt that he had no active participation in the game and he wanted a more interactive playthrough. That’s how we thought to build a startup that enables the users to make decisions through their choices that truly alter the existing stories.
‘’Choice’’ is the key element of our startup. Since life is based on choices and decisions, we wanted to create an application with audio stories -original or inspired from movies and series. That’s why we created “Delectus”, that means ‘’Choice’’ in Latin. Delectus gives its users the opportunity to actively influence the plot of each story by making choices throughout their listening process. To test if there was interest in our idea, we conducted a 100-person quantitative research. The answers indicated that the audience would consider an app that offers this type of content while a significant percent would even buy such a product.
Our research showed that our target audience is mostly consisted of millenials and people who belong in Gen Z. They are people who live in a multitasking era, they often use apps, are always on the move and love watching series, mainly on Netflix. Considering the last fact, we decided to include, at a subsequent time, spin-offs of popular Netflix series and movies in our arsenal of stories.
From this point on, we proceeded to develop Delectus’ Business Model Canvas, while taking into consideration the nine basic sectors that helped us perfect our plan for the app. In conjunction with the BMC, we focused on the customer segment, we decided on the two basic types of Delectus’ users while showing the values we provide to each throughout their individual customer journey. After agreeing on the above, we turned to an equally important matter, the competition, as we wanted to find out about the things that differentiate us from the other companies. We found out that there were no direct competitors. The closest thing to our ‘’choices’’ concept were mostly video games and apps companies with interactive playthroughs.
So what about our product?
-Delectus runs on a subscription model for premium users, with a monthly fee of 4.99€ which provides them with unlimited ad-free content. On the other hand, there are ads for free users who are also limited to two episodes per day.
-Delectus aspires to build a community consisted of people with common interests, where they can discuss about their favorite stories and genres. In addition, Delectus gives users the opportunity to rank stories while also providing a ‘’recommended’’ section, fitting for every individual.
-Lastly, Delectus supports co-creation. Each user is free to upload his own story. This way, we as a company provide amateur writers a platform where their stories can get potential visibility.
In order to complete the basic idea of our app, we were called to create a prototype of our app and an audio story. Antenna was kind enough to invite us in their studios to record. With their help we were able to create a 3-minute audio of an original story, which we later presented to the class. Along with the prototype we also built a proto.io, so as to visualize our basic idea of the mobile app.
Finally, after completing our idea, we needed to estimate the expenses that Delectus’ pilot year would require. If we were to address a funder, we would need about 250.000€, a price that would include the making of 100 episodes, app development costs, design and starting-operating expenses.
Panteio University of Social and Political sciences — AD&PR LAB
Professor: Betty Tsakarestou
Coordinator: Domnika Skreta
Team: Mark The Future
Members: tselepidhs, Ναταλία Γεωργουλοπούλου, Manolis Kritikos, Anastasia Liakou, Konstantina Mountaki, Stavriana Orfanou, Renata Stav
