Movie Repair Service, Year Two

After one year of activity, and over one hundred movies repaired, I can start drawing the first conclusions about this incipient business.

I’m amazed by the diversity of movies that have revived through my hands:

A submarine hockey game, an award delivery in name of the Queen of England, 2 house robberies caught on a spy cam, a few indie concerts, a dozen family events, from births to … burial, a dentistry congress, a Chernobyl nuclear plant tour, funny classroom stuff, a few documentaries and even a feature-length movie.

movie diagnostic

Diversity also in terms of codecs and formats:

Video: DVCHD Pro, DV, JPEG, RPZA, MPEG-4 Video, H264, Sorenson 3, Uncompressed, HDV, Apple Intermediate codec, ProRes422, XDCAM EX Pro.
Audio: AAC, Integer of all sort, uLaw

My customers are in general video professionals, but there’s also a number of hobbyists that value their lost movies enough to afford a repair. The two main causes of corruption are: technical problems during recording, and storage failure (hard disk, memory card).

First of all, let’s take a look at it from the problem solving prospective.
It’s definitively a problem that is useful and interesting to solve, thus meeting my top goals as an entrepreneur.
But, it’s not an easy business: it’s time consuming, needs a lot of interaction with customers, and doesn’t make a lot of money at the end.
So is it time to give up and move on? Well, not so fast. As any incipient business, it has to go through several phases.

The first months, it started as an experiment. At that moment, I did not really care about making money (but charging for the service was a reality check that you must put in place soon), nor about being able to repair any movie a customer would throw at me. The goal was to check that movie repair delivered as a service was possible. In other words, that the mechanics of the repair that I had envisioned, from the first contact with the customer, the transfer of data, diagnostic, delivery of a “repair kit”, iterations to achieve full satisfaction, until the payment, was working. With the first dozen of happy customers behind, the goal was considered achieved.

Developing a repair technique

Once you know it’s possible, you want it to be reproducible, reliable and predictable: How will I advertise my repair service if I don’t know what can or cannot be repaired, what level of quality to expect? That’s what the second phase was about, and it took me the rest of the first year to fully characterize this.
With over one hundred of cases solved, I’ve developed all the tools and techniques, classified the cases from easy to impossible, the quality of repair from rough to broadcast quality: At the end I was able to repair almost anything, and to predict the quality that I would achieve.
This second phase required some sustained effort, so I wanted it to be profitable. I adjusted the price points accordingly.

Now it’s time to enter into the third phase. It’s about scaling up: to reach more customers, and increase productivity. I have a few ideas about how to reach them (more about this in a future post). I will continue standardizing and automating the repair techniques to be more productive. Ideally, I would end up using fully automated repair tools that could even be deployed as web services. I think that it’s possible in a few happy cases, and that for the rest I will continue having a mix of manual and automated processes. More productivity means also profitable at cheaper price points, thus potentially reaching a lot more customers.

All this is really interesting for me. I have serious technical and marketing challenges ahead, and this business can succeed if I shape it as a small industry. Each industry has its own rules, that reflect the balance between what the customers want and are willing to pay, and what technology can do.

I will succeed if I can discover those rules. I will fail if I play against them.