Cinch, an app to enable entrepreneurs to shoot and edit videos on their mobile phones, has launched this week.
Co-founder Alexandra Kinloch told StartupSmart her team was excited to empower entrepreneurs and small business owners to create quality video content now all the necessary technology was in their pockets.
“We realised people weren’t making the most of the opportunities of video, not because they didn’t have the technology, but because of knowledge and skill, and we wanted to enable entrepreneurs and small business owners to overcome that gap,” Kinloch says.
Online video content, and its consumption, is increasing at a rapid rate, and Kinloch says videos are key to successful crowdfunding campaigns that are increasingly popular for start-ups raising launch costs.
“Video is important because with a photo you can’t experience what the product is, but with a video, a more experiential medium, you can get a sense of the product,” Kinloch says.
Kinloch, a professional photographer, was inspired to create Cinch after she struggled to create quality video during her travels through the Simpson Desert.
“The problem was even though I had the best equipment I could get, I didn’t know how to take and construct a video, I didn’t know when to take which kind of shot and I didn’t understand how to construct a story,” Kinloch says.
The Cinch app has onscreen guidelines and tips for shooting the footage, and then stitches together selected clips into one film that can then be shared directly on social media.
Kinloch says balancing the boosted functionality with customer experience and ease of use has been her and co-founder and chief technical officer Ben Rashleigh’s biggest challenge.
“A lot of apps have feature overload, and they get a bit too hard to use. So we put a lot of effort into choosing the features quite carefully. The challenge was trying to give people enough tools to create a great video while keeping the user experience easy,” Kinloch says.
The iOS app is currently available for free in the app store, but the Cinch team will be pricing it at around $AU4.49 in the coming weeks. They’re also beginning to work on an Android edition.
Rose is the current head of growth at Rampersand Ventures. She was formerly a reporter at StartupSmart.
