2016 Year In Reflection

Lauric has spent the entire year talking about herself, literally, which is what a startup does. And if there’s one thing that Lauric’s team has discovered, it’s that you really do get to meet a lot of people when you’re a startup. You network a heck lot. From clients to potential partners to potential investors, and if you’re an entertainment content strategy consultancy, the number of people you meet triples. The funny thing is that Lauric is affiliated with Creative Coconut Animation Studio, and has been used to servicing mainly large organizations who are familiar with the inner workings of entertainment content.

It’s been quite a journey for us too, seeing how much unlearning we’ve had to do, and how much learning of startup lingo we’ve done. Some of us still can’t get over how vastly different the benchmarks of KPIs, content marketing, social media marketing and reach are.

Lauric Strategy+ Marketing is the premiere Entertainment Content Strategy Consultancy that specializes in Brand Integration. We work directly with international brands who are seeking to seamlessly integrate themselves into popular culture. 

We knew from the start that Lauric was going to work with startups, and since personal safety was one of our sub initiatives under the theme of Specialized Healthcare, that’s where we started looking. Late December last year, we signed up our first client.

Eyeprotec had a personal safety app and our role was to establish partnerships for the company for them to meet their initial goals.

Enter Shadow of Carthage: Angel’s Flight, an original graphic novel produced by Lauric, with six initial characters and a universe, in which Eyeprotec aligned themselves with and from which, they subsequently licensed its characters to promote their app.

Bangkok Jam

But we’re more than content producers, we’re also partnership brokers and for our first client, there were meetings with Lien Foundation, Shaw Foundation, and the head of geriatric psychiatry at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. The app had an online presence, but there needed visibility in the segmented market they were targeting, so Lauric established partnerships with various restaurants, cafés and public establishments.

Note: Eyeprotec has since ceased operations in Singapore and has successfully launched in France instead.

Reassessment of launch strategy or not, the message of personal safety was gaining traction both online and offline and so in early December 2016, Lauric successfully launched the Lineable smartband and app from South Korea in Singapore - with 400 bands sold so far in the first month.  

Being an entertainment content consultancy brings interesting opportunities.

That includes merchant acquisition and so there was Viro- a loyalty and community activation app, in which we were appointed to find merchants for Viro, to facilitate the sale of Viro’s packages and which included producing relevant content that would be delivered through Viro.

We got a chance to meet up with the new management team at SauceInk in the middle part of 2016. It was great to speak with ladies who understood the impact of entertainment content and desired it… except that it sounded like the senior leadership desired it all. Original licensed digital characters, an original storyline around their services with the intention to promote their services within the universe, plus unlimited changes. That was fine- Lauric does brand integration after all- but if the primary concept was going to involve a potential infringement of existing copyright, there would be significant costs if we were going to work around it.

That would mean long term, and that was something for the leadership of SauceInk to decide. We decided to revisit the recommendation at a later stage, which, well, turned out to be a wiser move for both sides, as there were leadership changes later part of the year that would have affected the concept.

Change is constant

It’s a delicate thing dealing with startup founders, we’ve discovered, and that’s perhaps one of our most valued experiences this year. There’re all these different people with different dreams and values and goals and varying levels of risks vying for the same slice of pie- and everyone has, or claims to have- a disruptive idea.

There was this one guy.

He had with him what was allegedly a disruptive idea for the fashion industry but could only afford less than $500 for the development of the fashion App. What he required from Lauric was to develop and market the app. When we told him that it was a no deal unless he could pay for the development- since we’re the marketers and content producers- he offered us a co-founder role. When we declined, he claimed that a certain VC told him that it was viable so we called up his VC on the spot and asked if he would invest. The VC said no, and that was the last we saw of this guy from NUS.

Then there was this other guy.

An E-Marketplace operator who was still in the initial launch phase. He was marketing his marketplace under the banner of a social enterprise, which was a great idea, until he tried to convince Lauric to provide services under the very same banner. We met him to discuss about Viro. What he hoped for was for us to provide Viro for Free on a donation basis, as well as creative services to be rendered on a pro-bono basis. For a marketplace with a reach of less than 500, they expected Lauric’s artists to work for free, whilst questioning Lauric’s certainty about the mass appeal of the original characters created, as an attempt to convince us on the pro-bono part. Maybe we should have said it to the gentleman then, but it’s not too late to say it now.

The organizations he relied on to come beneath his banner of social enterprise are in communication with Lauric, and if we wanted to have our artists work on content for his business pro-bono, we might as well have the same artists- who have worked on King Kong, LOTR and other motion pictures, to work directly with the organizations themselves to help further awareness of their causes.

One of them is Sunlove Home, with whom we will involve their beneficiaries in the production of one of our works, after having successfully launched the Monomano Adaptive Trike through a pilot program with them in September 2016.

This trike was developed by a student run startup from US, and is one of the deals we established on the international stage. We’ve also established marketing consultancy and licensing contracts with tech starts up in South Korea, US and Israel involved in personal safety, and there are marketing and licensing deals with startups from US, Ukraine, Poland, China, Japan, Qatar and Abu Dhabi for Shadow of Carthage: Angel’s Flight. We will be launching their products in different countries in 2017.

The volatility of local startups is a very real one. So are the risks. And funding is always a consistent issue. We saw that first hand at an accelerator- which we went undercover. ;) Fintech was all the hype in 2016, so we had a startup engage us to attend the 3-day selection and we got to understand the constraints of the accelerator as a launch pad for the startup, and the competition. Competing for the same slice of pie means that there’re all kinds of ways to reduce financial risks and whilst some would negotiate to pay by shares, others would get a co-founder and still others would try to get free services under the same co-founder pretext.

Thereby, in this one year, we’ve placed a few simple ground rules, that it does not accept payments by shares, does not provide unlimited changes for its design, and does not do pro bono work.  

What’s next for Lauric now?

We’re heading into the most critical part that every startup faces and which is essential in creating a community that needs their product and maintaining the sustainability: FUNDING.

For suitable consumer product clients who license our characters, Lauric will act as the broker for them to the wholesale distributor, for bulk purchase of the wholesale licensed products, and we will be starting a series of workshops for startups and companies with consumer products that will address the correlation between creating original content, original characters, licensing and how it all generates funds.

Launch of Licensing Workshop

Given the high volatility of strategic plans and the constant requirements for funds, Lauric will launch a unique workshop that address their need for funds as long as they are in the consumer product space.

Investment

With the increase in Licensed Merchandise that is now under the care of Lauric, Lauric will enter phase 2 of its consultancy, which is to validate the viability of the startup through a unique crowdfunding process to promote the licensed merchandise on behalf of the startup clients, before a wholesale distributor is appointed in various geographical locations.

If you are reading this, and have between $1000 and $50,000 and on a lookout for an investment that pays 20% - 25% within 3 - 6 months, hedges your principal sum against another financial asset in order to minimize your exposure to risk, while allowing you to understand and learn how financing and investment in the entertainment industry works, fill up form here and we will be in touch with you.

or if you are a business with consumer products that is looking to integrate your products into an Entertainment Property in the PRE-LAUNCH stage, with global distribution deals secured fill up form here and we will be in touch with you.