Instant Media Hub (IMH), hitting home-run at Cultivator’s START program Cohort 10, aims to revolutionize digital asset management for creative agencies. We recently had the chance to catch up with co-founders Josh Stewart-Van Dusen and Patrick Ullrich, the dynamic duo behind IMH. In this week’s FOUNDER FEATURE, we’re diving into the digital asset management world to uncover how these tech wizards are ‘filing away’ frustrations and ‘uploading’ innovation for creative agencies. Who knows? This might just be the ‘Ctrl+S’ the industry has been waiting for.
IMH’s smart digital organizer leverages AI to streamline media pipelines, allowing creatives to focus more on their craft and less on file management. With features like AI-enhanced tagging, fast file management, and a branded media hub, IMH distinguishes itself in the market by prioritizing speed and simplicity. As IMH prepares to launch its MVP within the next month, the startup community eagerly anticipates the impact this solution will have on the creative industry. The $15,000 prize from the START program will undoubtedly accelerate IMH’s path to market and customer acquisition. Stay tuned for updates on this promising Saskatchewan-born startup as it takes its next big step in reshaping digital asset management for creatives worldwide.
‘Instant Media Hub is a smart digital organizer for creatives that uses AI to quickly tag and find files, making it easier to manage tons of pictures, videos, and other digital stuff. It works with popular creative software, lets you access your files from anywhere, and helps you collaborate with others, all so you can spend less time organizing and more time creating cool things.’
In summary, we’re helping busy creative agencies manage their media pipeline with speed and ease by leveraging AI to work as their sidekick, allowing them to focus more on creating and less on managing, searching for and moving creative assets.
The best technology solutions have come from real world problems that are felt with immense pain by the founder who stop at nothing to solve that problem – Instant Media Hub is one of those solutions. Tandem X Visuals is a commercial photo/video production company producing thousands of digital assets weekly. Managing a pipeline of those assets is no small feat. While there are other solutions out there on the market, I feel like they overcomplicate the approach that a bootstrapped creative company needs to be agile within the marketplace.
As we’re creating this technology solution from a real-world-based issue, we’re the experts in how we believe this problem needs to be solved. Although, when you look to the growth of a startup, you need to understand that our customers all have different identities and specific needs. We will have guiding foundational product pillars that we know will need to be there to maintain the stability of our solution while also crowdsourcing feedback from the customer to help alter or change the experience in how they interact with the software.
Cloud storage isn’t a new business model, but it grows yearly while more of our target customers transition to cloud-based workflows. We believe a fundamental difference exists between ourselves and our competitors based on how we’ve built the product to be a value-driven experience for the creative agency and how they manage their day-to-day operations. Every aspect of our product feels ‘Just right’ because we’ve tried to streamline our feature set to optimize the speed of creativity vs adding bloated features to our product’s offerings.
General start up advice is to go as fast as you can and release anything that is passable and provides value. “If you are not embarrassed of your first release, you released too late” is a famous quote related to this. That is definitely true for startups in brand new vertical, but the game changes slightly when you are taking on an established vertical. Take a product like linear that took the over saturated market of project management by storm. When entering a competitive vertical, like we do, the bar of what is acceptable from an UI/UX perspective is way higher than in a completely new vertical. Caring about the little details starts to make a way bigger difference than it would be if there are no competitors. Having had experience in both large corporations and startups, I believe I know exactly how to balance speed to market and flexibility with quality.
I fundamentally believe that ‘Experience perpetuates creativity’. Every past job or role has provided me with foundational skills that have contributed to my success as a CEO. From the earliest days of working at McDonald’s in high school to being the CEO of one of the largest creative companies in Saskatchewan, this wide range of perspectives has helped me massively in how we’ve approached building Instant Media Hub. I’ve been fortunate to work at organizations that immensely focus on their customer experience and how they can look within to themselves to create a sales or customer journey that puts their customer on a pedestal. I firmly believe in customer-centric approaches to business, and I know this will help make Instant Media Hub one of the best SAAS companies in the world.
The support we’ve been fortunate to experience from Cultivator powered by Conexus has helped us lay a very strong foundation for our company’s growth. $15,000 in value dramatically helps us get to our customers and revenue quicker, which is a startup’s #1 goal in its infancy.
Kind, Easy Going, Quick Wit
$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No – Alex Hormozi
Good to Great – Jim Collins
Skip The Dishes (Before they moved to Winnipeg)
Hard Working, Inclusive, Intentional
Thinking in bets – Annie Duke’