Startup Spotlight: Shutterspeed brings transparency and efficiency to the creative economy

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When Shutterspeed founders Henry Collinson and Freddie McKenzie grew frustrated with the burden of admin weighing down their production studio, they figured there must be a better way.  

Its solution? An AI powered performance metrics tool that automatically tracks time across the production processes without any manual input, freeing up the creative to focus on creating. 

Now, Shutter Speed is one of the 4,400 companies accepted into the US global startup network Techstars and its accelerator programme, and it is the only third Kiwi company to have done so.  

Caffeine caught up with founder Freddie McKenzie for this week's startup spotlight. 

What problem did you found Shutterspeed to solve? 

The problem I found is that the way we charge as creatives is time-based. So it's either hourly or half day or full day.  And so what that means is that when we don't actually charge for our work, we're quoting our client on a certain amount of time that we think the project is gonna take to complete right now. If we're gonna understand whether or not that project was profitable at all, whether or not we went over budget or whether or not the client is profitable, then the way you do that is by tracking the time that you've been actually doing the project. 

Now, you can go on Google, and you can type in a time tracking tool, like I did, and I tried them all. But I found that they all have the same underlying problem… they're just far too manual in the way they time. 

Starting and stopping a timer every time you do a task, going back and putting time logs into a timesheet or retrospectively assigning stuff - that's a lot of admin, it's a lot of thought, and it pulls creators away from the creative workflow. Because of that, we don't use time tracking tools in the industry, so you have a whole industry that charges the time that doesn't track it. 

So, a large chunk of creatives are essentially working for free?

There's a whole disconnect in terms of transparency between supplier and client, especially in the creative industry, it's very muddy sometimes.Clients can't understand why content is so expensive and the creative can't understand why the client won't pay them what they're worth. 

What we found in my case and almost 100 and 50 other creators that we've spoken to in this journey is that the out-of-scope request, that's, the changing in brief, which in turn ends up costing more, is nine times out of 10 absorbed by the creators. What that means is that we usually underquote ourselves and undercharge ourselves. 

A lot of the time we do projects that are costing us money to complete and the biggest problem is that the whole industry has no idea that they're actually doing it. So there's a whole lack of insight, there's a whole lack of transparency and there's a whole collection of talented traders that are essentially running financially unsustainable businesses. And they don't know that they're doing it right. 

So, how does your tool address that problem?

What we realised is that if we're gonna make a tool that was the creative sector that tracks time, it needed to be as un-invasive and as automatic as possible so that our creators can continue doing what we love and not have to worry about any additional admin. 

It's all about taking admin off the creator's plate. We've taken a really unique approach at time tracking where every other time tracker, you know, requires you to start time or create a log so on and so forth. 

What ours does is that we front-load all of the admin to a quick five minute set up at the start of the project where the creative would create a project in our shutter speed web application, and then what they'll do is they'll point the shutter speed desktop companion app at the folder on their computer or the hard drive or the server where all the files that relate to that project will fit throughout the life of the project

What does the next 6 months look like for Shutterspeed?

At the moment we're over in Sydney at the TechStars Accelerator. We're about halfway through that program at the moment, which is essentially getting our business up to speed from a different readiness perspective and, and you know, really trying to hone in on, on our product and our customer, the kind of plan for us. 

At the end of the Accelerator, which is in December, it's highly likely that we will look to open a preseed. 

And off the back of that, hopefully closing it up early next year, we'd be looking to start building out our internal team. So building out our internal development squad and our customer service team. As far as the product is concerned, we're about to release our public alpha in the next couple weeks and that public alpha is focused around the time tracking and the budgeting component. 

We had a successful MVP launch at the end of last year. That really proved that this method of time collection was, was even possible. So now we've taken all of the learning from our MVP, put it into a platform that you know, can be deployed across a large group of businesses to really learn and iterate and then hopefully launching the full public beta sort of early to mid next year. 

Any advice to other founders?

This tech stars program for us has been huge in terms of just like external validation, but also a network to the world. We're actually the third company from New Zealand to ever get accepted into the Accelerator, and they're the largest pre-seed capital firm in the world, highly renowned, and they've got a huge talent pool from all over the world. 

For me, I'd love to see more New Zealand companies getting into this program and applying for this program. It's a very hard program to get into at least a 1% acceptance. But I've seen some really talented entrepreneurs that have come from New Zealand, and I highly, highly recommend that they apply for the program or apply for some international accelerator because, you know, it really opens the world up, and it opens the world up to us.

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