The Gobi team on how they are aiming to innovate the process of storytelling
By: Benedicte H. Tandsæther-Andersen
Tags: Creative, Angel Challenge, Startups, Technology, Investors

The death of the newsfeed

Now, Gobi still develops a service for interactive stories, stories intended for websites and platforms. On their website, Gobi writes that “the story format, consisting of sequences of vertical images and videos, has quickly become one of the most popular formats online, due to its high level of interactivity and low barrier of entry.”

We have seen that stories are getting a bigger an bigger impact on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. The newsfeed plays a less and less important role, and in the future we might see that stories are what remain of a newsfeed on Facebook. When you consider the fact that 94 % of the time you use a phone it happens to be vertically — and only 13 % of the time do you turn a phone when there is horisontal content, the idea of scrapping the newsfeed and favouring stories is not unnatural. These trends are observed by more than just the biggest technology platforms, which means that we are focusing on quick entry into a growing market — aiming to take a position as a leading SaaS service for stories.

Searching for a steady footing in the story waters

During spring 2020, Innovation Norway and Angel Challenge have had having a Fundraising For Startups program for Creative Industries. The program took place at 657 Oslo, one of the coworking spaces in Oslo, Norway. Just like the regular Fundraising For Startups program, the creative branch is aimed at helping startups in the process of becoming fundraising-ready. And now, the Innovation Norway and Angel Challenge teams are getting ready for an investor course aimed at making investors pick creative startups for their next investment.

On Gobi’s website, they write that “the story format is perfect for creating mobile generated videos, even for users without video editing experience. Since 2016, creation and consumption of content in the story format is up over 840 %.”

The primary goal for 2020 is to get a steady footing within one or several of the verticals where our technology will add the greatest value at this point (for example within recruitment and media). And when we talk about getting a footing, we mean that we want to have enough customers and integrations for us to have the competitive advantage — and the sales rig needed for replicating and scaling to new markets.

A key part of the concept behind Gobi is how the stories allow people to connect in more innovative and immersive ways. It’s a whole new way of doing marketing for a company that is hiring, or a university that wants to reach a new generation of students. Like the Gobi team writes on their website, they “have analytics and administration tools to make content management easy, including controlling its lifetime and getting engagement data.”

Norway is also a very valuable test market for us. People are quick to use new technology, they respond to the user tests we send them, and that in turn helps us expand. Gobi has always had international ambitions, so the help from Norway has been very useful to us. The goal is that the international product will be more or less identical with the road we’ve taken in Norway. Making the international product match its sibling in Norway also means that we will get to match the user groups.

Nevertheless, the Gobi team see no reason to take it easy on innovating new things — after all, you only get a certain window of time before your competitors see the great market prospects you’ve found.

All the effort we do is built on the feedback we have gotten from customer meetings — and this is where we see that stories as a concept have a future. One of the success criteria for a startup is that they are out and about — trying out different things, and communicating what they are doing. You do of course have a “first-mover advantage” when you are among the first few in an industry, but we also see how building new things gets easier and easier. So you cannot live on the “first-mover advantage” alone, as you have to do more than one smart thing to make your startup succeed. These days, having one great idea will not keep you or your company afloat forever.

Did GOBI make you eager to invest in creative industries? Now you have the chance to sign up for an Angel Challenge course on exactly that — investing in creative industries!