Free Film Camp — A Six-Week Startup

In late 2015, after I graduated from building CreativeLive I didn’t know what I wanted to do next in my entrepreneurial journey. I spent four months brainstorming 101 different ideas, and scoped out a process I coined as the Six-Week Startup to start testing some of them.

My Six-Week Startup is a process for rapidly testing, developing, and launching a new business idea. It involves bringing together a small team of 3-5 people, each with complementary skills and expertise, to work on a specific business concept. The process is divided into six weekly sprints, each building off what we learned in the previous week.

Most importantly, every week we put our work in front of customers. On Monday we start with a planning session to identify what we want to accomplish in that week’s sprint — and by Friday we put our work in front of real prospects or clients and get direct feedback from the market.

FreeFilmCamp: Where Kids Learn Filmmaking by MAKING Films!

Our idea was to create an app that enforced a structured 10-shot film that has a beginning, middle, and end. We envisioned a frictionless learning platform where kids learn the art of filmmaking by making a series of ten easy, fun, and increasingly sophisticated films.

Each week we come together on Monday to brainstorm and plan what we were going to accomplish that week. By the end of each week we put the current build of our app and curriculum in front of kids and discovered what works.

By the end of our six-week sprint, our team had led a special Halloween Film Camp at Northwest Film Forum. Jonah and Aaron showed a dozen kids how to make their first short films using the latest version of our app.

FreeFilmCamp: Team & Schedule

• Craig Swanson — Vision
• Aaron Anderson — Project Manager
• Eric Mentele — iOS Developer
• Jonah Kozlowski — Filmmaking Instructor
• Tessa Archer — Copywriting & Kids

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