The project
A few years back SceneIt’s founders decided to travel to New Zealand to visit locations from their favourite movie franchise, Lord of the Rings. Little did they know that this would prove trickier than getting the one ring into Mordor.
After hours of searching Google, browsing dozens of websites and emailing an endless number of people they managed to pull together a plan for their trip. Spreadsheets, Word docs and print outs gave them the itinerary for their once in a lifetime holiday. The trip was amazing, organising it was not.
There had to be a better way to do this.
Planning and Prototyping
The pair came up with a plan for a digital platform, taking all the great features from existing travel sites and adding an extra layer to help users build trips around their favourite TV and movie locations. The end goal was a system giving explorers a one-stop shop for travelling the world, scene by scene.
As with any startup, rather than leap straight in it was important to test the offering. An early prototype gave the founders the tool they needed to validate their assumptions. Only after this could we dive into the complex product build.
Our idea was ambitious, we wanted to build a fully featured end-to-end solution but getting there wasn’t possible straight away. Lighthouse showed us how we could phase our way to the full platform.
Feedback was positive. While the market was niche, the fans were passionate and wanted a tool that made it easier to explore the fictional worlds that they love. They were excited about the offering and research showed that there was a steady revenue stream to be found for the business.
Time to start designing and building.
We’d already spent ages collating lots of information about who our audience would be: both from the people who’d buy using SceneIt but also those who we’d partner with. The prototype bridged the gap from our research to putting the platform together.
