TupiTube

TupiTube is a digital platform to introduce children and teenagers into the animation world in a fun way.  Our approach is not only focused on the entertainment aspect of this beautiful art, but on providing the technical knowledge required to develop professional skills in the long term. The target audiences are 8-20 years old.

Our solution is made up of a desktop tool, a mobile app, a social network, and a repository of training content we deliver on YouTube. With these resources, our younger users start making their first animation works. From that point and giving them basic but strategic training, every kid begins his own journey, on his own timing as a digital artist. Over time, they discover the power and potential of telling stories through animation, empowering their skills by their own motivation.

With our software, a basic animation (made up of 2 frames) can be created in a few seconds, but of course, as the users explore and learn the features of the tools, they start getting more experience, challenging themselves in bigger projects that in some cases include the production of small animated series.

Understanding the context of our solution, the social aspect is key to achieve our goal. The interaction between users on our own social media encourages the learning process not only from our advice or references but from the comments made by other users. Counting on the age of the newbies and the features of the new generations, the social experience among creators is an essential element of our proposal. Kids learn by watching the animation works made by others, but also advise the newbies and from time to time, they create their own group challenges.

About me, I am the founder of this startup since the very beginning, when it started not as a business but as a research group about 2D graphics.

I found our supreme goal after watching an interview with John Lasseter (Co-Founder of Pixar), where he mentions how discovered his vocation as an animator when he was still a kid.

In a few words, our main objective is to find and train the next Walt Disney’s generations from every corner of the world. We are very aware that talents like Walt, John, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, among others are out there and today they are only 10 years old.  Our goal is a talent hunt that we hope to harvest in the coming years.

Currently, India is the country with more active users of our platform, specifically the state of Kerala. There, the government defined a strategic plan for the next decades to develop and empower its local animation industry, betting all its resources on one goal: teaching animation at schools.  Why? Because the artist kid of today will be the professional animator of tomorrow.

As TupiTube, we are seeking the same goal, but targeting a global scope. Our dream is that kids from any country, any language, any race can have access to our platform with the potential of developing their skills as digital artists.

At this point, it’s important to say that we are aware that not every child likes to draw, even less to animate, but our vision goes further than that. Maybe the animation as a communication media is not a resource that everyone wants to create, but in the 99% is a resource that kids want to consume. Who doesn’t watch cartoons when is a child? In that sense, we have secondary goals related to promote the use of animated content in schools as a powerful pedagogic tool. In fact, I could talk hours about the implications of our secondary goals, but let’s say that there is a lot more than only “fun” behind the animated content. It’s a universe.

Our mission as a company is based on two premises:

Given this context, our company is not only competing from the user experience (UX) of our apps as anyone else but from the understanding of the animation as a technique, a profession, and a lifestyle for those who find passion in this beautiful art. Our methodology allows us to focus on the individual needs of every user, looking for developing his skills as much as possible based on his interest and capabilities.

Currently, we count on four success stories of kids who started with us making very basic exercises, and now they are thinking as content creators, planning and developing the universe of their first animation series.

As a company, we truly believe that we can replicate these cases thousands and thousands of times around the world.  Understanding that our solution goes further than “only software”, our approach makes us a different proposal from the popular and basic premise “come and get fun animating”. TupiTube is more than that... a lot!

Our presence around the animation culture impacts several institutions and industries: elementary and high schools find in our proposal an interesting resource to support the learning process of different matters. The untraditional option of “animation as homework” provides an innovative and pedagogic instrument for teachers.

On the other hand, as we are gathering the young generations of digital artists around the world on our social network, we expect that our community becomes an interesting market for advertisers focused on assets for our target audiences. In this specific topic of digital art, what we are building should call the attention of global brands like Adobe, Wacom, and Huion, among others, due to our users will become their customers in the coming years.

Finally and thinking of a long term vision, other players around the animation industry that should care about what we do are the animation studios (from the private sector) and the government institutions related to education (from the public sector), as we are profiling the new talents of the future. Talents that they could track and support directly from our platform.

In conclusion: TupiTube is not just a “software product” but a digital ecosystem for young artists surrounded by a community.

The development of our software clients started before I decided to fund the startup. Our company has taken advantage of several years of R&D, which I led when it was just a research group. All that time of interaction with school students guided the design of our UX framework and features. Although the development and extension of the software never end, it's important to say that our current versions provide an easy-to-use experience focus on children and teenagers specifically.

Depending on the animation technique you want to teach, the design of a friendly environment is not an easy task, as the workflow for an artist can include an important number of variables and steps. Our design principle is not about being fancy to impress young people but to be clear and simple as possible.

The feedback we get daily from teachers and students confirms that our technical foundations are reliable and that we are going in the right direction.

To measure our satisfaction rate, the first fact that we had to understand is that we count on several kinds of users. We have classified them into categories according to their interests and behaviors:

About our customer's attention, our main channel to receive all the user’s feedback is our social media presence, including our own platform. Statistically, there are three kinds of requirements:

Every new interaction is evaluated and attended depending on the complexity and context. New features are added to our devel To-Do list and scheduled for future releases. Bugs are reported to the development team and prioritized. And questions about animation software procedures are solved either by email or videoconference depending on the case.

Additionally, I must say that we are in constant communication with users all the time.

Due to the nature of our business, we chose a different parameter to measure the lifecycle of our users and it's based on the time span they use our platform to learn and develop their skills as animators. As we count on three kinds of users, these are the time frame they stay with us:

Our main knowledge repository is available on our YouTube channel. There, users can find a huge amount of training content following different formats: workshops, tips, examples, demos, etc.

When users contact us making questions about animation techniques and specific procedures, usually we reference some of those videos.

Currently, we are implementing a forum/bug tracking module inside the TupiTube social network to attend and track all the requests generated by our users. It's not in production yet, but we expect to release it in the middle term.  For now, email and direct messages from other social media are our main channels.

Along 2020, we were implementing the integration of all our software components with the social network. Only in 2021, we were able to start running our business model based on advertising, expecting to get our first interesting results around the end of the year. For now, we are focused on increasing the size of our active users.

The motto of TupiTube is “Your first animation experience” because we dream of becoming de facto standard to introduce the basics of animation for the next generations of digital artists around the world. In the next 10 years, we expect to impact the lives of millions of kids around the world, with an evolved platform providing the state of the art on UX and animation techniques for beginners. Also, we want to become key players in the animation industry for other companies and institutions interested in the endless talent available in our user community.