Sensing the disruption in the late noughties of the growth of social media platforms, Sensum co-founders Gawain Morrison and Shane McCourt began experimenting with how they could use technology to create new products and services in the media space.

Their work won them funding from Northern Ireland Screen and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2010 to generate an emotional response horror film.

Not only movie lovers were excited when the film premiered in 2011. New Scientist and Channel 4 showed strong interest in the film, leading to the development of their emotional response measurement technology into a business.

Since then, Sensum has been working on refining and commercialising their product. In the year ahead, they are looking to raise their second round of finance as well as growing their customer base.

Q&A with Gawain Morrison, co-founder of Sensum

We asked him about his experience and reflections on starting up.

To create a successful startup like yours, what should founders watch out for?

The bottom line is you’ve got to get the money in the door and you have to have the people to do it, other than that you don’t really think about anything else.

What are your reflections on your experience receiving government funding?

The funds are very useful, the issue is the decision-making process around innovation products. If it’s a government body that’s handling funds, it rarely has a skill base internally to make strategic decisions based on it. So the language you can end up using can be rather hard work because you’re having to educate as well as to apply.

Sensum is based in Belfast – did you ever think about moving to startup hubs such as London?

When you’ve got a cloud-based product or a product that you can step on a plane with and be in London in two hours, it’s not really a major issue. When you’re startups, you’re using every resource that you have in your armoury and if we were to up sticks and move to London, we wouldn’t have that network of people, and, if we needed to, we could pick up the phone.

What did you find most challenging in building your startup?

Recruitment’s a challenge in Belfast. The issue here presently is that there’s a lot of inward investment in terms of the region, so the mechanisms are to try and pull in the likes of your Googles and your Intels, and rightly so, to build profile. But it has created a sort of a financial tech bubble in terms of the skill base. So the ability for startups to be able to attract high calibre talent is largely diminished due to not being able to offer the salaries that the financial tech bubble has created.