Membrana Media at NDRC: Where Ideas Meet the Future

Walk into Dogpatch Labs in Dublin – the startup nerve center of Ireland – and you’re met with the kind of energy that makes sleep redundant. Last week, that energy peaked during the NDRC Startup Sprint, a one-day crash course in turning ideas into products, fuelled by caffeine, rapid prototyping, and bluntly honest feedback.

For Membrana Media, it was more than just another networking stop. We used the Sprint to unveil our new video product – a step outside our established comfort zone of high-performance tools for text publishers – and to put it in front of people who don’t pull their punches.

The response was as sharp as we’d hoped. From the B2B camp, we heard about integration demands, monetization pathways, and the unglamorous but essential need for reliability. From the B2C side, it was about experience: immediacy, flow, and a sense that video should add value rather than just noise. Both perspectives cut through, and both will shape the next phase of our work.

Beyond the familiar

Membrana Media has long been known for building resilient, effective solutions for publishers working with text. That foundation remains strong. But the future is moving elsewhere – towards video, towards richer formats, towards platforms that serve not only publishers but creators, audiences, and advertisers alike.

What we’re building now is not an add-on. It’s a reinvention: a product that aims to align those often competing interests and make them work together.

A structured path to innovation

This is not happening by accident. At Membrana Media we have launched a formal innovation program — a structured approach to testing, validating, and scaling new ventures. Every idea that enters the pipeline is treated like a startup in its own right, subjected to the same discipline we would apply to any market-ready business.

Our framework is built around tools such as the Business Model Canvas, which allows us to validate assumptions quickly, understand customer segments, and define clear business cases before moving into development. This approach is helping us build not just products, but ventures — designed to be scalable, investor-ready, and globally relevant.

The Sprint effect

Events like the NDRC Startup Sprint matter because they strip away the polish. In the course of a single day, ideas are stretched, challenged, and sometimes broken – better here than in the real market. It’s part hackathon, part pressure test, part reality check.

And in that intensity lies its value. You leave not just with notes and business cards, but with a clearer sense of what works, what doesn’t, and what absolutely has to change before the next iteration.

For Membrana Media, this wasn’t simply about attending an accelerator event. It was a declaration of intent. We are moving beyond text, into video — and into the future of media.