IPhone App Helps You Discover Upcoming Movies (YCS11)
mashable.comI'm worried about the apparent disconnect between my brain and the world of web startups or maybe even simply the world. I think YC numbers are proof enough that startups like this can become popular and commercial successes.
Yet as someone who likes movies and watches a lot of them it's completely beyond me how something like this could ever be more than a minor feature of some movie site, one that is trivial to copy for anyone in the space with the advantage of an existing user base.
I have no reason whatsoever to trash this startup, quite the contrary, I'm in a completely different space and I wish only the best to any and all fellow startup founders. I'm just honestly puzzled, fully aware that it's probably me who is going to be wrong again.
I'm just wondering if anyone else is struggling to convince themselves to take something as simple as this and run with it in a crowded market. Even if I had the slightest interest in solving this problem, I just couldn't bring myself to believe in it and that might be why I will very likely never strike it rich.
Hmm. On the one hand I really want to spell out the steps we plan to take to turn what it is into a huge, huge business. On the other hand, I don't want to give away our strategy to potential competitors and partners.
What I will say is that people like watching trailers--our downloads and usage numbers prove that, as well as trailers.apple.com and other trailer websites which are very successful. However, nobody else does trailers on mobile as well as we do, and if they do better in some area we will iterate past them soon. Over the period of a few months to a year, we're going to have a respectable number of users using this simple app.
Additionally, we've built out our user experience so that virtually everyone rates the trailers that they see, telling our system whether they can't wait to see a movie, or if they're going to pass on it.
Finally, we are also building up our own social graph.
So, without going into too much detail, we think there is immense value in overlaying the graph of what people want to do in the future (which movies they want to see), with the graph of who their friends are.
Eric weren't you working on an another YC company? Convore? Or am I mixing people up?
Yep, I was at Convore, but left that company to start this one.
Hmm.. Get rep of having large, savvy userbase
Shop it to studios
Get exclusive trailers and snippets before other sites
Get larger more savvy userbase
Add in perhaps coupons and premiere ticket drives
Rinse, repeat
If I had to guess, I'd say that they have a larger vision that what you see today is just the first step of.
Remember that Microsoft started with Basic on the Altair. Just because a startup seems unimpressive when they release their first product doesn't mean that they're not building in an important space.
Every time someone says that I'm reminded of Color. Every article said they were going to do 50 new things that were coming after the iPhone app was a big success (they needed data to do the 50 other things) but when the iPhone app tanked so did the genesis of the other ideas.
Not every startup which seems to have a limited first product goes on to do great things.
But of the startups which have gone on to do great things, many have had limited first products.
Therefore, it's not much of a commentary on a new startup to say their first product is limited, because you don't know where they're headed. It's better to focus on whether the first product is good at what it does and makes people happy.
But if they are so busy building a movie notification system, how will they have time to create a programming language for a new computing platform?
I completely agree and came here to say something similar. I'm honestly perplexed by "startups" that build an app that seem to introduce no new processes or technology (a reminder about a release date? a list of movie trailers? tweet out about a movie?) because these don't strike me as very inventive or even startup-like. It's an app. The same app could be built by a 2-man team working nights and weekends as a side project. It could also be cranked out by Fandango or the other big, established iPhone movie apps. What's stopping them?
I share your thoughts around finding a problem 'big enough' for undivided attention...
Similar, but this hit the app store about a month before:
Its revenue model is simply selling the app. Which does make me wonder what's behind this particular YC startup. As another poster says, maybe there is a bigger plan?
* Disclosure: made by a friend.
I agree, as a someone that is a fan of movies.. I don't see the problem of choosing which movies to see or finding enough places to talk about them, as a problem at all
Even if I had the slightest interest in solving this problem
Yet, is this really a "problem"? I've never had a problem with finding out when a movie comes out... EDIT: ...or finding out about a new movie. What's wrong with Flixster?
Love the app, but please make an iPad version. (doesn't need to be pretty, just play the trailers in fullscreen)
10,000 copies in one month strikes me as extremely low for a free app.
It's been 2 weeks.
still pretty low, that's 700/day. I've never released a free app that didn't get < 1,000 d/l a day, and my apps are niche apps with no advertising or marketing at all.
I would remove the 10,000 copies reference because anyone who has any experience on the app store would see that those numbers are very low. It's like bragging about a 3.0 GPA.
We cannot "remove the 10,000 copies reference" because this was an article written about us, not by us.
Also, we like the way our graphs are inflecting. In the first week we pushed way less than 700/day and in the second week we pushed way more. Dividing it out and saying 700/day is a bit simplistic.
In any case, I fail to see the purpose of your comments. What's the goal?
I released a free app last week. No marketing or advertising. It's got 2 downloads, and one of those was me.
How did you get those downloads?
Just installed it. I wish it would let me browse movies by genre. Unless I'm missing it, there's no way to do that.
Thanks for the feedback! You're not missing it, we haven't quite built browse-by-genre yet. Early users didn't mention it, but just recently we've heard this feedback from quite a few people, so it's definitely on the list.
ericflo: What's happening to Convore now?
Love the juxtaposition!
Microsoft BizSpark sponsoring a section highlighting an iPhone app.
:)
Hows that android version coming..
Right now tabs work and click properly. It loads data from our HTTP API and displays it in an ugly way, and trailers do play in a basic way on the Android version.
tl;dr: I'm actively working on it, but I don't want to promise a release date just yet.
If you are not embarrassed with your 1st release, you've waited too long. Release it now! ;-)
I know this was said tongue-in-cheek but as the founder noted below, if you release a half-baked iPhone app you're done. Dead in the water. Nobody cares or will write about your 1.5 version when you finally polish the turd of the 1.0. It's all about the launch, not iteration, on the App Store.
that strategy does not apply to mobile apps. You need a polished product before you release.
Yo guys. It's a joke. I'm friends with the founders.
I wonder how much more ahead of the iPhone it has to pull in marketshare before mobile app developers consider releasing an Android app to be of equal priority.
Remember that Hunch piece about the demographics of Android vs iOS users?
http://pinoytutorial.com/techtorial/wp-content/uploads/2011/...
Maybe that's a factor over and above adoption numbers.
I Can't Wait to win my free movie ticket.
There's a decent chance that'll happen if you use the app :) http://i.imgur.com/yFPbP.png (Keep in mind that's just the people who decided to share, and to share to Twitter instead of e.g. Facebook.)
