Timeline
Like most other subjects on the Internet, the online movie landscape is incredibly competitive. If you take a look at MSN, Yahoo!, IMDB, Rottentomatoes, Moviefone, etc, it’s immediately obvious that there are many large players in the space who have spent years developing strong movie portals. Many of these sites are also backed by huge companies with quite a bit more cash than we have.
Given the competition, we knew we couldn’t immediately start building a product without spending serious time thinking about what users still lack the ability to do on traditional movie websites. Thus, we started brainstorming in April of 2007 without any code being written until July. For three months, all we did was talk about features that other sites offered and what people liked most. MSN and Yahoo! were seen as mainstream, corporate websites with good information on recent movies. IMDB was seen as the number one source for raw movie data. RottenTomatoes was seen as the best place to get user feedback on movies through the Tomatometer.
After deciding on some things that we thought we could improve upon from these sites, we began to build. The Summer of ‘07 was spent working diligently on finding movie content, learning over 5 different programming languages, building up a movie database backbone and above all, scrounging around for food without open dining halls. If any future VCs ever have concerns about our ability to conserve money, all they need to do is go through weeks of Dominoe’s, Quizno’s, and Baja Fresh receipts.
With school starting again, it has definitely been harder to maintain focus. Drawing some cues from Tony D’Amato in Any Given Sunday, I’ve been doing my best to continue rallying the team. It is amazing to me that people can manage multiple problem sets and programming assignments, while still doing their best to build a company. I never had such an opportunity in school, but chances are, I wouldn’t have had the guts to take on the challenge while still trying to maintain my grades. This is a special group that I’ve been extremely proud of.
Below are some photos of the team, hard at work during one of our weekly meetings. Thanks to Eric for volunteering to be our historian.
- Steven
- Josh and Chris have a good laugh.
- Stan and Dave go over design issues as I look over.
- Dave’s son, Callum, reminds us that movies with trains are cool.