Growing a SaaS App for the Film Industry with Rigorous Experimentation | Hacker News Reader

Growing a SaaS App for the Film Industry with Rigorous Experimentation

indiehackers.com

122 pointssigil30 comments

> Worked: Native Ads

> We place our name and logo in all new Endcrawl projects. Customers can remove them if they like of course, but the power of default is strong. As a result, our name and logo are sprinkled across hundreds of films and will be seen for many years to come.

> We encourage all founders to think creatively about what constitutes a "native ad" in their space.

There is a smart, subtle insight here. "Ads" can take a lot of different forms that can be very powerful without spending any actual money. "The power of default is strong" is great!

This, for me, was the money quote (pun not intended)

There is no value in learning that someone would gladly use your product for free.

> In fact, we completed just shy of 100 productions — who were happy to pay $500 to interact with an API over email — before we even rolled out the first iteration of our UI.

> How have you attracted users and grown Endcrawl.com? Once the Perl MVP existed, we cobbled together a landing page with a WuFoo form and sent an email blast to Pliny's filmmaker contacts. That was the extent of our launch.

Not trying to diminish the success of this work at all, you guys did a great job finding a niche and working through the process!

I get pitches talking about these types of stories and have noticed that many feature a strong "the founders knew a ton of people who would be the first customers" element that is lost on many readers who are looking to learn from the experience.

Not many SAAS concepts started by a lone hacker developer can get 100 people paying $500 ($50K!) to interact over email with an API with no UI without spending any money on advertising.

This is absolutely true. I'm the technical co-founder of Endcrawl, and there's just no way I could have pulled this off without the deep industry connections & insight of my co-founder Pliny. First off, the idea never would have occurred to me -- who knew this underserved niche market even existed? I mean end credits...really?

It goes beyond just identifying the opportunity though. The way we run Endcrawl is heavily influenced by Pliny's experience running OFFHOLLYWOOD, a post-production facility that mostly served indie filmmakers. Left to my own devices, would I have nailed pricing (flat fee, no room for bargaining) and customer support (email-only but responsive) like we have? Doubt it.

Hackers take note: non-technical co-founders CAN bring a ton of value to a partnership.

Or: if you're going solo, make sure you really understand your customers and your industry.

Other founder here.

Coming at this from another angle: people in film approach me with ideas for products, and always ask "where can I find a coder?"

The only answer I have for them is that they don't need a "coder". They need a co-founder.

I love your humble attitude on the reality of things.

I've been trying quite a few projects targeted outside of my network and relationship building is something that gets missed. And now as I'm working on an analytics tool where people do know me and my expertise in that domain, it is much easier to convince.

> "the founders knew a ton of people who would be the first customers" element

It's something that gets missed but after speaking with the founders directly, that's usually the case so far. The element that's missing most of the time is the "credibility" and "trust" effect.

Why are end-credits usually so boring?

I want end-credits with inset-windows showing bloopers, for instance. Or fragments of the "making of". Or how about showing the faces of important people working behind-the-scenes at the very least? How cool would it be if a CGI programmer could have the opportunity to say something during the end-credits?

A lot of end credits _are_ very stylized.

I think the reasoning your suggestions wouldn't work is because it takes people out of the "magic". I love learning more about behind-the-scenes stuff, but I don't think I'd like it 10 seconds after the movie ends. I obviously know movies are fake, but I don't necessarily want to be reminded of that... I want music and some graphics, while I absorb what I just watched.

There's two exceptions I can think of: Pixar's bloopers (which are obviously all fake) keep you immersed in the "world" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCBLywCKZmM), and real/actor pictures after a story based on true events.

> I think the reasoning your suggestions wouldn't work is because it takes people out of the "magic"... I obviously know movies are fake, but I don't necessarily want to be reminded of that... I want music and some graphics, while I absorb what I just watched.

This. End credits have evolved a secondary function as the In Between Time. You're still under the spell; here's a gentle transition back to reality.

Rush Hour...

They're boring in part because you're seeing big-budget movies, with a small army's worth of effects crews. When it takes something like twenty minutes for all the names to scroll by slowly enough for you to pick out the name of your cousin's brother who worked at Foobar Digital, there's just kind of not much you can do. If you've got a really big budget you might have some animation going on during the end credits, or at least cool images - but even those usually taper out once you start listing the seventeen different effects houses you outsourced scenes to.

It's a lot more bearable if you watch movies that aren't full of effects.

Ugh, that stuff destroys the fourth wall. Save it for the DVD extras or put it on YouTube.

Awesome interview, if the people making it are still reading: What about those "fluff" credits in major blockbuster movies (I don't recall specifics, let's say some animated whatever zooming through a part of the credits) - do they just add this to the endcrawl-rendered video or is this more for the 90% low-key credits that aren't so fancy? :)

Not sure exactly what you're referring to there, but you nailed it with that last bit. We're after the non-fancy stuff because it scales. And there's more of it.

Bigger productions will hire a title designer to do the opening credits and the "mains on end." Then there's the scroll, which is where we come in. Some title houses sub that part out to Endcrawl because it's fiddly and not terribly creative work. (It is, however, surprisingly tricky to get a readable, smooth, and artifact-free scroll into a variety of deliverables.)

Thanks for the answer. The most fancy example I could find (looks like opening credits): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwQL5ZxYwI

I think http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Creative_Closing_Credits has a good list, but maybe I'm just misremembering - could've been Episode 8 with a silhouette of BB8 chasing through the credits, or maybe it was GotG2 with Groot - maybe I'm blowing these "special" things out of proportion and 90% of movies don't do this ;)

Gotcha. Yep, getting fancy with the end credits is something big budget films tend to do. Those have better visibility, but there's fewer of those now and more of a long tail indie downmarket developing. A few bigger films have used Endcrawl (Expendables 3 and 10 Cloverfield Lane to name a few) but beyond the occasional prestige play, it doesn't make much sense for us to focus on that corner of the market. The area under the indie film segment of the curve is much bigger. 4000+ feature films submit to Sundance every year!

Pliny talks about the "chasing prestige" trap in our IH interview. This is how the film industry de facto operates, and we only managed to avoid the trap by approaching things like a software company would -- itself mostly an accident and byproduct of our backgrounds. Lots more opportunity for software to "eat film" imo.

Note: Endcrawl does let you carve out areas for a video inset where you can add things like blooper reels. Compositing those into the scroll is still something better done in your NLE timeline. Can't solve all the problems!

Hi, great interview and congrats on your success! My question for you guys is specifically about search-ability of end credits.

Apologies for the self promotion, but I'm working in the same space and built and launched https://www.spoiled.tv last month. I live in LA and know a lot of film people and one of the suggestions I often get is that I should add a feature where people can download/view/search entire film credits. Since you guys are knee-deep in this, do you (a) think this is a good idea and (b) know where I could grab this information freely (barring OCR methods)?

Again, keep up the awesome work!

Check out IMDb's data dumps! They're licensed for non-commercial use but they're quite complete. https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/

Thanks, unfortunately IMDb's data dumps miss a lot. I used to work at a (VFX) studio, and people would always complain how they didn't make it on IMDb, even though they were in the actual credits.

It's possible, albeit onerous, to submit credits for yourself on IMDb. I'd be very interested in a dataset with better completeness. Not aware of any, but we do have some half-baked ideas around this -- feel free to drop me an email.

Will do!

what is servicy about this? how many times do i need to make endcredits per month?

Not terribly service-y tbh. Some of our customers (post production houses, title houses, prolific producers) help finish lots of films per year and might be receptive to the subscription model. Most of our customers, however, are indie filmmakers who make a film every 1-2 years at best. So as much as we'd love the MRR, subscriptions don't really make sense.

There are some other reasons for that touched on in the interview -- see "What's your business model."

guilty as charged of not reading all the way through. kudos on building something people are willing to pay for.

No worries. I agree "SaaS" might be a bit of a misnomer in our case, but we wanted to distinguish ourselves from desktop software (which still rules our industry).

Thanks for reading!

Hi, other founder here. Does "SaaS" have to be synonymous with a subscription business model?

I wouldn't put it synonymous, but most of the SaaS products I've ever paid and used were based on monthly/yearly subscriptions and were not "pay per use", so that's probably why people mostly use it that way - but there's credit token models though, e.g. SauceLabs or Audible where your monthly payments grants you N tokens to spend now or later.

SaaS does not imply a recurring billing model. Stripe, Twilio, Square, Facebook, Google - all SaaS, none have a recurring billing model.

Congrats for being honest with your customers. Enjoyable read as well filled with a bunch of golden nuggets. Thank you.

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