Can’t Wait (YC S11) is a mobile social network for movie trailers

which ones are you referring to?

I don't know whether you are right or not about that.

However, I do think it's a good idea to be "extremely niche", especially when the size of your market - in this case, people who like watching movies - is very large.

I'm sure that a good movie trailer recommendation system would work well on other sites, but those sites may have already moved past the startup/development phase into business-as-usual, where they are trying to squeeze money out of what they currently have without searching for new value propositions.

I'm currently working (albeit in a tremendously half-assed way) on a very obvious movie-related idea because I know I can do it better than the big sites and because the market is enormous.

If this isn't on the YC FAQ, it should be.

A lot of great companies start small. One of my favorite PG-isms is this:

If you can make a simple product for a niche audience and make them amazingly happy, it's clear what you need to do next. Find more people like that. Move into adjacent markets (e.g. Craigslist started as an SF classifieds mailing list, Amazon started with books).

If you make a product that makes a huge audience ambivalent, you often have no freakin' clue what to do next. Add features? Take them away? Change your positioning?

So imagine if these guys OWNED movie trailers on mobile. Do you think they'd be stuck there? Could they, perhaps, move on to dominate broader short-form video to satiate micro-boredom? Could they then move onto longer form stuff?

AirBnb started out as a site for renting airbeds and now they're worth over a billion dollars, so I'm not too worried.

Know what you mean. It's mobile and social, but is it local? I suppose it is if the monetization is to send to a nearby movie theater to see the movie whose trailer you liked.

Seriously though, props to them at least for choosing something that is theory monetizable. Movie producers would pay big bucks to reach the influencers that get everyone else to see a movie.

It's niche, but studios pay billions a year to market movies. That's not a small market.

You highlight a real tension: a great strength of a tiny startup is to thrive on niches so tiny that established companies cannot justify entering - so they don't compete. The tension is that it's not exciting (unless you're prone to visions).

Also, a tiny niche is probably all you can cope with, with limited resources.

Ah, but consider how much easier a sell this niche is than Convore was. I have read exactly one sentence about Can't Wait and I already know who it is for and what it does. I have signed up on Convore and I still have no idea what it's really best at. In my short time there, I saw it used for HN meta-chat, and a bunch of Ruby chat. And I watched tptacek try to start a conversation about his field, but it kind of died, so I guess it's not the go-to place for that.

Branding is important. Marketing is important. Far, far more important than novelty or impressive technology. Novelty is fleeting - my god, we're already used to Google, and it's literally an epochal advance in library science - and impressive tech tends to confuse people for the first few years, which may be more years than your little startup can afford.

EDIT: I see that Can't Wait also has a revenue stream: Affiliate fees from Fandango.

Am I alone in trying to avoid trailers? I find they tend to give away too much of the story, and always contain the best special effects from the film. I want to be surprised by the movies I see, and trailers act against that.

How do you guys get access to the trailers? Does that involve some licensing or are they freely available?

Very nifty app btw - congratulations.

Weren't you working on Convore a few months ago? Is this from the same team?

I was thinking the same thing.

Edit:

Also, Convore was launched in YC W11. So this transition must have happened a while ago.

Eric and I left Convore a few months ago to start working on Can'tWait!, and Leah is staying with Convore Inc to continue building out that company.

Netflix doesnt charge per rental, the most that they could do is an affiliate signup with the company.