I’ve made a movie site, but it sucks, and I don’t know why

Imagine a graph, with "effort" on the x axis and "value" on the y axis. I think you're down the bottom-right. I just don't care very much about remembering which movies to watch. That's not to say I wouldn't find any value in your site, just not enough to bother keeping around in my brain. Definitely not enough to sign up for.

So you need to either be less effort or more value.

It's pretty tough to significantly raise the value of what you're doing without fundamentally changing your idea. More integrations would help, and social features maybe (assuming you got the numbers for that to kick in), but ultimately it's not really going to improve my life that much.

Finding ways to be less effort could be a bit more fruitful, though. As others have suggested, I'd remove the signup requirement or delay it as much as possible. Improving the UI would be a good idea, not so much in terms of how it looks, but in terms of making it as fast and low-friction as possible to use.

One angle you could try is to add a super simple hook to get people started. Like, the front page just says "What's your favorite movie?" and an input box that does a search with auto-complete and live-updating results. When you pick the movie, it pops up a few recommendations. Each suggestion has "have you seen? yes/no", if yes: "did you like it? yes/no" that feeds back into the recommendation system. If they haven't seen it, a mini-blurb + "show trailer" + "want to see? yes/no".

If you kept that all snappy with ajax and a reasonably fast backend, a person could feasibly visit your site for the first time and have 5-10 recommendations within a minute. Exactly the same service, same value proposition, just a lot less effort. I think if I had visited that website instead of your one I would probably have a movie list by now.

I worked at a movie startup, very similar to this idea, way back in 2007-8. It was my first startup experience, and I knew back then that it was not really an interesting product. We did a lot of cool text mining stuff on movie reviews we scraped (I am a statistician by trade) and at the time provided a way of searching based on emotions and moods. It was kind of neat, but even still - we were making a glorified movie list, which is not a problem anyone actually has.

At the time, our biggest 'competitor' (in our eyes) was jinni.com, which still seems to be doing something similar to what they set out to do way back then.

It's 2014 now, and I still see about 1-3 of these types of sites pop up every year. I just met a guy who has a similar movie list app out in Berkeley last week - no joke.

So, does your product suck? Maybe not. Is it a product solving a real problem that people will pay for? I don't think so. I personally don't see any value in using this site over Netflix, and I'm sure a lot of others would agree with me.

But it is okay if no one likes it - you can get a lot out of making something without it being successful or ultimately useful. I learned a lot working at that movie startup, and I am glad I did it, even though the damn thing fell apart before we could generate revenue. Revel in it, pal! You have created something!

"To access the full featured mowish site please provide your email and password respectively:"

I don't see that you can access anything without registering. Always a bad idea.

Unfortunately, I don't even see what the point of the website is -- other than making a list for some reason -- so I have no incentive to register.

"Unlock feature to get movies for your taste! Only $12.97 for 6 months."

No idea what "feature" is and certainly not going to pay for it.

- I don't like the name at all. It's not obvious how to pronounce it and that's a huge problem if you want people to talk about it. MovieWish I'd be fine with.

- Basic problem - what do I do with this list? Is it integrated with my Netflix account? My Bittorrent client? A ticketing service like Fandango? The DVR on my TV? all 4 of these?

- Forget numerical ratings and silly averges like this movie is 7.4/10 points good – for you, a movie is either good or bad, period. I hate this. My opinions on a movie are much more nuanced than 'good or bad'. I'm not even that hot on only having 5 stars to do a Netflix rating. 'Averages' is spelled wrong BTW.

- The individual movie pages are OK, in fact the graphic design is pretty good. still, I can't escape the feeling that it's a prettier but less capable version of IMDB. did you scrape their DB? a good aspect is that so far my searches have all returned a result, even for my obscure test films.

- Social buttons - I would fold them away under a sharing icon and put them in a UI frame rather than straight in the film listing. I never understand why site designers want to stock someone else's branding in the middle of their offering.

I agree with others that your site's main mistake is to impose a "register wall" to discourage engagement. The fix is for you to "show, don't tell" visitors what your site does.

But, even if you just want to use registrations to gauge interest, a lot of your content is unclear or just strange. Some examples:

* "Get Notifications" - Of what? You never say.

* "The cleanest way to browse movies" - Is browsing movies dirty? Or, are you saying your users browse dirty movies?

* "Never miss a movie again!" - How do you miss a movie and how does the site prevent that?

* "Your girl or kid wants..." - Flippant, gender- and age-biased language that dismissively "shelves" your family's tastes

* Why are numerical ratings or "silly averges" (typo) less useful than your site's binary good/bad ratings? No matter where you put the good/bad cut-off, you will either include borderline movies as "good" or bury almost-good movies in the "bad" category.

You don't specify why you think it sucks, so maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong angle, but * don't use the term "girl"! * hire a professional designer -- it really shows * switch off debug! http://www.mowish.com/search/movie/looking%20for%20a%20movie...

If you don't know why it sucks, how were you able to determine that it sucks?

Figure out what you don't like about the site, then ask for ideas on how to fix it, or hire someone to fix it.

Your current method will get you lots of opinions, but they will be all over the map.

At least do social auth or auth to netflix instead of requiring an email account to sign up... ain't nobody got time for that.

What is the purpose of this website?