Kyle
If you’ve felt like the current movie discovery platforms aren’t quite getting it you my be in luck. A new New York startup called Moovio promises to offer the fastest way to find a movie either in the theaters or for at home. They do this by offering a graphic intensive list of movies that looks reminiscent of the screen on a redbox. They couple that with some quick preferential questions and voila, you’re off to the movies.
If you find a movie you like on moovio than the site takes you right to where you can buy tickets. If you’re looking to watch a movie at home it points you to where you can rent the movie either on or offline.
Moovio says that they’re discovery platform isn’t just simple, they call it “ridiculously easy”. We noticed that after a brief tutorial coming back to the site is pretty easy and extremely fast.
We got a chance to talk with Erik Linde, Co-Founder of Moovio. Check out the interview below:
What is Moovio?
Moovio is a website people can use to quickly decide what movie to see, and we mean really quickly! The idea for Moovio came as we were constantly agonizing over the user experiences and the time wasted at existing movie sites when trying to decide what movie to see. Ancient user interfaces, lacking functionality, cluttered designs and information overload were what drove us to build Moovio, which aims to be the opposite of all the aforementioned.
Moovio’s number one priority is to save its users significant time and effort in their movie discovery and decision processes. We do this by providing an interface and functionality that have been designed with the user experience first in mind. For example, we let users display and sort movies using the critera that they care the most about, whether those criteria be critical acclaim, specific genres, box office popularity, the directors behind the movies, etc.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Erik Linde
Prior to founding Moovio, Erik worked as the quant analyst of a large equity fund in New York, but decided to take a break from Finance and ride the Web / App wave instead. Erik claims to be a movie afficionado, but this has come into question after he recently admitted that Dumb & Dumber is one of his favorite movies. Erik first started programming in 1998 after taking an introductory course to Pascal, and has since been hooked (although not on Pascal!). Even though Erik is currently the sole developer at Moovio, he has had great help from…
Per Linde
Per is an industrial designer turned architecht who – when he doesn’t draw futuristic commercial buildings at his day job – is responsible for a lot of the design and interface work on Moovio. In his spare time, he can be found roaming the streets of London and New York in the hunt for the next chic clothing store. He gets intensely annoyed when his brother beats him at computer games but constantly triumphs at whipping up awesome Illustrator designs in a matter of minutes.
Where are you based?
Moovio is headquartered in New York.
What problem does Moovio solve?
Several million people go to the movie theaters every day in the US, and a lot more than that buy DVDs or stream movies at home. The question “What movie should I see tonight?” gets asked so often that it deserves a much more efficient and elegant way of answering it than was previously available. Moovio’s vision is to provide that service: one that can answer the above in a lot less time and with a lot less effort than was previously possible.
There are hundreds of apps providing movie discovery, at least by component, what’s your secret sauce?
Moovio is lightning fast when it comes to quickly zeroing in on the movies that are interesting to you, yet it offers depth to people who want to go into greater detail. Whatever information the user needs is usually never more than a click away.
The user experience on Moovio is also highly personalizable and has been streamlined for quick movie discovery. For example, we allow users to sort and organize the movies the way they prefer: some users may only be interested in critically acclaimed movies, whereas others want to see Action or Comedy movies only; some may be looking for movies with specific actors or directors. Sorting through movies like this is extremely easy on Moovio. We also let users become fans of their favorite movie stars and movie critics, thereby allowing them to always stay in the loop if a favorite movie star appears in a new movie, or if a favorite critic publishes a new review.
To complete the circle, Moovio integrates with 3rd party services such as Fandango (for movie ticket purchases) and Amazon (for DVD / streaming), once the user has decided what movie to see.
What is one dilemma you’ve faced in the startup process?
Attracting users to a new website can be slow in the beginning, and Moovio was no exception to this rule. Our traffic only really began taking off after we started personally reaching out to movie critics and telling them about the benefits of getting their fans to visit Moovio. The way this works is that if a movie critic manages to get a lot of his readers to become fans of him or her on Moovio, then that critic’s reviews will be a lot more visible to ALL users on Moovio, leading to a positive feedback loop where more and more people discover that critic, and thus more and more users become that critic’s fans, which again leads to even more people discovering that critic. Offering a situation like this in which all parties – including the users win – is ideal.
What’s next for Moovio?
An important focus will be on building traffic by continuing to reach out to movie critics, and by getting more press coverage. We will also try to figure out how we can offer value to actors, directors and writers in order to get them onboard as well. New features will of course also be introduced, such as email reminders when an upcoming movie premieres (if a user has asked us for such a reminder), movie matchmaking functionality (i.e. find out whom of your Facebook friends would be good movie companions), etc. With enough interest, we might even add independent movies and movies in limited release to Moovio, and let users toggle between that and movies by major film studios (the latter currently being the focus on Moovio).
Linkage:
Check out Moovoio at their website here
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