The client

Sanzhar Sultan is a director, producer, and screenwriter in Los Angeles. He completed the directing program at Lee Strasberg in New York. He cofounded Wotson with a partner, Emma Wernham, a management and marketing consultant, creative designer, content creator, and copywriter.

The problem

Sultan had a sense of frustration with the movie industry and an idea for how it could be better: “Pretty early in my film career, and as an avid moviegoer, I became frustrated with the movie critic system, especially the binary Rotten Tomatoes rating.” explains Sultan. “It seemed like these aggregators, and some of the critics, would give people a reason to not see a movie, even if they might otherwise enjoy it. So many films are affected by this. And how is that good for business? How is that good for the film industry?”

Sultan wanted to find a better, more democratic model for movie recommendations, and he thought a social network might be the answer. After all, he reasoned, the best recommendations come from people we know – so why wasn’t there an Instagram for movie reviews?

The solution

Wotson, an MVP of an app-based platform (Android and iOS) providing social cataloging was built. The platform allowed users to get recommendations about movies and TV shows from friends.

The MVP development process included two separate phases: Discovery and Development. Sultan and Wernham worked with us to comb over the concept they had, brainstorm new ideas for features and functionality, and shape that work into a finalized “development backlog”: a collection of all the features needed to build a full version of the app. The first phase helped Sultan better understand the app development process before diving into the full build.

In the Development phase Sultan learned how much it takes to build an MVP: “In movies, you work on a thing endlessly until it’s absolutely perfect, and I was coming at it from that mindset”. After 10 weeks of development, they had a working v1.0, but it was far from complete. Coming from their background, Sultan and Wernham’s instinct was to keep working on it until it was perfect. Sultan explains: “That really helped me understand how different the process is – with a movie, once it’s out, it’s done. But with an app, the release is just the beginning.” So against his instincts, Sultan and his team pushed the first version. In the process, we’ve improved engagement, usability, and despite being unfinished, the response surprised the founders.

The results

Without advertising on the initial release (opting to get family and friends to download and try the app), Wotson, with 470.000 movies and TV shows, got an impressive rate of engagement, eventually onboarding thousands of new users: “We had maybe a few dozen people join in the first few days,” says Sultan. “But their engagement was fascinating. Within hours there were hundreds of movie tags coming from those users – I think the average was around 30 tags per user within a day of downloading the app.”

Social media has proved to be an effective tool in leveraging word of mouth, so viewers can find good movies and TV shows that people as they recommend.

The objective was not to make the full product but an MVP to validate the business idea, something that Element 14 made it possible to achieve.