Entrepreneur

Whatever you do please don’t give up you seem to be very close to real success

A major problem is youre competing with imdb. A site with zero ads. Then i open your site then im immediately met with this.

https://ibb.co/vdbsvzR

It's a horrible first impression that would immediately lose me as a user and i havent even scrolled or read anything.

Also as others have said your server costs seem crazy

random idea not sure it will solve your problem completely but may generate more revenue to continue. Find a way to partner with the streaming sites that have the movies. When someone uses the website or app they can have the option to hit watch and be directed to the streaming site that has the movie or be asked to. maybe even directed to where they can rent it. Maybe those streaming sites would pay for traction like that.

Yeah I took a look at your site and the issues that immediately pops out to me are the navigation and the usability of the site.

It feels like a typical wordpress template that was stuck in 2007. I can see your idea (it's a good one btw) but why would I waste my time on your site when there are others that could get me what I want quicker and easier?

Agoodmovietowatch.com

What would have you done? Any advice?

Cloud platforms are surely way more expensive when your traffic is low. Especially when you’re hosting databases.

Assuming you’re using RDS Aurora and you went with a serverless architecture, I suspect the biggest cost is keeping the serverless Aurora instance warm. So it may not be a bad idea to outsource your DB to a service like Supabase and cut your cost to half almost instantly.

Supabase is also hosting the DBs on AWS, so as long as you match the regions, the latency should be OK.

Also feel free to let me know whether I was spot on or way off my assumptions. :)

Have you considered turning it into an app instead?

Have you considered turning it into an app instead? Easier to access, you can monetize the downloads instead of having it as a subscription service, and have non-mandatory in app purchases. This is a fantastic idea, but if you want to continue to do this, you will have to think of monetization. I’ve had ideas just like this in the past and you’ve done a great job with it.

Hey! I think that $300/month is outrageous. I’m interested to look at this problem with you and help you reduce the costs. At the end of the days, this is part of my job. I got myself a great computer for £1200 for my projects, and by hosting everything at home, I’m saving money and gathering more data. Contact me if you are interested on my help.

Your situation is the same as mine.

If you can find a cheaper monthly hosting, and don't really expect this to be anything more then a hobby, then I suppose go for it

That said, your UI/UX feels mega dated, very mid-90's.

In order to really get a userbase, especially one that pays, you would need to revamp into something far more visually appealing and modern and offer alot more then what you currently do

trakt.tv is a good example

Maybe create your own local server? Hop on marketplace and eBay and get some cheap hard drives. Also this isn’t as important but maybe consider a name change?

It's always difficult to advise when it's about whipping out your bliss and playing with it in public. Plenty of people have been shocked the positive comments they receive were never accompanied by any money.

My product validation is completely different then real results. Advice?

Need a bit of help; Created an amazing product, posted some images on social media, all the feedback has been extremely positive... but ZERO sales. How do I change this?

How To Crash Your Startup

So shocked they write "zero" in all capital letters. Point being, from a pure business standpoint it will be very difficult to monetize at any more than ramen level. What you actually decide is up to your preference for keeping this going.

I mean the best option here would be to increase your traffic to a point where it's sustainable off adsense, you can choose to do this through investing in SEO, branding and marketing to try to get it to that point, or youll have to kill it. If you're not good at that stuff, consider pitching for a co founder to join that can take you to that level. But it seems like a cool product, if you do end up killing it, put the idea and inner-workings out there and maybe another indie founder manages to execute it that is just as passionate about this. Another idea is to try your luck pitching to integrate with a bigger website that already has traffic but not as advanced features.

This is a feature not a business. If you have proprietary code try licensing that to a bigger movie website, but otherwise I don't think anyone's going to pay for this on its own.

Menu isn’t very mobile friendly

No, don't you dare killing your efforts. People here are looking the problem the wrong way. You are not trying to pay less. You are looking to monetize your stream of clients. HOW?!?! Just make a shop man. Sell things yourself. You Understand your customers better than no one. Start selling.

Why not put affiliate links to all the shows/movies for them to buy on whatever platform they are available? I.e Amazon links

To some this may seem like a daunting task but I’m sure a script and a few external facing api calls could probably make it happen. As far as finding other ways to make it profitable, I would suggest trying to sell ad space directly to independent long form content creators, create an email list that eventually converts into affiliate sales or ad rev, published sponsored posts, add a members only section to your forum, or even just advertise the paid service better (it’s not super clear to me that you are asking for donations like Wikipedia for example).

As far as offering this service as an api, I think that is good too and don’t think it’s as much work as you might think, the bulk of the code already exists, it just needs to be repurposed and delivered… you also can start with basic features and build it out, but I get that development work takes time and is annoying. Congrats on the traffic and good luck!

This sounds like a passion project, not a business. Take a page from the wikipedia/Godot/etc book and simply ask for monthly donations from users with no perks because you're one person offering a free service. I'm sure you'll get some bites.

You can try putting a donate button? See how much converts monthly?

Maybe another site would be interested in buying the technology. Have you approached anybody yet? IMDB?

I believe the business model is wrong. The way is currently set up is not and won't bring you revenue, not only for maintenance but to grow it to a bonafide business. If you have no direct competition or your search filters are unique compared to other websites that are similar, you can partner up with someone who can market it to, perhaps, a streamer or a platform that already has a good monetization strategy. I think you bring something of value and if you're inclined, reach out to me to talk more.

You really went for it so nobody can knock what you achieved.

I've learnt good ideas don't necessarily mean success.

I wonder if you could've hosted for cheaper though. $300 is a heck of a lot.

First of all, this looks like a really cool passion project. I’m sure you learned a lot while making it and you had fun developing it.

If it doesn’t make money it’s just a hobby. You are posting about this hobby project in the Entrepreneur sub so I assume you aspire to become a professional someday.

Since you rather abandon your project than make it profitable I would suggest selling the entire website and source code on a site like Flippa.com. Someone might like what they see and find a business model for it.

If you want to keep your site however you’ll need to lower costs if possible and increase earnings most importantly.

Think about what your site offers to people, how it brings them value and how you can make money out of it. There have to be possibilities.

Hey first off, I’ve found passions projects as the best way to learn.

Many of mine have only resulted in expense, but what I’ve gained in learning has almost always been worth the expense.

There are some good ideas here on reducing cost or increasing revenue. Maybe they will work…

However what I like to do from these learnings is find a way to turn my learning into profit, not necessarily the project.

For example, I’m sure you can find a client who would be interested in building a “discovery” app that uses algorithmic abilities to serve its customers the best recommendations.

And apparently you know how to do this, here is the proof right in front of us. You even found a potential path to profitability for an entrepreneur who has the right marketing skills.

That is how I would use this…

Sell your ability to deliver this concept or sell the entire thing on a website like flippa to a marketer who doesn’t have the tech ability

Good work

A $5 subscription seems to be too high for the service provided. Netflix / Spotify/ YouTube are just x2-3, but they are providing actual content (music/movies/videos) and paying authors at the same time. I would suggest $1, this should bring you more subscriptions

It's still too much. 200k items in a database is nothing. I'm familiar with elasticsearch as well.

What size server are you running? Are you sure you needed an EC2 instance? Why not lightsail instead?

Are you using RDS? Redundancies? LB with multiple servers -- doesn't look like it.

Zoho for email was a good choice -- are you using the free tier?

Your bill for your infrastructure and what is needed is high.

Now onto the revenue. Even at $7 you would barely be able to pay for a lightsail instance and break even. Though, it could buy you some time with the 3 mo free.

Your traffic is decent. But, your offering is near impossible to find. Are you referring to Patron?

How many of your users are on mobile vs desktop? On mobile it looks confusing. How many are repeat users? I read some, but percentage? Why do they return? Is what you're offering for the $5 worth it to them or how did you decide on the "perks"?

When you talked to your users what did they say?

I visited your website and thought it is way more complicated/versatile than I expected. You even have added a dark mode. You are so passionate about this project, and you must have learned a lot in this journey.

However, I have several questions as follows:

1. If I am not wrong you started with two categories (movies and TV shows), and then expanded your scope to books, music albums and people without considerable revenue growth. Right? Why?
2. Have you ever talked with your users about the exclusive rewards of being a supporter? Did they think those rewards are attractive enough for a subscription?
3. Can the cost be reduced significantly if there were only the two original categories (movies and TV shows)?
4. Have you ever thought of just using an embedding to represent an entity (titles, people, etc.), instead of the heavy text based Elasticsearch? Or you simply just use its vector search?

Wish you the best to find your way out.

Admittedly I’m a very junior developer who knows nothing: why can’t you just dump the website in vercel or a droplet/docker container? I feel like that’s enough for 14k sessions no?

For the db I’m guessing planet scale doesn’t cover your basis

Will your server costs grow with more traffic, or are the costs pretty much set with the database.

Like if you get 100k visitors in a month will your costs be $3000 USD? In this case pull the plug.

If it is still around $300 then you might have something here.

It’s a cool idea, but 99% of users are going to end up on IMBD, and I don’t think you have the money to advertise or run operations.

Maybe take it as learned experience about operating costs and put it in your resume. AI generally requires high processing costs $$, does your app really need this? Maybe you simply can’t support that feature due to costs.

I would also consider revamping the UX, seems a bit cluttered.

Perhaps instead of subscription, you can ask for donations(like what Wikipedia and Adblocker do). You'd be surprise how many people might be willing to support. Since I assume you’re providing this service ads free. Donation in crypto (bitcoin) is a plus.

I'm a paid member of episodecalendar.com, which seems to be a similar sort of site. I got my friend onto it, and she's a paid member too.

I did a lifetime plan, and I don't remember what I paid, but it's $39 US at the moment.

If the dude had to shut down the site and asked for a bit more cash to cover expenses, I'd probably chip in. It's probably not worth me paying $10/mo for, but it's a website I find useful.

I think the main reason I upgraded to a paid plan was because he had a limit on how many shows I could add to my list.

Having looked at your membership options, yeah, dude, $5/mo just seems. I dunno, I hate paying things like this monthly. It's useful, but I could live without it. You should at least have multiple pricing tiers.

And uh, "be our first supporter" looks sad dude, take that bit + the "backers list" out. You ever seen a begger shaking an empty tin? There's always gotta be a coin in there to make that rattle, to show that someone else has shown a generosity that you're at risk of not having.

Is there some sort of social aspect you can incorporate? Make it like a good reads but for different media.

Also agree with the other user that it needs a UI refresh, and the post about affiliate links is brilliant.

ui is huge turn off for me

I second on the affiliate links

Just curious, when you added the subscription option did you promote it at all?