WatchThis Blog i

WatchThis: the first week

Last week-end we officially launched WatchThis, the website that helps you watch good movies. Initially an experiment to replace a Google spreadsheet shared with a few movie lovers, this project interested some friends and friends of friends. We at 0to88 eventually decided to open it to the public.

In the past days, we counted more than a hundred of new users and a lot of nice and useful feedback e-mails. While we were focused on production performance and bugs fixing, many of you suggested that we rethink the way the Movies page works, so we did: it now only displays the movies you haven’t seen and automatically hides the one you mark as seen, which makes it easier to discover good movies.

We also found out that some people just don’t get it. That’s not their fault, it’s ours. We were really bad at explaning the purpose of WatchThis. As Netvibes’ CEO Freddy Mini told us:

You built a great tool, but you don’t present it as a service.

One of the reasons was the front page’s poor copywriting. We were explaining the user how to use the tool (“Add a movie to your list”, “Watch a movie”, ”Leave comments”), without really telling the benefits it has to offer. We redesigned the page and we expect you and our new users to better understand WatchThis as a service.

We are already working on the next big features and we will let you know in time.

Thanks a lot to all of you for being a part of this exciting adventure.