Buck The Critics
Review movies, TV, games & books in one app
I'm a self-taught solo dev, and an 80s kid who genuinely believes movies, TV and games peaked somewhere around the golden HBO years. Somewhere along the way "what should I watch tonight?" stopped being answered by people I trust and started being answered by bot farms and streaming algorithms shuffling me from beige to beige. Why would I watch some algorithmic filler when Deadwood exists?
So I built the thing I wanted: a social version of IMDB. A reviews database you build with your friends, weighted toward the friends whose taste actually matches yours. Because who cares what a million strangers think?
To begin with, that friend-weighted "calculated score" was my whole USP - and it didn't catch. I've got under 100 users, most of them testers. I think the problem was that the USP only pays off once you already have friends in the app, which is a brutal cold-start for a solo founder with no distribution. Too narrow.
So I made a call: broaden the appeal. v4 now tracks movies, TV, games AND books in one app - very few apps on either store that does all four and from what i have seen Buck The Critics is the best of the breed based on the richness of its other features. At the click of a button for example you can get Buck AI to provide you interesting trivia on any title. Major gaffes and easter-eggs, actor controversies, 'what does it mean?', this massively enhances the users understanding and appreciation of the media they consume.
The bet is that "one place to track everything you watch, play and read" is a wider door to walk through than "friend-weighted review scores," and the social layer becomes the thing you discover after you're in, not the thing you need before you start.
Which brings me to what I actually want to ask this crowd:
How did you get your first 1,000 users? Specifically for something with a social component, where the product gets better with friends but you have to get people in the door solo first. I'm confident the app is genuinely good, the problem is squarely distribution, and that's the muscle I haven't built. War stories, channels that worked, things you'd never do again, all welcome.
It's live on iOS and Android (buckthecritics.com). Feedback valued over installs - if something annoys you, that's the comment I want.
James Earl Jones once assured me that if I build it, they will come. I've built it. They have not, notably, come. Working on it.
24 Comments
I would say making it more broad by including other categories like games/books etc doesn't necessarily make it more appealing. It would probably be better for your app to have a particular niche it answers rather than attempting to do everything.
Thanks for the feedback. Alas i tried that. Movies/TV was the only thing it did until V4 came out a couple of weeks ago. I spent 100% of my marketing effort in movie related threads and communities and couldn't make a dent hence my broadening the proposition.
Solo-to-social cold start is brutal, no way around that. One thing that's worked for others: launch the solo utility loudly, then quietly ask your most active users to invite 2-3 friends once they're already getting value, forcing the social ask up front usually kills conversion
Ha ha. Yes i noticed. An idea i am consideration right now is setting up 'influencer' accounts which people can 'follow'.
It would work a bit like a sub-stack or the 'subscribe' feature in X where-in the influencer would commit to reviewing lots of stuff in their niche (movies, games, books), and followers would pay perhaps a dollar or two a month to see their output.
If i can get an influencer with 10,000 followers to then shill the app, it would be a non-trivial income stream for them, and i'd have 10,000 new users who follow that influencer and DONT depend on having invite their own friends.
My problem is getting an influencer to shill the app. I contacted The Critical Drinker with a revenue share offer which would have literally netted him hundreds of thousands of pounds if he bought even 10% of his followers to the app for virtually zero effort and didn't even get a response. You can't GIVE money to these people.
I should probably start with lower profile influencers.. lol.
yeah lower profile is prob smarter tbh. big names get pitched 50x a week so they tune it all out. someone w like 5-10k who's actually hustling for income might actually read the dm
I know you're right! It's just annoying when you spend years working on a great product, which is almost custom designed to be a money printing machine for influencers with large audiences for almost zero effort and they just ignore you.
It's like handing someone a brief-case full of gold and they just look right through you. ha ha.
yah that part sucks, feels like the effort should count for something. but tbh the smaller ones who reply are usually more valuable long term anyway, real engaged following > one big name ignoring you
I’d postpone the “first 1,000” target and prove one repeatable 20-user loop first. Your cold-start risk is real, so measure two separate promises: solo value on day one and social value after one invite.
For the next cohort I’d recruit 20 people from one narrow identity—e.g. Letterboxd power users who also track games—and manually onboard them. Instrument: first title logged, first useful recommendation/trivia view, first invite sent, friend accepted, and day-7 return. Then ask every churned user which step failed. If solo activation is weak, distribution is not the only issue; if solo activation is strong but invites fail, the invite loop/message is the bottleneck.
The strongest acquisition asset may be a shareable artifact that is valuable outside the app: a ranked “what our group should watch next” card or cross-media taste profile. That lets existing users distribute the product without asking friends to join first.
We use this evidence-first loop while building Atlantic’s GTM systems. Disclosure: I’m Ege, co-founder of Atlantic, sharing our founder experience rather than pretending to be an independent customer.
Thanks for this feedback.
I currently have a couple devices in place in this area...
1) MixPanel tracks the users progress through onboarding. Signup only takes about 2 minutes but it is across 5 screens so i wanted to assess if people were dropping off part way through. Though it's outside of onboarding the final step i track to identify an interested user if the first time they submit a written review. I consider this a high intent action and a fair number of users don't make it to this stage. I need to enrich this to incorporate some of your other suggested actions. I also currently have no idea how to identify which users are dropping out so need to add that to my list so i can follow up with them.
2) I have an automated 'nudge' email system which will engage with users who haven't engaged in obvious ways with the app, and also educate them on it's less obvious features.. It looks as follows...
Day 2 - You haven't invited any friends yet (If they haven't)
Day 3 - Don't you DARE fade buck AI
Day 4 - Have you reviewed anything lately (If they haven't)
Day 5 - Ever heard of DNA matching? (A system i invented which recommends titles if they share important production team members with another title they liked)
Day 6 - Share you reviews with the world (If they haven't shared via social media)
Day 7 - Level up your filtering game
Day 8 - Take Challenges (If they haven't)
Day 10 - Feedback survey
That looks spammy (perhaps it is), but half the emails are conditional on them not having completed certain actions, and i make all of the emails funny.
Users also get a 'We haven't seen you in a while' nudge if a user doesn't log in for 3 weeks requesting feedback.
With respect to the shareable artifact the app already lets eusers generate nice images of their reviews so they can share them on social media. I have taken another action point from the feedback i have year to do the same for AI trivia as well.
My biggest struggle and question for you is how i would 'recruit 20 people from one narrow identity'. That is not a trivial task. I am currently warming up a reddit account (unable to make my own posts yet). Would this be your recommended recruiting ground?
This is a very real solo-founder problem. A product can be technically good and still feel invisible if the distribution and positioning are not sharp enough.
One thing I’m learning with my own app is that “high quality” is not always the hook users respond to first. They usually react to a very specific painful moment.
So instead of leading with:
“I built a high-quality app”
I’d test framing it around:
“What frustrating thing does this remove from someone’s day?”
Then make the first sentence painfully specific. The more specific the pain, the easier it is for the right people to recognize themselves.
Also, “barely used” might not mean the product is bad. It might mean the current audience has not felt the problem strongly enough yet.
Thanks for the feedback. Based on the responses i've had it seems peoples pain point is juggling different apps for different media. A major review platform called 'TV Time' closes this week so i've been stalking related tweets and it's largely about people complaining how they're having to migrate to multiple apps. (There's also dozens of people creating AI slop apps in the hopes of catching the refugees, unfortunately i found out about its closure too late to build an import tool)
The multiple apps pain is real though. Perhaps i will focus on this as the pitch. I think people will stay for Buck AI though. I don't think any other app offers the 'here's some instantaneous cool info about the thing you already like' experience.. But as you say, people aren't looking for a product that delivers some great value in an area they've not even considered, they want a product that fixes their pain point so that's how i need to market it.
"I feel this deeply — I'm a solo designer shipping a small tool and the 'built it, now what' phase is 10x harder than the build phase itself. The thing that's helped me most so far isn't a channel, it's committing to writing about the problem publicly (not the product). Every distribution channel I've tried assumed the product was already loved. Would love to hear what channels you've tried and specifically why each failed."
Hi there. Are you talking about your TinyPdf project? Did you do TinyPNG as well because i already use that!
I am currently writing a blog for my landing page, though this is entirely for SEO purposes. I'm a solo guy with limited time and no income so i readily admit it's AI generated. At the moment it's just comparison blogs (Link my brand to the competion in googles brain), but once i get past that ill start drafting the brief and post-editing the output and will perhaps do 1 a week. I have zero expectation that anyone would ever read any of these posts so am not spending too much time on it, but according to Claude 'writing a blog for SEO' is how the game is played. A bit depressing really.
Beyond that the only channel i have significant experience with is X where i participate in general movie related discussions. I've tried being the 'reply guy', adding a pithy or funny comment or image in the hopes it gets shared. Given my account is so young i've had very limited success with this. My X page has had a few hundred views and there has definitely been a small amount of movement. I just think there's no shortcut to getting a sizeable X following.
Beyond that i'm currently warming up a Reddit account. I have no idea how much value i will get out of this channel because it forces you to 'do your time' before it lets you even make a post. I basically spend my mornings recommending movies and games to people on it... It doesn't feel like work which i find frustrating. lol
The cold-start problem for a social-component product might be the hardest distribution problem in indie hacking — you're asking people to bring a network to a product that only proves itself once they have one. When I hit something similar with my own solo SaaS, what actually moved the needle wasn't a channel, it was finding roughly 20 people who already complained about the exact problem publicly, and DMing them individually instead of broadcasting. Slower than any growth hack, but every one of those conversations told me something a launch post never would.
One thing I'd push back on gently: you're framing this as a single distribution problem, but you're actually running four different products under one roof now (movies, TV, games, books). Each of those has its own existing community with its own vocabulary and its own pre-built resentment toward the incumbent (Letterboxd, Backloggd, StoryGraph, whatever the gaming equivalent is). I'd bet one of those four verticals is quietly outperforming the others in your ~100 users right now — do you know which, and have you tried going all-in on just that one community before spreading across all four?
Honestly, outside of my friends i'm struggling to find 20 people. As much as i demand cruel honesty from my friends i never seem to get it. The gush about it, use it every week, yet i can be having a beer with them and notice the bloody title is truncated on their login screen. lol. I guess this is what i'm hoping to get from the Indie Hackers account.
The games and books were only very recently added in v4 which is only a couple of weeks old. I have previously tried engaging with movie communities with X but even with a premium subscription find it impossible to get anywhere. It just seems like one of those apps where only people with huge followings are allowed to participate. If you didn't set up your twitter account in 2012 then you missed the boat.
I am currently warming up a reddit account from where i will start to engage with all 3 communities to see where i get more bite. Notionally though i would think it would be useful to movie/tv fans, games fans and books fans in that order because people tend to watch more movies than play games, and play more games than read books... That said movies is obviously the biggest competition vertical.
totally with you on the 2012 twitter thing. building any real presence on X in 2026 feels like walking into a party in 2015 — everyone already has their circle and you're the new guy asking where the drinks are. reddit's the one platform that still feels open to unknowns, but only if you read the sub rules first and post something actually useful before ever mentioning what you're building. brutal mods, but that's kind of the trade you want.
on the friends thing — you're never going to get cruel honesty from friends because they can't emotionally afford to be the person who tells you the title is truncated on the login screen. the pattern i keep seeing work for other solo founders: find strangers who've publicly complained about the exact problem you're solving and dm them one at a time. they don't know you so they'll say the actual thing. slow as hell but every conversation is worth ten friend-gushes.
fwiw i'd bet books is your dark horse. movies is a bloodbath of incumbents, games has steam basically owning the layer. but goodreads has been coasting for a decade and readers hoard opinions like currency — imo a lot easier to find people there who'll actually engage with a new tracker if it respects their weird niche lists.
your instinct to make it valuable solo-first is right, but i'd go one further - the trivia feature is your actual wedge, not the tracking. tracking is a habit people already have somewhere else, switching is friction. trivia is a thing people screenshot and send to the group chat mid-movie. that's organic distribution baked into the product. i'd make buck AI trivia the hero, dead easy to share out (image card with your handle on it), and let people find the tracking + social layer after. lead with the thing that travels, not the thing that needs a network. also +1 the letterboxd refugees angle, those people are vocal
Thanks for the feedback! That's a great idea. I already give users the ability to generated images from their reviews so they can share on social media. It shouldn't be too hard to do this for AI trivia as well. The only concern with this is that (as with all AI) there is potential for mistakes being generated and then shared but i could just add a disclaimer to the screenshot.
Building an iOS app myself, so no 1,000-user war story yet, but one thing that's been working better than anything else: short-form video showing the app solving one very specific moment. For you that moment already exists in the post — the "what should I watch tonight?" argument. A 15-second TikTok of Buck AI surfacing trivia mid-movie-night demos the value instantly, no social graph required. I'd also lean hard on the "replace Letterboxd + Backloggd + StoryGraph with one app" angle in niche communities — media trackers have obsessive fans who are already annoyed at juggling three apps, and that pitch lands on first touch way better than friend-weighted scores. Curious which of the four media types your current ~100 users actually log most — that might tell you which community to go after first.
Thanks for the feedback. Games and Books we're added only on the V4.0 release so are only a couple weeks old. Among MY friend group i'm seeing about 50% games reviews but that's probably more of a comment on the specific friends i keep.
The app immediately demonstrated its 'find the hidden gems you missed' value though. I've got a mate gushing about the emotional weight of the 2012 game 'spec ops the line' which is a game i wouldn't have thought twice about. Maybe i will try it now.
I was hoping to avoid a TikTok account. My face was NOT made for video and being on camera would make me intensely self conscious. I'm also not sure at the logistics of it... If i'm showing a feature on my phone, i'd presumably need someone else to film me with their phone? Or are their ways to do it where you can just do a mobile screen recording? If you have any examples of your own videos i would love to see them.
I think the shift from leading with "friend-weighted recommendations" to "one place to track everything you watch, play and read" is an interesting one.
The original value proposition depended on users already bringing a network with them. The newer one creates value on day one, which gives people a reason to stay long enough for the social layer to become meaningful.
Honestly i think the biggest day one value, which is something i never expected, is Buck AI. You can literally watch and movie, play any game or read any book and then at the click of a button have the AI generate interesting trivia about it!
So i might watch Iron man and then look up controversies on Robert Downy Junior... Or i might ask it to summarise the themes of Wuthering Heights so i can see if that's the book for me. It's all pretty much instantaneous. You can even ask it free text questions.
It's quite an addictive loop and requires no friends. This is obviously behind the premium tier though. AI is expensive.
I'm glad it resonated.
Reading your reply gave me one thought about what happens once Buck AI becomes the primary reason people return instead of the social layer. I'd rather explain it in the context of what you're building than try to condense it into a few comments.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
That's a good idea.