Movie Medium

After a month-ish of building upon my existing work to integrate the game within Slack, it's paid off!

You can now predict Rotten Tomatoes scores of upcoming movies against your coworkers in Slack.

https://moviemedium.io/slack

Why Slack?

• After playing the game with a couple groups in GroupMe (simple chat app), I realized that when I or others would share the idea of the game, folks wanted to play but didn't want to use GroupMe, or hadn't even heard of it. Totally understandable. I thought about just sticking with only GroupMe as MVP, but more and more people were being excluded b/c of that limitation.
• I always discuss movies with coworkers, and figured playing within Slack would be a welcome bit of fun during the day and way to become closer to my coworkers.
• I've seen other IndieHackers find success leveraging traffic from the Slack app directory.
• I've been hesitant to make the game 100% standalone, b/c that'd be a shit ton more work than leveraging existing social platforms, which make people more likely to play the game together, and I'd have to market from scratch, whereas I should hopefully get eyeballs from the Slack directory

The set up was cold emailing a movie podcaster/reviewer/personality that I’ve been listening to for a while. Wouldn’t consider famous, but they have a solid following.

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Cold Email

Hi [MOVIE PERSON],

Huge fan of your work on [PODCAST], especially the [SEGMENT ABOUT MOVIES]. You’ve all tapped into something really special there.

Inspired by the [SEGMENT ABOUT MOVIES], I’ve built a game where users predict the Rotten Tomatoes Scores of upcoming movies that don’t have reviews yet.

Do you think that type of game, leveraged and designed appropriately, could help you engage with your audience and bring value to your personal brand? If so, would love to have a phone chat to discuss in more depth.

Cheers,
Ryan Yost

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Response to Cold Email (6 days after)

Hi Ryan

Sorry for the delay. Sounds like an interesting idea. What did you have in mind?

My normal insecurity made me not expect a response at all, let alone one that asked to hear more specifics. And while I’d certainly thought a lot about how the Movie Medium game could be used as a means for movie commentators to better engage with their audience, I hadn’t laid out anything concrete.

So after some research, brainstorming, and a little whiskey, I came up with a super tangible value-add that involves Movie Medium and organized it into as compelling an email pitch as I could within a day and a half. The goal is to get a sizable, avid group of movie fans to play the game, and have this authority in the movie space become a fan of it, too, for hopefully some shoutouts, partnership opportunities, or who knows what.

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Email Pitch

No worries, thanks so much for taking the time!

For some context, here’s the current “How to Play” page to get an idea of how the game is designed —> https://moviemedium.io/rules.

I've got a couple thoughts on how to leverage Movie Medium for [YOUR PODCAST] and its community. One tangible, near-term idea that adds value in multiple ways is to start a Slack community for [YOUR PODCAST] Patreon supporters and play the game via a Slack integration.

How that would work, roughly

1. Start a Slack group (free) and invite Patreon supporters.
2. Add the Movie Medium app to Slack, which creates a channel that’s set up to facilitate all aspects of the game (get notified of new trailers for movies to predict, make a prediction, see results and rankings, etc.)
3. Play the game initially with the [HIGH PATREON TIER].
4. Build up and leverage the Slack community in TBD ways

Benefits to you and [YOUR PODCAST]

• This incentivizes folks to become patrons and/or level up.
• This helps [YOUR PODCAST] reach its funding goal.
• Happier, more engaged fans.
• The game of predicting RT scores, then seeing how close your predictions are, can be a segment on the podcast. The audience will be playing along, too, so have a desire to tune in. The “Prediction” and “Post Mortem” content opportunities would be regular and ripe for commentary.
• [YOU AND YOUR CO-HOST] have another platform to build a bigger, more valuable community, promote XYZ, more directly poll your fans about new initiatives, etc.
  • This is all supplementary to other social platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, but the interaction on Slack is just much more intimate and fulfilling, IMO.

Benefits to your audience

• [YOUR PODCAST] patrons participate in a tight, passionate community of movie lovers.
• They are better connected to [YOU AND YOUR CO-HOST] , and all of the content you produce.
• The users get to have fun playing a game that I can attest is a blast to play with friends. [RELATED SEGMENT ABOUT MOVIES] is further evidence of just how enthralling this game is and could be.

Why Slack specifically?

• The Slack integration will be launched by Monday next week, so it can be played seamlessly within a specific channel (web app still an option that works together with Slack).
• There are thousands of thriving Slack communities. I have not seen a good one that's dedicated to movies, so there’s an opportunity here to become the premiere Slack community for movie fans.
• Slack has great ways of integrating 3rd party stuff like the Rotten Tomatoes game, so users can make predictions, see results, and debate movie predictions all on Slack, effortlessly. No need for yet another app (though we have one).
• Examples of Slack channels for this hypothetical [YOUR PODCAST] group that folks would love…
  • The Movie Medium game (a.k.a. Rotten Tomatoes Prediction game)
  • Netflix recommendations
  • Oscar nomination debates
  • Live chat for the Oscars, Emmy’s, etc.
  • More that I’m not creative enough to think of….

This of course would all be dependent upon [YOU AND YOUR CO-HOST] testing the game, coming up with dates and milestones, etc.

I’ve excluded plenty of additional thoughts, nuances, grand ideas, etc. to keep things short. At the end of the day, I think the combination of your community of movie lovers and this game (administered in a seamless, fun way) is a win-win.

Cheers,
Ryan

P.S. The game/platform (https://moviemedium.io) is in its zygote stage, so could be molded in myriad ways. And you know your audience much better than I, so the sort of molding that goes on in the near future can be influenced by your input.*

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Perhaps in retrospect I’d spare some details and clean some things up, but I’ve been plagued by building shit and having it go nowhere, so I’m trying to force myself to be cool with imperfection and the “just ship” mentality.

Because Movie Medium is a social game, I figure movie nerds/fans on Twitter will be a prime way to find leads and users. So I made a Twitter account (@movie_medium).

My goal will be to 1) post the movie/score updates that get sent to users, 2) follow/interact with folks who seem to be avid movie fans, 3) post/retweet entertaining content that my target audience enjoys.

After playing with 3 groups and about 15 people for the past few months, and tweaking as feedback rolled in, I can tell this game is something people want and something I should pursue. Plus, any time I bring up the game, or start a debate about an upcoming movie's Rotten Tomatoes Score, people can't help but want to join!

So now I'm refactoring my hacked together code to be ready (a.k.a. for me to confident) for primetime.