After reading the thriller novel The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, I conceived an idea for a web platform that would be the "IMDB of Potential Movies". I spent the next year conducting thorough market and user research, interviewing authors, book readers and movie fans. Upon validating my idea, I recruited my friends Noel (brand designer) and Ian (developer) as co-founders, and we eventually grew to a full-time team of seven employees. I spent the next 5 years leading business strategy and product design. IF List would become the world's first and largest database for crowd-sourced movie and casting ideas.
IF List successfully raised $650,000 from investors in seed funding. We launched, securing proof of concept, product validation, and market positioning. We have acquired key partners, and reached milestones in user engagement metrics. We have scaled to over 155,000 registered users.
Design Thinking In designing IF List, I studied many entertainment sites such as Hollywood Reporter and IMDB. I found these sites to look too informational. I wanted to design IF List to have as much of a movie feel as possible. I referenced DVD menus as inspiration for IF List's series of hover and animated effects.
User + Market Research I led my team in setting up exhibition events at Book Expo America and Actors' Expo, where we met hundreds of authors, readers, publishers and actors. Through my qualitative interviews, I learned about relevant features to include on IF List, and the appropriate direction to drive the site toward.
UX/UI Design I oversaw a three-person design team, set a priority of product features for development, designed and installed a custom analytics tool to measure user behavior and engagement on the IF List site. I set up weekly design critique sessions with the entire team to review my wireframes and mockups. I worked closely with the development team to ensure efficient communication and precise execution. I conducted live usability studies to refine the product. I also worked with Noel to execute branding and marketing designs.
Pitching/Fundraising I led the investor pitching process, successfully securing $650,000 in capital. I designed pitch decks, presentation material, and wrote business plans to present to and discuss with investors on a regular basis.
Leadership As CEO, I identified and drove the creative and business visions for IF List. I established product development timelines and user acquisition milestones, and fulfilled them. I hired and mentored team members, setting a conducive, safe, and encouraging environment for constructive feedback and discovery.
My market research consisted of film and TV trends, types of movies being produced, recent film adaptations, box office revenues according to original screenplays and adaptations, journalists' article content, movie fan pasttimes, and actor pain points, as shown in this section.
I recognized the need for a solution to an age-old pasttime of movie enthusiasts: that people love discussing who should be cast in upcoming movies or who should have been cast. That's why so many magazines and journalists ask, "Who should be cast in ... ?" But there is no centralized platform to quantify these opinions. Fans have adopted Pinterest, IMDB, Reddit and Deviant Art to share their suggestions, but these sites are far from ideal for this function. Thus, I went on a quest to once and for all design a fun and engaging solution for anyone to propose actors and vote on other people's ideas.
Industry research has shown that many actors feel unempowered during the casting process. Often their agents inform them of auditions, and after trying out, they wait for callbacks. My friend who is an actor, asked me, "Is there a way that I could propose myself on IF List?" This sparked an idea to extend the platform into actors being able to propose themselves, as opposed to just proposing well-known celebrities. As I spoke to more actors, they verified that similar to gaining social status through Instagram followers, getting fan support for an actor in a role went a step further for their career; Instagram and Facebook merely promotes an actor's popularity; IF List helps promote actors for specific roles.
I envisioned a digital platform where multiple stakeholders benefit from IF List, as shown directly below. However, as indicated in my storyboard narrative (illustrated by IF List designer Noel) further below, the main user would be a fan who has ideas they'd like to share.
As I compiled user and market research, I also strategized on operating models and monetization, and began formulating them into comprehensive business plans and pitch decks, which I continuously refined. As the sole creator of these assets, I presented to investors, and successfully obtained $650,000 in financing.
While ideating on features, I often thought abstractly about the IF List entities, pseudo-coded logic, and had extensive discussions with my developers. As a programmer, I like to identify object classes, attributes, foreign keys, join tables, schema, and map out the relational database structure, as shown in the diagram below.
While designing the visual look and feel and object relational map, it was important to understand what the business process flows might look like. In the map below, I diagrammed the journey starting from IF List's outreach to an author, as well as our posts on social media. This map was continually refined, and proved to be a valuable blueprint for our success and goals attainment.
During our numerous iterations, the sitemap and information architecture changed quite a bit. Here is my final documentation of the latest live site's architecture. This has been one of the most important "blueprints" for my team to easily identify accessible data throughout different screens.
We could have used IMDB's API, but we opted to establish our own database so that (1) our site will be a growing, valuable proprietary asset of talent profiles, (2) our talent headshots would have a uniform size and a versatile square shape, with a cleaner and more professional look than IMDB, (3) our users would have an engaging and fun experience that is conducive to casting proposals, and (4) we would not have to rely on IMDB's API and be under threat if its policy ever changed. Below is a comparison of the same actors' profile images in IF List's and IMDB's databases. We believe IF List's actor profiles appear cleaner and more like "headshots" for users to play casting director with.
Our content team created many of the initial talent profiles, but we felt it would not be sustainable in the long run. Thus, we tested the notion of an open database, where users can add talent profiles. This proved valid as our users became heavily invested in IF List and proactively added new actors to our database. This was a great help to us, and we encouraged our users to contribute by including simple guidelines in our forms for them to follow, thereby ensuring the newly added actor profiles retain the consistent IF List signature look and branding. The images below show guidelines for users to follow when adding new actors, and sizing and cropping their headshots. This open content platform has proven successful, as users have strengthened our talent database by adding thousands of diverse international actors, models, comedians, and public figures.
We had a very strong 3-man design team; I led most of the UX/UI efforts, while Noel created most of the visual branding and print materials. Ian brought our designs to life through creative and experimental development. He encountered many technical challenges along the way, especially with my film strip feature, as Javascript was heavily required. We spent many months iterating on wildly different design concepts, and through testing, finally landed on a design that was nearly unanimously loved by our users. The designs shown below are our final live versions.
Below, I layed out two possible proposal scenarios: 1) actor or character proposed already exist in the database, or 2) actor or character do not yet exist in the database. I designed a solution that would require the least amount of effort for a user to propose a new actor or character. For instance, users do not need to input information regarding a new character. I only ask that users include a specific story that the character is affiliated with (if applicable). Secondly, they are only required to upload an image, so other users will see a published proposal with images. The scenario with the actor or character that is not yet in the database will have a slightly different workflow, as shown in the diagram below.
While story and casting proposals were the primary functions of IF List, users reported that they had to frequently visit IMDB to refresh their memory of what movies actors played in. This enabled them to get more ideas and further propose roles for actors. My team had considered using the IMDB API, but felt its JSON data was limited. Instead, I came up with an idea of using iconic images of actors in-character to show their credits, as displayed below. In addition, users can also give "thumbs up", "thumbs down", or reviews on actors' performances - a new way to measure actors' performances. Though this feature was a big hit with our users, we were tasked with extensive content management, and had to hire a part-time content team. On IF List's desktop view, an actor's credits can be viewed through scrolling down a "film strip", as compared to IMDB's credits, which are text-based and static.
We also created a separate credit post page (shown below on desktop and mobile views) to easily promote an actor's recent performance on social media. This format allowed for easy sharing, which helped us gain many new registered users. This actor credit feature with ratings remains unprecedented - no other platform has this capability.
The videos in this section were recorded live from a coded and fully-functioning site on a production server, to demonstrate a holistic user journey, through numerous end-to-end workflows and delightful interactions. All content and data displayed on these videos are based on real user inputs.
Since my team was frequently in communication with our users through email or in-app messaging, we continually developed new ideas based on user insights and feedback. We would iterate through different levels of fidelity while testing on users. When our production code, bug tracking, and refactoring were under control, we developed new features from a backlog of our most prioritized features in sprints, and released after extensive testing on a staging platform.
IF List was able to achieve a Customer Acquisition Cost of $0.03 because our main strategy consisted of key influencers outreaching to their followers for free. These influencers included bloggers, authors, actors, and superfans (super users of the IF List platform). They would often tweet or post on social media to their fanbase, helping us to onboard thousands of users at a time. This successful onboarding existed because these influencers qualified the IF List site to their audiences. Why would these key influencers want to promote us? Because they each have something to gain - I have identified the motivations for each of these influencers:
Bloggers want their dreamcasting articles and posts to stand out and gain more readership.
Authors want their books made into movies, and often partake in "dreamcasting" with their fanbase.
Actors want to be cast in more roles, showing quantifiable demand, to gain increased Hollywood stardom.
Super Fans want their proposals to be seen and commented on by other fans.
Though each of these influencers have great user acquisition potential for us, authors have proven to be most effective. Thus, I have focused mainly on this target group, with a sell-to, sell-through strategy. Early on, this author group helped validate my hypothesis that they would use IF List to build hype and publicity for potential films for their books.
Since book readers were among my key target audiences, I needed a way to communicate and market the IF List brand to them in a fun and engaging way. I conceived an idea of an IF List bookmark "Read the book. Imagine the movie." and a link to the website. I felt this message would be short enough to attract them to visit the website. Furthermore, they would be probably curious about the book they are reading, which would prompt them to visit the website. I sketched the concept for the bookmark, and worked with Noel, who designed it in high fidelity. I printed thousands of these bookmarks, and distributed them at conferences, bookstores, and libraries. The high number of direct traffic results indicate that these bookmarks may have influenced users to visit the IF List website.
After getting the IF List MVP platform built in 2014, I decided to attend and host an exhibition booth at the annual world BookCon event in New York City. The intent was to generate buzz, meet thousands of potential users and content creators, such as authors. My team had to prep for the event, with marketing materials, custom IF List bookmarks, and giveaway goodies. During the 2-day event, we received much praise and excitement from readers and fans, and obtained over 700 registrations! This jumpstarted an exponential increase in user signups throughout the year. Following this successful launch, we decided to attend the same event the follwing year. Below are photos of my team at BookCon and Actors Pro Expo engaging with and getting feedback from IF List fans, readers, users and actors, as well as interviews I conducted.
We referred to Google Analytics and Bluehost data to monitor site engagement; as shown in the report below, the IF List site was visited globally, with unique sessions consistently averaging over 12 minutes. In order to constantly measure KPIs such as new registrations, proposals, votes, and comments, I asked my developers Ian and Lucas to build a custom metrics tool with tabs, which displayed different data sets and key KPIs in real time, as shown in a screenshot below. This helped us assess performance, make marketing pivots, and adjust strategies.
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As I observed how users interacted with our platform, I identified different monetization strategies; users enjoyed seeing their favorite actors, and would welcome an advertisement featuring actors over non-related ads. This positions IF List well for native advertising. In addition, Hollywood production studios rely on data and intuition to cast roles - which play a big role in box office success. I conceived of "IF List Insights" (shown further below) from the big data we are gathering from our users' 3+ million votes. Lastly, IF List is an entertainment entity much like other media companies, and can eventually be positioned in an acquisition.
After capturing enough user proposals and votes, I aimed to monetize IF List through advertisements of the very actors on the platform. My thinking was: since users are proposing actors for roles on the site, wouldn't it be an effective way for companies and brands to remind users of the actors that are ambassadors for their brands? These companies would pay IF List for their actor advertisements to appear on the site. Brands often employ actors as the faces of their brands, thus this type of advertisement would seem native to IF List. Furthermore, fans may enjoy it, as it retains relevance to the site. My design for these ads are shown below (with real actors endorsing company products), utilizing the same side-by-side image like the IF List casting proposal module, except the "if" would be replaced by "for" -- an actor for a brand. These ads would have appeared on users' newsfeeds.
My long-term strategy was to accumulate vast amounts of data pertaining to users' movie and casting preferences, as well as actor correlation statistics. This data would position IF List for a sale to a major film or media company such as IMDB, Hollywood Reporter, or ComCast. Below is a list of film and media companies that have been acquired by entertainment firms. I believe IF List offered unique data that would have been valuable for predicting and modelling future movie and TV show demand, viability, and profitability.
While the IF List team firmly believed in the long term value our application provided from a data standpoint, investors had wanted us to monetize as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we were unable to monetize sufficiently to secure further funding. This is a pity, as IF List was just beginning to gain promising traction. Though IF List’s run is discontinued at the moment, our story is not over yet. We apologize to all our fans and users (as their longing sentiments are shown below). We have learned a great deal from our user community, and we hope one day to return, in a reboot, even stronger! Stay tuned!
"Benny is a creative powerhouse - a very impressive, versatile strategist and design partner on The IF List. He was a fervent, copious ideator with an unwavering vision for where our product could go, inspiring our team to dream big while also honing in on the smallest details to ensure a high-quality visual design. Benny is not afraid to be bold and push projects forward, and his natural instincts around user experience and consumer appeal drove a high level of engagement with our platform that excited everyone."
"Benny was a great leader during my time at IF List. He really knows how to bring his passion and excitement to the team, to bring people together and to get everyone on the same page. Benny was always thinking a few steps ahead and about the implications of what we're doing on a day-to-day basis. He always made sure to align that with the future vision. Benny is a deep thinker about whatever he is working on as well, re-visiting and re-tweaking ideas and possibilities to ensure the best move forward. Benny was a pleasure to work with, and I would welcome the opportunity to do so again."
"I had the pleasure to work with Benny at The IF List, where I worked as a Front End Developer. Working with Benny was an absolutely great opportunity where I was able to grow and learn and contribute to an inspired product. I was always really impressed with Benny's vision and passion for his work and his ideas and strategies. Whenever he would discuss his plans for the next stage, he would look at a situation at all sides and follow up with impressive research, and would be excited and involved at all steps of the creative process. Benny was great at making his employees feel comfortable and making sure that the team was happy and involved. My work was able to thrive and advance while being in a very positive office environment under great direction and leadership. Working with him was fun as well as I had the opportunity to discuss with him various topics that he's very knowledgeable in, like film and technology. I would definitely recommend Benny as a creative strategist and leader."
"Benny is the most upbeat and optimistic person I have ever had the pleasure of working with. He is incredibly passionate about The IF List and has been the driving force behind what is now the largest platform for film and TV ideas. His ability to see big potential in an idea that is difficult for others to envision makes him a true innovator. However, what stays with me most about Benny is that he is smart, hardworking, and genuine - qualities that can be difficult to maintain in a stressful start up environment. I look forward to working with Benny again in the future!"
