From auteur to entrepreneur
I am Peter Dickinson and I am one of the co-founders of WeGreenlight.com.
WeGreenlight (WGL) is a new community of influencers and innovators who post ideas they’re developing and greenlight the ideas they want to see made. We welcome all ideas but we see people tend to post new startups and projects that are crowdfunding soon.
WeGreenlight was not always this way. When WGL started, we were a production company that was trying democratize the film industry.
It was supposed to be a production company and was both a studio and platform that welcomed movie ideas from everyone. The audience decided what films we would create.
This idea solved a problem I had faced as a film student at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film & Media Arts. While trying to get my friend’s thesis film approved, we came at odds with our school’s frustrating “greenlighting” process that decided which scripts would go into production. Despite the support and feedback we received from our friends, it was a struggle to get the “greenlight” for scripts from the administration. They didn’t quite connect to the story of the film or market.
In that frustration, I came up with a production company that didn’t rely on the limited perspective of a few executives deciding what type of entertainment is made each year. Instead, we would let the audience decide and “democratize entertainment”.
Through the amazing hardwork of our developers, we developed a platform to do this quickly based on the expert knowledge of the film industry we had learned in college. Having studied film, we knew people would most likely post their ideas for movies in one of the following major categories:
- Action
- Comedy
- Action/Adventure
- Romance
To cover our bases for the genres not included, we offered an “Other” category for people who wanted to post french new wave films or documentary shorts.
As a film production platform, we knew we had to offer our own video hosting too. Our custom video upload and playback was one of the most intensive developments we had to do. Shortly after publicly launching the site with friends, family, and fellow college peers, we quickly learned the high cost of video hosting and playback. Our site crashed with just over a few thousand visitors.
After our site froze up and crashed, we decided to rummage through the wreckage and see what movie ideas our users had posted. We were surprised to find one of the most popular categories for the ideas posted was “Other”.
As an academic film auteur, I was shocked to find there were genres of film other than the well known genres that were popular amongst our users. I thought “what genre of film is bigger than action, comedy, action/adventure, and romance”?
I was surprised to find foreign language documentaries was not the new rage amongst our audiences, but instead our users posted ideas they had for new apps, products, startups, and more.
It was at that point we realized our users saw more potential in what our platform could do before we did. Instead of solving an issue in the film industry, our platform could be used to help validate all kinds of ideas.
At that point, we decided to pivot away from democratizing film with the film production company, and offering a platform to help validate and launch all new ideas.
Just remember: when you start a company you never know how it is going to evolve and how the idea will grow over time. [Click to tweet]
As much as you would like to strengthen your business plan, refine your vision, etc — your market WILL determine what you do — so start listening!
WeGreenlight now offers the same real-time consumer feedback our first users gave us when they used our platform. We want to help our users validate their ideas before they spend any time, money, and energy — unlike us.
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