Movieo - 100,000 monthly visitors - Discover over 250,000 movies.

The beginning

After delivering two back-to-back client applications in late 2014, my colleague and I decided to take a couple of months off to work on a side project which we later named Movieo.

Since this was a pure passion project, we skipped market research and jumped straight into design. We started by brainstorming and sketching out different user interfaces, then spent some time refining what we thought was the best one. We wanted a simple-to-use filtering system that encouraged exploration, with movies ranked by a combination of IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores.

The next step was building the actual web app. Responsibilities were split, which translated into Ivor working on the client-side, while Vedran dealt with the back-end part of the application. Smooth and performant user experience was our top priority, so we needed all movie data to be readily available in our own database. We decided to write a script that imported quarter of a million movies from TMDB and OMDB API’s, and automatically updated them on a daily basis.

In conclusion

Today, Movieo is used by about 100,000 people every month. Even though we haven’t promoted it in years, the numbers are still slowly but steadily rising.

Looking back, the decision to start our own project was definitely worthwhile. We learned a lot as we went through all phases of the product lifecycle. We received several interesting job opportunities, and most importantly, we had tons of fun in the process.

The path forward

We are involved with the project and we are developing new features day by day.