Ask HN: Review my Startup MovieSaints

[prishiraj]

https://www.moviesaints.com

MovieSaints is a website that curates unique independent films from around the world and makes them available to rent-on-demand. If you like a film, you can directly support the film’s creators, and if you don’t, you can get a refund.

We built MovieSaints to serve the needs of filmmakers. We want to ensure that a significant portion of the revenue earned on each film goes towards supporting the film's creators. We’ll release a small number of films, for now just 1-2 films at a time, so that we can focus individually on each film. We’ll also collaborate with the filmmaking teams to promote every film that releases on MovieSaints. We are already building tools into MovieSaints that enable audience building and audience engagement; and we’ll continue to improve them further.

We've been working on MovieSaints for a while (over 2 years) and we just launched about a week back. Please let us know what you think.

[wj]

As a former filmmaker I like what you have done. It seems as if you are effectively the distributor? The site looks nice and the movies sound interesting. The refund options are a bit confusing. The biggest question I would have would be about awareness. How am I going to learn about the films and is that going to happen when I sit down to watch a movie?

I imagine that many people are like me and sit down to watch something but aren't 100% sure on what they are going to watch so we browse through are Netflix/Amazon queues. I think Roku might have a combined browse/search feature that would help. Build up the Twitter following and reach out to indie filmmaker to see if they could mention you in a tweet. I could see Mark Duplass liking your site and tweeting about it.

Keep up the good work!