When my friends and I set out to save our hometown movie theater, I thought the hardest part would be convincing Hollywood to give us movies.
I was wrong. The real, day-to-day battle wasn’t with studio executives; it was with the technology that was supposed to be running the place.
I quickly learned that the entire movie industry, from a software perspective, has been neglected.
A System Built for the Past
The software a cinema uses is the heart of its operation—it controls tickets, concessions, scheduling, and customer relationships. The problem is, most of this technology was built 30 years ago. For an operator, switching providers is like a heart transplant. You’re often stuck with what you have.
We found ourselves wrestling with six or seven different systems that didn’t talk to each other. Building the weekly movie schedule was done in a spreadsheet, then painstakingly re-entered, click by click, into a clunky scheduling tool. It was a tedious, inefficient process that wasted hours of our time. We were spending our days managing software instead of creating a great experience for our guests.
A New Set of Rules
I knew there had to be a better way. During the pandemic, I locked myself in a cabin in the woods for a year and started building the solution from the ground up. I didn’t want to just patch an old system; I wanted to create a brand new, fully integrated, cloud-based platform designed for the modern cinema operator.
Our mission was built on three pillars:
- Grow Top-Line Revenue: Give theaters the tools to actually increase their sales, not just manage them.
- Increase Operational Efficiency: Automate the tedious work so operators can focus on what matters.
- Improve Quality of Life: Create software that is a joy to use for everyone, from the owner to the 16-year-old at the concession stand.
From Our Problem to Our Platform
While building this new system for my own theater, I realized something important. If we were facing these frustrations, so was every other independent cinema operator in the world. This wasn’t just about saving one theater anymore; it was about empowering an entire community of passionate owners.
This idea led us to merge with INDY Cinema Group, a company run by my now business partners, Ian and Carmen Brown, who were already providing services to 40 independent cinemas. They were facing the exact same technology roadblocks we were. By combining their industry expertise with my software background, we were perfectly positioned to build the solution the industry desperately needed.
Conclusion
We started with a single, crazy idea to save a hometown theater and ended up on a mission to redefine the technology that powers the entire cinema industry. Building a platform from scratch allowed us to challenge every old assumption and create tools that weren’t just better, but smarter.
By using modern technology and machine learning, we’re now helping cinemas not just survive, but thrive in a rapidly changing world.
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