In 1991, prior to the wide availability of the web as we know it today, I used to download and devour the “rec.arts.movies movie database” from Usenet (it was two 800KB text files that I searched with a command-line editor). Created by Colin Needham, it went on to become the Internet Movie Database.
More than a decade later, my love of design and film was perfectly encapsulated in the Mac cataloguing app Delicious Library. And when Wil Shipley suggested version 2 would feature an online component, I hoped the aesthetic value of his app would be enhanced with some form of social sharing mechanism. When the second version shipped with a static HTML export facility, I started thinking about the sort of film-related network I’d like to use.
It took me a further couple of years to firm up my thoughts (coming back to it every six months or so, as other projects allowed) and by the third design revision I was ready to share. I had placed focus in three areas: a film diary/journal, the ability to share reviews using a follower model, and the creation and sharing of lists.
Since 2001 I’ve co-owned a small design and development studio in my hometown of Auckland, and after pitching the idea for Letterboxd to my co-founder and our team, we decided to build it in-house, giving ourselves six months to achieve an initial beta offering. Given the high annual price for using IMDb’s data, we instead opted to use crowd-sourced alternative The Movie Database (TMDb).
In October 2011, after a month or so of friends and family giving the site a workout (and some robust feedback about some of our poorer decisions), I presented a short video and handed out promo codes at Brooklyn Beta. The feedback was hugely positive and registrations trickled in over the next few weeks.
A year on, our thriving community has written over 20 million words in reviews, we’ve been mentioned by the likes of Mashable and the L.A. Times, have published our 2012 Year in Review, and have some great plans for 2013.
Update Letterboxd has exited its invitation-only beta and is now open to the public. We’ve also introduced a Pro membership tier with additional features.