Monday, June 11, 2018
Interview with Scot Lawrie and John Rhodes, Coverfly
For our interview this morning, we caught up with Scot Lawrie, the President and technical Co-founder of Los Angeles-based Coverfly (www.coverfly.com), and John Rhodes, Coverfly's head of Marketing and Business Development, to learn a bit more about the early stage, bootstrapped startup focused on Hollywood script writers.
What is Coverfly?
Scot Lawrie: Coverfly is a few different things. It is a platform for talent discovery, and a platform for screenwriting fellowships and competitions to manage their programs. We have a really robust dashboard, which allows them to track screenplays as they are submitted, and coordinate with readers. It also has a reader dashboard, so that readers for different fellowships can log into a dashboard and evaluate and provide feedback on those scripts. It's also a platform for writers. Writers can submit their scripts to these programs, and the dashboards make it convenient to track, and it also allows writers to track placements and their scores in these competitions. Finally, we also have an industry dashboard so that producers and managers can log in, see the top rated screenplays in our database as well as sort and filter scripts by genre, format, etc. That's been our focus, centralizing talent discovery on the platform. Just in the last few weeks, we generated three great success stories of writers signing with literary managers through our platform.
For those not familiar with how the writing process in Hollywood works, fill us in?
John Rhodes: We took a 30,000 foot view of the industry. I've been working in the entertainment industry for a decade, in screenplay development, distribution, and talent management. We saw that there were a lot of talent discovery programs out there, such as screenwriting fellowships, labs, film festivals, workshops, and writing competitions. Each one has their own process for discovering talent, promoting them to industry, and helping provide career momentum for them. We saw that it was a fairly disorganized and ad-hoc process. As everyone knows Hollywood is fairly closed and hard to break into, even nepotistic. Increasingly, with the Internet and the democratization that it allows in different industries, we've seen a very interesting potential to help unite and tie together all of these different disparate talent discovery platforms out there. We've created a database that writers can optionally join into, to present their screenplays, their positive reviews across different organizations, all in one place so that the industry can discovery emerging talent.
Scot, how did you get into this industry?
Scot Lawrie: I cut my teeth in Philadelphia, developing software in the big data and ad-tech areas. I had a screenwriter friend in Los Angeles, who asked me to work on a service for him. I started working on that, and realized that there was this problem. There were all these film festivals, and screenwriting fellowships, and you had to coordinate all those submissions. I dove into it as a side project, and figured out there was a big problem that the festivals were having. It just sort of took off from there, so I began pitching this around town to all these labs and competitions, who have come on board.
What's the business model for this?
John Rhodes: The primary business model for Coverfly, is we take a commission on the submission fees for the differently organizations. For writers submitting to a writing competition or a fellowship, there is usually a submission fee for them to enter, and we take a small percentage, which is collected by our platform.
How big of a market is this, size wise?
John Rhodes: It's a very niche market. I think one metric I've heard, is that the Writer's Guild of America's script registry sees around 50,000 screenplay registrations each year. I think the neighborhood is a bit more than that, including all aspiring screenwriters in the English language, trying to get their spec screenplays to the industry.
What's the hardest technical challenge for your startup?
Scot Lawrie: I would say it's aggregating all of this data in one place. Lots of these competitions have their own systems, whether that's WordPress, Magento, or Salesforce, which they are accepting submissions. We want this platform to integrate with them, and are building custom integrations, using ton of APIs, and work around automating importing submissions from them into our system. That's been the most technically challenging part. I think that's also the biggest value add for our writers. Before that, they had no way to track what contests they had entered, or even if they did, no way to know what website to enter to see their submissions. We've created a centralized place for that. It's been challenging but worth it.
How is Coverfly backed, financially?
John Rhodes: It's been bootstrapped from day one, and is completely self funded. We've really just been focused on growing organically, and have done very little press, with virtually no marketing to date. It's all been organic growth from our users, who are hearing about it, sharing it, with no outreach on our end yet.
Finally, what's the next piece of the puzzle for you?
John Rhodes: Our ultimate goal is to become the industry standard talent discovery platform for new screenwriters. We'd like to bring some systemization and efficiency to something which has been disorganized, messy, and inefficient for screenwriting talent. We think screenwriting talent is the heart of the creative foundation of Hollywood. Without good screenwriters who dream up these stories and characters, you don't have anything. They're really the creative foundation of a film or TV show. Film and TV is the height of human culture, in many ways, and screenwriters can create a narrative that influences the national and international conversation with a shared emotional experience. I believe we can make the process of discovering unique talent and voices around the world more efficient, and actually increase the quality of the output, and also make it a more democratic system.
Scot Lawrie: I think Coverfly opens the door for lots of writers, who otherwise wouldn't have a way into Hollywood. If their stories get told as a result of Coverfly, and make it to televisions across the world, I think we'll have a pretty profound influence on the way people think and act, and can change the world.
Thanks!