Screena^{{current side hustle}}

Indie filmmakers are sending their work into a black hole.

Film festival submissions, distributor pitches, producer reviews - all sent via password protected Vimeo links or Google Drive folders. The filmmaker has no idea if the submission was watched, skipped, or opened at all. Worse, it looks sloppy, uncurated and uncontrolled for the person watching, after the film maker has spent countless hours crafting a curated viewing experience for the audience.

Big studios use Frame.io and Shield which are expensive, collaboration-heavy tools built for teams. Indie filmmakers and graduates have nothing between "blind submission" and "enterprise DRM."

The gap is clear: a lightweight video hosting platform that returns meaningful analytics. Did the festival director watch it? Which scenes held attention? Did they forward it? That data changes how a filmmaker pitches, what they cut, and whether they follow up.

Film grads, indie directors, small production companies.

Two sides to the platform:

• Senders: filmmakers uploading work for review. They need a professional-looking share link, viewing analytics, and an audit trail that shows the film was actually opened.
• Recipients: festival programmers, distributors, producers. They need a clean, fast viewing experience with no account creation friction.

The paying user is the filmmaker. The recipient experience is frictionless by design - any barrier on that side kills the core value.

Every touchpoint in the recipient journey is designed to feel considered. When a reviewer opens their link, a glowing invitation letter emerges from an envelope before the player loads. These theatrical touches are intentional: early adopters will come to Screena because they want their work to feel premium, and every layer of polish compounds toward a broader wow factor.

Three weeks in. Interviews done. Early designs up.

This is a side project I've been chipping away at, mostly from the business development and UX interview side, but I've had a lot of fun crafting a visual identity and taking my time with it because for creatives, this will live and die by the aesthetis as much as the usability. I've spoken with indie filmmakers and film school graduates about how they currently send work and what they're actually trying to know on the other end.

The signal is strong: the pain is real, the current workarounds are embarrassing, and anyone who's submitted to festivals understands the frustration immediately. No one has built the obvious thing yet.

The early designs below are the beginning of that, a clean, fast sender dashboard and a recipient viewing experience that feels like the work deserves to be seen.

The upload flow is the filmmaker's aha moment.

The sequence from upload to first analytics ping needs to feel effortless and exciting. A filmmaker uploads their film, configures who can see it and for how long, then shares a link. The reviewer receives a gated, cinematic experience. The filmmaker watches the data come in. Getting each step of this right is the design priority: it is the first moment the product earns trust.

Wireframes

Validate with 3 paying users before building the backend.

The plan is simple: get the design to a state where three filmmakers would pay for it before a single line of backend code is written. If the core proposition doesn't convert, the product isn't solving the right problem yet.

The core loop I'm testing: upload a film → generate a share link → watch the analytics come in → follow up with confidence. If that loop is valuable, it's worth continuing with a proper build.

My goal is for this to become a self-sustaining platform for passive income. Due to its PLG nature, my best case scenario is that once validated, the product can live a life of its own with minimal intervention from me. Either way, I love building and this has been a fun niche to explore.