MovieFit Story
- Role
- Co-founder
- Timeline
- 2018 – 2025
- Team
- 2 cross-functional members
In early 2018, a few friends and I set out to answer a question we kept hearing from everyone around us: "What should I watch tonight?" It seemed simple, but nobody had solved it well. We took that as our signal to build MovieFit — a product to help people decide what to watch next. What followed was seven years of building, growing, and learning as a co-founding team. MovieFit became the most formative experience of my career as a designer and product thinker — and it shows up in everything I've built since.
First version
We shipped our first MVP in one month around May of 2018. It was a lean iOS app built around curated Movie and TV collections that we handpicked and managed ourselves. The design philosophy was simple: reduce friction, surface great content fast, and get out of the way. A featured collections view and quick filters on the discovery page were all we needed to get started.
We launched with no marketing budget and watched the app grow on its own. Within a few months we had acquired 5,000 users — enough signal to know we had something worth evolving.
App Evolution
A year in, we had grown to 15,000 acquired users and over 3,500 MAU. We used that momentum to rethink the product more ambitiously. We automated the curation process for featured collections, overhauled the discovery experience, and introduced social features — including Friends Activity and Follow capabilities — after hearing repeatedly that users wanted to share what they were watching. We also refreshed the visual design to match where the product had grown. On the technical side, we moved from Swift to React Native via Expo, which opened the app to Android users for the first time and immediately expanded our addressable audience.
Web expansion
Around the same time, we built our first web platform. The initial vision was modest — a lightweight landing experience that would funnel users from Google search into the mobile app. Discovery was available on web, but tracking and social features lived on mobile only.
Then COVID-19 hit in 2020, and our web traffic surged. What was meant to be a conversion funnel became a product in its own right. We recognized the shift quickly and began investing seriously in the web platform — building out user-facing features, expanding functionality, and introducing monetization to keep pace with our infrastructure costs.
Golden Era
2021 was our peak. We reached over 1.4 million MAU. A major driver was our use of AI to localize content into Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages, which opened the door to a massive audience in South America. At our height, our top three markets were Brazil, the United States, and Mexico.
But we were growing fast without the retention foundation to sustain it. We hadn't built aggressive conversion or re-engagement mechanics, which meant new users weren't coming back reliably. When Google began rolling out significant SEO algorithm updates in 2022, our organic search rankings dropped sharply — and so did our traffic.
Last Dance
2022 brought challenges we hadn't planned for. The war in Ukraine deeply affected our team — one of our co-founders was still there, and the weight of that reality made it impossible to operate at full capacity. Development slowed. Releases became infrequent. The product gradually fell behind.
Over the following years, we kept the lights on for our existing users while we cut costs to a minimum. In 2025, we made the decision to close MovieFit.
It wasn't the ending we had imagined. But looking back, MovieFit gave me something no job could have: the experience of building a real product from zero, navigating growth and failure in equal measure, and learning what it actually takes to ship something people use.
