BizSpark Startup Flickchart on Mashable

Cool story on Flickchart on Mashable. 117 Million ratings? Wow!

2 Guys, 1 Passion Project & a Gold Mine of Movie Data

This isn’t your average startup story, nor our Nathan Chase and Jeremy Thompson your average founders. No, this is the story of movie ranking engine Flickchart, a hobby project dreamt up by the designer-engineer duo after having an epiphany — an epiphany that would only occur to the most die-hard of movie fans.

What Thompson and Chase realized back in 2006 was this: Movie rankings are completely arbitrary. The web, with all its possibility, had not yet developed a way to assign values to films that could definitively determine that movie A is better than movie B.

Part of the back story involves a notable moment when Thompson discovered that the Internet Movie Database IMDb ranked Pulp Fiction higher than The Empire Strikes Back. “Impossible!,” he thought, and so Thompson and Chase set out to rectify this miscarriage of justice and build a better movie-ranking engine of their own.

Today, Flickchart boasts more than 70,000 users who have ranked movies more than 117,000,000 times. That’s not too shabby for a hobby project run by two guys and their volunteer staff.

We did a case study on Flickchart last year. You can view that here.