I founded MoviePass in 2011. It was a good idea at a fair price. Then Helios and Matheson bought it, dropped the price to $9.95 a month for unlimited movies, and turned my company into a bonfire.
Unlimited movies for $9.95 a month. A single movie ticket costs $15. Yes, we lost money on every customer. The plan was to make it up on data. The plan did not work.
We went from 20,000 subscribers to 3 million in six months. The growth was insane. The burn rate was more insane. We were losing $20 million a month.
They burned through $150 million of investor money subsidizing movie tickets. That's not a business model. That's a charity for people who like Marvel movies.
I told a conference that we tracked where users drove after the movie. The privacy backlash was immediate. I misspoke. But at that point, we were making a new mistake every week.
I bought the company back out of bankruptcy for almost nothing. The brand still had love. People missed MoviePass. They just didn't miss losing $20 million a month. Neither did I.