We started Boilerplate in June with the idea of building apps we ourselves want to use.  When we started, we didn’t know what we would work on first, but we had a stable of ideas that we wanted to build.  It’s interesting to look over the list, because a few themes emerge: people are increasingly mobile, experiences should be social by default, and new products should center around existing real-life behavior.

There was one app we just couldn’t get out of our heads.  It seemed so fun, so obvious, and while others had built apps in the space that proved the market, nobody had done it the justice we thought it deserved.  To top it all of, we envisioned a great business model for it.  This idea leaped out of our heads and eventually became our first product: Can’tWait!

Watching movie trailers has become somewhat of an unspoken pastime for many, many people, and sharing those trailers on social networks is now one of the top ways that new trailers are discovered.  Millions of people watch and share trailers every year.  As popular as it’s become, however, there has always been three big problems with the way movie trailers are consumed today.

First, while trailers are good fun and great at getting people excited about the movie, there’s a huge time gap between when the trailer is first released and when the movie hits theaters.  That’s a lot of time for someone to get involved in other things in their life, to go about their business, and to generally forget about that upcoming movie release that they were excited about.

Sure there are advertisements and media campaigns put on by the studios, but these campaigns are wide broadcasts, and have the tendency to miss people if they don’t happen to be watching TV at just the right time. Countless times I’ve gotten excited about trailers, and then months later realized the movie has already left theaters.  Bummer!  As a consumer, I want something smarter than that.  If I’ve shared a movie on Twitter and said “I can’t wait for this!” then I’ve broadcast my desire to go see it, and want something to remind me when that movie comes out.

The second problem with watching trailers today is that I’m not always at my computer.  I’m on the bus, or out at lunch, or standing in a line.  So my options are either to visit a website designed for the desktop and pan and scroll around, or use an app where trailers is a small feature instead of being the main focus.  We think that this experience can be great, even better, on your phone.

Finally, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are fantastic general tools, but people post about everything there.  When I’m in the mood to watch some trailers, I want to see what my friends have liked, but without the baby photos, job changes, and birthday reminders mixed in.  We think there’s room for a movie trailer-focused social sharing and discovery experience in addition to the big social networks.

At the end of the day, we just think people are going to have great fun watching movie trailers with Can’tWait! because we think it’s a better experience than anything else.  We’re most excited to hear your feedback, what you like, what you dislike, and we’ll make sure it gets better and better.

So get it in the app store today and let us know what you think.