Streaming alerts on all saved movies

Today we’re super excited to announce our latest feature, streaming alerts! Have you ever wanted to watch a movie or found a great title on MyZeus but realized it wasn’t available on Netflix? No more troubles, we’ve solved that! Now, whenever you save a movie for later, we’ll email you when it becomes available!

Extend your reach by making MyZeus work for you. Remember, you can always text in movies you want to watch later and we’ll email you when it becomes available on Netflix. It’s super quick and super easy.

Follow musical artists with great movies

We’re really excited to announce our latest feature. As of today we’ve given our community the ability to manually follow musical artists. In case you don’t know, our goal is to allow you to discover movies based on all the variables made up from your life. Music being our initial and most popular way.

Many people don’t have an Rdio or Last.fm account, although we suggest using both of these great services. But even if you did you might find that a certain musical artist has great movies in them. For instance, Battles has some incredible results like Helvetica the movie. But maybe you didn’t listen to them on Last.fm or Rdio. Now, you can freely follow musical artists and your friends get to see the movie results you thought were cool! It’s super easy.

All you have to do is search for a musical artist and click the follow button. It’s as simple as that! Your friends will see that you’ve followed that artist and everyone can see all the great results.

Remember, our search tool is completely open to the public. If you want to see where a movie might be available to watch instantly or see all the movies that a certain musical artist has music in, now you can!

“A fully interactive woman”

With MyZeus in alpha we’ve uncovered some interesting pieces of data about people in relation to movies, their interests and their friends. We’ve taken some of the most interesting pieces of data and portrayed them for you here.

As you can see, even with a small number of people inside MyZeus there’s an equal amount of discussion happening about movie titles as there are sharing of movie titles. Discussions happen to begin around the movie title or context and 10% of the time end up continuing outside the origin (about the movie).

Us, the creators have obviously followed the most amount of people, but we know these numbers are going to be quite different with our beta release. Horror movies have become the most popular shared genre thanks to Jon Rohan and the most interesting share goes to Ian Eure for Virtual Girl which is where our wonderful title comes from.

There’s still time to get on the beta list

Alpha King

Zuesian’s (?), your co-captain Patrick speaking. Today I wanted to share some fantastic news and some hands-on style suggestions. First and foremost I want to continue to thank everyone for the overzealous amounts of support from the Chicago community. Special shout out to Harper Reed, Wilfried Schobeiri and Jason Fried this week. Second, I am utterly pleased to announce that we have begun using our product in an Alpha stage.

MyZeus has had a long journey to get here. Many roads have been traveled with plenty of U-turns, stops at gas stations asking for directions and 30-minute bathroom breaks in the middle of no where (not sure on that last one). But our journey has since taken us to a happy place, a place I am pleased to say is fun, interesting and refreshing. The MyZeus team has been using the Alpha for roughly one week now and let me say, we’re having a blast. We’ve found interesting movies we never would have seen before, we’ve watched them and suggested more to one another. For us specifically, it’s been addictive by nature.

Aligning with the last post about buzz-words and blog post heavy topics, I want to suggest something that I can personally attest to working. Jason Fried has mentioned production environments similar to this in the past and it continues to be a relative topic by many to this day. But the idea of pushing for an Alpha and using your own product is something I strongly suggest for everyone. It may seem logical but you learn so much about what you’ve built. It drives you to create features you didn’t realize you may want. It helps you align user communication, figure out what did and didn’t work early and continues to keep you and your team excited about what’s being built. After this specific experience I would fully side with the folks who say, “Alpha now.”

We’re letting people in slowly as there’s plenty of land for us to see in our journey. We’ve stocked up on Cheeto’s and are ready to get back in the car. Continue to get your name on that beta list and join us on Twitter and Facebook to show some more love. Thank you!

It’s called startup for a reason

Welcome to the MyZeus blog! We wanted to take a moment and share the progress. If anything, we hope some insight into what we’ve been doing over the past few months gives some perspective. There’s numerous amounts of opinions in having a startup in Chicago, we hope these insights can shed some small glimmer of light.

Let’s talk about what we’ve been up to first. Currently, were in the process of raising seed-stage capital for our company. With that money we hope to hire some of the most intelligent engineers and some of the happiest creative culture leaders. What most don’t talk about or realize is that there’s plenty that goes behind raising a round of funding. First and foremost the documentation. You need a C-Corp ready company, vesting terms for the founders (recommended), C-Notes (convertible debt) with terms, a well estimated pre-money valuation and a few other essential items. The difficult part is finding the proper time to coordinate those tasks, manage each angel investor who might be interested and all the meanwhile not loosing grasp of your product. Remember, you created a company to create a product, not to gain investor capital (let’s all repeat this as our morning mantra). It’s easy to loose steam when your daily tasks involve speaking with 5 people who think your idea is an utter failure and you should quit while your ahead (not our case, but many others).

For us, we’ve been graceful enough to have a slew of informed pessimism (see: The Positive Change Cycle) hit our company like a brick wall (see: Sarcasm)  but also a good deal of informed optimism. Our company is fueled by the idea of proving others wrong and living by producing a tangible reality to dream-like products. We thank creative and intellectual leaders like Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who share our same definition of technology. Jeffrey has joined our team as an Advisor and quickly refueled us with creativity and insight to continue our journey in directions we’ve been blind to.

Bubble, MVP, Ninja, Rockstar and every buzz word aside. Our hopes is that more people begin to stop doing everything they read about and start making their own rules. Or else it scares us that we could lose the idea of creating innovation. Remember the founders that share our same definition of technology all created products not because a blog told them how to but because they needed to. But let’s end this mini-Buddha session early.

MyZeus is in such a great place, we’re transitioning into the company full-time and we’ve got something we’re really excited to share. Our goal is to create a useful, fun and intelligent product that makes our lives better. If you’d like to participate in our very early stage beta, please sign up on our home page. Feel free to contact either Patrick or Brandon and start some discussion, we’re here for our community! As always you can also follow us on twitter as well.

Sincerely,

The MyZeus Team.