Launch Goes Well

Well the launch ended up being a huge success, and we were very happy with the way the event ran. I was a bit nervous, because a few minutes before the event, it looked like no one was going to show. Thankfully, a lot of people ended up showing up late and we  had about 70 people in the audience. It was a great moment for us.  Varitey Magazine, the Santa Monica Daily Press and The Daily Bruin were all present – we hope to get a mention, or a write-up somewhere, but that wasn’t the real victory here. More later – I woke up for a meeting that I thought I had, and I am completely exhausted. Loooonnnnnggggg week.

Two days ’til launch

It’s getting down to crunch time, and I’m starting to get a bit worried. My stomach hasn’t been treating me well the past few days, due in large part to poor eating/stress/going out last night.

What I learned today – never purchase an open-box product from an electronics store. In anticipation of the event, we are trying to complete this “checklist” of things to do… One of them is “purchase digital video camera and return a week later.” I have definitely returned stuff in the past… Last year, I took a week-long backpacking trip to Yosemite, and I purchased a funny looking hat for the trip. The hat is meant to keep your head warm at night, etc, etc… Well, I wore it for the whole week, and thanks in large part to a terrific return policy (will not mention store name, but feel free to email me to ask) I returned it without any questions being asked of me. Hurray for good return policies.

Thing is, when you buy consumer electronics from a store like Best Buy, or Circuit City, they are way more sophisticated. They know taht jerks like me come around every now and then looking to “borrow” expensive consumer electronics for one or two uses. Their way around this is to charge you a 15% restocking fee for any item that costs in excess of $200. There is ONE exception to this rule – if you purchase an open box item, they WILL refund all of your money within 14 days.

I went to Circuit City on 4th and Arizona the other day and bought an open-box Hitachi DV Camcorder. It was marked down signicantly from the original price, and it would have been perfect for our launch event. To my disappointment, I walked home and discovered that it did not have a battery. When I took it back right away and explained the situation, they tried to tell me that it was actually my fault, and I may have taken the battery… After some squabbling, they gave me my money back. I think next time I’ll just go to Costco.

Is this really California? The weather is awful.

WGA strike rolls through Harvard

I like to write. It’s always a rewarding process. Sometimes it feels like exercise, but I eventually break through the wall and can coast for as long as my wrists can manage. But for me this is just a hobby, not a job, and it is unfortunate that artists have to struggle to make a living. That’s why I’m sympathetic to the WGA strike.

I like Cambridge. With the bricks, the history, and now, covered in snow, it feels almost surreal. With some 50 colleges and universities in the Boston area, it’s also a great place to go to school. I was in Harvard Yard when the writers descended. I was looking for a place to study and heard chanting. Curious about who would protest around Harvard, I followed the noise and ran straight into a long line of picket-yielding actors, writers, and other WGA strike sympathizers.

I paced alongside Chuck, an actor from New York, who believes the studio position is unfair. He recognizes the sacrifices that both sides are making by pursuing this bargaining strategy, but insists it’s the only way for the writers to get the compensation they deserve.

Ever the entrepreneur, I told him about Scripped. I explained that I’m a student at MIT and that my friends and I produced a free online screenwriting software and are offering it for free to writers. So instead of spending $200 on software like Final Draft, you can use Scripped for nothing. He thought this is a great contribution to the strike. I like to see it as even more than that.

We created Scripped to try something new in a rapidly changing market. We are artists too and want to provide useful services to the writers who need them. We also think interesting things can happen when a great group of writers shares some cyber space and is able to collaborate on new pieces of writing. Ultimately we want to improve the quality of scripted online video. That’s what drives me, at least. I can’t really speak for Sunil and Zak.

Seeing the writers march and picket through Harvard Square brought much of what I’ve been reading and hearing about home. To see and talk to real writers involved in the struggle, in a region about as far from Los Angeles as you can get, pronounced the importance of the strike and the impact that it is already having.

I was glad to see the strike in person, but I’m more glad about the other eyes and ears they reached. Parents with their kids, tourists, and local residents each got a taste of what the WGA and the writers are trying to do. I hope Scripped can expand the impact even further.

13 Days ‘Till Launch

This is not an advertisement for Apple (you can barely tell that I’m using an Apple from the grainy image), nor is it an advertisement for http://www.scripped.com (the world’s first web-based, free screenwriting software), but it’s just a random blog site from an overworked business school student trying to launch a website. I’m at Coffee Society in Cupertino, CA trying to think of everything that could potentially go wrong with our official launch on January 8th, 2008. I am not making crazy New Year’s plans, had a pretty quiet Christmas, and actually worked pretty hard during my vacation in Spain this past week (except for the 6am night at the discotheque – yeesh).

Zak Freer (a former college classmate, USC Film School graduate, and recent winner of the Hollywood DV Short Film Festival for “Best Horror Short), Ryan Buckley (Harvard/MIT MPP/MBA student, hippie, former consultant and generally good guy) and I started Scripped a little over a year ago and we finally have a beta site. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned over the past year about entrepreneurship, each other, and how optimism needs to be tempered with a good dose of realism. We thought we would have a full site with all of the bells and whistles 8 months ago, we’ve changed the business model at least a dozen times, and we thought we would be way further along than we would be at this time. That being said, we’re happy with where we are, what we’ve learned, and we appreciate all of the support that our friends, family, and classmates have provided over the past year-and-change.

We were fortunate enough, thanks to a classmate of mine at UCLA, to make a connection with the Writer’s Guild. After a couple of successful meetings, we were able to come up with a pretty good barter: the WGA Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of the guild, will send two writers to UCLA on the 8th of January, and we will plan the event. In exchange for filling all of the seats in the audience, and taking care of the logistics, Scripped Inc. gets full sponsorship of the event. I think that’s a great deal. This is a huge opportunity for us to get some publicity and network with the guild (and take business plan number 15 to the guild in hopes of getting support and goodwill). If you’re interested in attending the event, email me at sunil@scripped.com. The two writers are superstars – one was nominated for the Academy Award for Field of Dreams (which he also directed), and the other was the former chair of the screenwriting department at USC.

Tuesday Jan 8th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, UCLA Anderson campus, Panel Discussion about the strike. Come with your questions!

More to come tomorrow – I am too busy burning a hole in my stomach with all of the caffeine I’ve had here… Thanks for keeping up – I’ll post every night ’till the event (and the night of the event, though admittedly, I have a bottle of Absinthe which I brought from Spain and I plan on opening after the 8th is over).