Interview with Neeren Patki, the CEO of AddToTheList [2023]

Hi, thanks for having me. My name is Neeren and I’m the founder of AddToTheList. I, myself, have always watched a lot of movies and TV shows. I would often discuss them with friends and I would use a simple notes app to keep track of what I liked and what people had recommended. But it was a pretty poor way to handle this and that’s why I created AddToTheList; to help solve this problem of staying organized in the ever-growing world of content.

I studied Computer Engineering and had worked on side projects in the past, but AddToTheList was one I was extremely passionate about as it solved a problem I had. Because of my background as a developer, I set out to fully turn this idea into a useful website and app.

Users can track what they watch with AddToTheList. There’s just so much content available now with all of the streaming services now. It’s hard to know what’s good, what’s available, and what’s returning or coming out. For shows, the app will remind you when new episodes come out and they will show up under your Watch Next queue. You can see upcoming movies and shows as well as their ratings so you can decide if they’re worth adding to your list or not. Oftentimes, shows and movies can change streaming services, so if something is not on your streaming services at one point, you’ll get a notification when it becomes available on your saved streaming services.

Yes, it does. There is a Coming This Week section on the home view that shows everything coming out that week. There are also Smart Lists that show all upcoming movies, and shows airing as well. Also, if you add any upcoming movie or show to your list, then you will get a notification when it comes out.

It’s honestly hard, especially with this project being in its early days still. So there’s a lot of time being spent on it. Sometimes you have to remind yourself to disconnect and spend time with friends and loved ones.

I like that I wear several different hats. I’m actually developing the app and project itself so that’s always fun. I mainly try to make sure to get a good balance between the different aspects of the project: promotion, social media, editing, developing, blogging, etc. The variety helps keep everything fresh and interesting.

The goal is to get an Android app up sometime in the future, but currently the focus is on promotion and getting more users. But the Android app is definitely something needed as there are users who want it.

I think one issue is some apps don’t handle tracking TV and movies together that well. And I think we’ve done a good job of handling both in AddToTheList because you can track shows by the episode and your watch history will show which seasons of shows you’ve watched. As for market competition, it’s tough, but we’re trying to carve out an area that will attract some users who have a need to track both TV and movies as we do have several other useful features to go along with that.

Try to address an issue that you yourself have. See if there’s anything out there that does something similar and see if you can improve upon it or make it fit your needs better. Once you have that, the best thing to do is to just start allocating some time to it every day. AddToTheList wasn’t built overnight. It took a while to flesh out, but a little bit of time was spent on it every day.

The goal for AddToTheList is to grow its user base to a substantial amount and to build a good community on the site/social media where discussion and love for films and TV can be shared. Hopefully when this happens, then the brand will have more value and meaning to users. Then we’ll be able to get more into producing video breakdowns of movies and shows as well. There are also more features we will plan to build out, but we want to grow the community at the same time.