ZDONK, an early startup set to open its doors this spring, plans to create a market for new comedy movie scripts in a step towards democratizing the movie-making and investment process.  Once enough investors purchase shares of a script, ZDONK will guarantee its production and distribution and investors will reap what the movie earns at the box office and in distribution.  On the creation side, the company is looking to build a network of writers and movie fanatics in order to keep up the flow of new scripts.

Making a movie is an extremely risky affair.  What better way to combat those risks than by measuring a movie’s financial success by crowd-sourcing it from both angles — investment and creation.

ZDONK will start out with a collection of existing Hollywood scripts that have yet to make it to the big screen.  If you’re to believe Entourage, that means there are a lot of great, hidden scripts simply sitting in studio drawers, waiting to be made.  ZDONK wants to let you, the users and investors, weed through that pile and determine which of them are fit to be the next blockbuster hit.

Want to own a part of a movie and invest in hits?  You’ll be able to invest in movies much like you can invest in shares of a company.  Want to be sure a particular movie makes it to the big screen?  Be a part of a group of investors that invest enough money to be sure it happens.  Want to turn your idea into a movie?  Start writing a script and have it ready for this spring, and, if enough investors believe in it, watch your idea become a reality.

The ZDONK founders

I’ve been following ZDONK and their founders since the idea was a mere glimmer in their collective eyes.  Before leaving New York this past September, Zack and Dennis — two of the company’s three founders — sat with me for lunch to share their experience building a company and navigating both the financial and film worlds.

Dennis is a former Bank of New York analyst who’s handling the financial side of the business, setting up the market for their scripts, and providing energy enough for the entire team.  Zack, a child of the Hollywood scene, has been helping the company make connections, find scripts, and create partnerships.  Roy, the third founder, is focused on project management and works with the company’s two other team members, their engineer and graphic designer.

Right now, the team of five is working to set up the core infrastructure for the site, making partnerships, and creating an online presence with their blog.  At the time that we spoke, they were learning to brand their idea and went through several logo iterations.  Since speaking with them, it looks like they’ve started to hit their stride with a collection of fun and informative blogs posts and a great tag line — Hollywood’s not just for asses anymore.

In December, they were in the process of raising funding to both build the site and start acquiring scripts, and they’ve since successfully raised a $1 million first round of funding.  Their next task, assembling their board of directors, also looks to be moving along with top-level experience from Fox, Walt Disney and Revolution Studios.

Image via Wikipedia

Since they’re essentially creating a stock market for scripts, a lot of their costs are spent on legal fees. Their business type — a market for movies — carries with it unique complications and intellectual property issues.

What they’re up against

Movies compete against a host of other media for our attention.  Once created, they’re likely to be pirated everywhere from college student dorms in Boston to marketplaces in Bangalore.  The financial crisis certainly hasn’t helped the industry’s outlook.

Heck, even ZDONK acknowledges what they’re up against in this environment — just check out recent ZDONK blog posts on startups in a crappy economy and the film industry during the financial crisis.

One of the ways they’re trying to combat this is by focusing on what can make money with less risk — comedies. (With a name like ZDONK, what else would they be focused on?) Comedies can be created on lower budgets and have the potential to earn significant long term revenue after distribution.  Also, during these hard times, board member Joe Roth points out, “It’s already bad enough, movie-goers need an escape.”

As things seem to be moving along, it seems now that one of their biggest challenges is powering through the low points and building a community to get behind them.  Working with the film industry requires a lot of connections, and at this point, their idea has been picked at from every angle.  Just ask Chris Albrecht of NewTeeVee, who takes a look at the hard economics of actually funding a movie online — 6,000 investors with $500 each.

At the end of the day, creating a website that could potentially help create movies is a great thing to be able to call “work”, the ZDONK’s founders told me.  This is the movie business, after all.  Everyone has a chance to become the next big blockbuster.

Update (1/4/2009): Since it had been awhile between when I met with ZDONK and when this post went live, it appears some of the post requires clarification.  I asked Dennis if I could re-post his response because it’s a much better representation of the company than I could make alone:

“create a market for new comedy movie scripts – For the most part, we will be working with agencies, development executives and riding the traditional industry channels to acquire properties (eg – talking with people who already have some level of vetting). We definitely plan on engaging writers on the site, but we’ll be doing that more through having “log-line” competitions where the winners develop comedy shorts to be distributed on zdonk.com and then syndicated across the web. Ideally, if a writer was very good, we’d eventually want them to write features for us but we are not comfortable rolling that out just yet.

We will definitely be encouraging writers to use their profile on our site to post their feature films and potentially receive feedback or find representation, but we will make it clear that we will not be scouring the web looking for feature scripts (too many IP issues). That is not to say, however, that a producer wouldn’t see a script they really liked on our site and pick it up and finance it themselves.

- Their next task, assembling their board of directors, also looks to be moving along with top-level experience from Fox, Walt Disney and Revolution Studios This was no biggy but we’ve had our Board of 5 people set for a while now. Lastly (and also unimportant), we raised about $1.4m and are done for now…raising money became too “expensive”.”

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I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days so I’m cheating a bit and re-posting something that I originally posted to thenextweb.com.  My apologies to readers of both blogs, the Google search bots, etc.

Recently, Boris over at TheNextWeb.com wrote a bit about the things he hates about the web. After reviewing the new group socializing startup, MIXTT, recently, I was thinking about one of my favorite things about the web. It’s those rare moments, when ideas, computer code, and virtual screens somehow turn into fresh air and real conversation. I love when the web helps me get outside and talk to real people.

These days, no matter what your profession, it’s hard to avoid constantly being on the web. You write emails, text messages, and 140 character status updates. You talk to people on Skype, your cell phone, and your iPhone (which isn’t really a phone — especially given it’s lackluster reception). You have all of these ways of trying to recreate real, flesh and blood conversation. Every once in awhile, why not use some of the web’s tools as a way to experience the real thing? Go meet some real people. Go visit some real places.

Go to an event

Back in the days before the web, finding out about an event was a bit of a crap shoot. You might see a flyer for the event somewhere or an ad in a magazine or newspaper. With the web, you can find just about any type of event you can imagine. You can find business and tech events on sites like Garysguide or get a list of events by your location with Eventful. You can even find tickets to professional events (i.e., you have an overpriced ticket with a bar code) resold for extra high prices on StubHub, Ebay, or craigslist.

Create your own event

Services like MeetUp and MIXTT help you form both online and real life groups to help both your business and social life. You can create an ad hoc gathering focused on learning something new with a BarCamp event. If that doesn’t work, there are all kinds of other “unconferences” you can create — you can even create your own overpriced tickets with tools like EventBrite.

Find a date

It’s hard to watch TV these days without seeing the dueling ads between Match.com and eHarmony. Real people are using these services, and you can use not-so-real compatibility tests to find them. If that doesn’t work for you, try finding dates based on religion with sites like JDate, MuslimFriends, or, Christian Cafe.

Go to china (or somewhere similar)

Ernst-Jan of TheNextWeb.com has recently been traveled around China for with other bloggers. What a great idea! You can find great travel deals on sites like Kayak, Orbitz, or Travelocity. Read about about whatever the places you choose to visit with Lonely Planet (or get paid to write about them) or crash on a couch with CouchSurfer.

Go outside

When all else fails, fire up one of your favorite directions services and walk or drive to somewhere new. You can look up a nice park using one of your local park websites, or find a team to play sports using site’s like New York’s ZogSports.

It’s been almost 6 months since I posted an Enter Venture update — 6 months!  When Enter Venture started, I released one of these monthly, but moving across the country and joining a startup has affected the frequency of Enter Venture in all kinds of ways.  Needless to say, though, after 6 months, Enter Venture has gone through quite a few changes.

The goal with these update posts is to capture the evolutionary entrepreneurial process.  Enter Venture is about learning to become an entrepreneur, which, as I’ve imagined it, means learning how to do a little bit of just about everything.  It’s a whiteboard for trying out new ideas and new experiences — whether those include attending events, interviewing other entrepreneurs, learning new things, or making your own mistakes.

In this vein, I’ve been working a bit on an update to the Enter Venture theme that will give the site its first real large scale update since its inception.  Over the past few months, I’ve made a few token changes to the site — a picture here, a  widget there.  I ended my affair with my tiny green RSS button — it just wasn’t a good usability choice.  After the Crazy Egg post, it’s relative invisibility was hard for me to ignore.  The honkin’ large, orange RSS button that Neil Patel let me steal from the old QuickSprout theme does a much better job of attracting user attention.  (Neil also happens to be the founder of Crazy Egg — go figure.  Thanks Neil!)

I’ve unfortunately not been the heaviest commenter on other blogs, which is a shame.  Before my move, I had begun to get a taste for what it really means to “develop relationships in the blogosphere”.  I’ve found other ways to make use of social networking services to grow Enter Venture, but nothing quite as lasting or reciprocating.  This is something I need to address.

I’ve taken a Jules Verne-like tour around the world of web startup blogs in search of a better picture of the global startup scene.  It’s not over yet, but so far I’ve covered:

• Asia
• Middle East
• Europe
• Australia
• Africa

As part of that series, I was fortunate enough to have a few of the blogs in the international startup series invite me to guest post on their sites.  Check out StartupsNigeria and TheNextWeb.com for the same great Enter Venture content on whole new sites.  After that, check out the rest of these sites as they’re both excellent.

If you’re really watchful (and read to the end of my posts) you’ll notice that advertising’s been added to the site.  This has been a simple test to judge Google’s topic match and fit with Enter Venture, rather than a sincere effort to make money.  Though, that said, some kind soul was dear enough to click on the links a few times so I’ve earned enough to purchase an iTunes song or two.  In the future, expect to see more advertising on Enter Venture.  For one, I don’t think you can really claim to understand the internet if you’ve never worked with online advertising.  For two, I’ve started to change the way I feel about advertising while working at my current job.  Nothing is really free, no matter how much we’d like to think so and certainly not in this economic climate.

Two of my Blue Venture Community (formely known as Columbia Venture Community) colleagues — Ari Greenberg of Baveo and Dave Whittemore of Ativiti — were featured in Enter Venture’s early entrepreneur / startup posts.   Enter Venture’s 10 startup job websites post blew up and alone accounts for 35% of this blog’s traffic.  And last, but not least, Enter Venture crossed the 50th post mark recently!