We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Pablo Rodríguez Gómez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Pablo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

When I began my professional journey I didn’t really picture myself as an entrepreneur, let alone a future startup founder. I started my time in college as an aspiring filmmaker, lucky to have been accepted to my reach school, Emerson College. It was a journey that started with ambitions of greatness, of becoming a director, a writer, an actor. By that point, I only had a handful of short film projects under my belt, my best ones part of a summer program I had taken the summer prior. As a high schooler, my academic trajectories were more reflective of someone who would delve either into STEM or political science with a rather important caveat of a barely above-average GPA. Trying to convince the best American film schools to take me was a challenge, on more than one occasion having my rejection letters quoting my below-the-norm GPA as the determining factor.

When Emerson College took me in, I threw myself into becoming the next great filmmaker from Mexico. I wrote three screenplays, applied for student film projects for the highest positions in directing, writing ,and producing. I found myself in an environment full of people like me, more talented, more experienced, and more understanding of the organizational and social structures. My confident sauntering into the system didn’t go quite as planed. I recall coming across as arrogant in my excitement, too inexperienced for my immediate goals. I’d have to start from scratch and make my way up through the creative fields. I found myself doing set and production design work, camera operation, production assistant work. I knew that for me to become the writer, the director, the actor I wanted to be, I’d have to earn it and learn it.

When the COVID-19 pandemic came in my second semester, that whole plan was thrown into disarray. Suddenly, student groups were having mass vacancies in leadership positions, productions lost cast and crew members and had to readjust. Suddenly, the short film I was doing production design work needed a producer, and I was offered to take it up. In the fall, back on campus, I delivered the film, doing three jobs on it. The student group that funded the film, Frames Per Second (FPS), found itself in need of a new president, as the line of succession had now graduated or left the school. And I was apparently the most experienced and viable option to take over, the sophomore who a year before was humbled due to a lack of experience.

When I took over FPS on January of 2021, our organization faced budget cuts, a lack of new projects, and an inexperienced leadership team. By the time I stepped down in December, we broke our screenplay submission records, were back to producing films, hosting weekly workshops, and all the while brandishing an expanded budget. It was at that time that Auteurnet was first conceived. I noticed that in previous years, FPS films had a problem of lacking follow-through from filming to final project delivery. Students seemed eager to go on set and have fun but very little incentive to take that footage and deliver the final cut of the film, a problem since the organization was spending about $10,000 every year in those projects without accounting for the equipment purchased to film said projects. I realized that the next step for FPS was to have a distribution branch, adding an extra step of our film production process. When our films were completed, money would be allocated for the film festival submissions to allow the film to potentially win awards and increase the exposure of the filmmakers themselves. The idea was to increase the visibility of our creatives and incentivize our productions to have a finished product for their own benefit. Furthermore, I realized it was a worthwhile effort to expand and offer those same services to all students regardless of organizations or context, running a selection process to find our films to support.

The only catch we’d have, is permission to present the selected films on the FPS website after the fact, a place where students would be able to point towards as their portfolio and show how they were involved in a community of filmmakers. I stepped down from the FPS presidency to become its first distribution manager. By May of 2022, the time I finished my work setting the distribution department, I had been personally involved in either the production or selection of five film projects, brought FPS back from collapse, and left it with a brand new branch with which the organization could cement itself as Emerson College’s distribution hub. I never directed a film. I never produced any of my screenplays. Instead, I emerged with an idea for a new type of website, a community that mixed the best of all the services that emerging filmmakers could need. I came up with Auteurnet.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I feel like I went on a huge rant on the previous question so I will provide a more abridged version here!

I am from a background of film with a pivot into entrepreneurship upon graduating college. I set up Auteurnet during my Optional Practical Training year post-grad, a permit that allowed me to work in the U.S. on anything related to my field of studies. I am currently running it from Mexico, my home country, as I work on securing an E-2 visa, a process that I’ve been working on for almost a year now.

Describing Auteurnet as a tech startup, while semantically accurate, feels like a disservice to its intrinsic goals and business model. Yes, it is a web service that provides tech solutions to a consumer. In this case, these services are in the form of creative portfolio services for filmmakers to share their work, tag their collaborators, and use their Auteurnet profiles as extensions of their resumes. We also provide production tools like the Crew Allocation Tool (CAT), a database where users can register to find and be found for creative projects, inputting your team needs based on location, type of work, and team size to receive data-driven recommendations on who you can reach out to make your project come to life. We plan on expanding those very services in the future to encompass a greater array of tools to facilitate the creation and propagation of work from students and amateurs alike who want to build a career and need a place to put their foot in the door. Therein lies my conflicting thoughts on the term “startup”.

Startups are often perceived as VC funded operations expected to provide a billion dollar valuation, an environment where the value of the company is determined more by its inclusion of terms like “data-driven”, “AI powered”, and “blockchain compatible” being equated as indicators of an industry disruptive product. My usage of “data-driven” in the paragraph above feels more like a reflex to maintain that very façade of being another startup CEO aiming to maximize company value while also providing a viable product to consumers. But as recent years have shown, the very expectation that holds startups accountable to their techno-jargon often becomes their undoing. With many high-profile startups barely making a profit (if ever) while securing multi-billion dollar valuations by capitalizing on selling user data or operating as what would almost be described as Ponzi schemes.

That realization has made me pivot my approach on Auteurnet. I cannot in good faith approach my peers, my colleagues in the film industry, especially as they struggle to launch their careers in that volatile business, and work more towards the interest of a market cap than to their career improvement through the Auteurnet mission. Our business plan is one of bootstrapping as long as we can, about grass-roots events at college campuses, about supporting our fellow filmmakers to connect and promote their works to grow our user base the old fashioned way: earning their trust and loyalty by helping them see results in their own paths and growing together. When the odds are against you from the get-go, every enterprise is an experiment. And for me, Auteurnet is an experiment of faith in what our creative communities can accomplish by coming together. If anything, the Auteurnet goal isn’t just to become another subscription for filmmakers to pay for, but an institution best known for its contribution to an art form that is both as challenging as it is rewarding to be a part of, a step towards a less oligarchical Hollywood.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

While Auteurnet wasn’t a side hustle, it certainly started as a side project on an extra-curricular activity. As I mentioned, the prospect of distribution solutions for student filmmakers was an untapped market at the time. I believe that my distribution branch was the first of its kind on college campuses in the U.S.. And, while that project was more about helping students reach film festivals rather than providing them with a portfolio tool, Auteurnet’s inception lies therein.

I guess I thought of all the people that go into the film production process. The average film production on a college campus would often have about twenty people in it, from which, only a handful are the owners of the intellectual property, only specific cast and crew positions are eligible for awards and recognitions on film festivals. The credits in the movies we watch at theaters are minutes long with hundreds if not thousands of people. Every single one of them contributed to the final product and have their place in the industry. Auteurnet is a manifestation of their efforts. What sets us apart is that you can upload your films and tag every single person that contributed to your film, from the lead actors to the first-timer production assistant. Doing so allows everyone involved to show that film on their profile, highlighting their contributions to a film. Someone who is a gaffer on a film set may not have much to upload to their portfolio despite working on dozens of projects. I believe they deserve a chance to show what they are capable of. Seeing a lack of that on the FPS distribution branch I put together set the groundwork to let Auteurnet be the place to make a difference.

Have you ever had to pivot?

In its first year of development, Auteurnet faced its first major pivot. Originally, we wanted to offer job listings for film productions where users could sign up and apply for jobs directly on our site, using their profiles as their resumes. About three months into development of the job listing interface, I had the chance of speaking to the CEO of a production company that also had a VC department. It was my first opportunity to pitch Auteurnet, learn from a professional, and maybe even find that sweet VC money. Needless to say, I got my ass handed to me.

I vividly recall being told that “we’ve seen this before, it won’t work”, “there is a reason the industry is the way it is”, and I realized that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of my user market. My ego was heavily bruised. I could barely go to sleep for days afterwards, only thinking about how I made a fool of myself and that my business plan was dead before even launching. “Of course! Job listings aren’t a thing for gigs! You don’t find a film director on LinkedIn, you call someone you know!” For months, that entire element of the site was shut down, halted in its development. We would be just a portfolio site. That is, until I met local Boston producers who shone a light on how they hire their teams. They don’t do job listings, it is not time efficient and it is expensive. Instead, they use their networks to get lists of capable and willing people ready to work and be reached out to. Their selection process being determined by experience and reputation as well as location and availability: four straightforward variables that could be expanded upon through the very information that can be obtained through an Auteurnet profile. And so, the Crew Allocation Tool (CAT) was conceived. Now, instead of paying a company to have your name on a registry or to even access said registry, you’d have access to a better system, with less delays, better suggestions, and all bundled up with more tools to make your filmmaking path accessible and exciting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Auteurnet.com
• Instagram: @Auteurnet
• Facebook: @Auteurnet
• Linkedin: @Auteurnet
• Twitter: @Auteurnet
• Other: The business website is signupauteurnet.com

Image Credits

Images 1 and 5: Thaler Bishop
Image 2: Pablo Rodriguez Gomez
Image 3: Jennifer Chan
Image 4: Sahishnu Hanumansetty