Why Sean Drummond built Cindee, New Platforms Webinar is this week, and how to join the Distribution Lab waitlist.
I had the pleasure of meeting Sean Drummond during the third cohort of our Distribution Lab. I’m super excited that he has used his experience releasing his films (and the information he learned in the lab) to create a new and innovative solution to many of the problems that plague our independent film distribution sector – his new platform Cindee. That’s why I wanted to include him to join our New Platforms Webinar this Thursday (register here and more info below) I asked him to write about the genesis of this platform for our Substack today. Here is his post:
Why I’m Building Cindee
Guest post by Sean Drummond
I produced a feature film in 2022 titled No Right Way. My wife Chelsea Bo wrote, directed, and edited it. Nobody was going to greenlight it for us, so we did what you do: kept it small, kept it personal, pulled a lot of favors, and made it by any means necessary.
It’s a dramedy about Georgie, a brazen tween thrust into the guardianship of her half-sister Harper, whose attempts to parent only expose their paralleled childhood wounds. We premiered at Cinequest in August 2023 and took it through the festival circuit for the next year. Nineteen festivals. Sixteen awards, including the Ultra Indie Award at Woodstock.
This is the story of how producing No Right Way turned me into a distribution platform founder. What we needed during that release didn’t exist, so I built it: Cindee, a platform that empowers filmmakers, and festivals, to build, engage, and monetize an audience directly. Everything that follows is why.
Screening No Right Way at festivals was an incredibly rewarding experience. Yet at every single Q&A, people kept asking us the same questions:
How can I share the film? Where will you be playing next? When is it going to be online?
We didn’t have good answers. We didn’t have “distribution” yet. We told them to visit our website, follow us on Instagram, log it on Letterboxd.
The minute after somebody watches your movie is the highest conviction moment you will ever have with that person. They just sat in the dark with it for ninety minutes. Whatever you’re going to ask an audience to do, that is when to ask. We did have an ask. It just came down to blind faith that they’d go sign up for our newsletter later and handing that relationship over to another platform and its algorithm.
We played to somewhere north of 2000 people over that run. Beyond our own friends and family that showed up, I couldn’t tell you who a single one of them was.
After the Cinequest and Woodstock lineups announced our film, we did have distributors and sales agents reach out. It felt good to be wanted. But the deals were all the same: seven to ten years of rights, marketing costs recoupment before you see a dollar, and at the end of it your film lands on Amazon and Apple, which we could do ourselves through Filmhub anyway. And I’d already been through it. I have films sitting with Freestyle and Gravitas, where quarterly reports are a scavenger hunt and you’re chasing people down just to get updates on something you poured years into. I wasn’t going to do that with No Right Way.
Something else nagged at me the whole circuit, and it wasn’t coming from filmmakers. It was coming from the audience. Attendees kept telling us how hard it is to find these films the other 51 weeks of the year, when their local festival isn’t happening. Person after person, city after city. They weren’t short on interest. They had seen something they loved and had no idea how to ever see it again (or how to share it with their community in 1-2 years when it was eventually streaming). Every film we screened alongside was attracting an audience and had no way to keep it. That isn’t a marketing problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.
Somewhere in the middle of the run, the idea started forming: what if there was a place filmmakers could build an audience around their film as they go through the circuit, interconnected with festivals, and that same place was where the film eventually lived? So that when the film was ready to watch after the circuit, the audience you’d built was already there.
That was the kernel for Cindee, but I kept going through the circuit, and the vision kept sharpening.
Somewhere in there, friends pointed us toward Jon and the 8 Above Distribution Lab. I came in looking for tactics: release windows, PVOD strategy, how to eventize our self-distribution. I got all of that, but the part that stuck with me was a (zoom) room full of filmmakers describing our exact year back to us. Our experience with No Right Way wasn’t unusual. It was par for the course.
In November 2024 we did a one-week run at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. We built each evening around a different community Chelsea and I are part of: film school friends, crew, local family. For the most part, that filled the theater. Twenty-one screenings. At the end of the run, Laemmle handed us a box office report.
Approximately 700 people had watched our movie. That was the report. I didn’t have details on who showed up, which nights they came, or what outreach actually converted people. The audience was in a black box. I don’t blame the theaters, they just aren’t set up to share that data. But if we had sold those tickets ourselves, I’d be sitting on 700 contacts. Not all of them were new, but plenty were. Those are the people I’d have emailed when the film went up on PVOD a few months later, and the people I’d tell about the next film.
From there, PVOD. We went with Eventive for our digital premiere in May 2025. For video on demand, it was cumbersome to say the least. But it’s built for the festival as a business, and as the filmmaker you barely touch it, which is true of most of the tools in this article: you are the person who made the film and yet you are the last one the software was designed for.
So we built it. We formed Cindee in May 2025, started engineering in September, and beta launched at Sundance in January 2026. Every piece of it traces back to something we wish we’d had on No Right Way.
Start with the landing page. Most of us already have a digital press kit sitting in a private folder, and then we pay to build a website that says the same things. IMDb will list your film, but you can’t gather an audience there and you can’t sell anybody the movie. Letterboxd is where people log it, but if you want to reach the people who put your film on their watchlist, you need to pay Letterboxd to reach those people. Each of those tools solved a piece. What I wanted was the pieces connected.
A Cindee film page holds all of it: festival selections, screening information, awards, press quotes that link out to the actual articles, trailer, behind the scenes, full cast and crew profiles.
And here’s something I didn’t know until I started researching festivals: most of them wipe their lineup off their website every year. The 2019 program is just gone, and so is the SEO. So we’re building the archive. Somebody pulls up the lineup from a festival you played, sees your poster, clicks through, and they’re on your page, just one click from watching it if it’s available. The more films and festivals that come on, the stronger that gets. That’s the cross-pollination that a website in its own silo can never do for you. If your film has played a festival we’ve already imported, odds are a page exists for it right now, and you claim it free, the way you’d claim a Google Business or Yelp listing.
Then in-person screenings, which are really two things.
First, the festival itself. We built the whole infrastructure a festival runs on: lineup, schedule, ticketing, pass sales. When a festival you’re playing runs on Cindee, your screening shows up on your own film page, and the people who buy tickets to it are people you can still reach next year. You can also sell your screening instead of posting a flyer and hoping the festival’s audience finds it. That part isn’t theoretical for me. The only reason we filled the Laemmle was that Chelsea and I worked our own communities, night by night. Every festival wants filmmakers doing that. They’ve just never had a way to let us do it that didn’t end with the audience in somebody else’s black box.
Second, your own screenings. The same ticketing system can run a roadshow, a pop-up, a community screening, a four-wall. Point people at the venue’s site when they are the one selling, or sell the tickets yourself and keep every contact that comes with them. Anyone following the film gets told automatically when you’re screening in their city, and the day it goes up to rent or buy. It’s the clipboard Jon tells you to pass around at festivals, except this one keeps working automatically after you’ve left the theater.
Then streaming. You list the film for rent or purchase, set your own price, decide whether a rental runs 24 hours or 30 days, and choose which territories can see it, which matters more than people expect if you’ve already sold off a region. Every time somebody rents or buys, you see the transaction and you get the email address. No quarterly reports, no scavenger hunt, no waiting until March to find out what happened in October.
Here’s the number that matters to me. When we self-distributed No Right Way through Filmhub out to Amazon, we kept around 40 cents on the dollar once everybody in the chain took their cut. On Cindee, a filmmaker keeps about 85 (we deduct 10% + cc fees). I’ll be honest about the tradeoff: Amazon brings its own traffic and we don’t (yet), so on Cindee you’re selling to an audience you built. But that’s the audience standing in front of you after every festival Q&A, and they are worth a great deal more per person than a stranger scrolling past your poster on Amazon.
As you’re taking your film to festivals, you’re building a snowball. The longer you wait to let people engage with it, the more it melts. So many films die on the vine because it’s been two years since they premiered and nobody has reached out to a theater, hosted a screening, or put it online. We almost did the same thing.
Discovery, ticketing, streaming. None of those is new on its own. What’s new is having them in one place, instead of five separate tools with your audience leaking out through the seams between them, because every seam is a place where somebody who loved your movie disappears. Cindee is the infrastructure we’ve built to fix this: festivals and filmmakers on the same rails, building the same audience, so that you can actually build that direct audience relationship, and when they pay for to attend or stream the money goes to you. It’s the platform I wished existed when we started our distribution journey with No Right Way back in 2023.
Working Through Your Own Distribution Strategy?
One of the things I love about the 8 Above Distribution Lab is that there is no single distribution roadmap that works for every film. The questions raised here — how to build and retain an audience, when to self-distribute, how to evaluate the opportunities in front of you, and how to turn festival momentum into a longer-term release strategy — are exactly the kinds of questions we work through together in the Lab.
Our next Distribution Lab cohort will begin in Spring 2027. If you’re currently thinking through the distribution and marketing strategy for your own film, join the Cohort 6 waitlist and we’ll let you know when applications and upcoming information sessions open.https://jonreiss.substack.com/p/19-festivals-16-awards-zero-owned