How Some Clever Marketing Got My $75K Microbudget Film on HBO

Hello, fellow indie filmmakers, and welcome to the collapse of traditional distribution! If you’re just joining us, rest assured, the smoke you’re smelling is real, and the sales market is in free fall. And yet, I’m here to tell you that not only is there hope, but that this might be the best time in history to make an indie film. Here’s why.

I made Simmer for $75,000. No names. No festival pedigree. And I sold it to HBO.

To be clear, I, like many of you, didn’t have a single meaningful contact in the sales and distribution industry. What I did have was a ragtag group of filmmaker friends and an expertise in digital marketing. Here, I’m going to outline exactly what we did and share some practical ideas on how to find an audience (and distribution) for your indie feature in this brave new world.

The Night of the Premiere

We held a live screening of Simmer at a small local theater. Before the film started, I did something that probably sounded insane: I asked everyone in the audience to pull out their phones, open Facebook, and visit our film’s page (which had next to zero followers). There, I directed them to view our unlisted post — the full film, which we’d published an hour earlier — and hit play. Then they put their phones back in their pockets and let it play on silent.

So while they watched the film on the big screen, their phones were streaming it in the dark.

Why?

'Simmer' premiereCredit: Stefan van de Graaff

Because the Facebook algorithm values engagement more heavily when it comes at the end of a video rather than the beginning. A like, share, or comment from someone who watched 90% of your content carries more algorithmic weight than one from someone who clicked in and immediately bounced. By having our audience watch the full film and then engage at the end of the night, we were priming the algorithm to treat our post as high-quality, high-completion content.

Then, when the credits rolled, I asked everyone who was willing to leave a comment and share the post.

We left that screening with nearly 100 organic shares and a comment section full of genuine enthusiasm.

The algorithm started doing what algorithms do: it served our post to our audience’s audiences. Organic reach kicked in before we spent a single dollar.

The next day, as the organic reach began to slow, we took that same unlisted post and ran it as a Facebook ad. I don’t mean we ran a teaser trailer as an ad for the film. I mean, we ran the entire feature-length film as an ad. At the beginning was a pre-recorded snippet of me and my co-director, Nick Rush, asking the viewers, in exchange for being able to watch the film for free, to just give it a share if they liked it.

Less than 24 hours later, our film had over one million views and nearly 10,000 shares.

But if you’re nodding your head now, thinking “genius”, pump the brakes. Because then we got a message…

'Simmer' premiereCredit: Stefan van de Graaff

The DM That Changed Everything

It was a message from a sales agent. He basically warned us:

“Take it down now. If it gets too broadly exposed, you’ll never be able to sell it.”

So we did. Immediately. And while it was hugely disappointing in the moment, in hindsight, the stunt did exactly what it needed to do. As a consequence of proving there was genuine interest in the film, every single conversation we had with sales agents from that point on was immediately different. They actually cared. They were confident they could sell this no-name-actor, no-budget film. And eventually, they did.

The check wasn’t enormous. But it was enough to recoup. And more importantly, we got to say we sold our first feature to HBO without a single festival laurel, without a name above the title, and without begging a gatekeeper to notice us.

The Bad News and the Good News

The traditional indie distribution landscape has imploded. Film festivals that once existed to surface new voices are quietly, in desperation, rebranding as marketing platforms. Streaming platforms are acquiring fractions of what they once were. And the old path: make film, get into festival, attract sales agent, land distribution…now leads only a very small handful of filmmakers in a generation to anything resembling a sustainable career.

The bad news: what indie filmmakers have been doing isn’t enough anymore.

The good news: what indie filmmakers have always done is exactly what’s required.

We’ve always operated without institutional support. We’ve always found ways to route around the gatekeepers. We’ve always built something from nothing on our own. And sadly, but excitingly, it needs to be done again.

'Two Sleepy People' premiere in Los AngelesCredit: Brenda Vuong

How to Pivot in the New World of Film Distribution

Stop thinking about distributors. Start thinking about audiences.

Starting now, and likely for the rest of our filmmaking careers, the growth of your audience and that of your film is going to be as important as conventional distribution. I predict that more and more mainstream distribution will come as a consequence of having an audience, rather than an audience coming as a consequence of having distribution.

Take Creator Camp, the team that made Two Sleepy People and describes itself as “A24 for the internet generation”. They’ve amassed nearly 250,000 followers on Instagram by making well-produced social content and having a strong viewpoint on the pains of modern consumers and creators. It was their audience that enabled them to make their film. It was their audience that got them theatrical distribution. As Max Reisinger, one of their co-founders, put it:

“We set up this website where we built a globe, and if you put your name, your email, and your zip code, it would place this pin and you’d show up on the map and get your name in the credits. That was the campaign that gave us all this data allowing us to target theatres with a much more compelling argument.” — Max Reisinger, Co-founder @ Creator Camp

That’s the principle in its purest form. Leverage. Starting today, you need to use marketing and audience-building to cultivate leverage with distributors. That data can say, “People want to see this,” far more effectively than you ever could. If you’re in pre-production, start building your audience now. If you’re in post-production, start building your audience now. If you’ve already sold the film to some crappy aggregator, start building your audience now!

'Two Sleepy People' premiere in Los AngelesCredit: Brenda Vuong

8 Practical Tips to Get Started

If you’re ready to get serious about this, here are some practical tips to keep in mind:

1. Many fires don’t burn hot : Don’t worry about having a social presence everywhere. Think deeply about where your audience for your film is, and hit that platform hard.
2. DM’s are your friend : Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of one-to-one outreach to people who you think would like you and/or your work. Don’t just blast it on Instagram or Reddit or TikTok. DM the people in relevant groups and invite them personally. 100 real followers are more valuable than 1,000 fake ones.
3. Look sideways : Too many filmmakers are worried about trying to be noticed by someone “above them” and not enough about building a cohort of peers and fans beside them.
4. Daisy-chain influencer integrations : Skip the massive influencers and go to niche ones. They’re more affordable, easier to work with, and likely in closer proximity to your ideal audience.
5. Document the process : There’s no need to overthink what needs to be posted. Capture moments from the real-world process (behind-the-scenes, footage, script notes, cast conversations, phone calls).
6. Build infrastructure you own : A self-hosted website with direct ticket or rental sales, a Patreon (which–protip–is actively expanding into the film distribution space!), and an email list. Anything you own increases the value of your film.
7. Break some eggs : Fortune favors the bold when it comes to digital marketing. If you follow a formula, it’s unlikely to get you somewhere new. Take some risks, especially now when the “right way” of doing things is mostly dead and gone.
8. Be consistent : Wherever you decide to post or whatever your marketing strategy is, it won’t work if you only do it in sprints. You have to be consistent to see meaningful growth

As a final point, never forget the iconic quote from Littlefinger in Game of Thrones: “Chaos is a ladder.” If you feel like the film marketing and distribution industry is in utter disarray, then you already know what to do next…

Simmer SVOD rights have since been sold to Amazon Prime.