Apps and domains for actors shutting down left and right. A note from the founder.
Hello fellow performers!
It's Friday before the 4th of July weekend and I figured I'll journey into the actor apps that we've listed over the years on ActorsApps site. While I do use IMDb Pro almost daily, I usually have very little need for other apps for either casting or learning lines, so while I did have it on my dedicated iPad, I don't really check how often they're updated, and well, I should have.
What do iPerform, Moodcaster, AuditionCal, Line (the other Line) and Castivate have in common? They used to have apps on apple and android devices that served actors, yes, but also... they've all been shut down. It's a shame, but it's not easy maintaining tools for actors. We know! The demand, while high, may not be very lucrative, and all of these companies that are excited to begin with usually fade away with the rest.
That drove me to dive deeper into our competitors. Anyone else who might be advertising as building websites specifically for actors and I was not surprised. Just like with apps, these websites too have been shutting down left and right. Companies that we have once marked as "let's keep an eye on them" no longer exist. We wanted to make sure that if they come up with something that we don't have, we need to step up our game and make sure we offer the same quality of a tool, but no, there's no need to keep an eye on companies that abandon their projects and move on to something different.
This letter is more of a warning tale. While I do believe that all small businesses deserve a chance, when it's your career on the line, do a bit of a research, see how long the company's been around. Are they posting new blog posts? Are they active on social media? Send them a message... will they respond to you? It takes only few seconds to do the research, it takes hours to redo things that you've lost in a digital fire. Shameless plug time... it takes seconds to build your actor website on Web For Actors, so that's a saving grace, right? Oh and yeah... we're not going anywhere. We'll stick by you thick or thin.
