Jason English is the founder of IHeartMovies. Visit the company blog here.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your service?

My name is Jason English. I currently work for a small web design company where I live. Two years a go, being unhappy with the current DVD/video online organizational tools, I decided to learn PHP/SQL and write my own. It was originally called Movie DB, but later renamed to I Heart Movies. It's essentially a place to come discuss and organize you're collection.

How did your two partners join into this project?

I've known Matt Newton since high school. We took computer classes together and he's one of the co-founders. I couldn't of started it with out him. He's given me a lot of the ideas for IHM. I also would like to mention Dan Smith, who did all the paper work to make us an actual company. He's recently leaving us to further his college career at George Mason University in Virginia. Mike Davis was hired where I work. He ran FileAnchor.com which was a very popular and successful image/file hosting web site at the time. It's currently been shut down to some hosting issues. He joined IHM around Christmas, and has been a huge asset in helping with programming and ideas.

What makes IHeartMovies stand out among all the movie services available?

I believe it's our focus and ideas which will set us apart from similar sites. Our focus is to make a web site, where it's easy to use and get the information you want most as quickly as possible. We're currently working on a contribution system which will allow users to contribute not only titles, but information for almost every aspect of IHM, including photos, information

and titles. Users won't have free reign right away like some systems. You must earn the right to edit the information; however anyone can submit the information. The people who have worked hard at adding information to IHM will be given special rights to approve these submissions. Aside from the site's information for Titles, we want to be more than that. Many sites focus on information, there is so many more things you can do with that information, which many site's haven't done, or have done very poorly. We're looking to remedy that.

How is the company funded?

It's been funded out of pocket the entire time. The three of us have all contributed to the hosting and other fees.

We recently purchased a dedicated server.

How much time do you put into this service on a daily basis?

After work, I spend a good portion of my nights working on it, if nothing else comes up. I'd say about 4-5 hours a day. It's a struggle at times. Only having so much time to work on it. I wish I could work on it as if it were a job, 9-5.

What do you do full time?

I am a web designer for Commercial Software, Inc. A local company where I live. I handle all of our new clients and I also do design work on IRA 2000, a online real estate application.

What is the current state of your IHeartMovies?

Right now we have 750+ users. We get about 3,500+ hits and 32,000+ page views per month. We've only advertised a couple times, and small advertising. A small text ad on yahoo, just to see results. Most of our traffic comes from word of mouth. We were mentioned in an AP article along side Spout.com and IMDb.com, which was exciting.

Is that 750 visitors or 750 registered members?

Registered accounts.

How do you plan on making money?

Smart advertising placement.

We've got big plans for additions to IHM, people will be able to buy ad spaces. Right now we have Amazon and Google ads on our site. It pays for most of the hosting.

Do you mean Amazon's affiliate program?

Yes.

How does that perform compared to Google Adsense?

To be honest, not nearly as well as we'd like. Google's Ad Sense is the big revenue maker for us. The issue with Amazon's affiliate program is that people actually have to purchase something. We plan on integrating Amazon's products into our titles, so someone could purchase toys, posters, the actual movie right from the title page. However, it's not our main focus yet. There are a lot of features were wrapping up (Dashboard, which will have selectable widgets, drag and drop interface that will keep users informed about what's hot on IHM).

Where is your company headquartered?

We're located in Midland, Michigan.

Did you have any programming or entrepreneurship experience prior to making IHeartMovies?

I had little programming experience. I use Coldfusion at my day job. I've learned PHP and JavaScript since then for IHM. I had no entrepreneurship experience. This is my first company. We're all trying to learn as much as we can as we go. If anything it's an exciting learning experience.

How did you go about learning PHP and Javascript?

I bought Learning PHP 5 by David Sklar and learned as I went, making a lot of mistakes a long the way, but I learned quickly over a few months. I learned the basics of JavaScript at Commercial Software, Inc. and expended on that in my free time, when I needed to do something, I had to learn it.

Do you have any parting words?

Keep checking back, we've got some great things in store!