With a huge abundance of entertainment options at our fingertips, deciding what to spend your time on is a tough choice.

Reklist, an entertainment recommendation app, aims to make this dilemma a whole lot easier, by providing person-specific suggestions based on your preferences and your friends and communities recommendations.

We spoke with one of the co-creators of the app, Dan Levy, about Reklist.

1. First of all, tell us about Reklist!

Reklist is a centralized place to send and receive entertainment recommendations (movies, shows, podcasts, books, and music), keep track of what you have watched, read, & listened to, and discover new titles. We have an Explore page with tons of recommendations to browse, a Newsfeed where you can view, like and comment on your friends’ activity, and a My Reklist page that allows you to keep track of your recommendation list (“Reklist”). Reklist also has a ton of other cool features, like providing detailed information about titles, where exactly you can find what you want to watch, read or listen to, and more!

2. What inspired you to create Reklist?

We created Reklist because we realized it was a hassle to keep track of all the entertainment recommendations we were getting from friends (movies, shows, books, podcasts, music). We’d have to scroll up through texts to find a recommendation, keep notes in our phone that weren’t helpful in finding where to watch anything, or use the inadequate suggestions from streaming platforms. Plus, nowadays there are so many streaming platforms with so much content, it’s impossible to keep track of what you can watch on each of them. We created Reklist to offer a one-stop shop for storing, sharing, rating, and discovering entertainment so it would take the hassle out of deciding what to watch.

Reklist isn’t a finished product just yet either. We’re constantly tinkering and adding features based on feedback from our users. We’ve created a community and want to make sure we build Reklist with our users’ opinions in mind, so it’s something they genuinely want to use.

3. What makes Reklist different to other similar apps?

Our focus on person-to-person recommendations is what sets us apart. The other apps in this space either have algorithm-based recommendations or an Instagram-style model where you recommend titles to all of your followers in general, even if not all of them would like that specific title. Reklist offers a completely personalized approach by encouraging users to send recommendations to specific friends who they know will like that movie/show/etc. While we do offer recommendations from the Reklist team and display recommendations from the Reklist community as a whole (e.g. the “Most Rekked” category on our Explore page), we believe that the best recommendation is one from a friend or family member that is specifically for you.

4. You’ve tried to create a community feel to Reklist, being able to see a friend’s activity is a great idea! How important was this when creating the app?

That was actually one of the first features we added to the app. Our first priority was the ability to send and store recommendations from friends; but beyond that, we knew people would want to see what their friends are recommending and watching. We added the Newsfeed as a result and later added the toggle so you can see your friends’ activity as well as all user activity (anonymously of course). We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that our users love the ability to see their friends’ activity, comment on it, and create conversations around what’s being recommended. People also seem to add a lot more to their personal Reklists from seeing what other people are recommending, which is fantastic!

5. What are your plans for the future of Reklist?

Eventually we plan to expand to other types of recommendations, but for now we’re focusing on entertainment. Our slogan is “recommendations from people that know you best” and we see Reklist as a platform for organizing all of the recommendations you get in your everyday life. That includes the types of entertainment we offer now but also includes things like restaurants and vacation destinations. There’s a lot we can expand to but as entertainment lovers, we knew we wanted to start with entertainment recommendations.

6. What were some of the barriers you faced when trying to create Reklist?

There are barriers every step of the way when you’re trying to build something, especially an app. Our first barrier was finding a programmer who understood our vision and wanted to join our team. Luckily, we found Nick Caruso, who has been integral as we’ve tinkered and tweaked the app almost weekly based on growth and feedback.

Once we had an app and some users, it was all about getting their feedback and building the features that they wanted. Feedback from users has truly been our greatest ally. For example, while just about everyone agrees with Reklist’s purpose and need, our early versions left out a lot of important and necessary features. We originally thought of Reklist as simply a tool rather than a social entertainment-based platform, but learned from users that they preferred having something they could browse and scroll through. They wanted to see what other people were recommending to each other, comment and create conversations around these recommendations, and keep track of what they have watched. They also wanted to know where to watch each movie or show and ideally one-click to open it up immediately. We integrated all of these features over time and can’t thank our users enough for that feedback.

As we take the next step now and grow to a much larger audience, our goal is to continue tweaking and adding features based on feedback so we ultimately build Reklist into something everyone enjoys.

7. We can’t talk about a recommendation app, without asking you which of your favourite movies you’d recommend our readers to watch?

I should mention that our motto is “recommendations from people that know you best”, so my recommendations won’t be nearly as helpful as recommendations from your readers’ friends. That said, two series that I’ve seen recently and loved are Red Oaks on Amazon Prime and Friends from College on Netflix.

8. What are some of the lesser known features of the app that people might find useful?

One of my favorites is being able to one-click to open up recommendations and start watching/listening. For example, if you search Red Oaks and go to its page on our site, you can click the Amazon Prime button and it will open up Red Oaks so you can start watching.

Our Explore page is another very useful feature, especially for people just getting started on Reklist. On the Explore page, we display lists such as “Most Rekked”, “Under the Radar”, “Coming Soon”, and more so you can browse and add titles to your Reklist quickly and easily.

Another great feature, which only works on your computer because phones don’t have a hover feature, is that when you hover over any title’s thumbnail image, you’ll see icons appear in the upper right corner. You can click those to add that title to your Reklist, remove it, or mark it as watched/read/listened to. It’s great for when you’re browsing the Explore or Newsfeed pages.

We also constantly add features based on feedback from our users, and have a new feature coming in the next month or so that will probably be my new favorite. I don’t want to give away too much because we’re still testing, but you’ll be able to create lists within your Reklist and set privacy settings on each of them. So you can share (and follow) specific lists with friends, some with the public, and keep some for yourself. That could be very useful for groups of friends that share common interests in entertainment, book clubs, or even just someone going on a road trip that wants some recommendations to pass the time.