CrewChat
CrewChat
Solving Impact's retention gap by bringing on-set communication into a mobile app that 200+ crew use on every production.
43% DAU increase · 4 studio deals · 50% referral rate
The One Workflow Worth Solving
Most coordinators and crew already used Impact to network and get hired. Once they landed on a project, which could run for months, they had no reason to open Impact again.
We needed a pain point worth solving as our entry into that stretch. We found one:
15-page PDF called the crew list. Everyone needed it. Everyone hated using it.
Coordinators rebuilt and resent it by hand to 200+ people every time someone joined or dropped off. No version control. No single owner. Crew opened it, zoomed in, copied a number, and typed it into their own personal contacts, one at a time.
Every other piece of the production workflow had a tool. The crew list had nothing.
We assumed it was a simple as replacing the PDF with something digital
The obvious starting point: replace the PDF with a digital app that solved the pain points we just saw. Searchable. Department-organized. Call or text in one click. Built for how productions actually work.
Clear problem, tight enough to ship. What we didn't know yet: we were only solving it for one user group.
Two iterations before we landed. Each one taught us what the next had to solve.
The Personal Contact Directory
Crew's personal contacts were already a mess: coworkers mixed in with friends, all in one address book. They hated it. So we thought to seperate it.
The first concept: a work-only directory. Upload the crew list you received, each name matched back into Impact's database, surfacing their title, contact info, and every past production they'd worked on.
We kept it bottom-up on purpose. We didn't want to change the coordinators workflow just yet and crew got a digital directory.
The Active Production Directory
We built this version around one fact: most crew only work one production at a time. So we scoped everything to the active production, improved department navigation, fewer taps to reach someone in a different department, a favorites tab for people you contacted often, with past ones archived but still reachable.
We also moved away from V1's opt-in model. V1 was a personal directory, crew chose whether to build it. V2 was meant to keep everyone in sync automatically, making the coordinator in charge of new changes. The old directory concept carried over, but it was secondary now, production scoping was the main focus.
Without a clear answer, we paused and went back to our two user groups, crew and coordinators.
Crew liked V1 for how little friction it added, and V2 for the focused department navigation and staying in sync. But liking a tool and needing it aren't the same thing.
The real insight came from somewhere we weren't looking. We were heads-down on the hiring side of the product at the time, and that work turned up something we hadn't accounted for: we'd been solving for crew the whole time. Coordinators were still building the crew list somewhere else either way, and neither version had reduced their workload.
Two things were still true. Crew would visit a couple minutes a day, then go right back to email, text, and calls, retention barely moved. And coordinators, the ones actually deciding whether a tool gets adopted on a production, still had their real pain point untouched.
If we wanted retention, we had to own communication and solve the coordinator workflow.
New Insights, New Direction
Communication On Platform
This means we had to invest in the communication framework. Not a workaround in iMessage. A purpose-built communication layer where every contact is verified, role-tagged, and scoped to the production.
Coordinator Owned Workflow
Every version so far had coordinators building the list somewhere else and uploading it in. That wasn't solving their problem, it was digitizing it. The list needed to live inside CrewChat from day one, owned by one coordinator, not maintained elsewhere and dropped in after the fact.
With the new north stars in place, the concept shifted entirely. Not a crew list feature — an on-set communication tool. Something crew & coordinators couldn't live without on a 14-hour shoot day.
Coordinator-Owned. On-Set Communication.
Version 3 committed to messaging as a core surface, not an afterthought.
Onboarding started with people, not a download link. Our CX team worked with one coordinator per production first, the same single point of ownership V2 had gotten right, and got them set up before anyone else touched the app. From there, invites went to the rest of the crew already organized by department, so the structure crew expected was there from their first login.
Once onboarded, coordinators could add or remove crew members inside the app itself, no more editing a PDF every time someone joined or dropped. V1 and V2 both left that part untouched, coordinators still maintained the list somewhere else and imported it in. Version 3 moved the list inside CrewChat for good, closing the one gap that had killed both earlier versions.
Coordinator-Owned. On-Set Communication.
Version 3 committed to messaging as a core surface, not an afterthought.
Onboarding started with people, not a download link. Our CX team worked with one coordinator per production first, the same single point of ownership V2 had gotten right, and got them set up before anyone else touched the app. From there, invites went to the rest of the crew already organized by department, so the structure crew expected was there from their first login.
Once onboarded, coordinators could add or remove crew members inside the app itself, no more editing a PDF every time someone joined or dropped. V1 and V2 both left that part untouched, coordinators still maintained the list somewhere else and imported it in. Version 3 moved the list inside CrewChat for good, closing the one gap that had killed both earlier versions.
Standalone Or Integrated
We knew we were on the right track with this feature, but there was a bigger call to make: build CrewChat as its own app, or fold it into Impact's existing network app as one integrated product.
Standalone was the safer bet on paper, simpler, faster to ship, easier to kill if it didn't work.
Integration Won.
Standalone would have solved the on-set problem and missed the bigger one: 200 crew using CrewChat every day would never see Impact's hiring network sitting right next to it. Get hired through Impact, work on set through Impact, find the next job through Impact when the production wraps, that loop only closes as one app.
It also helped that integration was cheaper than expected. We already needed network messaging for Impact, and since the web version was responsive, most of the integration work was frontend, not new backend. The safer-sounding option wasn't actually the cheaper one.
Tracking User Behaviors That Led To Evolution
We hadn't designed file sharing into CrewChat, but crew were using the announcements channel to distribute production documents anyway. The chat couldn't handle it: phones lagged, size limits were hit, no watermarking, no access controls. The live product told us exactly what to build.
File Distribution — the feature the announcements channel had become, done properly.
Coordinator-owned, watermarked per recipient, scoped access, built for the file sizes crew were actually sharing. It replaced the last piece of off-app workflow, email, and closed the full loop.
CrewChat didn't start here.
Network + Credibility
Profiles, search, availability, reputation signals. A network with real trust — not just a database of people who exist.
Hiring System
Avail Check, status tracking, coordinator workflow. Structure that fit how hiring already worked, without replacing it.
On Set Tools
Crew list, messaging, file distribution. The layer that kept crew inside Impact during the production itself — and closed the retention loop.
Proof, Not Projection
Ron Howard's EDEN was one of the first major productions to run fully on CrewChat.
Ground-level read on adoption from day one to wrap, not platform averages.
DAU increase, driven by keeping crew in the platform long after the hire closed.
Studio deals, AMC, Skydance, Warner Bros, and Netflix, signed once CrewChat proved the platform could hold a production, not just staff one. Scenechronize was charging $30,000+ per production for less.
of new productions came in through referral, crew carrying the tool from job to job. That kind of adoption doesn't come from sales, it comes from people not wanting to go back.
"I don't know how I or any other production could do without it now. It set a new standard."
"CrewChat became my first choice for getting information from production instead of email."
"The most streamlined way to get messages out to everyone on set immediately."
Reflections
Cutting from MVP was the right call — every time
Call sheets and on-site status indicators were both designed and both cut. The live product validated every cut — shipping incomplete is a listening strategy.
Offline-first should have been a launch requirement
We knew signal was poor on soundstages and didn't prioritize aggressive caching. Given the constraint, offline-first should have been a launch requirement, not a retrofit.