How Showrilly uses Customer.io to move TV-show dreams to the screen 

Showrilly is a two-sided platform that connects creators of unscripted concepts with verified production companies. Adam Wilkenfeld, a three-time Emmy Award-winning producer, founded Showrilly and handles product, marketing, producer outreach, and everything else an early-stage company needs. In its first months, Showrilly attracted more than 800 users and nearly 400 concepts, along with producers from some of the biggest production companies in the business. Best of all, Showrilly has already helped facilitate its first signed development deal, with several more in discussion.

Showrilly runs on Customer.io through the Startup program, which gives early-stage startups that are new to Customer.io 12 months free with up to 30,000 customer profiles and full platform access. Customer.io now handles the follow-up that Adam needs to scale beyond a team of one.

In this article

• Why Showrilly needed messaging based on behavior
• What happens when a creator stalls before publishing?
• How is Showrilly engaging producers?
• How does one founder run lifecycle marketing without a lifecycle team?
• What's next: the AI Agent and analytics

The challenge at Showrilly starts after registration. A creator who has carried a TV show idea for years finally creates an account and starts building a pitch: a title, a logline, an explanation of what happens in an episode, sometimes a deck or a video. Then work gets busy, and the draft sits unfinished. Other creators sign up and never begin a concept at all. A producer gets approved and doesn't come back regularly to scout. As a small startup, Showrilly couldn't follow up with each person at the right moment manually.

Customer.io gave Adam a way to recognize where someone stopped and respond accordingly, with enough customization to match how Showrilly looks and sounds, and without a large marketing team. Someone who created an account but never began a concept receives one sequence, and someone who built part of a pitch and left it unfinished receives another.

Timing is as intentional as the message. Showrilly delivers creator emails in each person's local time zone, and Adam often favors Sunday afternoons, when a creator can find a few uninterrupted hours to work on a pitch.

Adam continues: "A creator might have Sunday afternoon to work on their dream. A producer might be looking for ideas Tuesday morning before a development meeting. Those are very different people and very different moments."

Showrilly sends a different message depending on where the creator stalled. One automation targets creators who joined but haven't created a first concept, and a separate one targets creators who started a concept and left it in draft.

The "Stuck in draft" automation shows how this works. A creator who has begun building a pitch has already shown intent, and Customer.io's journeys let Showrilly follow up automatically the moment that behavior appears. The automation currently sees a 62.3% open rate and a 6.6% click rate. Its 4.9% conversion rate counts creators who, within a week of receiving the message, logged back in, finished the concept, and clicked Publish.

Adam treats these as directional results from a relatively small sample. The measure that counts is movement inside the product, and a published concept is exactly that. Publishing is the moment a creator's pitch becomes available for producers to discover, and once Showrilly adds its paywall, it will also be the moment a free user becomes a paying customer.

Showrilly's broader creator onboarding automations also get people to open and engage with their messages consistently.

Producers come to Showrilly looking for their next great show. An onboarding sequence introduces them to the Pitch Room, where they can browse and search concepts. Follow-up emails encourage them to explore new pitches or tell Showrilly what kinds of projects they’re looking for. Adam can time those messages for weekday mornings, when producers may be preparing for meetings about what to develop next.

Email is the only channel Showrilly uses today. Adam chose to get behavioral targeting and timing right first, and add channels later, and the payoff is already visible: two people receive different messages based on what each has done inside Showrilly.

Customer.io also shows whether recipients go on to take the action a message was meant to prompt. That changes how Adam evaluates an onboarding message, because the question becomes whether people act afterward. It also tells Adam where more communication will help and where the fix belongs in the product itself.

Customization and support round out the picture. Adam cares about copy, visual presentation, and the overall experience, and has been able to make Showrilly's messages feel like Showrilly in Design Studio.

Support has stood out as well, especially for a founder running everything alone:

Adam is starting to experiment with Customer.io's AI Agent and analytics, both a good fit for a founder without a dedicated lifecycle marketing team. His first test is having the Agent analyze where creators drop off and help develop the next iteration of the workflow. He also wants to compare the performance of different automations and surface patterns that would take him much longer to find on his own. The aim is to give one founder more time to help the next creator's show idea get closer to the screen.

Read about the Startup program to see how Customer.io helps early-stage teams build lifecycle programs that scale with their business.