Every filmmaker needs an email list. Here's how to build it this week.

By the end of this free course you'll have everything you need to stay in touch with your audience for the next year or more, right up until your film is released. Those people become your earliest supporters, the people in your theater seats, and your first sales. Email is how you get a sold-out opening weekend.

Step zero: open your free Kit account

kitforcreators.com is my referral link. If you ever upgrade, Kit pays me a commission, and it costs you nothing extra.

You don't own your followers.

Instagram and TikTok decide who sees your post. Ads work until the day you stop paying for them. Either way, you're renting someone else's audience.

An email list is yours. Nobody can change the algorithm on it, and when your film comes out, you can write to every person on it the same morning.

What a list did for Brotherhood.

Every one of those people signed up somewhere along the way: a tour stop, a song page, a theater request. We presold 835 tickets before a single showtime was posted. When it was time to sell, I didn't have to buy anyone's attention. I just wrote to the people who had already raised their hand.

The first line of your marketing budget.

Kit is free up to 10,000 subscribers, and Days 1 and 2 of this course run on the free plan. On Day 3 you'll build a welcome sequence, and sequences need Kit's Creator plan: $390 a year (about $33 a month) at 1,000 subscribers.

That $390 is the first line of your marketing budget. It starts on day 1, years before you need a poster.

What you'll build in five days.

• Day 1 Your free Kit account and a "Follow the making of" signup page for your film.
• Day 2 Tags that sort people from the very first signup, by where they found you, why they care and what city they live in.
• Day 3 A welcome sequence: the story behind the film, why you're making it, and one small ask.
• Day 4 A monthly "making of" email that runs until release, plus the release-week emails that fill theaters.
• Day 5 Where your first 100 names come from, and your first email to all of them.

About an hour a day. Every email has a template you can copy and a Claude prompt that rewrites it for your film.

Start today.

Open your free Kit account

kitforcreators.com is my referral link. If you ever upgrade, Kit pays me a commission, and it costs you nothing extra.

Then tell me where to send Day 1.

Send me Day 1