Building Your Own Big Break

A Brazilian American TV-loving girl from Boston, Michaela Goodfellow has spent years finding creative ways to turn her passion for TV and film into cool, unexpected opportunities.

Before she even started college, Michaela launched her own YouTube channel, making videos about everything from movies and television to fashion, skateboarding, and social justice. At Loyola Marymount University, she turned an on-campus mailroom job into the starting point for Work Study, a five-episode workplace mockumentary she pitched, wrote, produced, directed, and edited with a 20-person cast and crew. She found her way into a writers’ room by responding to an Instagram call for writers for Homegirls, a comedy web series about the complexities and importance of Black sisterhood. She also co-hosts the podcast Sitcom Queens with her best friend, sharing their thoughts and analysis on sitcoms and Disney Channel Original Movies.

Michaela’s past and ongoing TV and media projects: (left) the Sitcom Queens podcast, (center) her Work Study castmates, and (right) the writers of Homegirls.

So when Michaela joined Hack Your Summer, she wasn’t looking for a way to break into TV. She was interested in exploring how people find the shows and movies they love, particularly when they're looking for something more specific than a genre or a star.

That exploration became Mizemunity, an app designed to help people discover TV shows and movies through the kinds of searches a real fan might actually pose. For example, a sci-fi show with a Black woman lead, or a buddy comedy directed by an Asian woman. Michaela isn't just interested in helping people find more content. She wants the kinds of stories she and so many others care about to be found, watched, and supported.

Halfway through building Mizemunity, an unexpected opportunity landed in Michaela’s lap. TV Time, a TV-tracking and community app with millions of users, shut down without warning. Almost overnight, a large community of people who cared enough about television to use an app for years were suddenly without one. A Reddit and Discord community formed almost immediately, calling itself “TV Time Refugees.” For Michaela, the conversations offered something unusually valuable. People weren't being asked what they might want from a hypothetical product. They were talking candidly about a product they had already used, what they loved about it, what frustrated them, and what they wanted from whatever came next.

She joined the community and started listening. She also sent a short survey through Discord, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Reddit, collecting 30 responses in the first few days. The feedback helped her work through a question she had been wrestling with from the beginning: should Mizemunity focus primarily on smarter content discovery, or should it also become a place to find TV and movie fan events, both online and in person?

Using feedback from her survey (left), Michaela designed the mobile app to make it easy to share and save TV show recommendations from friends & family and to find additional recommendations from people on social media (right).

Rather than trying to build both at once, Michaela used what she was hearing from potential users, along with two ideal customer profiles she developed with guidance from a HYS mentor, to decide what belonged in the first version and what could wait.

Some ideas didn't make the cut. She explored an Instagram infographic integration but shelved it after running into the platform's API restrictions. She considered adding a JustWatch-style feature showing where a title was streaming, but dropped it after finding there wasn't an affordable way to license the necessary data.

She built the prototype herself in Base44, coming to the project from a non-technical, non-engineering background. Along the way, she added features including voice-to-text search and a genre breakdown that lets users see the makeup of their results at a glance.

Mizemunity is still early, but it fits into the pattern of what Michaela has been doing for years. She sees something she loves, finds a way to get closer to it, and creates something of her own along the way. From YouTube to Work Study, to the Homegirls writers’ room, to Sitcom Queens, Michaela has never waited for someone else to give her a way into television. Instead, she's been building her own way in all along.