Operation Phoenix

Executive Summary

The screenwriting industry just lost five of its most prominent platforms in a single year. Operation Phoenix turns that catastrophe into FameWeaver's founding moment.

Between February and September 2025, five screenwriting platforms -- Coverfly, ScreenCraft, The Script Lab, WeScreenplay, and Tracking Board -- ceased operations. Together they served over 35,000 active writers and collectively represented 800,000+ archived web pages of competition results, rankings, educational content, and deal databases.

Every one of those writers was told their data would be "preserved forever." Every one of those promises was broken. Writers lost years of competition placements, scores, rankings, and professional credibility -- the accolades that proved their talent to an industry that runs on credentials.

Operation Phoenix recovers those lost accolades using the Wayback Machine's CDX API, parses archived HTML for competition results, and presents them to writers through a zero-friction claim flow. The result is a "proof before promises" onboarding weapon: we show writers their own history before asking them to trust us. This inverts the standard SaaS trust model entirely.

The Great Platform Collapse of 2025

Five platforms. Seven months. An entire ecosystem obliterated.

The collapse was not random. Screenwriting platforms have historically operated on unsustainable economics: heavy competition infrastructure, low margins on coverage services, and dependency on a fragmented user base that was never large enough to support venture-scale growth. When funding dried up and ad revenue declined, the platforms folded -- one by one, in rapid succession.

The speed of the collapse caught the community off guard. Writers who had built years of credibility on these platforms -- Quarterfinalist here, Red List ranking there -- woke up to dead URLs and empty inboxes. The Internet Archive captured it all. That data is still sitting there, waiting.

What Each Platform Lost

A forensic inventory of vanished features, services, and writer infrastructure.

Pain Point Intensity

Measured from audience database signals, community sentiment analysis, and direct writer feedback.

The 0.95 intensity on lost accolades is the highest pain signal in our entire audience database. This is not a nice-to-have. This is career-defining data that writers cannot reconstruct on their own. The emotional weight of seeing "your achievements have been recovered" is unmatched by any marketing copy we could write.

The 0.82 distrust signal is the strategic challenge. Writers have been burned. They will not trust another "we'll preserve your data" promise. This is precisely why Phoenix leads with proof, not promises. We show them their recovered data before they create an account.

The Recovery Engine

CDX API, HTML parsing, and a pipeline that turns dead URLs into living accolades.

CDX API Strategy

The Wayback Machine's CDX (Capture/Digital Index) API provides programmatic access to every archived snapshot of a domain. Our approach:

Processing Pipeline

Data Schema

Progressive Trust Architecture

Four verification tiers from zero-friction to identity-confirmed. Designed for the distrustful.

Badge System -- The Phoenix Tier

Seven rarity tiers. Twenty-two achievement definitions. Four neurochemical triggers. One animated recovery-exclusive badge.

The Phoenix tier is recovery-exclusive. It cannot be earned through normal platform activity. It is only awarded to writers who claim recovered accolades from dead platforms. The badge is animated -- a perpetual ember glow that signals to every other user: "This person rose from the ashes."

22 Achievement Definitions

Neurochemical Trigger Design

Ghost Slot Strategy

Locked badges appear as greyed-out silhouettes on every writer's profile. The writer can see the shape and name of the badge but cannot unlock it without meeting criteria. This creates persistent aspiration -- every profile visit shows what is achievable. The Phoenix badge ghost slot is particularly effective: it is visible to all users but can only be earned by those with recovered accolades, creating urgency around the /recover flow for anyone who had placements on dead platforms.

The /recover Page -- User Journey

M1U: Moment One User Journey. Six moments from discovery to retention.

Trust Counter-Narrative

What writers will not believe, and how FameWeaver answers without repeating the lies they have already heard.

What Writers Will NOT Believe

FameWeaver's Counter

Feature Gap Analysis

What the dead platforms had, what FameWeaver covers, and where the critical gaps remain.

Lost Features vs. FameWeaver Coverage

What FameWeaver Has That Dead Platforms Never Did

Phoenix + Lighthouse Convergence

Same engine, two funnels. Dead platforms and live platforms feeding the same conversion pipeline.

Shared Infrastructure

Build Order & Timeline

Priority-ranked deliverables with current status and dependencies.

Competitive Moat

Why nobody else will do this, and why waiting makes it harder.

The Time-Locked Asset

The Wayback Machine's archive is not permanent. Pages can be removed by domain owners, robots.txt changes can retroactively block access, and the Internet Archive itself faces ongoing legal and financial challenges. The recovery data we are harvesting today may not be available in six months, twelve months, or two years.

This means the data is a time-locked asset. Every day we wait, the window narrows. Every day a competitor might consider doing this, they start further behind. The first mover does not just have an advantage -- the first mover has the data itself. Second movers may find the archive degraded, restricted, or gone.

Why Nobody Else Is Doing This

First-Mover Dynamics