Dylan Rattet graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Miami Herbert Business School in May 2026. After graduation, he had one month before starting his job as a financial analyst for Under Armour.
He spent that month in Europe, where he came up with the idea for Cinova.
Cinova is a modern entertainment app that eases the stress of deciding what movie or TV series to watch. The app exposes users to movies and TV series, allowing them to rate what they’ve watched, directly access streaming platforms, read critic reviews and connect with friends.
“During this month, I was grinding. I was re-learning how to code and figuring out what I wanted to do in this app, what features I didn’t like in the other apps that already exist,” Rattet said. “And with all that, I was just spending countless hours working on it.”
He also had help from his hometown friend, Ethan Nigrin.
“He’s a mastery student in mathematics and he helped with the math behind what gets recommended to you on the app,” said Rattet.
Together, Rattet and Nigrin launched Cinova.
One of the app’s main features is its ranking system.
“You start by rating a movie or TV show you have watched,” said Rattet.” The app will ask you if this movie was exceptional, excellent, good, mediocre or poor.”
Depending on what rating the user clicked, the app will cross-reference movies previously rated similarly and recommend movies in other categories.
Four scores will also be generated for the user: a Cinova score, a friends score, a critic score and an individual rating that can be entered manually or be curated by the app.
What makes this app different from its competitors — like Letterboxd — is the generation of a Cinova score. The Cinova score allows the user to see averaged out scores of everyone else on the app. Along with the Cinova score, the app includes modernized features that foster entertainment-centered social connections.
“You can DM friends, send them movies directly and see where to stream them. You can look in the app, see what your friends have rated certain movies and see what the critics’ score is,” said Rattet. “You can see what everyone on the platform thinks about the app, and then just pick a movie straight from it.”
Unlike other apps, Cinova also allows flexibility when it comes time to rate the movie or TV show.
“On other sites, you are stuck with either rating a movie — let’s say an 8 or 9, whereas on this app, you don’t have to be stuck with a whole number. You could give a rating of 8.5, 8.2 or something in between,” said Rattet.
For more personalized recommendations, users can use the Cova feature. Cova allows users to pick a movie or TV show, the genre they want to watch and their preferred streaming services.
Users can also see their strongest matches according to Cinova, or they can interact with Cova’s swiping feature.
“It’s kind of like Tinder. You swipe left for not interested, right for interested or up for already seen, and you can click straight into the movies or watch a trailer,” said Rattet.
For those who enjoy TV more than movies, Cinova offers a unique outlet for sharing thoughts on new and old series.
“The apps out right now don’t have TV. It’s a super big hole in the market, so, I’m hoping this app helps people find a different platform to rate something they are passionate about,” said Rattet.
Right now, Cinova is just a side gig, but Rattet is hopeful that it will eventually become his full-time job.
In terms of jobs, Rattet is also looking for a marketing intern. The internship will focus on running Cinova’s Instagram.
“I want Cinova to be the future where people discover new movies and also rate them,” he said.