GRAND RAPIDS ? West Michigan is known as a pretty conservative region where liberals don’t tend to roam ? the last place you’d expect to find a web site started by film lovers trying to turn Hollywood’s film distribution and marketing scheme on its head. But that’s the mission of Spout, started by four 20-something Grand Rapids kids with a passion for films.

Spout?s headquarters is in a 3,300 square foot loft that overlooks Monroe Center in downtown Grand Rapids. Dozens of young people ? the kind Gov. Granholm hopes to keep in Michigan through her Cool Cities program ? scurry about on the day a reporter joins them to talk with the Spout brain trust.

The head of the brain trust is Spout CEO Rick DeVos, 24, the oldest child of Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos and his wife Betsy, the daughter of Prince Automotive founder Ed Prince. Young Rick also is the grandson of Amway co founder Rich DeVos, so his entrepreneurial blood lines run deep. But his passion for film flows even deeper. The young DeVos recently hosted a monthly meeting of GLIMAWest to tell the Spout story.

The Roots Of Spout

Rick enrolled briefly at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., near Hollywood to be near his beloved film industry, but moved back to Grand Rapids to finish his degree in mass media at Calvin College when he became disenchanted with the Southern California lifestyle. It was at Calvin that the Spout business model was born.

With friends and fellow film lovers Dave DeBoer, Daryn Kuiper and Paul Moore, DeVos began his quest to build a web site that would enable filmmakers to find audiences for their work much more quickly and cheaply than they can today. Running the operations is the old man of the group, 37 year old Bill Holsinger-Robinson, a former marketing manager at Sagestone Computing.

Sagestone was purchased two years ago by NuSoft Solutions of Troy. NuSoft now serves as Spout?s IT department. The creative and marketing work is performed by BBK Studios of Grand Rapids. NuSoft and BBK staff work side-by-side with the dozen or so Spout full timers in the loft headquarters.

Spout?s goal is to create a grassroots alternative to Hollywood’s promotion and distribution model for low-budget movies that would be distributed to the millions of homes that will be eventually equipped with high-end home theater systems. This, in turn, will create a huge market for independent film makers, passionate folks like the founders of Spout.

Initially, Spout is making money from the sale of movie DVDs. But its goal is to help those independent filmmakers get their films noticed and for film lovers to find and share good films with their counterparts in a social networking/marketing scheme made popular by the likes of MySpace.Com.

Users of the site can search for, organize, recommend and buy their favorite films. They can interact with each other and post personalized film tags on movie titles such as overrated, instead of typical genre labels like adventure.

“About 70 percent of moviegoers don’t trust reviewers or media companies about what to watch,” said Kevin Budelmann, of BBK Studio. “By forming this online community of friends Spout can add trust back into the whole economy of shopping for films.”

Budelmann described the Spout web site and technology behind it as quite complicated.

?They have very high expectations and desire to seek out best of breed technologies,? he said. ?There has been a high bar set for us and NuSoftt. One of the things, we?re helping them with is the marketing in this Web 2.0 space.?

Said Keith Brophy, NuSoft President for Business Operations: ?There is definitely some cool stuff in the air on this project. We’re all about driving change, and that’s what Spout is doing.?

Brophy also said it was kinda cool the way both NuSoft and BBK got hooked up with Spout. A year ago, the Spout management team identified and interviewed five software companies, and in the end selected NuSoft. The same process was used to pick BBK over a field of a half dozen of so interactive marketing firms.

?They really needed to build a foundation that would grow over the years and not retrofit it down the road,?? Brophy said. ?Certainly the platform behind Spout is very scalable.?

But where do four 20-somethings come up with the cash to fund such a cutting edge and very deep Internet web site? Rick DeVos declined to say. But insiders said more than a million dollars has been spent to date developing and marketing the site with several millions more in reserve – no doubt from friends and family investors, which include the DeVos and Prince fortunes.

When will Spout begin to make money? Perhaps in three to five years, Rick DeVos said. But in the interim, Spout is helping to reverse the thinking that Grand Rapids is just an old line factory town with little technology talent. And how much is that kind of good will worth to Michigan?s economic future?

For more information, click on Spout.Com

This story was written by MItechnews.Com Editor Mike Brennan. If you have a story idea, email it to [email protected]