Last August, MoviePass had 20,000 subscribers. As of February, it had 2 million. That explosive growth has given the company scale and leverage it hadn’t dreamed possible by this point. It’s also given scores of MoviePass customers a serious headache.

Every fast-expanding company has growing pains. But over the past six months, MoviePass has invited a broad range of complaints, ranging from long waits for membership cards and nonresponsive customer service to specific theaters and movies being unexpectedly blacked out.

It's one thing to tinker under the hood—it's another to do so when you're speeding down the highway. But MoviePass is at least aware of the issues, particularly around technical mishaps. “I kind of parachuted in folks to triage the situation, and they were contractors; we outsourced the solution,” says MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe. “Despite the amount of time we gave it, we hadn’t made as much progress as I wanted.”

The company has already introduced some changes that it says should help with some of that progress. But the deeper tension at play—that of balancing customer satisfaction with building a profitable business—may not be so easily solved.

Complaint Department

Gripes have followed MoviePass since it launched its revised subscription model last August. The company slashed its cost to $10 per month, for which members could see one movie a day using a company-supplied debit card. The gambit to acquire customers paid off better, and more quickly, than anyone anticipated—including MoviePass. And why not? It often pays for itself with a single viewing. Go to a dozen movies a month and a MoviePass subscription could save you well over $100 a month alone.

The problems started early: MoviePass couldn't keep up with demand. Lowe readily acknowledges that it sometimes took weeks, if not longer, for the company to deliver the debit cards to new subscribers. Complaints to customer service lines would go either unanswered or inadequately addressed. And all the while, more cracks began to show in the company’s too-good-to-be-true veneer.

Lowe sees MoviePass’s customer service issues as falling into two equal but distinct categories: Inadequate communication of information to new customers about how the service works, and actual breakdowns in the mechanisms that power MoviePass. The former covers issues such as customers who don’t realize they need to register their card before their first MoviePass purchase, or who are unclear about whether a specific theater honors MoviePass. “It’s your first time, you did something wrong, and of course we haven’t made it super obvious,” Lowe says, adding that MoviePass is working on a series of short videos to help more clearly explain how membership works.

'We haven’t done as good of a job as we need to do in communicating.' Mitch Lowe, MoviePass CEO

The latter category often comes down to MoviePass inadequately keeping up with its scale; Lowe says that demand for Black Panther tickets the first two weekends overwhelmed its system, leading to brownouts and slower response times in the app. On these issues, MoviePass has the makings of a plan in place. In January the company hired Natasha Mulla, formerly of Mashable, as its first chief marketing officer, charged in part with more clearly communicating MoviePass policies to customers. And on Monday, MoviePass announced a partnership with customer service shop TaskUs, as well as the hiring of its first VP of customer experience.

Strategic hires, more reps, and strengthening the backend should go a long way to resolve those hiccups. But there's a third category of frustrations about MoviePass that stem not from lapses in the system, but from intentional choices that MoviePass has made to help shore up its future—and that have left some current users in the lurch.

Hardball

On Friday, during an onstage interview at the Entertainment Finance Forum, Lowe told the audience that “we watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards, and so we know the movies you watch. We know all about you.” That came as a surprise to anyone who had read MoviePass's privacy policy, which says that it makes a single location request to check you in to see your selected movie and no more.