Archives: shipping

This blog has been offline for almost 3 months. The first month was spent wondering what to do with it, the following two re-jigging the code and re-designing the site, getting it ‘just so’ before launch.

Why, then, did I launch the site yesterday before it was fully ready, while I’m still not 100% happy with it?

Two reasons:

1. I’m not sure it’s ever possible to be 100% happy with anything – there will always be things that bug me and that I want to change. So I’ll just change them as I go.
2. It’s far more important just to get it out there than constantly be thinking about getting it out there.

In all the huffing and puffing over lines of code and photoshop files, I lost sight of the fact that the purpose of this blog is to keep me focussed on what’s important. Getting the perfect website just right isn’t one of those things.

Far better to get things out there, to open yourself to the world – to ‘ship‘ in Seth Godin terms – than to sit on your butt and think about doing something that you may eventually ship.

What project (or projects) are you sitting on, waiting for an excuse to start? When are you going to start? And when are you going to get it out there?

Inspiration comes from many quarters all around us. Sometimes it’s something we see, sometimes something we here. A lot of times for me it’s things I read.

I’ve written previously about Seth Godin and his new book ‘Poke the Box’. After reading the free eBook SXSW Pokes, I immediately downloaded the Kindle version of the full book and read it quicker than I’ve read most things before.

Poke The Box is all about starting, initiating, changing the status quo without fear of failure. Reading it struck a chord with me. Not only had I decided to give up fear for lent, but I was also living a more fearless life, committing myself to things and driving myself forward in several areas of my life, albeit slowly.

While going through my RSS feed one day, I wondered if it wouldn’t be nicer to have a single place on the ‘net that collects all of the best content, particularly for filmmakers. There’s Hollywood Wiretap – a great site for news on big studio movies – but nothing really similar for blog posts and articles that are aimed at, written by and for the benefit of independent filmmakers.

TheIndieFilmHub.com was born in mere moments and, no sooner had the idea come to me than I had set about making it happen. This project, which launched yesterday, is my poke at the box, my attempt to get something shipped when other projects and ideas have been stagnating or not progressing as quickly as I’d have liked.

The Indie Film Hub is a place indie filmmakers can go to find the best, most useful, most relevant and entertaining content on the web, all personally curated. Every post on the site is hand-picked by a real, genuine human being – no bots, no aggregators, no automation whatsoever.

I hope, in time, it will become a great resource for filmmakers and be the first stop on their hunt for content. But if not, at least I started something. At least I poked the box.