Let me start by saying that I am aware it’s been a very long time since I posted to this blog. Honestly, the topic today, and the related topics to follow have a lot to do with that! But I’m back and I’m ready to share with you all what I’ve been working on for the past almost two years, so let’s begin!
There’s a lot to share with what’s gone into building Showpitch.com. This includes what Showpitch.com is, what its goals are, what technologies we’re using to make it successful, and the patterns and practices at work in its implementation. And then there’s how all of that ties together into a comprehensive eco system with many capabilities now and more planned for the future.
Today I want to start with talking about what Showpitch.com is and what a very high level overview of it looks like. I’ll go into more detail regarding its design, implementation, and specific capabilities in future posts.
In a nutshell Showpitch.com‘s stated purpose is to make talented people famous. This is a very simple concept, but very hard to make a reality. There’s a lot that goes into talent, discovery, fame, and the entertainment industry. Becoming famous isn’t easy, in fact it’s a lot of hard work! As the saying goes “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” So when you consider solving the problem of fame, you can easily see that this is a very hard problem to work on!
Showpitch.com‘s solution to this problem takes a very comprehensive approach.
We’ve identified the major forces involved in the talent discovery process:
- Industry
- Fans
- Talent
Further, we’ve broken the process down in to many components:
- Discovery
- Engagement
- Connecting
- Collaborating
- Funding
- Development
- Production
And with this in mind we’ve modeled the problem domain, and built tools and processes around each of these components. A short list of some of the tools and processes includes:
- Fan Recruiting, Promotion, and Social Posting
- Connecting between Industry members and Talent in a Social Network
- Full Text Search across Talent, Industry, and Media
- Deep Tag-based Search and Analysis across Talent, Industry, and Media
- Showcalls and creating and publishing Opportunities for projects
- Joint Ventures, Partnership Channels, and Industry Contacts
- A Media Hub, allowing for Distribution and Consumption of Media
This starts to encompass the scope of features that are made possible through the Showpitch platform and specifically the Showpitch.com website.
With such a large feature set, and with the team size that you would expect for a startup, it quickly became evident that we were going to have to embrace several modern approaches to web application design to achieve success, including:
- Being Cloud First, Cloud Native
- Leveraging partner solutions where possible and economically viable
- Leveraging technologies that allow for Rapid Application Development and Iteration
- Running on a very Lean and Agile Management approach
- Using only what we need, when we need it, and being ready to scale when the time comes
And so less than a year and a half into principle production development you can see the results at Showpitch.com. I encourage you to head over to the site, create an account, and check out some of its features!
After a lot of hard work there’s a lot we’ve gotten right. There’s also a lot of lessons we’ve had to learn. And I’m going to use the next several posts to this blog to share those with you. So stay tuned!
john brunnings 