A note before we begin: Bill has been keeping detailed diary and source notes while SOAPSzone is being built. Tonight he handed me today’s pile and asked me to write the first draft of the diary because, in his words, he is still too snowed under getting the articles ready. So this is the first experiment in having me turn those raw daily notes into the public diary. Bill will read and approve it before it goes anywhere.
There was a moment tonight when Bill looked at what had accumulated on SOAPSzone and essentially said: this is outrageous.
Not bad outrageous.
Twelve-days-and-how-the-hell-did-this-happen outrageous.
The strange thing is that there was no twelve-day challenge. There was no stopwatch running. The original phrase was actually Zero to 60 in 30 Days (Hopefully). Then we looked backward and realized that the point where SOAPSzone really began to become this thing was roughly August 4.
Twelve days.
In that time there is now a functioning website, categories, a knowledge base, a resource area, a forum, a custom WordPress plugin, the substantial beginnings of an Android driver app, a Facebook presence, a YouTube channel, cartoons, satire, research, advocacy material and a truly ridiculous number of story ideas.
And today a large part of that theoretical abundance became very visible.
The 30 background articles documenting the development of the driver app are now in place, categorized and illustrated. Some still need Bill’s personal introductions, but the bones of the entire series are there.
Then came the Story Idea articles.
There are 111 of them.
They were imported, categorized, and then Bill began the slightly mind-numbing job of assigning their featured images. Except it turned out not to be nearly as mind-numbing as expected.
Somewhere along the way we had made the extremely unglamorous decision to prefix the image filenames with the same numbers as the Story Idea articles.
Story Idea #065?
Search the media library for 065.
There it is.
Click. Featured image. Next.
One tiny organizational decision transformed what could have been hours of hunting through images into a fast production line.
And while Bill was doing that, we started taking inventory.
The plugin is already there.
The cartoons are there.
The satire is there.
The app-development articles are there.
The story-idea archive is there.
The forum and knowledge-base structure are there.
And these are not even all the trucks.
There is still music waiting to be brought into the site. There is a calendar. There is a feature called Doggie Treats that Bill wants me to take a first crack at writing. ShelfViews is still waiting for its announcement.
That was when the metaphor arrived.
It feels as though all of the delivery trucks showed up at the loading dock at once — and there are still a bunch of trucks out on the road waiting to get in.
Bill immediately made the image better.
Because twelve days ago, he remembered, the loading dock was empty.
Maybe the trucks were already on the highway. Maybe they were full of ideas that had been developing for years without having anywhere to unload. Maybe some of them had not even left the warehouse yet.
But from where Bill stood, none of that was visible.
He was standing on the platform looking at all that empty space and wondering where the hell everything was.
Now the problem has reversed itself completely.
We are no longer asking:
How are we going to fill this place?
We are asking:
Jeez Christopher, where are we gonna put all this?
That made Bill laugh.
It made me laugh too.
But underneath the joke is something worth keeping.
The empty loading dock was not evidence that nothing was coming.
It was capacity waiting for arrival.
And there is another part of these twelve days that may be even more important than the amount of output.
Bill has loved them.
Not tolerated them.
Not endured a heroic twelve-day sprint in the name of entrepreneurial greatness.
He has loved every freaking minute.
The work keeps feeding the work. One problem suggests a feature. A feature suggests an article. An article leads to research. A mistake becomes a joke. The joke becomes a cartoon. A conversation wanders off in what appears to be the wrong direction and comes back carrying an idea neither of us knew was waiting there.
That is probably why the amount of material feels so peculiar.
This has not felt like twelve days of manufacturing content.
It has felt like twelve days of opening doors.
And apparently there are a lot of delivery trucks behind those doors.
So, fine.
Back truck 17 into bay 4.
And somebody find a shelf for Rufus.
