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I love movies.  I love going to the movies and spending far, far too much money on popcorn.  I met my wife while we were both working at a movie theater.  So I didn’t really need a solid business plan to create Single Sentence Movie Review.  I knew I wanted to create that site.  I included it in my web development portfolio, but that’s not why I built it.  Interestingly enough, though, it has led to bigger and better things.  And I imagine that your passion projects can lead to bigger and better things for you.

Last night I joined the board of directors of the Indianapolis International Film Festival.  First of all, I really like the other people in the room.  There was a lot of good energy focused on the idea of growing and improving the festival.  It’s always good to be in a room with those types of positive vibes. 

My first responsibility on the board is going to be lending my expertise to the development of the festival’s website.  This is probably going to be the highest profile website I have worked on since I started my business.  It’s a great talking point when I’m meeting other people in the Indianapolis community.  This position is going to go along way in establishing my credibility in the local market.

So what does all this have to do with Single Sentence Movie Review?  When I contacted the festival about doing some work on their website, I included a link to Single Sentence as a way to demonstrate both my development skills and my love of movies.  That approach seems to have been pretty effective. 

Now it’s entirely possible that I may have eventually ended up on the board for the film festival even if I had never created Single Sentence.  But I can tell you that the board president was very excited about it.  Viewing my site actually spawned some ideas of how the film festival’s site could be approached differently.  I also had a lot more confidence when speaking to the board members (who voted me in) because I wasn’t giving them a theoretical pitch of what I could bring to the table.  I had already created a website with a database backend to store all the movies.

filed under: Finding Work, General News