Customer Profile: Film School Database

January 25, 2010

Tags: customer profile, internet ideas, startup

In January of 2010, we helped release www.filmschooldatabase.com to public beta. Our client, Joshua Pancer, is no novice to software development. He has held roles as a project manager of a software development startup and has released several personal software projects. Josh was a film school graduate and saw an opportunity to help film school students communicate better, publish their work, and organize new film projects.

In 2008 he contracted with an India based firm to build his social network. When it was finally completed he had an independent review done on the code that was given to him. It was not a success. The India based team used poor quality coding techniques combined with non-standard frameworks. He judged the risks were too high to release the project and so decided to take a second round on development.

In 2009, we contracted to help Josh release a new version of, FSDB, filmschooldatabase. This version was to be built from the ground up using a proven social networking framework along with quality coding techniques. We helped Josh interview and find an excellent U.S. based developer who was himself a film school student. We vetted out several social networking frameworks and helped him choose Pinax, a Python/Django based framework that would allow FSDB to scale well in functionality. We loosely oversaw the project during development and acted as a resource to the primary developer. This relationship allowed Josh to stay on budget while having the confidence of having his project overseen by senior level experience.

When the project reached its first milestone we setup a development environment so FSDB could be tested and verified. As FSDB progressed and was ready for beta testing, we set up a production stack that would meet the combined needs of, 1) high availability, 2) scalability, and 3) maximizing cost savings.

Today, FSDB has been signing up new schools on a weekly basis. To see Josh’s project, visit FilmSchoolDatabase here: http://www.filmschooldatabase.com/