Patience.
After years of planning, waiting, more planning, hoping and more waiting, the first version of Indibook now exists and it works really well.
It's hard to believe how fast things have turned around in the last few months, largely thanks to my original business partners who I first approached four years ago. For various (very good) reasons, the time wasn't right for them then to take a punt on a start-up idea headed by someone without any track record.
But something obviously stuck in their minds and, in January, I got a call saying they had a few week's gap in their schedule and they wanted to give Indibook a go.
What followed has been a bit of a whirlwind. The fist iteration of the app was with me in just a couple of weeks - something I could never have achieved if I'd gone with my then-current plan of coding everything myself. I even went so far as to book myself on to an excellent weekend Ruby on Rails Codercourse in Soho with Michael Healy - highly recommended by the way. and something I'd love to get back to as soon as this rush is over.
Once the basic app was ready, there's been a ton of back and forth communication using Active Collab which continues today as we pick up valuable feedback from the first of our beta testers and continue to refine and improve the service.
And there is still a shed load of stuff to do before we're ready to open our doors - but more of that next time...
It's a strange feeling, looking back over the past few months and to what lies ahead - a mixture of excitement, uncertainty and 18-hour-day exhaustion. But this stage of our journey also reminds me of something Steven Soderbergh once wrote about making his first film, 'sex, lies and videotape' - "just keep plugging away at your project, don't ever give up and, one day, you'll be successful. Just be ready for it when it comes."