As many of you know, I co-host a video podcast about craft beer called Hop Cast. Its a side project that I’ve been doing for several years now. Its just me and my buddy drinking and talking about beer. Overall its been a lot of fun to do and it doesn’t take too much time to put out an episode every week or so. About a year ago we got an idea to shoot another side project that would explore the cellars of craft beer geeks. We wanted to make it fun and also poke fun a little at how obsessive beer geeks can get about cellaring. Our inspiration for our new project Cellarz was the MTV show Cribs. Once we were finally able to shoot it we had to find the time to edit it and do the graphics for it. Well, it took us a while. It’s hard to believe it took a year for us to get the first episode of Cellarz online. When we first started the project we were pretty excited about it and started telling everyone about what we were working on. You know I’m all about sharing what I’m working on. The response was great and people loved the idea. That’s exactly the response you want to hear. How could this back fire; we had a fun idea and the response was outstanding. You hear from a lot of startups and businesses about the importance of building buzz early. But they never really tell you how early you should build the buzz. Well I think I learned what’s too early with Cellarz. It is easy to get excited about a new product, but if you generate excitement before you can deliver, everyone might not be there when you finally show up. With Cellarz, we had a teaser and a logo done for the show and it seemed like we were in good shape. Since this was a side project, it kept getting pushed to the back burner. Every month it just kept getting pushed to the side and it almost seemed like it was dead. But knowing that we had some of that interest for the idea out there we still wanted to deliver… no matter how late it was. Really we should have waited until we had some sort of rough cut or product together before we started telling people what we were working. There has been a couple projects over the last couple years where I’ve seen how revealing too much about your company, product, or service too soon can really back fire.

This was a fun project and we got a pretty good response when we finally uploaded the finished product. I think if we could have uploaded it within the first couple months of us teasing it, we could have had even more people excited to see it.