Recounting the Launch of our First Startup

Well, it has been nearly one month since the completion and launch of Spicy Elephant, our first one month startup. The launch went crazy, far exceeding the expectations of the team and myself. This success was channeled into our follow-up project, which is in semi-private beta and nearing completion.

Toward the end of July (the end of the spicy project) we quietly launched on popular related news sites (hacker news and reddit) with little to no effect. We got a few additional users, and some interesting feedback, and we though that was that. Our project was a success (we got there), the task of slowly growing the user base lay ahead, and we shifted our primary focus to August and the next one month project.

A few days later the energy of the team was low, and we were having trouble selecting (let alone motivating) the next project. In attempt to reconcile the general feeling of the team, and to crystallize some lessons I'd learned over the course of our self-funded hack-fest, I bashed out a post capturing my experiences. Pushing it again to HN and reddit, I thought little more of it, and went out for the night.

I awoke to a fire storm. My inbox was flooded with an array blog comments, messages from the site, and personal requests from fellow hackers and business randoms (to meet up for coffee/drinks). I immediately hit the site. It still worked, and the number of users had increased an order of magnitude. Fellow team members were spamming me, one highlighting that the sign-up process was broken. Apparently we had overloaded our email quota with activation emails. At the time I thought that this was good problem to have as a founder (the site is popular!), but obviously terrible for the public face of the app (loosing users and potential customers every second that email is down). A quick fix, and the sign-ups continued to climb.

We had front-paged hacker news (near the top), reddit programming (top for a while), delicious popular bookmarks (screen grab), and uncounted other new aggregates.

That day was simply amazing. I'm getting a buzz just writing about it. The two of us that were full time on spicy spent the day responding to users, with a third team member pitching in from work (where possible). I was glued to the screen, refreshing pages and my inbox every few minutes, tracking conversations. We captured as much specific feedback as we could into our ticketing system (trac), and gave away free lifetime premium accounts to users if they experienced any difficulties or sent through exceptional feedback. And there was a lot of exception feedback, one of the first outcomes that really blew us away. I credited this to the collegial start up community, mostly hacker news.

The direct feedback was all positive and supportive, which was really encouraging. The blog comments and discussion on the hacker news post also had the same vibe. Strangely, the comments on the reddit post were negative, and many with troll like qualities. I could see some valid points amongst the negativity, although the sharp contrast in the tone from all of the other feedback started to dampen the morale of the team.

The buzz died away after a few days, although we are still getting feedback from the site, emails, and alerts daily. We pushed a new version yesterday with a suite of bug fixes, UI enhancements, and a set of the most requested features including: card import, export, deck copy, hot decks and speed improvements to the study process (more details).

We were lucky, really lucky. We worked hard, built a solid product, and expected it to smolder and grow organically. Instead it launched like a rocket ship, filling out our user base, and generated enough money to cover our initial costs (not our time). The most impressive thing besides the amount of traffic we generated was learning that people really do want to pay. I've read (and watched) this a number of times, but never really considered it deeply. I do pay for web-based services on occasion, and our team purchased a few project management services along the way, so the notion is not alien. Although, when users started buying our premium service, even on their first encounter with the application, it totally blew us away.

We also got a lot of feedback from people interested in our aggressive methodology of one startup per month for four months, which was very encouraging. Related to this approach was a post on the same day as our launch by Jeff Atwood entitled "Quantity Always Trumps Quality", a philosophy that we have debated a lot in the team, specifically regarding the feature quality/quantity trade-offs under our tight time constraints. In fact, this is always the teams biggest point of contention, for example: how do you decide what is worth pushing for more than a month? is shifting to maintenance mode and moving on to another project abandonment?

Anyway, we are nearing the completing and launch of our second one month startup, and things are looking good. We lost two of our team members this month to other commitments (one of which was our UI guy), so it has been craig and myself solid for the last four weeks.

The webapp is called Screen Sponge and the focus is on movie management with what we expect to be a much larger market than spicy. We are desperately looking for early feedback on our semi-private beta (privacy through obscurity), so if you are of beta ilk, sign-up and let us know what you think.