Thought & Theory

A lot of people wonder what its like for a startup to launch their project. We figured this would be a great opportunity for us to help others by logging all the activity for the launch of Only Human. So Jason and I decided to keep an hour-by-hour journal to give people a behind the scenes look of all the stress and celebration.

Sunday, Jan 14th (Working out the Kinks)

12:00 PM
Dennis: Incredibly nervous because we had to make a last minute switch from google Gmail as our email server to using the hosts. Plus Engine Yard is going some through hardware maintenance so we have to be patient.

1:00 PM
Jason: Went to website to find a 404 error…. called Dennis to find out email maintenance is going on.
Dennis: Jason talks me down from the ledge because i’m still looking at a 404 Screen. Trying to work on things locally on my own computer to svn up later to the staging and production site.

2:00 PM
Dennis: Finally taking a break and eating some food. Finding some individual health insurance and realizing how much it sucks. Go bootstrapping!

3:00 PM
Dennis: Fixing some more copy and visual things I’m seeing here and there.

5:00 PM
Jason: Just read a couple of the stories Dennis posted now that the site is back up. It makes me think about the fact that people are very multifaceted and you may never know some things about people because the topic never comes up.

6:00 PM
Dennis: Thinking of more stories to talk about while I continue to stare at individual health plans. Man, these are a ripoff.
Jason: Going to ‘Mojo’s Kitchen’, a new bbq/blues restaurant in Jacksonville Beach (next to Angies Subs, the best sub place in Jacksonville).

7:00 PM
Dennis: DNS settings have been changed and we now have a 1 slice staging / 2 slice production setup. Hope this is enough to survive any kind of press we get on launch day.
Jason: Called Dennis to try to resolve the AOL email resend verification issues. Australian Open coverage started, flipping back and forth between that and the Chargers/Patriots game.

8:00 PM
Dennis: 24 is on! I’m interested to see where the series goes this season. I mean Jack has been tortured for a year now and he was already pretty dark before it all. My prediction, Jack tortures a puppy just because it leads to more information.

9:00 PM
Dennis: Uhm, Jack ripped someone’s throat out. Dude…Oh, and getting calls from Jayson and Ezra @ Engineyard.com assuring me things are being worked on. Always good to hear that.
Jason: Just finished cooking (baking) some Tollhouse cookies, they were exquisite, I doubt Dennis is enjoying some chewy, warm and wonderful chocolate chip cookies right now.

10:00 PM
Dennis: Working with Steve, our developer, to get the email issues on the server fixed and good to go. Having fun with the staging server and other randomness. We make the call to postpone launch one day to Tuesday, January the 16th.
Jason: Sent Dennis a reminder e-mail about putting up a banner to promote our FOWA trip.

11:00 PM
Dennis: I finally let Steve go to bed after rigorous testing on the staging server. I breathe a sigh of relief and drink some beer to celebrate. Mmmm old Bud Light.

Monday, Jan 15th (Testing)

12:00 AM
Dennis: Last minute IE testing then sleep!
Jason: Got off the phone with Dennis, tying up some loose ends and discussing the launch plan for Tuesday. I will be sending out a couple email invites tomorrow as well as going over the friends/family email list.

2:00 AM
Dennis: Can’t sleep. Putting together press stuff for launch.

8:00 AM
Dennis: Wake up to klogd error. Have no clue what it is but I give Jayson a shout and it gets fixed.
Jason: Headed to the 9-5, not before checking the site again; looks like a story I posted from last night got lost in the migration of content from the testing environment.

9:00 AM
Dennis: Some more IE fixes. Why must browsers render everything differently!
Jason: Checking e-mail, Facebook, Digg, Techcrunch, AOL Today, Mashable and Espn.

10:00 AM
Dennis: Noticing critical profile error on the site. Proceeding to freak out.
Jason: Finished updating the Campaign Monitor with my contacts for our “Public Launch” email. Sent Dennis a note about a CSS issue on the Welcome page of the site.

11:00 AM
Dennis: Still diagnosing, seems to be associated with your profile being public or private.
Jason: Trying to post a couple of stories, getting some weird errors.. Hopefully Dennis is just messing around again.

12:00 PM
Dennis: Found it, figuring out how to fix it now.
Jason: Grabbed a quick bite to eat and found my dog standing atop the 5th shredded dog bed in his cage. I am going to write a story about it on the site - this dog is a pain in the ass!

1:00 PM
Dennis: Last minute cut of some code. Sent email to blog contacts and Facebook group for people to check things out.
Jason: Took a few minutes to read Guy Kawasaki’s latest blog posts, it would be nice to talk to him at the FOWA in London.

2:00 PM
Jason: Sent out the first round of e-mails about the site launch to CenterNetworks.com, Web2List.com, and LifeHack.org. Dennis is contacting Pete Cashmore at Mashable!.

3:00 PM
Jason: Reading some of the new stories posted, looks like we are going to have a good amount of moderation to do!

4:00 PM
Dennis: Our first junk posts, yay. Thank you hipinion.

5:00 PM
Dennis: Answering feedback and jotting it all down.
Jason: Headed to the gym.

9:00 PM
Jason: Revised our press release and shot the corrections back to Dennis.

11:00 PM
Dennis: Fixing one last little glitch with Rails. Switching the site to public beta! So excited.
Jason: Just hopped on Google Analytics to look over some of the site stats before the site gets some serious traffic flowing in. It is interesting to see Google’s software compared to Nielsen stats which I have been used to.

Jan 16th (Launch Day)

12:00 AM
Jason: Had a phone call with Hiten Shah about some SEO stuff, general site feedback and some promo for the launch of the site tomorrow. It is getting very exciting, the site is actually live right now (shhhh)!
Dennis: Testing on staging site. Launching the production slices. Our site is live!

1:00 AM
Jason: Site has it’s first official promotion on Cssvault.com!

2:00 AM
Dennis: Receive email about server issues. Its being fixed, go EngineYard!

7:00 AM
Jason: The usual morning rigors of letting the dog out, feeding him/myself, maybe showing etc etc.

8:00 AM
Dennis: The word of mouth marketing begins. I start with Facebook, 43things, and other communities i’m a part of and just try to explain what we’ve been doing for two months.
Jason: While waiting for my roommate to wake his lazy ass up, I checked out Dennis’ post on Newstoday.com and also if there was any reaction to the post on Cssvault.com.

9:00 AM
Dennis: Listening to Explosions in the Sky’s first album because it makes even the geekiest moments in life, including site launches, seem uber epic.
Jason: Sent another Site Launch email to Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.net.

10:00 AM
Jason: Sent an e-mail to Noah Kagan (formerly of Facebook) to let him know of the launch and to get him to post some feedback on his blog; I am not holding my breath Noah!

11:00 AM
Dennis: My friend Jeff finds a small security bug, turns out to be a small issue and fixed quickly.
Jason: I have officially kept this diary going for 23 (almost straight) hours. Good idea Dennis, I think people will find this a fun read, I know I would.

12:00 PM
Jason: 24 hours, wahoo! I think I am going to celebrate by eating a pizza for lunch. Yes, a whole pizza. Also, I e-mailed Brian of SocialDegree.com, Sid of rev2.org and Ryan Carson of Carson Systems about the site launch.

1:00PM
Dennis: Gears of War and pounding the pavement looking for some freelance work to help support my broke startup ass. It’s tough trying to bootstrap a new venture AND trying to support yourself.
Jason: Finished up some lunch, did not in fact eat a whole pizza, only could muster the strength to take down 4 huge slices (I threw the word ‘huge’ in there to make me look like more of a man). Submitted the site to Emily Chang’s blog.

2:00 PM
Jason: Posted a story about a mistake I made getting a tattoo. Not only am I a founder of Only Human, I am also one of it’s biggest clients!

3:00 PM
Jason: E-mailed Dennis about some weird goings-on with the stories and being logged in to the site. It is not possible for a logged in user to access the front page of the site and see the newest stories posted (which I think is not good). I feel like I give Dennis more work then our actual users..

4:00 PM
Dennis: Obsessed with tracking Technorati, google analytics and watching our crazy egg stats. I can see this becoming a huge addiction.
Jason: Receiving some e-mails back from our blast of 200 friends/family, seems to be a good amount of positive response and a lot of praise to Dennis’ design work.

5:00 PM
Jason: Headed home from the 9-5, going to give Dennis a call to figure out my e-mail mess and schedule a meeting for tomorrow night to talk about the next phase(s) of features.

7:00 PM
Dennis: Still staring at stats and seeing some of the newer stories people have posted. Its really addicting to just hear about these small snippets of people’s lives. I realize how important a “relate story” feature will be in the future and jot it down in the ol’ notebook.
Jason: Started cooking up a storm with my roommate. By cooking up a storm I mean incorrectly using an automatic rice cooker and eating some chicken my roommate marinated and cooked. You’d think someone couldn’t mess up rice in an automatic rice cooker, but I did, it wasn’t very good.

9:00 PM
Jason: Browsed through the site and noted some changes to be made for our upcoming meeting with the programmer. I also spent some time finally setting up my mail through Mac Mail and not internet web-mail, god web-mail sucks!

10:00 PM
Dennis: Jason and I discuss the next steps and sift through a lot of feedback. So far so good, and haven’t received a bad remark yet. People have been really passionate about the idea.
Jason: In the midst of a phone conversation with Dennis about the first day of the site being live. We are both pretty happy with the launch and we are going to meet up to discuss the progress of the site from here and what features come next. We also chatted about who is talking about the site and he showed me how to use the Technorati watch-lists.

11:00 PM
Jason: Just got off the phone with my girlfriend, rubbed it in her face that one of my stories is the most viewed while hers are pale in comparison; not really pale, one of them is pretty close.

12:00 AM
Dennis: Launch day is over. Overall it went pretty smoothly with little hang-ups. We were hoping for some blog coverage by today but in all honesty, that was an unrealistic goal. 14k page views in one day, Pretty good for just word of mouth. Thanks everyone for all their support. Stay tuned for some exciting developments in the next coming weeks :).