A few days ago I wrote an article on my personal blog giving the perspective of how important the day was to me personally, but here I wanted to give some insight on what the time was like for us as a company.
For the startup junkies, we believe in a lean startup philosophy. It basically means that we shoot for a deadline, and instead of extending that when we think we're not going to make it, we just start cutting things out that are non-essential. The point is that we think it's important to deliver something to our users, even if it is missing a couple of features, than not provide anything at all. You'll notice that we've still got our 'beta' tag next to our logo in the Blank Label website. We're basically trying to make it obviously clear that we're still figuring things out, working out the kinks, and taking onboard feedback to make everything better for you.
As we rolled into the final week pre-launch, we started to get concerned that we weren't going to be able to get everything up we thought we wanted to by October 31, Halloween, launch day. There were a couple of hundred people who'd come to our previously pretty crappy site, but liked us enough to drop their email, we had got bloggers and journalists excited about launching, so the pressure was on that we had to launch that day. On the 29th, we'd decided to publicly tweet that we were going to officially launch at noon on the 31st. The pressure was now on.
The burden was really on our Chief Interweb Builder and Lead Design Dude, Zee and Alec. At this stage, we'd already heard from so may doubters that there was no way that we were going to be able to launch on time. 'Web development is always months late, what makes you think you can beat the system.' We hate the system. We break rules. Zee and Alec were up from 48 hours before launch and 24 hours after it to make sure we delivered our promise. That's really important to us. I can honestly say that I slacked off, and actually sneaked a few hours of sleep in there, and I took a break around 11pm on the evening of Halloween to hang out with some friends for the holiday. Not Zee and Alec. To them it was so much more than just getting our website up. When users come to our site, and we hope that they like it and become customers, we promise them that they're going to get a product that they love in 21 days. Getting our site up on time was our first opportunity to build that trust, to deliver what we actually said. This milestone really belongs to them.
Well done guys. And what a kickass men's dress shirt design application.
Fan Bi
Chief Shirt Maker | www.twitter.com/lifeoffbi
Blank Label | Co-Creation Blog
P.S. Leading up to Halloween and launch we tweeted that we were going to give away a free custom men's dress shirt for someone tweeting their coolest Halloween pic. This is who we chose, in honor of Zee, who also has a baby daughter. Congrats Rodney!
