Photo Story: The Days Before the Xobni Launch

This post tells the story of the weeks at Xobni before the launch of our first product, Xobni Insight.

Just after we decided we were going to launch at TechCrunch 40, I drove down to Palo Alto to chat with Paul Buchheit and his experience with launching Gmail. One of the most striking things he said was that he didn’t remember much of what happened before April 1, 2004 (Gmail’s launch date), because in retrospect, everything was just a blur. That’s why I decided to snap some pictures and write this post.

The decision to launch did not come easy and we actually flip-flopped on it: We decided to do TechCrunch 40 after deciding against it. There was strong interest from the organizers, and Josh Kopelman, one of our investors, said that it was good to have a deadline. And what a deadline it was! While we didn’t get all our ideas into the product, or refine it to the level of perfection we wanted to achieve, I think we did a great job.

A lot of things had to come together before the launch: Two months ago, our UI looked amateurish, our features were far from complete, and our website was decidedly non-flashy.

Mountains of Work

The engineering team – Greg, Adam, and myself – moved mountains. Greg is in charge of much of the heavy lifting, core code, ranging from NLP, to concurrency, and data flow code; Adam’s specialty is Outlook integration (and he still is the original author of 60-70% of our codebase), and my job is to make our UI fast and delicious. Here are Greg and I joking about some data flow code.



Here’s Adam testing our software on a VM. He’s probably the Windows user with the highest number of concurrently open windows.



Bryan Kennedy, Xobni’s latest addition, revamped our website, and did a lot of our server-side setup. I think it rocks.



Two weeks before launch, we sent the first release candidate into QA (thanks to Jorge and Arlene!). About a week before that, we were working day and night. By that time, my professional pose at work had started degrading.



At some point, Adam and I had a fist fight one night to decrease stress. I wish I had photos. Obviously, I won.

On Short Notice

We already had contracted out some UI refresher work (thanks to Dave and Jeff from Vestal!) when we realized that we wouldn’t have the capacity to get everything quite done. For example, we didn’t have a “Learn More” video until really late. When we decided we needed one, we asked around for someone who could produce broadcast-quality video on a short notice.

Timo Hetzel to the rescue! Timo is a friend of mine from Munich, Germany. He agreed to board a plane to SFO within 72h of my initial email. We even bought some Macs so he could do all the editing work we needed (Timo is also the biggest Mac fanboy on the planet). It’s safe to say that everyone loved the videos.



Another short-term arrival was Jey Kottalam, who whipped our web servers into shape after flying in from San Diego on a 4-hour notice. (Thanks, Jey, for your hard work!)



Tim came in on short notice to handle support requests and did a great job handling the stream of incoming messages and bug reports. Here are Jey and Tim munching on some Pizza Hut in our swanky conference room:

Shipping the First Beta

Eventually, the time arrived to send our beta to people who had signed up for the beta on our website. This was pretty much the first time our software was shipped to users we didn’t know. It’s safe to say that I was excited and afraid of this development.



Greg, on the other hand, stayed pretty calm.

The Final Countdown

On Sunday night before conference started, the entire team retreated to Mel’s. Mel’s, for those of who don’t know it, is an American diner best known for staying open late (and not for good food). We were working late and after 9 pm, it’s the only place left open close to our offices. But even dinner time wasn’t downtime. Matt had brought his laptop and was editing our press release after ordering his burger.



All this effort really paid off: A great product, a great presentation, good press, and happy users. Here’s Matt on stage at the conference.



But, as always, there’s plenty of work left to do.