Fixed our First 1 AM-on-a-Sunday Bug
by Henrique SpotornoThis is it, everybody. There is no coming back now. After over a year of developing products that failed to get traction, we finally got a product that is being used in real-life scenarios. Insights (https://getinsights.io) receives bug fixes requests which are both urgent and coming from a different time zone. This one happened to be an easy fix, luckily, so everything was good to go for Monday morning.
I know this is a weird milestone to celebrate, but here's the thing: I've been interested in the startup lifestyle for a while now. Reading about it I knew it was often romanticized - late nights, fixing a product right before a presentation, coding on the airplane on the way to meet an investor...
But for me, since quitting my job a year ago, none of that was really true. Yes, I would work late on a weekend, but I knew it was only because I wanted to do so - there was no reason for me to push myself. No users, no companies, no urgency would drive me. I would end up telling myself: I could keep pushing myself to finish everything now, or I could do everything tomorrow. Or the day after. It didn't make a difference.
Things are different now. There is a sense of urgency, a weight that I can't quite explain. I'm still doing everything from my living room, and I don't feel that anything is different with me. But things have changed.
May they continue to do so.
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3
Did you get an alert about the bug or just happen to be online?
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1
We set up an alert system that sends messages on Slack, which we then get on our phones. We were both still awake, luckily :)
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1
Great idea. How difficult was it to build this? What are the challenge you face while marketing it?
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Building it was not that difficult - we've been building products for a while now. It started as a solution we wanted to use on our own websites, so part of the work had been done before.
The biggest challenge now I think is getting it in front of the right people. Privacy-minded people are notoriously good at avoiding marketing.
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Yes, looking at your target audience it is a very interesting case of marketing. We are also facing the same issue to find the right people with web performance mindsets since our product is based on web performance statistics.
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