From laid off twice to product of the day

What a roller coaster since May.

Laid off, again, for no damn reason while taking care of my newborn and right into the harshest job market in recent history. Barely any savings, no plan B. And I really don't want to join another job with weekly layoff all-hands.

What should I do?

I had something in my mind, but I had to do it very quickly. A few weeks later the pet project ralify I've built got selected to exhibit on the collision conference in Toronto.

Well, basically I spent my last money exhibiting and there were registrations and first alpha testers. But nothing significant. My wife is gonna kill me.

So what's next?

Oleg and Svitlana that joined the team had me connected with an incubator, and the incubator was the first customer and they also recommended it to their participants.

That was a first good step, but I needed something that had more outreach.

Then I've found Product Hunt and first I was like, "how the hell should we get so many votes? No one knows us."

That idea set Oleg & Svitlana and their friend Olya on fire. I gave them a goal, we want to be product of the day. Even if it sounded totally ridiculous.

We set a date, August 7th.

August 5th came along and nothing was really done, and on top of that I got a bronchitis.
Moved it to a week later.

August 14th was it. One shot.

I said, either we make it, or I'll kill the project. What a gamble.

The crazy thing, those 7 days we've collected a lot of users on notify me, around 200 and my confidence started rising.

The night before august 13th. I've been setting up the server infrastructure. Nothing works, everything needs to be set up properly, load balancer, file server, nodes. I was preparing for the worst. I did not want everything to crash that night.

Guess what, the 2 CPU cores VPS would've done it :D

Anyways, things stayed solid and we started to gain traction and were at the first spot quickly. But the competitors were catching up.

Our keyboards were melting, we were sending out messages like crazy to everyone who committed to support us. There was no shame, it was all out war. Absolutely nuts!

A 37 hour shift, to finally celebrate at midnight: ralify is the product of the day.

Sign ups kept pouring (around 200) in and people actually created goals, requirements, tasks. Crazy!

I got so excited, that by walking down the stairs I slipped, and broke my left foot. Fantastic :D

Anyways, things are still tough, no idea how the next months rent is gonna be paid.

I'll keep you posted!