adieu, hasta la vista, sayonara

My life, like this blog, has been focused on starting this company for the last few months. With the site officially launched it is time for me to spend more time with loved ones, get healthy and explore my new home.

I'm starting a new blog (and a new website) at www.Slicksta.com.

See you there!

3. . . 2. . . 1. . . launch

WE FINALLY LAUNCHED !!

Today was our offical launch date and things are pretty serene and quiet around the office. The last few weeks have been hell and this weekend in particular was extremely stressful.

We started the day by issuing our launch release at 12:01AM. Oh, by the way, I'm now managing PR (and Customer Service) and have a new appreciation for what folks in this discipline do for a living. The launch release went through at least 20 revisions (I lost track after 16 or 17); we had last minute changes up to 15 minutes prior to posting in on the wires. Crazy. Good news is we got picked up by the AP, NYT, FT and WSJ among others. Not bad for my first PR launch.

The site is looking great. Creatively, the design is going a bit away from the direction I had in mind, but smarter, more creative-types are calling the shots now. We're up to 14 FTEs and are running out of cubes.

Today is bittersweet. On the one hand, I'm ecstatic about our launch. On the other hand, a part of me is sad about this chapter of the startup-cycle drawing to a close. Overall, I'm relieved, over-joyed and excited about building a business from scratch.

project management bitch

"I ain't no PM bitch"

This is what I said to my co-worker the other day. It came out during a moment of frustration and deep down inside, I knew that it was a false statement.

For the last two weeks I have been acting as project manager for the merchant area of our website. The folks who run this part of the business seem to have no ability nor the inclination to successfully figure out how to get their site produced. So I've been trying to take an 85 page powerpoint presentation on "must-have functionality" and writing technical requirements. Not my cup of tea.

The hardest part of this task is getting these guys to make up their minds. Every other day they change their minds about how something should work. Whenever a new idea pops into their heads, they turn to me to scope it out and figure out how to build it. I honestly do not understand why anyone would want this job full time.

The bright side is that when this is all over I can look to both the consumer site and the merchant site and say "I built that."

fast track it!

The last day or so has been a crazy series of "we need to get this done as soon as possible" projects. Pace at a startup is supposed to be frenetic for sure but this is ridiculous.

First, our business development team decides that they want to hand out flyers at a conference they are attending. I'm all for it if it will help them close important deals. Problem was, I had only two days to write a creative brief, take the agency through it, get and revise concepts from them, present to the biz dev guys, get approval and product and print them!

Today, we decided to redesign an important page on the site. I walked my CEO through the propsed change on the phone (he's in NY), mocked it up in Powerpoint and sent it to our developer. After talking through uses cases and design issues for an hour, he started to code. Crazy! But I'm not complaining because having zero product development processes ultimately is what will allow us to get this new design live by next week.

One day this stuff will be impossible because we'll have to sift through stacks of "requirement forms" and argue our way through "prioritization processes".

Ctrl + Alt + Del

I had a funny conversation with our new Director of Application Development today. We were talking about how to handle weekly code pushes and escalation procedures for when there were problems with the site. She mentioned to me that she was taking my name off the emergency alert notification list.

What was I gonna do when our managed hosting provider called me anyways?

HOST: Your site is down. What do you want us to do?
TOM: Have you tried pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del?

But this is in fact the first thing they do! Okay, they don't press the keys in that sequence but apparently 90% of application and webserver problems are resolved by just rebooting! Ha! Who would have known?

gonna fly now

I was driving into work today, enjoying my free trial of XM Radio, when I decided to check out channel 7 - Hits from the 70s. Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now" came on. You might remember this song from the movie Rocky. It got me so pumped up I could not wait to get into the office.

This week has been the toughest on record. As of last night I worked 43 hours and Thursday and Friday are still to come. The sheer amount of work is down-right daunting. So many things to QA; pages to re-write, processes to re-do, banners to approve, bugs to log, bugs to fix . . . the list goes on and on!

The good news is that the site is really coming together. Everyone we show the site to get really excited by the concept. The redesign was well-worth it.

data entry

Its about 9:00PM and I have already worked a 13 hour day. The office is calm and dark, most employees having gone home hours ago. The cleaning crew has come and gone. An editor and I are grooving to some progressive trance and entering content into the database. This type of data entry is mind-numbing. Fortunately, we're both in a hypnotic state: exhausted but determind to make progress tonight.

We are about 10% of the way to our goal and we have 10 days left before launch! Next week we'll have a team of temps coming in to help out and we just might make our deadline.