How not to do an investor call
Steps, an app helping you overcome social anxiety launched on Product Hunt in February and gained a remarkable amount of downloads and daily active users. Last month, we published the numbers, so if you’d like to hear about these, read here.
As the developer of Steps, I was especially anxious something could break when more people than ever before would be using the app.
One thing, friends and fellow developers always recommended me to do when building something, was to always make it scalable. No excuses like we’re not aiming to reach so many users that it could get critical. NO EXCUSES.
Maths
In maths, you seek for the limits of a function by forming the limes (Latin for ‘border’), meaning you check how a function behaves when you replace the variable with a certain value. And you wouldn’t do this once with only one value; you check with different values and increase or decrease them depending on what you’re looking for.
It’s not different for developers. Developers (should) replace the variable (variable = amount of users) with a large number to see how their product behaves when more people start using it. And how it behaves when no one uses it.
We don’t have a backend behind Steps as of the time writing, the content ships with the app. You will always be able to see the challenges regardless of a working internet connection or a working server. However all the artworks are stored on a server. Meaning if the server breaks, the artworks won't be accessible for the app and it would look really empty.
One day…
Everything worked fine on launch day.
Two weeks after however, the service hosting the artworks went offline for an entire day and Steps indeed looked completely empty. We couldn't figure out why it happened. Only two days later we were informed that it was the result of an SSL DoS attack on our hosting service, causing them to shut down operations temporarily.
We did not realise that the server was down by ourselves.
On this day, we had a call with a venture capital firm from California.
The investor we were talking with pulled up their phone and curiously showed us an empty Steps. Just like in the picture above. We were convinced that the cause must've been their bad internet connection. But since we were having an internet call this turned out to be rather unlikely and we realised, our server was down.
Yeah…
The important part for us is what we learn from this happening and how we can prevent this or react early in the future. The threat of a server outage is omnipresent I guess. Setting up monitoring systems that alert us when something is going wrong is one thing we're going to do.
As always, we’re eager to hear your thoughts on the product, mission, anything really. Get in touch at hello@stepsapp.xyz!
