What it’s like to launch a public beta when you are a small startup

Hi All, I wanted to give you some first hand experience about what it is like to launch a public beta when you are a small startup like us.

Five, four, three, two, one..

So there we are on Monday morning after 3 hours of sleep. Implementing the last fixes, having some nice discussions and making the build that will, for the first time, make Airwave.io be exposed to the public. You think about the last year, how the pet project became a startup, the bumpy road leading to it etc. A great moment to remember.

We have liftoff!

So there you have it. Its’s live and immediately we are pulling up the graphs of the live stats. You hope all goes well and that your early users will be happy with the update. We have tested a lot, but there is always a chance that stuff goes fubar. Exciting..

The first messages started to appear and.. they were quite positive. Pfew.. We know its the beta release, but still, you want everything to work perfectly. Some features are left out, because you know, time..

But nobody knows about you..

Ah there we have it, our first classic mistake. We were very late informing people and media that we had our launch planned on Monday. And, being a small team, we did not go full out on getting coverage. Getting coverage with 500 errors is something we were really scared of. Furthermore, how to get coverage when you are a small Startup that is privately funded, has a small network and does not have big news like raising a large round? Difficult to say the least..

Nothing all day. One of the Devs gave me the pat on the back with “You did what you could..”. To be honest, that’s even worse than somebody getting angry at you..

And then finally we got lucky. TheNextWeb, not the smallest around, did a really great LifeHack article http://tnw.to/w094. And as soon as it got published boom! Because Airwave.io is a video platform which does a lot to protect the security and privacy of its users, the story quickly got shared. That resulted in quite some traffic.

Monday night

So you know that you can handle large amounts of traffic, your Cloud-environment on Azure is tested and ready for it, but you also know that if there is only one bug, you are done for. It will result in a bad rep, it will cause an overflow of your support inbox (so much for the “we will reply within a day”) and it would be the last thing you want on your launch day

You and your team start to get ready for another all-nighter. Watching graphs, watching the incoming support questions, making sure your scaling works etc.
You see the traffic increasing and the number of signups as well. Still you see that your platform is doing what it should do. The code is doing what it should do and you feel relieved. You get some support questions but luckily no major bugs land in your support box. Time to open a bottle of wine, the sun is already rising but who cares.. It has been a great launch

The next days

We got a lot of positive feedback. From users, investors, competitors and others. The number of users are increasing exponentially. And because Airwave.io is a video communication platform where users can communicate in confidence, your story gets published in areas where the political situation is not so great. So all of a sudden you get support questions in languages like Urdu (happy that the people sending them also understand English).

This also means that we have been very busy. Fixing bugs, improving features, creating the apps, making plans etc. We are happy about how the last couple of days have been. We are live, growing and kicking

The future

The journey has just begun. We have a great user base providing us with great input. The launch was great, but you are still unknown. We have a platform, but there is still a lot that needs to be done to take it to the next level. We are still very small after all. The wave has been made, now it is time to turn it into a tsunami ;).

What this means is that we will further improve our platform. Our mission has been stated and we will continue to get the message across.
Native apps on IOS and Android are on the horizon. Our team will get bigger. The growth cycle has begun.

And this means that, to fully implement our vision, there is a lot of work that has to be done. We are getting getting users, clients and outside help aboard. And we are looking into the options we have to further finance your growth.

The feeling we have is great, we are onto something here. Airwave.io can now really say that its connecting people around the world.

Cheers,

Ollie
Founder Airwave.io, the video communication platform with a mission ;)