When the Most Important Part of Your Website Doesn’t Work
Make sure to read the rest of the series for the story of how LaunchGood started and valuable lessons in entrepreneurship!
One day I received an email from Bassem Rashidi, a nasheed artist in California who had come across our website as he was researching launching his first solo album “My Heaven”.
Bassem was the perfect LaunchGooder. A truly sincere, pious brother who had just left corporate life to try and dedicate himself to a career of devotional singing.
We worked hard on putting together his campaign, and everything was going swell until Friday, December 6, 2013.
That weekend Bassem was planning a big concert. He had printed out flyers with links to his LaunchGood campaign and was expecting a big push from his fans.
However one of our Pakistani developers made some quick changes to the site before he headed out for a weekend of camping. He made a small mistake with big consequences: the “donate” button was unclickable on the site.
Imagine — the most important part of our website was not working!
As fate would have it, the other Pakistani developer we were working with suffered a sudden tragedy when his father passed away. So he also left for the weekend, retreating to his family’s village in the mountains.
So there we were, with a big fundraising drive over the weekend and we couldn’t fundraise.
The website did get fixed by Monday, and eventually, Bassem hit his goal and had a successful campaign (you can get the album here!). But that was the final straw for those developers. No hate on Pakistan (in fact, we’re back to using Pakistani developers, Doozie Labs — they’re awesome!), but outsourcing can be a very frustrating and opaque experience. I needed developers closer to home, who I could call on their cell in case of an emergency.
Fortunately, I had Bob Weins.
Bob is not a developer, he’s actually my business mentor and one of the most generous people you’ll ever meet. He’s been coaching me for 6 years and hasn’t charged me a nickel.
As I shared my frustrations with Bob, he connected me to one of his old and most talented friends, Ryan Martell. Ryan is a genius. He was part of a startup in college that eventually sold to the company that made Halo and he had his first retirement at 22. After a while he started working again, had more success, retired again and bought a sailboat. I think he got bored, because he started working again but this time from his sailboat off of Water Island (within the US Virgin Islands).
Ryan took a look under the hood of our website and gave us the good news it wasn’t total garbage. Seriously, there are some startups who outsource and it’s so messy that the website has to be completely scrapped and rebuilt!
But it did need work, and fortunately for us Ryan was willing to help at an extremely discounted rate. He also had recently found a young, eager developer named Ryan Steadman who was apprenticing under him, and the two of them — Ryan Martell and Ryan Steadman — become our two core developers.
5 years later they’re still the heart of our development.
This is a personal point of pride for me. Bob, Ryan, and Ryan are all of other faiths; they’re not Muslim. But they love the work we do, the values that LaunchGood stands for.
They also embody better than many Muslims the values core to our religion, like honesty. When we used to pay Ryan hourly I was always shocked how low the number of hours were. I asked, and knew there were certain times he got on the phone, or hopped on the computer in the middle of the night to fix something. “Oh it only took 15 minutes so I didn’t feel right charging for it.”
If you’re reading this and you’re Muslim, you know how many people would’ve charged for a full hour for that.
But that’s what’s special about our team. From top to bottom I’m always amazed by the character of our people. Just recently I learned Ameera, our director of Asia-Pacific Operations in Singapore, would pray istikhara before every support shift so she would make the best decisions when responding to people and approving/rejecting campaigns. That’s ikhlas.
Speaking of ikhlas…
The Return of Omar
We had 99 problems with the new website, but design wasn’t one of them. At least to us — I was so proud of how the site looked!
For Omar, though, being the perfectionist he was, he wasn’t satisfied. He had also just learned about responsive design (i.e. it works on any screen, including smart phones), and wanted to rebuild our website as such.
So Omar got to work. He started redoing the layout, color scheme, and made it responsive. As much as I loved it, I had to stop him.
“Omar, we can’t pay you”
“Don’t worry about it”
That’s Omar. When he puts his heart into something he goes all in, even if it’s not in his best interest.
And although we were broke, we could afford free. So we worked with him, and after awhile Amany and I had a conversation, we were both feeling the same way: we should invite Omar to be our third cofounder. He was technically there even before Amany, 13 months prior to launch. He was clearly invested in the platform and he, perhaps more than anyone else, embodied the spirit of LaunchGood.
Omar agreed.
By January of 2014, we had a trio-founders in place: Myself, Amany & Omar.
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See how we’re celebrating 5 years and check out some of our favorite campaigns here: launchgood.com/birthday
