We all flew out to the Left Coast for a summer of excitement and hard work 16 days ago. We received initial funding from a VC to develop a location-based mobile app this summer, an idea that came out of a University CS class project. We got settled into our apartment (if you can call it that) on a Sunday and walked to Starbucks that afternoon to talk about our first day of work that Monday. It soon became apparent that we weren’t as thrilled about our initial direction as we had thought given some recent market research. As far as team alignment is concerned, at least we were aligned against our initial idea. The idea of spending the summer working on our original idea felt like a dead-end. So, we went back to the same conversation we had gone back to time and time again during our weekly dinners at school.

“What about a dating app?”

As early as February, we started playing around with the idea of a dating app. One of our co-founders had even begun fiddling with the development of some gesture-based game interfaces, but our eyes were mostly on a different prize in the spring. Our value props for our amorphous dating app were unclear, and we had a hard time articulating why such a gamified app+ would work, so we kept pushing it to the backburner. We’d usually conclude “It would be a cool hackathon project,” or “Maybe we can develop it next, after this project.” Perhaps it was the warm, dry sun of Redwood City or the excitement of finally being out in the mecca of startup innovation, but something finally clicked in all of us and we were all-in, 100%, on the idea of Robin. We started an impromptu brainstorming session right there over our iced coffees and teas, from which all of the major features of our current version would come. We left the coffee shop a couple of hours later and headed back to our apartment, our 96° Ikea incubator, with all of the convictions and eagerness of four young entrepreneurs with a new idea.

We updated all of our mentors and advisors with respect to our pivot, and began development on Tuesday, June 10, Fast forward two very short weeks of delivery pizza and Current Swell playlists and arguments and args() and we have a functional, testable app. Our “inspirational quotation” for the first week of development was: “If you aren’t embarrassed by your product then you’re releasing too late.”

As a team, we took that aphorism to heart and gave ourselves just these past two weeks (thanks Pikichat!) to create an app and move into a Beta test, promising ourselves that we would not skimp on any of the features that we wanted to incorporate into the public version by the week of July 4th. We are happy to report that we are on schedule! We will begin in-house and limited release testing by tomorrow afternoon. We are positively thrilled to be bringing you Robin, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback and launch early next month!

If you’re interested in testing the app for us, sign up for our waitlist at robinme.com or send us an email (team@baseforty.com).

Follow us on Twitter @TheRobinApp for more updates!