Experiences from launching a teaser page on HN

Yesterday was a pretty hectic day at the ducks’ nest: we launched our teaser page!

There were many reasons why launching the teaser was interesting to us:

• the real time Twitter timeline used is powered by our Ducksboard backend, being its first real world test.
• it’s a fantastic way of measuring the interest generated by our product in the form of subscriptions to our beta.
• it’s a good oportunity to make it to the Hacker News frontpage

All in all the experience has been very positive: 24 hours after, we have gathered hundreds of requests for the beta program, have had thousands of unique visitors checking out the page and have accumulated more than 200 followers on Twitter. Some moments weren’t that funny as bugs and problems, of course, appeared.

Here is a selection of the strongest memories and experiences I built yesterday:

If you are launching anything online, get real time statistics

The most exciting moments took place when the team gathered around a 40″ TV to look at our Woopra client update in real time the avalanche of visitors. Numbers going up and world maps showing a lot of activity are the best part of launches

Don’t EVER update live code if it’s not 100% necessary

Yeah, I know, it’s so obvious it’s not even worth mentioning, but we (I) did it. We launched the teaser and soon realized that it would be nice to have the tweets in the timeline actually link to Twitter. I updated the javascript involved, tested it on my machine, uploaded it to the server, and… broke the teaser. We were too excited to think clearly, I guess. I rollbacked and everything went back to normal, but some visitors found a broken teaser page… My excuses! Damn, I had a bad moment!

Tease, it’s a teaser!

It wasn’t until few minutes before the launch that we decided to add some screenshots of the product WIP frontend. We are now convinced that it was the right choice. Saying “we are building a beautiful real time dashboard” is very different from actually showing some sexy screenshots.

And, above all, have fun

In the end it’s the main reason why we started the company. And we are being pretty good at doing it until now