A (Launch) Day in the Life
14 May 2026
It’s not every day that you launch a new product into the world. In our case, this meant open sourcing our code base, launching our new website and brand, preparing a waitlist to start onboarding folks to our hosted solution, and then talking about it all publicly for the first time. It was a big deal that was years in the making.
I’ve launched my fair share of products. Most of those launches had the weight of the world on them. In the old days, we would have the team in the office in the late evenings/early mornings to try to minimize any potential impact to customers. Although those nights were a slog, they could also often be quite fun with lots of music, food, and as the night went on, a lot of delirium and stress. One of my close friends would often bake something special for our late night launches. We all looked forward to her creations.
These days, launches don’t require as much fanfare. A deployment rarely has to take down an entire system or site. Launches can and should be relatively seamless to the external world. There’s better tooling, improved practices, and just greater understanding of how to ship software.
Prior to our official launch, there was a ton of work to get the repos ready with the right docs and licenses. Once we felt ready, there was still a bit of fear, but otherwise, things felt very different. Here’s how it went.
Monday, 27 April 2026: Open Source Day!
James arrived at my house just as guacamole was being prepared. Good timing, James. As we snacked, we decided it was go time. With a couple presses of some buttons inside GitHub, we were officially open source. High fives all around. I don’t remember what was next, but I know the night included some cutthroat games of Rummikub (I lost…) and a homemade taco salad.
Tuesday, 28 April 2026: Official Launch Day!
I hopped out of bed to drive over to our favorite donut shop to get some launch day donuts. Is it even a launch day if celebration donuts aren’t involved?
We enjoyed some coffee and donuts before hopping on an early call with our friend who did all of our site design and development. It was a final check-in conversation to resolve open items. All systems were ready, so James went to work to update DNS and go through a long checklist of items. I think the majority of launch day issues in my career have been due to DNS and caching issues, and sure enough, we had a few hiccups, but nothing unexpected. The site was working across different browsers and we were, once again, high fiving. Our new brand was finally in the wild!
After a few hours of monitoring everything, we decided to get some fresh air and go for a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains.
We returned back to the house and then wrapped up the day with ramen and a meditation/sound bath/reiki session at my local yoga studio. Yep, that’s a first for a launch day! And, yes, we are definitely a calm, Southern California company.
Wednesday, 29 April 2026: Announcement Day!
With the code open sourced and the site live, it was now time to tell the world about it. Well, at least folks on LinkedIn. I pressed publish on my post and quickly started to feel the love from my network. Waitlist signups started to trickle in.
We then settled in for a couple hours of planning for our next month of priorities. We talked about our expectations around how many blog posts and types of blog posts we wanted to write. We talked about how we were going to handle the waitlist and onboarding. We talked about our next month as business partners and how we wanted to show up for each other. And finally we talked about product priorities and planning.
It was then time for James to get on the road to head back to his home (about an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles). But first, smoothies!
Several friends have asked me what’s different about being a second-time founder? I’d say hiking, sound bathing, and smoothies instead of all-nighters and junk food is a distinct change!