Startup Mullings

A Month in the Startup Life (Week 2)

This was a pretty hectic week for us - we got a great Glossi write up in TheNextWeb which led to a ton of visits that nearly crushed our server. After this incident, we realized we needed to understand the limitations of our system better and work on a scaling strategy. A lesson for me was that if you have a good product it’s not extraordinarily difficult to get press but it’s you need to make sure your system can handle the traffic burst. This is a good reason to use AWS, you pay a premium for the scaling flexibility but you’re able to deal with traffic spikes.

Here’s the second week:

• 3/26 - Got a writeup in TheNextWeb and spent the entire day dealing with scaling issues so our dev work had to be put on hold. Ended the day by grabbing a beer with a buddy to unwind.
• 3/27 - Met with cofounder to code and refine vision. In the afternoon meet up with another startup founder and send intros. Start writing blog post on our MySQL to MongoDB migration.
• 3/28 - Met with cofounder and had our weekly call with a client. Started working on Flickr integration. Met with another startup in the afternoon. Got home and almost finished up the Flickr integration. Finished up the Glossi tech blog post on our MySQL to MongoDB migration. Responded to a ton of emails in the evening.
• 3/29 - Got interviewed by a blogger to discuss how we recovered from our crisis on Monday. Finished Flickr integration and started working on Facebook Page integration. Went for a run.
• 3/30 - Met someone and got a ton of intros to scaling experts and chatted with one for an hour or so and got some good ideas. Wrote a blog post. Hacked on a side project to play around with a new timeline jquery library and learn Heroku/Flask while at it. Tried to find a venue and a time for the Skillshare classes I wanted to teach. Started setting up a meetup group but backed out at the payment step - will probably go through with it in a few days. Started filling out a questionnaire to get featured on an interview/startup/entrepreneur blog. After speaking with the team we decided we will not apply to Startup Chile this session.
• 3/31 - Ran some much needed errands in the morning. Went for a run. Celebrated my birthday in the afternoon. Not a very productive day but need to have one of these every once in a while.
• 4/1 - Worked some more on Facebook page integration. Complete the meetup group setup process and created the NY Web Scaling Meetup.