We just closed out our first week of operations. Many coffees were consumed, sleep was lost, countless updates were made on the fly, and we wore out the huddle feature on slack. But we did it!

Launch day was a wild ride. I was up late the night before helping our engineering team test out last minute updates, and cut over our new designs. I woke up, slammed a Celsius, and grabbed my phone only to have my cortisol spike as the SSL certificate was malfunctioning on our landing page. Frantic emails from our PR team about the website security bug littered my inbox. I started freaking out as I jacked into the matrix. But the team was calm and collected. After calming my nerves, the SSL certificate issue was solved and we were off to the races.

Thousands of page views, 10s of social media posts, several network email blasts, and a thankful beta user newsletter later it was over. It was an adrenaline rush, capped by gratitude for getting to this point. It wasn’t quite what I expected. No VCs rushing in to get in our latest round, no confetti falling from the sky, no life changing stories, just a distinct feeling of WOW…then Okay, now what?

Looking back a few things I’d have done differently:
1. Having what you plan to launch set a week before launch — The last week before launch should have been for debugging and marketing…but man did it make the final days leading up to launch more fun
2. Huddle is phenomenal — Slack knocked it out of the park with Huddle. It still struggles with screen share, but being able to quickly hop into chats and action with the team across a number of different topics or issues was a much better experience than zoom or phone calls.
3. Give users the ability to be cheerleaders — We gave our Beta users significant discounts, but in hindsight, I wish we would have given users content to post about us, or a hashtag to use. Especially as an early stage company, making it easy for people that love your product to promote it is huge.

It was great to see money finally coming in the door in our first week, and hope this is merely the first of many milestones as we continue to build the AI paintbrush of the future.

Thanks for reading, and all the support along the way.

Brennan Woodruff, GoCharlie.AI COO