February 17, 2008
6pm last night (Saturday) we had a conference call with all of the engineers. The new version of Like.com, which is supposed to go live yesterday, has issues. The new site is slow, every fifth click it hangs, and some parts are not working in all browsers. This new site is a complete make over of Like.com. It is the largest release we have done since launching almost a year ago. We have been working on this for over 2.5 months. Crap! We gotta get this out.
On the phone are: Dan Chiao our trusted lieutenant who has been there since day one – he has transitioned from the rapid prototyping hacker a few years ago to a methodical systems architect of a large part of the backend for Like.com; Andy Miller, who is one of the best Data center architects I've ever worked with and our guru on site performance; Eric Lee, a relatively new addition to our team, who has worked 5 weekends in a row for this release and finally took some much needed time off … on his own volition calls in from a ski resort and offers to help; Robert Long our front end engineer who I don’t know well yet, but who seems to be very very skilled and conscientious about his work; Jacquie Phillips who in just the last few months has gone on to become one of the best product managers I have had the pleasure to work with. Jacquie is a no nonsense mid western girl who followed her passion to NYC and eventually put herself through school at NYU before becoming an early fashion blogger with shefinds.com. In a company of computer science Ph.Ds she has provided the domain knowledge we needed to really make a better search engine.
She is the core of a new team strategy we have been developing all year (code named: beauty and the geek) that aims to create the smartest fashion search engine on the planet. Visual search was just the beginning. We recently hired a super smart and very talented fashion designer named Marissa Goodman (more on her later) to add to this strategy.
Azhar, Burak, and myself, and a few others are as also on the call. While I am on the call, Sofia Shah, my new 7 day old daughter rests on my chest. Having her there is calming for me and all babies love sleeping on their parent's chest - something about the beating of the heart reminding them of being in the womb. I am happy she is there with me.
Can we get this out today but it is clear we are not ready. The speed of the new site is 1.5 times slower than the current version. The flakiness is unacceptable. We decide to fix the issues and hold the release for another day at least.
The urgency is that we already briefed Matt Marshall from Venturebeat a few days earlier. I had walked him through the last year of Like.com. What a year it has been. We started out with zero revenue and now we were on track to do more than $10MM in revenue in 2008. Our search engine used to now let people find what they were looking for. Only 19% gross click through rate. Now it was close to 90%. We had not blogged or done any PR. In fact I probably would not have briefed him except that he asked about a recent small financing we did and asked how we were doing. We had just focused on building and building and tuning and tuning our search engine. All the while our traffic continued to grow from zero to over 3MM unique visitors a month.
Matt is supposed to hold the article until the new site is ready to launch so we end the call with the action items. Dan, Diem, & Andy will look at the backend. Robert and Eric will look at the front end performance. We will reconvene tomorrow at 6pm to see where we are.
Con'grats Manjul. Your stamina to keep things afloat amazes me !!
Al the best to you and team!!
Posted by: /pd | February 17, 2008 at 02:36 PM
Peter,
Thanks for the shout out of support ;-)
Munjal
Posted by: Munjal Shah | February 17, 2008 at 03:13 PM
Great shoe but the shoe did not last, I have had it about 6 months, and am trying to find where to go for warranty information.
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