32) Launch

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to figure out its mission. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, Courage, I explored the importance of courage for any entrepreneurial (or other) life-endeavor. There is so much fear and uncertainty associated with starting something of your own, and it’s easy to let that fear compound into something very significant-feeling, and that’s why we need courage the most when we least want to exhibit it. And also why it’s important to have a bias-for-action and to continue boldly and courageously showing up each and every day, and embracing challenges as opportunities to grow and experience all that life has to offer.

Launch

In today’s post, I want to briefly discuss some launch-related things that have been percolating in my mind following the recent launch platform for my first engagement.

(Brief) Background

I’m nearly three months into my first engagement with a regional lawn care company. The primary focus of the engage was ( / is) to modernize the customer experience, implement automated quoting, and integrating with a payment processor for automatic payment collection. We successfully built out these features—with room to improve of course—but the core functionality is there.

As part of the engagement, I also eventually took ownership of hosting the backend and choosing the right provider, etc. I don’t think I’ve really done anything particularly groundbreaking, but I’ve learned so much. We just launched the platform this past Friday, and are now a few days into deployment, and so I wanted to reflect on some things while the experience is still fresh.

Reflections

Testing (and its limitations). This is obvious, but setting aside sufficient time for fairly rigorous and robust testing was very important. But even more than that, I think I realized how critical is was / is to test edge cases and what happens if users don’t follow the happy path. When you actually put something out in the world, you can never really know how people will interact with it—and so I tried to run through various edge cases and also had the client and others click through the platform to catch bugs and identify opportunities for improvement there. But, and I think this is important, at a certain point there are diminishing marginal returns with testing and we have to just put it out into the world and then fix issues as they come. And that brings us to two related points:

Core features vs nice-to-haves. Within the context of the foregoing, there’s no room for error on the core features associated with the platform (I think these are called P0 features), and so we needed to rigorously test that core functionality. Customers must be able to order service and pay for service, and the company must be able to see that ordered service, route that ordered service, deliver that ordered service, and bill for that ordered service. I think I just developed an appreciation for just how much noise there really can be on the periphery and in the margins of these P0 features. And so being very diligent and almost obstinate about what we needed to nail for the launch was a learning.

Carveout: I also thought a lot about power laws and the 80/20 rule (roughly: 20% of something has 80% of the impact). If we could identify and nail the 20% of the work or feature-set that had the most impact, then there’s some more room for grace or difficulty with some of the ancillary features. It’s important to improve those features in the future—but preparing for launch has been an exercise in ruthless prioritization.

Rapid iteration and availability. Post-launch, really the most important aspect of the engagement is availability and rapid resolution of bugs that arise. There will always be kinks and things that have been overlooked—no matter how diligent or rigorous testing is—and it’s important to be nearly always available to address and rectify those issues as soon as they’re notified. And this also compelled me into action around just launching the thing and then taking the challenges as they come from there. Once the core P0 and P1 stuff is on terra firm, and you feel generally good about P2 and P3, then just get the thing out in the world and let the fire baptize you.

Performance monitoring. Now that the thing is live, I’ve started to think more about performance and health monitoring. I had built some high-level analytics-type dashboards previously, but now I’m giving them a bit more thought. I’m also interested in remote monitoring and health solutions and stuff to help me keep my finger on the pulse of the platform. But I just don’t want to overlook the importance of performance tracking to make sure that the thing actually continues to work.

Fun. Despite the stress and anxiety and fear, actually having something that I built out in the world, being used by people is a lot of fun. It’s not a hyper-growth software platform or a unicorn-bound company, but it’s a real thing that I architected and constructed from the ground up that real people are using to transact with a real company. I know that sounds maybe base or reductive, but it’s oddly satisfying and fulfilling to have a real thing out in the world and being used by real people.

Now the real roadmap begins. We spent so much time redesigning the customer experience over the existing backend infrastructure (to limit complexity), and now that we have the redesign built and launched, it feels like the real work is just starting. We can now observe how people interact with the platform and identify high-impact features that fit nicely in the new system. So I’m hoping to benefit from the compounding effects associated with the technical debt we paid off.

I’m still incredibly scared. With all of that said, I’m still incredibly terrified that I’ll wake up one morning or get a call one night and the entire platform will be down, or there’s been some massive and obvious thing that I entirely overlooked, or there will be some issue that prevents anything from working for an extended period of time—and there will be some irrecoverable damage to the relationship or whatever and then my life will be ruined. 🙂 It’s this (irrational?) fear that compels me to greater action, and so I don’t think it’s totally useless, but there’s also definitely a balance I must strike between world-ending fear and natural (healthy) anxiety. I’m still trying to find the middle road.

Looking Forward

For all I know, by the time you see this post the whole platform will have self-destructed and this retrospective will seem incredibly silly. But I’m cautiously optimistic about how things have gone thus far and am hopeful that we are mostly on terra firma. And, barring complete failure, this has been an incredibly exciting and engaging experience that compels me to pursue more opportunities. We are just getting started.

Thanks and I hope you have a wonderful week!

Sincerely,

Luke