“All hands on deck.”
I canceled a meeting with almost no notice. Apply had launched late the week before, a marketing push was sending new orders through the store, and I did not have time to talk through somebody else’s product plans that afternoon.
That was the good problem.
Five days later a customer hit an error while trying to pay. I could reproduce it. I could not fix it.
The store ran on Shopify, and Shopify handled the payment method. I opened a support ticket, turned the broken option off, and told the team exactly that. There was no clever product answer. The button did not work, so I removed the button while the company that owned the payment system looked at it.
The launch week kept moving.
The financing work we had been doing through August and September was finished. I had new company health insurance and could finally stop dealing with COBRA from Aaptiv. In one email I wrote that we were “off to the races at Apply.” That was how it felt. The company was funded, the store was live, and real customers were trying to buy things.
It also meant the work had become much less theoretical.
A few months earlier, the database was a spreadsheet. Now we had payment failures and imported packaging on the water. A shipment of patterned bubble mailers was due at the port the following week. Customs wanted the country of origin, the product classification, and a few other answers before it could clear.
I forwarded the questions to the people who might know and asked, “Do y’all have answers to these?”
This was not the version of startup work that went into the fundraising deck. There were no big declarations in it. Orders came in. A payment method broke. I disabled it. Insurance changed. Mailers reached the port. Customs asked questions.
The stickers were for sale. I was spending Friday figuring out where a bubble mailer came from.
We had definitely launched.