“Every dollar matters.”
I wrote that to the engineer we were bringing onto Loop after he offered us a discounted rate. Then I asked him to sign the consulting agreement and welcomed him to the motley crue.
The spelling was mine.
The urgency was real.
An investor had asked to wait until the product was in beta before meeting. It was hard to form an opinion without being able to use the thing, which was completely fair. I tried to move the line.
How about Alpha?
It would be raw, I said, but there should be something to play with in seven to ten days.
That answer created the schedule.
The engineer introduction had arrived through the North Brooklyn Runners note I sent the week before. We had a quick call. The next day I was finishing the agreement, collecting the information needed for it, and asking whether he could start immediately.
I wanted him in our team standup and inside the systems before the first real workday. The mobile repository first, then the backend. There was no onboarding program. The onboarding program was access, introductions, and a list of things that needed to work.
The signed agreement landed in Drive that night.
His first commits appeared the following morning.
The rest of the repository tells the story better than a clean retrospective could. The team was smoothing onboarding, fixing group creation, building a new follow-up screen, adding contact search, wiring recommendation cards into the home screen, and correcting the little pieces that made the Alpha feel unfinished.
I was in there too. My contribution that Thursday was minor package updates and changing “Coming Soon” to sentence case. Then I reverted a Google sign-in package version because the update was not helping.
Extremely glamorous CPTO work.
By the next week, the new engineer was adding reusable components, cleaning up the group flow, making the relationship story display in bullets, adding linting to continuous integration, stopping duplicate group names, and putting contact avatars into follow-ups.
Saturday morning was a 15-mile run. Then the product work kept moving.
This was not one heroic person arriving to save the product. It was a small group finally having enough hands to attack the list at the same time.
I described it in an apology to somebody whose email I had dropped. My inbox had filled during a flurry of investor activity. We had the engineer onboard, three part-time people plus the development shop, and ten days to sprint. I thought we had the team we needed.
That is a sentence with optimism and panic packed pretty tightly together.
Drive filled up at the same pace. There was a new maintenance contract, executed consulting agreements, a roadmap being revised, a document for the big product questions, an editable Alpha-access list, and then an investor bug tracker.
The bug tracker is the least subtle evidence that “seven to ten days” was not going to produce a polished product.
It was going to produce something people could use, find problems in, and send back to us.
The financing work was happening at the same time, but the details were not useful to the engineers. They needed decisions. Which gaps blocked somebody from getting through the product? Which pieces could wait? What was broken, and who could take it?
The skyline across the river looked very calm that week. The inside of the company did not.
We were still small enough that a discounted hourly rate mattered. We were still early enough that a sentence-case change mattered. We were close enough to outside users that every day mattered.
The Alpha would be raw.
We had ten days.