Riders' Voice Blog
The 2009 Data Entry Begins
on 7/23/08 by grembly
Here we go again…it’s that time of year when people are bbqin’, hanging out, enjoying the summer, and we lock ourselves in our bedrooms and create data and images for all of the new boards. For the 06/07 season, we logged 175 boards. For the 07/08 season, we got 488 boards in there. That means this year we’re totally screwed…it’s gonna take forever! Luckily, we have two new peeps working with us:
- Scott Wolynski: Artist, engineer, heartthrob, mench. I went to school with Scott, and then Dan and I worked with him at both Serious and R/GA. Watch out for some site enhancements in the next couple months!
- Ruthie the cut-out queen who always has a beer in her purse! Ruthie worked at Serious, too, and she busted crazy amounts of data and images out for us. Now she’s rocking snowboards for RV. She’ll help us keep our sanity, and who knows, we may even get stuff up on time for once. If we do, it’s all her fault.
January 29, 2008: Launch!
on 6/26/08 by grembly
At long last, we launched. I thought about companies that have crazy launch parties. We sent out an email to our parents and a few friends and then went to sleep, exhausted.
It’s an interesting and scary moment when an idea in your imagination meets the real version. The site felt half done at best. There were so many features we had had to put on hold in order to get the basic site working. So many details that we hadn’t had time to address.
It had been fifteen months to get this thing up. I sat up late into the night clicking through the site, terrified. If this thing was going to succeed, the hard work had just begun.
The Year of Not Launching
on 6/26/08 by grembly
As it turns out, building things takes time. And building things in your spare time takes way longer.
Thanksgiving and New Year’s 2006 came and went without much progress on the site. It was grueling coming home from work and then facing more work. Then we were deep into the riding season and couldn’t be bothered to think about much else.
By May 2007 the fear of failure really hit us. Our launch was nowhere in sight and the season was over. We either had to get serious and bust out some work, or just face the reality that we had failed. Did I mention that my wife and I had just been evicted from our Brooklyn apartment and that she was seven months pregnant? It was a little crazy.
We decided that even though we had missed the season, we should get the 06/07 boards into our database. Dan and I hunkered down and ripped through about 300 boards. I remember finishing Burton days before they replaced their site with their 07/08 boards. The end of July came and a baby daughter was born!
By the Fall the pressure was back on – all the new boards were out, a new season was coming and we still weren’t live. We all got together to see if we had it in us. It was a year later, and again we were shooting for a Thanksgiving launch. It was tough to talk about it without feeling stupid.
Dan and I started with the ten brands we’d covered in the 06/07 season. We ripped through all of their new boards. Trezza worked through the entire Thanksgiving weekend, with bleary-eyed emails waiting for me each morning announcing new pages and features. By the end of the weekend we had a Beta version of the site!
There were issues we hadn’t thought of. There were bugs. There were pages we didn’t realize we needed. We forged ahead, working through Christmas and New Year’s.
Two rules I’d learned so far:
- Rule 1: To project a launch, simply estimate the logical amount of time it would take to build the site, and then multiply it by a number that seems ridiculously big. Then add more.
- Rule 2: Don’t move while having a baby. Don’t launch a website while either moving or having a baby. And definitely do not move, have a baby and launch a website at the same time.
It all started...
on 3/31/08 by grembly
...on a random weeknight when me and Dan Marcello went to Princeton Ski Shop in October or November of 2006. I’d pretty much memorized Transworld Snowboarding’s Good Wood issue. But there were only like three sentences per board, and I was gonna drop $400 or $500 on a new board. I’d looked up the boards online and found no real info. Demoing boards had all but disappeared, and if you wait till the snow falls all the good boards are sold out anyway.
I looked at the boards in the store (did the classic bend and other stupid stuff that told me almost nothing) and talked to the sales guy (who had a lot to say about the boards but hadn’t ridden any of them himself…uh, thanks).
I had read about Mervin’s Magne-Traction; they said it turned ice into powder. I live on the East Coast and have a season pass at Mountain Creek. I’m on ice 95% of the season, and the other 5% is spent crossing over dirt to get to the next patch of man-made ice. I knew it wasn’t going to make powder, but if it could just help me get an edge into the ice, I’d be happy.
I put my money down and walked outside into the 60 degree weather. It was like we were the only people even thinking about the winter. Dan and I sat on the brick wall on the corner of 22nd Street and Broadway, laughing about how I just dropped $400 on a board I knew almost nothing about and wouldn’t get to ride for at least a month and a half.
I asked Dan if he wanted to help me build a website where people tell each other what they think of their boards. Real simple. He was into doing a little project, but we needed a programmer.
When I got home I called my buddy Mike Trezza and gave him the run down. He was up for doing the programming. Damn this was easy. I went to sleep that night debating whether the site would go up by Thanksgiving or New Year’s.