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.