Diary of a Tech Startup Gal
by Monica Birdsong
A few days ago, I was sitting in the movie theatre watching Tom Cruise dangle from the tallest building in the world and his technology fails, putting him in danger. I can’t shake the feeling that my two week old technology is failing as well. So, I excuse myself to go to the ladies room, phone in hand. I pull up the brand new website and it loads. I check out a few more things and all seems to be ok. I breathe a small sigh of relief but still have that “something is wrong” feeling. I head back to the movie to watch Tom save the world, the whole time my mind occupied by thoughts of my new website failing. The site launched a little over two weeks ago and I haven’t slept or been able to relax when away from a computer since. The fear of something going wrong and my not being able to fix it is tremendous. That feeling I had watching the movie turned out to be true. When I got home, there was a message telling me about a small problem from my business partner (a marketing genius, but not a techie). A problem only I can fix. I am the sole technology person and if anything goes wrong, I am the only one that can fix it. And it’s not like I created a blog or something that only affects my income if it breaks. If the site fails, I’ve messed up other people’s incomes. The site, Mooshpay, is a platform that helps people sell their digital products. It also has an affiliate system, where someone can request to sell other people’s products and get paid for it. Right now a man, let’s call him Joe, is in the middle of using the site to sell his product. This is the second time he’s used our system. The first time his product selling was a total failure. There was a scenario that I didn’t anticipate and the code was wrong. No one was getting the product they just bought. Affiliates weren’t getting paid. FAIL! Big time. I fixed it within an hour, and my biz partner did damage control, but Joe had already switched to a competitor. I don’t blame him, I would have done the
same. At that moment, my fear became reality and it knocked me out for a few hours. I was in a haze, feeling terrible for ruining his faith in the site, his product launch, and the affiliates not making money. Thankfully, because of Joe’s solid relationship with my business partner, he gave Moosh another chance and we’re in the middle of his second selling now. I feel like I’m about to explode. I don’t want to break Joe’s launch a second time. I tear up about every 5 minutes. I’m so emotional! Every time my phone or Skype beeps, I jump and pray that it isn’t a problem and hold my breath until I read it. My breath holding must be working because all is going well. This time, there’s a small glitch that is easily fixed. However, I won’t upload the fix to the site until the sale dies down for fear of accidentally
breaking something else (which I’ve done twice but not during someone’s product selling). This is the fourth time someone has sold their product through the site. Each time there has been a problem to fix. They get smaller every time but there hasn’t been a problem free day yet. People are starting to talk about Mooshpay in a good way. Buzz is starting. Yay! Now my lovely fear monster peeps in with “if more people use it, more things will go wrong.” Ugh. That monster is right. I start to stress again and then I remember what happened last night in the wee hours of the morning. As usual, I couldn’t sleep and I kept thinking something was wrong with the site. I got up to check it and all looked good. I still couldn’t shake the feeling something wasn’t right but I didn’t know what yet. So, www.seemagazine.org | pg 16