5 ms·

Launch

207 points by dkasper 16y ago

coolstartupbro 16y ago
Congrats!
AmericanOP 16y ago
For a drop-dead simple consumer experience, you're overly positioned for the tech market. Your average consumer doesn't care that it's social- they care that their 3GS can actually record video and put it on their facebook wall. You should be communicating that better on your site, in your name, and in your PR.... There are going to be a million social applications launching at SXSW. You have a head start, so I hope you're buying downloads to get ranked in the store and capitalize on your momentum. What premium features do you guys have in the works?
jbrennan 16y ago
This is the kind of inspiration I come to Hacker News to find. Fantastic work!
- elvirs 16y ago
  I was not going to read the article but I decided to read after I saw this comment. I read entire article to understand understood that the comment was sarcasm.
jw84 16y ago
Going through an exact same experience with launching a mobile product in time for SXSW. And likewise I'm not the one that's in the frontlines coding, I'm merely facilitating. Even then when day in and day out all you see are Basecamp threads, Google Docs, mockups, copy, rejection emails, unanswered phone calls, crashes after crashes after crashes... it wears. Wears like a too tight body suit; turns out doubt attacks like a python would. I take solace in the relinquished wisdom of men of higher caliber, fighting tougher battles, and understanding more of life: "If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
trotsky 16y ago
Planned 72-84 hour dev weeks? I don't want to throw stones here because everyone has ended up in an impossible situation at some point, but I'd still prefer to hear some owning up to it being a management failure. If for no other reason than to not give the impression to up and coming CEO/CTO/Dev Managers that crunching to that degree is a normal part of software development. Not a dis, just an observation.
- justin 16y ago
  You are right; the timeline we were up against was extremely tight because of external deadlines. Crunching to this degree runs an extremely high risk of burn out and is not normal, and I don't believe it is something that should be done unless you are in a do or die situation. I do think it was a management failure that we didn't plan / project manage better, but we're still relatively new to mobile app development. If we'd had perfect knowledge of what we were going to build in the beginning, we could have cut a lot of time off customer development / exploratory phase of the product development, but I've never realistically heard of that before for a new product.
  - trotsky 16y ago
    Understood, I appreciate the fact that you were up against sxsw and that scheduling is hard, especially when you're not that familiar with the platform. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
  - GavinB 16y ago
    What made launching at SXSW a "do or die" situation? Sure, it's free publicity, but is that worth burnout and product that was rushed out the door? I wish you guys all the best, but I wonder if you'll look back at this in a year and think that maybe you should have just taken another month or two to build 1.0.
    - Terry_B 16y ago
      I'm guessing that it's the famous kickstart it gave to Twitter that has started this trend.
mirzmaster 16y ago
Great story. I was looking forward to trying socialcam out, but no Facebook account. :(
diwup 16y ago
Congrats. You guys deserve some good sleep! Just went through the same iPhone app submission process as SocialCam did. And we were not that lucky, 1 rejection and 19 anxious days before approval for our 1.0.
DonnyV 16y ago
So what does this offer that my built-in client for YouTube doesn't offer?
- justin 16y ago
  Great question; obviously we've thought a lot about it: 1) First, it shows you videos of your friends. When we looked at how we used videos we realized we didn't go to Youtube to find videos our real life friends had taken. 2) Second, we let you easily post video to Facebook or Twitter. You can do this from your Youtube client on the phone (if you have Android) but it is hardly a streamlined process. 3) We optimize the process of getting video off your phone. Youtube is a fairly terrible experience in my opinion.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
erickhill 16y ago
Two really good (and popular) blog posts on HN by Justin.tv coders in one day. Pretty interesting PR strategy to humanize SocialCam from the bottom up as they ignite the engines for SXSW.
- eapen 16y ago
  The other referenced blog post: http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/ http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2302214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2302214
jkresner 16y ago
Feel like my life for the last 4 months. 2 more to go...

207 points by dkasper 16y ago

Congrats!

For a drop-dead simple consumer experience, you're overly positioned for the tech market. Your average consumer doesn't care that it's social- they care that their 3GS can actually record video and put it on their facebook wall. You should be communicating that better on your site, in your name, and in your PR.... There are going to be a million social applications launching at SXSW. You have a head start, so I hope you're buying downloads to get ranked in the store and capitalize on your momentum. What premium features do you guys have in the works?

jbrennan 16y ago

This is the kind of inspiration I come to Hacker News to find. Fantastic work!

elvirs 16y ago
I was not going to read the article but I decided to read after I saw this comment. I read entire article to understand understood that the comment was sarcasm.

jw84 16y ago

Going through an exact same experience with launching a mobile product in time for SXSW. And likewise I'm not the one that's in the frontlines coding, I'm merely facilitating. Even then when day in and day out all you see are Basecamp threads, Google Docs, mockups, copy, rejection emails, unanswered phone calls, crashes after crashes after crashes... it wears. Wears like a too tight body suit; turns out doubt attacks like a python would. I take solace in the relinquished wisdom of men of higher caliber, fighting tougher battles, and understanding more of life: "If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

trotsky 16y ago

Planned 72-84 hour dev weeks? I don't want to throw stones here because everyone has ended up in an impossible situation at some point, but I'd still prefer to hear some owning up to it being a management failure. If for no other reason than to not give the impression to up and coming CEO/CTO/Dev Managers that crunching to that degree is a normal part of software development. Not a dis, just an observation.

justin 16y ago
You are right; the timeline we were up against was extremely tight because of external deadlines. Crunching to this degree runs an extremely high risk of burn out and is not normal, and I don't believe it is something that should be done unless you are in a do or die situation. I do think it was a management failure that we didn't plan / project manage better, but we're still relatively new to mobile app development. If we'd had perfect knowledge of what we were going to build in the beginning, we could have cut a lot of time off customer development / exploratory phase of the product development, but I've never realistically heard of that before for a new product.
- trotsky 16y ago
  Understood, I appreciate the fact that you were up against sxsw and that scheduling is hard, especially when you're not that familiar with the platform. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
- GavinB 16y ago
  What made launching at SXSW a "do or die" situation? Sure, it's free publicity, but is that worth burnout and product that was rushed out the door? I wish you guys all the best, but I wonder if you'll look back at this in a year and think that maybe you should have just taken another month or two to build 1.0.
  - Terry_B 16y ago
    I'm guessing that it's the famous kickstart it gave to Twitter that has started this trend.

mirzmaster 16y ago

Great story. I was looking forward to trying socialcam out, but no Facebook account. :(

diwup 16y ago

Congrats. You guys deserve some good sleep! Just went through the same iPhone app submission process as SocialCam did. And we were not that lucky, 1 rejection and 19 anxious days before approval for our 1.0.

DonnyV 16y ago

So what does this offer that my built-in client for YouTube doesn't offer?

justin 16y ago
Great question; obviously we've thought a lot about it: 1) First, it shows you videos of your friends. When we looked at how we used videos we realized we didn't go to Youtube to find videos our real life friends had taken. 2) Second, we let you easily post video to Facebook or Twitter. You can do this from your Youtube client on the phone (if you have Android) but it is hardly a streamlined process. 3) We optimize the process of getting video off your phone. Youtube is a fairly terrible experience in my opinion.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

erickhill 16y ago

Two really good (and popular) blog posts on HN by Justin.tv coders in one day. Pretty interesting PR strategy to humanize SocialCam from the bottom up as they ignite the engines for SXSW.

eapen 16y ago
The other referenced blog post: http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/ http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2302214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2302214

jkresner 16y ago

Feel like my life for the last 4 months. 2 more to go...