THE ANATOMY OF A LAUNCH

A little back story…

In September of 2008, three guys sat in a Stockholm restaurant and started scribbling on a piece of paper.  In about five month’s time, those barely legible scratchings would become the new iPhone application PEEK.  
 
Actually, Peter and Tommy had been tossing around various ideas for about a year but they realized things were getting way too complicated.  From experience with other apps they knew that too many functions often meant too much confusion on the part of the user – not to mention more things that could go wrong.  So they went back to the drawing board and returned to basics.  
 
Months of agonizing labor ensued.  Tommy, PEEK’s programmer, essentially chained himself to the computer while Peter came up with all the design elements and slipped Tommy an occasional meal.  
 
The third (and newest) addition to the team was Christer, your friendly blogger.  You see, as critical as those other guys were, it was my contributions that were actually the most important to the success of the app. Since both Peter and Tommy have forgotten more about computers than I’ll ever know, I became the de facto Crash Test Dummy. Their motto was, “If Christer can understand it, then any knucklehead can figure this out.”  
 
What emerged was PEEK, a very simple way of communicating with people all over the world…so easy even I can use it.
 
Wednesday, February 11th – PEEK goes live!
 
Okay so PEEK is finally ready to release and it has even been given the blessings of Apple. Now the real work begins.  How do we compete with the other billion or so apps out there all jockeying for position in the vaunted App Store.  Will they love us?  Hate us? Even hear about us?  
 
We made the decision to hold off on any press releases until we had it out for a few days. There was a feeling that we just wanted to see what would happen without any word at all.  The three of us were talking on the eve of the opening when suddenly there was a download!
 
How did that happen? We’re not even launching until tomorrow morning!  Oh yeah.  It IS tomorrow morning on the other side of the world.  Well that was a good sign – but no guarantee for future success.  We tried to get some sleep that night knowing there wouldn’t be much in the days to come.  
 
Wednesday was fantastic.  Maybe people weren’t downloading PEEK by the tens of thousands but we were encouraged that these initial brave Peeksters were popping up all over the globe. Tommy had built a little tracker so we could observe where the downloads were going and it was so much fun every time the name of a new country would came up.  Who knew they had iPhones in Bhutan?
 
So who’s Peeking? Who knows?  Since it’s an anonymous app, you could be talking to anyone. In fact, a Washington insider today confirmed our suspicions that a user named Ewen Charge could be the president himself.   We’ve already suggested “Free PEEK to all” as an essential component to any economic stimulus plan.
 
Happy Peeking!            C