An Exceptional launch

Today we officially launched our first product, Exceptional.

525 man days, 2472 commits, 5103 lines of code (83% Ruby, 16% JavaScript).

4 guys (me plus 3 fucking amazing team mates and business partners), 10 late-night deploys, 10 late-night arguments, 2 RailsConfs, 6 RailsConf tickets, 50 encouraging encounters with our Rails heroes.

1,345,346 Enterprise Ireland forms filled, 4 Amazon S3 instances, 680 users (with 10 new signups per day), 641 apps, 2 surprise competitors, 25,000 e-mail notifications per month, 1,000 SMSs per month, 1 app.

This has been a long, tough, emotional, risky and expensive adventure and without warning it was all made worthwhile: our first paying customer just signed-up.

At least once in your life, try this: make something someone wants and try to sell it to them. There’s so little science involved and so much magic that it’ll never be a risk-free affair. But it’s guaranteed to be a lot of fun.

We owe so much thanks to everyone that helped and encouraged us along the way (you know who you are). We couldn’t have done it without you. Our App School is just one way in which we intend to give back to those Irish guys and the others we can only pay back in love and respect. Cheers.