With a Deluxe size bag of Chip Crisps, Cole enters the house. Everyone else had been working.
Hey team. Got some Crisps.
COLE.
I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.
yeah
The release, just give me a number.
aa.. I don't know.
Just spit one out.
aaaa.... MAYBE... two months?
You're joking, right?
I am not. I think maybe like three would be good.
Three?!? You're saying three more months of this bullshit. You can't just make the perfect piece of software in five months. It'll NEVER be perfect.
Well you can't rush perfection.
Y- You're on his side too?
You know I was since day one.
You're gonna release this app within the next month or I'm done with this fucking company. You know how much of our money is being drained due to server costs for your two month beta?
Actually, it's my money.
Shut up, Jon.
I just... I—
You just everything. You turned down a five hundred G acquisition offer.
Your money, his money, it's all the same. We're one company. Can we all just chill out, and finish our user network? And please... Cole, end this beta soon. We need to get a finished version out, get some funding. I need some money coming in.
aaaaa... fine.
Cole, it's alright. You can take your time, no one is—
Shut up, Jon.
We could push out version 1.0 right now, if we wanted to right? We're mainly working on our user network and quality of life features anyways right?
Yeah, but we have a huge backlog of collaboration features that need to be taken care of.
What's the ETA of the completion of the user net?
Three weeks?
We can do two.
You're crazy. Look at our board, there's no way we can do a month's worth of work in two weeks.
Zac points to the board where note cards are pinned into three columns. Most companies would use something digital, but Cole persisted on using an old style cork pin board, because there was something more "satisfying" moving a physical card.
It's not a months worth of work. Well, not anymore it isn't. Two weeks, we got this.
We could do it in two if we hired some more people, but guess who refused that?
This is my house. We barely have room for our second new person, let alone more.
I mean, someone could sleep in the basement, I could buy and inflatable mattress.
Shut up, Jon.
Yeah, I'm just going to head back to my room and sleep.
While you all were bickering, I just finished the prototype designs for #58. I'll test #59, and get started on #60.
Zach opens the file on his computer.
Woah... that's... different...
Yeah? I thought it might give it a nice look.
Cole, hows your tasks going?
Eh. Trying to get them done as quickly as I can.
Hey guys, looking at the forums for the 0.26.0 update, a lot of people of seem to be complaining about the new message sending animation.
Yeah I told ya that was a bad idea.
Yeah I'm going to be marking that as a loss in my book.
Any other feedback?
Some people don't like the new layout of the top bar, but people do like the speed improvements and the snappy feel.
Well that's good to know.
Speaking of updates, any of you shitheads know why the server has four times more traffic than it usually had before the update.
Might be the new read receipts feature.
Yeah it's definitely that.
Scaling's gonna be a bitch then. Can it be optimized?
Probably, but I don't know a way to do it without using up way too much memory.
Ugh, another server rack is going to cost another 30 gold. Can we do away with the end to end before the release?
But we're supposed to be the secure chat platform of the future.
Sure, but we're gonna save tens of thousands of credits per month in the future if we don't use end to end.
Damn.
Cole, can I hand off #55 to you? You're better with back end anyways.
Sure.
We might have a slight problem.
What. You're gonna tell Zac that he fucked up his font size again?
It might be worse than that. Anton, how many users do you think your servers can handle at a time?
50? Maybe 100?
Can you handle 500 by tomorrow?
What?
Yeah get this. Apparently we were ranked as one of the top startups of the month by TechDaily.
That's impossible, they can't just come and sign up for an account.
Yeah, but remember you gave every user 5 invite codes to invite friends to the beta? According to the statistics, only about 20% of those were used. Leaving about 250 in the wild.
Uh oh.
And... they have a daily live stream, averaging at about 300 users per stream.