Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

As technology innovators we all are conscious of the importance of ‘timing’. Alexander Bell got the patent for the telephone by submitting it just a few hours before Elisha Gray. The same happens today, and every day. For example: Yammer went live at TechCrunch 50 last year beating its competitor, Present.ly, by just three days. Present.ly had delayed their launch so that they could do it at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. I talked to them. They regretted their decision big time. Those three days gave Yammer a huge advantage. Yammer got more than 50,000 early adopters during that short period of time. Most of those users (including the entire Torrenegra Labs) never gave a chance to Present.ly, when it went live three days later. They were happy with Yammer. Today, Yammer is the leader in that front. If Present.ly had gone live three days before Yammer, it is very likely that it would be the leader today.

Some times, as it is the case of online marketplaces, innovation requires dozens of thousands of lines of code. LetMeGo, for example, is estimated to have taken more than 24,000 hours of development. Projects like these could take months (or even years) to go live. It is very important to try hard to get the first version of the software out as soon as possible. But how is this done? Is it done with agile development, extreme programing, test-driven development, automated user testing, pre-existing dynamic and detailed documentation, etc.? All those are the most important techniques that we have available… or so I thought…

Last Friday, I attended the networking lunch at The Incubator organized by Nate. The guest was Eric Litman, founder of Medialets (and a successful serial entrepreneur having sold companies for more than 100m+). Medialets is a creative advertising network (marketplace) for native mobile applications.

I asked Eric how long it took them to work on the initial version of their software. I was shocked with his answer. Eric hired seven full time developers and seven part-time developers. They all moved into an apartment in NYC. On June 1, 2008 they started coding 24 hours a day. Sleep? Eric said that most of them were able to get away with only 20 minute naps. They had plenty of caffeine (even caffeinated chips) and delivery menus. The challenge was not to leave the apartment until the first version of the software was live. The result? On July 11, 2008 (40 days later) the 1st version of their software was live. It was the same day that the iPhone 3G and the iPhone Application Store became available to the public. They got the momentum they wanted. They are now the largest ad network for the iPhone.

Impressive, eh? Well, let’s do some math: First, let’s assume that all the developers slept a total of seven hours per day (I honestly think that sleeping several hours per day is much healthier than just having 20 minute naps) and they used another hour for personal matters. Each of the seven developers coded around 640 hours each (at 16 hours per day for 40 days). What if instead they were working on regulars office hours? It would have taken them almost five months (140 calendar days) to achieve the same goal. In other words, using Eric’s technique (which for the lack of a better name, I am calling it “Development Immersion“) they were able to code 3.5 times faster than usual. Okay, you got me: I am making another significant assumption in here, that each hour of coding is equally productive in both scenarios. I know what you are thinking, “Is it even possible to maintain high levels of productivity under such intense conditions?” Keep on reading…

Back in 1997 Andres Herrera and I took 15 or so days off towards the end of the year. We set a small LAN party in my home. During all that time we only played computer games. We never got out of my home, we seldom took a shower, and we barely ate. We would sleep just three to five hours per day (at whatever time we were tired). We would wake up and go back to our games right away. We ate in front of the computer with one hand while we played with the other. Our only pause was when my mom, mad at us, switched the electricity off so that we would go downstairs, to the dinning room, to eat with them. We didn’t get sick or go crazy. We had plenty of fun and lost any traces of sun-tanning that we had ever gotten. Looking back at it, I am amazed in what the human mind could do when it is really, really focused.

What about the personal sacrifices that Eric’s team had to do? We all have agreements and responsibilities that drive our routines. Every week we invest time (around two thirds of the time we are awake) going through our personal (non-work related) stuff. We take time to be with our friends, partners, and family, we sit down to eat, we read the news, we carefully pick what to dress, we update our Facebook profile, we go to the movies, we watch TV, and we go to the beach. We do all these things because we enjoy then. We enjoy them so much that every now and then we take a vacation from work to completely focus on these activities and enjoy them even more. So I ask, “Do you enjoy your work?”. I do. If you do, what if we take a vacation from our personal routine and immerse ourselves, for a couple of months, in our professional passion? That is what Eric and his team did. Work hard. Play hard. Live life to the fullest.

I listened to Eric three days ago. It is now Monday and I haven’t stopped thinking about this. I wonder if I have what it takes to do this. I wonder if I know the people. Do I even have to do this? Would I enjoy it? If I don’t do it, would it mean that I am not passionate enough? Would it mean that I am not as competitive as I once thought I was? I still don’t have answers for these questions, but I am starting to figure out that what really scares me is that I may never get to know the answers.

Alexander Torrenegra