How Christmas helped us launching a website

… and what we’ve learned from building it.

I think it was around noon on the 19th, when we decided to build “a website that wraps your tweets”. We barely had a concept or visual idea, we didn’t have a name or URL and we certainly didn’t have much time. It was our last working day in the office, all of us were about to leave town. And it was only 5 days to Christmas, which is obviously the best occassion for wrapping gifts (even if they just consist of less than 140 characters).

There’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have launched it yet, if it wasn’t for that lack of time. We probably wouldn’t have started.

But somehow we pushed us into doing it and we all were extremely happy that we did. Not only because we had a really fun time doing it, but also because we learned some lessons – they aren’t new to us, but i guess you have to experience them from time to time to really believe in them:

• You can achieve way more than you can imagine, if you are focused and motivated.
and
• Don’t let perfectionism stand in your way of doing something.

Tweetwrappr is far from perfect. Was it a well thought-out concept? Nope. Was is buggy when we released it? Hell yeah. Could the design have been better? Definitely.

Still it worked better than we imagined. Within four days we had more than 8000 visits (32000 page views) and wrapped more than 500 tweets. When we started, Google didn’t know the term “tweetwrappr”. A couple of days later it returns thousand of results and even more for the alternate spelling “tweetwrapper”. And it seems that people have fun with it. We certainly have.

Now that we have launched tweetwrappr and saw its “success”, we can bring back our old habit of perfectionism to improve it step by step. Ideas for version 2.0 are already forming in our heads.

So if there is one new year’s resolution for 2009, it is: do it and do it more often. All the best for the new year.