Launch day — a little logistics, a lot of luck

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen, cofounders of thirty seven Signals. Well, we've launched several products over the years at thirty seven Signals, and we just recently had a launch day with our new product, Fizzy. So I thought we'd talk a little bit about that launch day, what it entails, how we prepare for that. So let's just get started. First, Jason, are you picking your day? Is it a day of the week, a time of the day? Like, how are you actually choosing, like, this is a d day for us to go live? Yeah. Historically, I think we've usually picked Tuesdays mostly because Mondays, you know, people are digging out from a pile of things that have piled up over the weekend or whatever. They have other things going on. So Tuesday seems like a good day. I think a lot of companies do it on Tuesdays. So maybe Tuesday is not a good day. Maybe we should do it on Wednesdays. But it didn't seem like there was a lot going on at that time. Like, you don't wanna launch, like, the same day as an Apple Keynote maybe or historically, that was the case. I don't know if it matters so much anymore since they're kinda recorded and people don't have to watch them live. But you just kinda pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in the world. We held up Hayes launch years and years ago because things were going on in the world as well. So you just kinda pay attention enough. And, we actually wanted to launch a few weeks earlier, but we didn't have the open source side of it all buttoned up yet. So we kinda wanna make sure that was in place and a few other things were done just right before we launched. So we picked a Tuesday, and we usually have our team call for Fizzy on Tuesday morning, really early. So we had that call, kinda went around, make sure everything was ready to go, and, like, basically hit the right button and, and launched it live while we were all kind of on a Zoom together. And David and I just announced on x and LinkedIn and, watched the sign ups roll in. And it's always exciting to launch something new to see how people receive it. I think one of the biggest surprises, of course, was the open source piece of it. The pricing was also a big surprise. We gave a lot we're very generous, a thousand cards for free, and then only $20 a month if you go beyond your thousand cards. So I think that was a big surprise. We'd already previewed the product quite a bit. Not everybody because not everybody's seen it, but, like, a number of people had …