Is it Friday already?

This week has been a crazy whirlwind of productivity. It’s the week before we soft launch FareShare at TechCrunch disrupt and we’ve all been working overtime to make sure this is a great conference for us.

I never really thought about all the work that goes into launching a product at a conference. When I launched VocabSushi last June, I kind of did so at my own pace and then when it was ready I demoed it on stage at the New York tech meet up, and got a cool TechCrunch post about it. I didn’t worry about much else.

Things are totally different now.  Here is a list of 10 things to do before a launch that we’ve had to tackle.

1. Get a logo — We did this through Crowdspring.com, a nifty website that lets you outsource your logo design. You basically explain the idea you have for the logo and you get back a time of actual logo designs from tons of designers. They guarantee something like 40 or 50 and the average logo project gets about 85. So that’s a lot to choose from. And then you pick what you like.  We finalized the logo the middle of last week, selecting a pretty cool concept (that I had initially mocked up to help guide the process) from a Romanian designer.
2. T-Shirts — Once we had a logo, made a whole bunch of black and white T-shirts through Vistaprint.com.  Having looked through some photos from the last TechCrunch conference, only a handful of people seemed to be wearing T-shirts with their logos (maybe there were a lot, but it’s hard to tell). It seems like an obvious way to be memorable amongst the other startups.  The T-shirts arrived two days ago.
3. Business cards — This is a no-brainer but still something that needs to take place at least a week before the conference since, like in our case, you have to pay a rush fee to get it in fewer than seven days. We used PrintsMadeEasy.com which is where I had my VocabSushi business cards made last year. I love their website and the little monkey that jumps around (is that weird?).  The business cards arrived yesterday afternoon.
4. Flyer cards — We need something to hand out to everybody who comes by our table whether or not they get a demo. So we made some really cool 2” x 4” diecut two-sided cards from PSprint.com. One side has a screenshot of the iPhone app while the other side has the logo and the high-level features.  They arrived two days ago
5. The app itself — Duh!  We’ve been working pretty much nonstop on tweaking and fixing the FareShare iPhone app over the last two months or so, but as we get closer to the conference, knowing that we need a really tight demo, I’ve been spending a lot of time hammering out all the little details to improve the app in a lot of subtle ways (and sometimes not-so-subtle ways… some of our fare calculations are still way way off!). One of the biggest hurdles that we are still facing is to get our app submitted and into the app store. Our hope was that the app would be available during the conference for attendees to use when they leave (and find each other to share cabs), but it looks like we’re just struggling to submit the app sometime next week and hope that it gets accepted by the following week.
6. The website — All this time we have been so focused on the iPhone app and the mobile web app that we never really turned much attention to a basic website! We had our developer set up a WordPress installation so that we could change the content and update a lot of parts of the website ourselves. Any time you’re about to get some press, even if you don’t have an app out or the product is in stealth mode, or whatever, you have to have a website that explains something and has a form so that visitors can enter their e-mail and be notified of the launch later on.
7. Produce a demo video — FareShare is a pretty fascinating concept because in order for it to work, two complete strangers need to physically meet somewhere and get in a cab together. So the demo video can’t be your typical screenshot slideshow of the app itself, since we are aiming for more of a cultural change where people become more at ease with sharing cabs. While the app is interesting to use, we decided that it’s far more compelling to show real people in real situations using FareShare. So we wrote a fun script that depicts Jack, a guy hanging out at a bar with some friends, and Samantha, a girl who is running late to get to her lady gaga concert. We thought the best way to get potential users on board was to show them situations and people with whom they could identify.  We hired my friend Dustin’s production company to produce the video.  We will probably see a rough cut of it later today.
8. Get some press — I guess it helps that I went to Columbia journalism school (‘04), but believe it or not most my friends are not journalists and the ones that are are not really involved in technology. So we had to hustle a bit and track down some New York City tech journos who might be interested in covering FareShare. One of the cool things about TechCrunch is that the participating startups can offer press passes to members of the press. So that makes the pitch e-mail just a little bit sweeter. Luckily, I did have one contact at AMNY that I had been e-mailing with about my MTA blog.  On Monday morning, look out for a piece (with a photo of yours truly) in AMNY!  I’ll blog about that separately.
9. Set up meetings and make contacts — FareShare is a pretty amazing app with a grand purpose: to help make transportation in New York City more efficient, cheaper, and faster. There are some really amazing organizations in the city with the goal of improving transit and reducing traffic. We met with a friend of mine, Charlie Komanoff (known for his congestion pricing model, and recently featured in Wired Magazine), to talk through numbers and figure out the market for cab sharing as well as what some of the benefits could be. He put us in touch with Open Plans, which is a wonderful nonprofit that does a lot of work with the city to help figure out better transportation options.  We are also planning to meet with TLC next week.
10. Set up a timeline and plan ahead — We are trying our best not to go about this launch in a haphazard way. FareShare is going to depend crucially on a critical mass of users. If we don’t have a critical mass in a pretty short amount of time, most people will probably not want to use the app because it will generally come up empty with rides. So we planned a bit of a launch schedule. First, we will be getting press on Monday. Second, TechCrunch will generate a huge amount of buzz (hopefully), and we will speak with potential investors. Just yesterday, I did a demo with Brandon Diamond who helps run the NY Tech meetup group. Their next meetup will be on June 8, in a huge 850 person auditorium at NYU, right smack in the middle of Internet Week. So third, we’re hoping will be able to do a big demo at the meetup and this will be when our app hits the app store. All during Internet week we’re hoping to generate tons of buzz about FareShare, so we’ve been signing up for as many events as possible (since they all basically fill up the week of).  When the app becomes available, that’s when will mass e-mail all the people who have signed up on the website to be informed when we officially launch, and our hope is that this rapid flood of new users will help us hit a critical mass in a more effective way than a gradual rise of early adopters.

There is always more to do: more people to meet, more tweaks to make, more practice for the demo.  We’ll be working til Monday when the conference starts and continue through til the end of Internet Week.  It’s going to be intense but this is what it takes to make FareShare happen.