3 days out of my life and 30 off it

Time to look back on the end of last week at TheNextWeb ... three days at stress levels I've not known for a long time.

Key objective: a successful launch presentation on Friday in front of 350 avid bloggers, twitterers, video journalists, entrepreneurs, investors and clever people. We ploughed our way through all waking hours and most of the sleeping ones testing our product, improving our presentation and correcting bugs until right up to an hour before the presentation. We almost dropped the demo because TheNext was sadly separated from the Web for much of the morning, only to become miraculously available at the last minute.

It was an omen we should maybe have heeded. We connected to our WAP service in advance ready for the demonstration. Having got the room interested in our dream and motivated into action to connect to the service so we could project their profiles up on the big screen, Olivier and I launched the demo and then *bam* ... I could not continue the connection. Yours truly had two minutes left on the clock to describe our pride and joy in flowery prose invented on the spot. What happened was brought about by our request that everyone connect at once; everyone pulled out their mobiles and started connecting at the same time. The server had to face an enormous instantaneous load equivalent to 24M visitors /day; as a consequence, the server would not let me continue my session online ...

The resident 'grumpy old men' whose role it was to grill us gave us a hard time: "Looks like MobiLuck wasn't so lucky this time..." But we answered their questions well. We have a plan to attract users and use viral techniques to spread the service via IM, alerts and SMS invitations. And when asked how we defend our technology against competitors Olivier said "We have 4 patents" and they shut up. They didn't go near our secret weapon: 1/2 million users and a successful mobile application on 180 phone models in 200 countries and 21 languages around the world...

And what was really great was that everyone we met afterwards that evening said they loved what we stood for, and the demo was bad luck but it happens to everyone at some time. Peaks are always very difficult to manage because of the CPU power required in short bursts, and we're still fine tuning the service as I write.

We left TheNextWeb feeling exhausted but having made it through a tough challenge and it's just the beginning. The service is launched. Sort of stealthily. http://wap.mobiluck.com/beta ...