The ImproveNow.com story

By Harvey Ardman

Some of us, if we’re very very lucky, see our fondest wishes come true.

And others, probably many more of us, are unlucky enough to find ourselves face-to-face with our worst nightmares.

But seldom do any of us live through both experiences. Even then, almost none of us get to face both extremes at exactly the same instant.

And yet that, in a nutshell, is exactly what befell the people at ImproveNow on Friday afternoon at 2:30, on May 12. That’s when the telephone rang.

Three people were in the office at the time: Jim Povec, 55, ImproveNow’s founder and president, a man with a ready smile and a well-developed sense of mischief; Chuck Luce, 40, the company’s co-founder and content director, a dapper Dartmouth man of many skills, and Russell Jones, 26, the webmaster, a soft-spoken fellow with a dark blond ponytail, modest earrings who breathed bits and bytes. These three comprised ImproveNow’s entire staff, as well as its Board of Directors.

ImproveNow is a website devoted to helping the Dilberts of the world, which is pretty much all of us, anonymously tell our bosses what’s wrong with their management style—not to get revenge, but to show them the error of their ways so they’ll shape up and make everyone’s life better, including their own.

Jim, Chuck and Russ had been officially working on the site since the beginning of the year. A simplified version had been up and running for several weeks. On April 10, they scored their first success: they got funding.

But there was a catch to the funding. The money would come in three installments. The first payment came immediately—just enough money to scale up and go online publicly. The second would be delivered when ImproveNow tallied 50,000 page views, which, according to the terms of the deal, had to be no later than June 10. The third would be due on August 10, if the site garnered 200,000 page views.

Back to our story…

Ever since the investors had come on board, Jim—who’d spent most of his working life as a publishing executive at IDG and Softbank—had been asking a favor from his industry buddies: Could they give ImproveNow some publicity? He’d also hired a Portland, Maine PR firm, Hauptman & Co. to work on the same problem.

On May 5, ImproveNow scored its second success—in fact, two of them: Hauptman called to say that Forbes wanted to tell the ImproveNow story in its magazine—if it could get an exclusive. A couple hours later, Hauptman had more news: Business Week also wanted an exclusive. It wanted to put the story on its Internet site. Jim decided to go with Business Week. “After all, we’re an Internet business too—or at least we’re trying to be.”

Meanwhile, Jim, Chuck and Russ were looking for more staff. As it stood, the site itself was skeletal. The staff knew what they wanted it to be, but they hadn’t had the time or the person power to get everything up and running. Now, with publicity approaching—and a funding deadline uncomfortably close, they started looking for help.

ImproveNow needed a web designer and they thought they just might know the right person: Sean Cannell, 32, an English Australian (or maybe Australian Englishman) with a dry sense of humor. Sean was media director at a nearby web design firm and he’d done a bit of freelance for ImproveNow. He came in Friday morning for a brief and promising interview.

They also needed a web developer. One likely candidate was Steve Bohler, 32, a runner with chiseled good looks who’d been an IT exec with Morgan Stanley in New York and London, then had resigned to go to Oxford and, among other things, coach the rowing team. He’d answered an ad ImproveNow had put on Allaire.com’s website looking for someone with a good knowledge of Cold Fusion.

On Thursday, May 11, Steve had driven up from his home in Portsmouth, N.H. for a Friday “pre-starting day” meeting at ImproveNow. He was still there that afternoon, when the call came in.

The call—the call that simultaneously made everyone’s fondest dream and worst nightmare come true—was from Coates Bateman, the editor of AOL’s business channel. “I have good news and bad news,” he said. “We saw your site mentioned at Business Week. We’ve taken a look at it and we’ve decided to feature it on the opening screen of our business channel, beginning Monday morning. We’re also going to put it on the main AOL welcome page.”

For a moment, everyone in the room was stunned. Here it was, quick as a lightning flash—50,000 page views for sure. First financing hurdle not only leaped, but leaped in a single bound, in a single day. Pretty heady for a little dot.com startup in Camden, Maine. Of course, everyone’s first thought was “we’re off and running,” and get the champagne!

“The reason I’m calling,” Bateland went on, “is to warn you. We’re going to be driving a lot of people to your website, and I mean a lot. Are you ready for the traffic?”

What a silly question! Traffic was what ImproveNow wanted more than anything else. It was a dream come true. It was a giant step on the road to success. It meant they were off and running, really running. Of course they were ready…

“I think I should warn you that mentions on the business channel—much less the AOL welcome screen—have crashed some major sites,” Bateman continued. “So you may want to do some serious ramping up this weekend.”

Suddenly, the nightmare popped into view. ImproveNow desperately needed traffic—its survival depended on traffic. But until this moment, the team hadn’t worried about being overwhelmed by traffic. The site was getting an average of 50 or 60 hits a day, all from wandering web surfers, friends and family or unusually well-informed associates of the investors.

In fact, ImproveNow had worried so little about being overwhelmed by traffic that the site didn’t even have its own dedicated server. It was housed on a shared developer’s server at VirtualScape in Manhattan.

Now Bateman was warning not about a simple increase in traffic, but a deluge that might have sunk Noah’s ark. “How long do we have to get ready?”

“We’ll be putting up the link at 5 a.m. Monday morning,” Bateman said. “So you have between now…and then.”

As Bateman’s words sank in, the mood at ImproveNow suddenly switched from delight to dismay and back to a kind of terrified excitement. And then the questions started:

? Was there time to go from a shared to a dedicated server?

? How much could VirtualScape help? The weekend was only hours away.

? Could Access do the job or would a change be necessary? Was there time?

? The site was still thin and underdesigned—not something Jim, Chuck and Russ wanted thousands to see. Could it be redesigned fast enough?

“So will you be ready?” Bateman asked.

Jim looked at Chuck and Chuck looked at Russ and Russ looked at Steve, who had a “Who, me?” look on his face.

“We’ll be ready,” Jim assured Bateman.

“Good,” Bateman said. “But if you run into any serious trouble, call me.” He gave them his home number and said goodbye.

Steve’s brow furrowed. “It’s Mother’s Day weekend,” he said. “I have plans with my mother and my wife.” Then he glanced at the others. “But I really don’t want to leave here.”

Jim, Chuck and Russ didn’t press him—it wouldn’t have been fair. Besides, they hardly knew him. But then they thought of Sean Cannell. Russ called him at about 3:30 and explained the situation. “I decided I might as well jump in the boat for the weekend,” Sean recalled. “Some boat. Some weekend.”

The next call went to VirtualScape. “We explained to them exactly what was happening to us and fortunately our excitement was contagious,” Chuck remembered. “They said ‘This is every web site’s dream. Every one of our clients would die for this opportunity. So we’re going to do everything we can to help you, whatever it takes.”

Less than an hour later, an email from VirtualScape’s VP of systems arrived at ImproveNow. “It said we’re going to light up your dedicated servers between 12 o’clock and 2 a.m.,” Russ recalled. “Normally, that’s a five day process. But VirtualScape told us they were going to do it in five hours!”

“A lot of ISPs don’t even have a plan for an emergency scale-up like this,” Russ said. “But VirtualScape knew exactly what it was doing. And it was willing to do that, even if that meant putting some other clients on hold. Some clients might be annoyed by that, but they’d also realize VirtualScape was demonstrating that it could and would give them spectacular service when they really needed it.”

“We asked VirtualScape if they wanted credit on our site,” Russ remembered, “and they hesitated and said, ‘Well, maybe we’d better wait a couple of days and see how it goes.”

At this point, Chuck had second thoughts. “What if this is all a hoax?” He said. “What if there is no Coates Bateland and AOL never heard of us.”

Everybody laughed, but not quite wholeheartedly. “Call him up,” someone suggested. “Tell him how we’re doing.”

“It’s after business hours,” Chuck observed.

“So call him at home. He gave us his home number.”

Chuck tried the home number. He got an answering machine and a woman’s voice, speaking in Spanish.

“Check the AOL directory,” Russ suggested.

Chuck tried. No luck.

At this point, some email came in from Coates Bateman at AOL, with screenshots showing where ImproveNow would be featured. This was reassuring, until someone pointed out that Bateman had an AOL email address. “What kind of serious person would have an AOL email address?” Steve asked.

“But then,” Russ remembers, “someone said well, wait a minute. He works for AOL.”

The paranoia faded slightly.

A little later, Sean arrived at the ImproveNow offices with all of his gear and he set it up in Russ’s office—a big dual monitor system running Windows 98. He even brought his speakers, so that he’d have his tunes. Once it was set up, Sean left to get a little sleep. He had a feeling it would be a long time before he got any more.

By 2 a.m. Saturday morning, VirtualScape had made good on its promise. The ImproveNow site had been switched out of its shared server and into two dedicated dual-processor Pentium III’s running at 550 mHz, each with a gig of ram. One server would handle the SQL database, the other would be the Cold Fusion application server.

Did this mean that the traffic problem was solved. Not hardly. It meant that the hard work could begin—remotely configuring the machines and migrating the site from Access to SQL 7.0. This would be no easy trick, because no one on the team had done any serious work with SQL and no one in mid-coast Maine had a copy. It was going to be on-the-job training in pressure-cooker conditions.

As if this weren’t enough, there was the design problem. If ImproveNow was going to look and function anything like its founders hoped, the entire site needed redesigning and additional content.

Early Saturday morning, Steve Bohler told his wife and mother that they’d have to spend Mother’s Day weekend without him. His new employers needed him Big Time. He hopped into his car and headed toward Camden.

Soon, all five of them were there—Steve, Sean and Russ, the guys who would have to do most of the technical work, plus Chuck who’d focus on content and usability issues and Jim, who’d be coaching and cheerleading. They had less than 48 hours to get it all done.

There’s something to remember about Steve, Sean and Russ. They’d be doing most of the work. And all they knew about each other was what had been said in the interviews. They’d never worked together, not for so much as a minute. None of them could be sure what the other two knew. None of them knew how fast the others were, or how well they performed under pressure. They had no way to be sure they could even stand each other.

But somehow, they had to get it done. “We had until 5 a.m. Monday morning to get our redesigned site up and running and ready for thousands of hits an hour. The whole would be trying to log on and if we weren’t ready, well, we were really going to have egg on our faces, not to mention that we’d lose an absolutely critical opportunity to meet our funding targets. It was truly do or die,” Russ recalled.

On Saturday, they got a little help from Keith Avery, the system admin at CP Web Media in nearby Rockland. He stopped in to help with the actual conversion to SQL, stayed a few hours and later provided some telephone support.

While Russ was working with SQL, Steve was not only handling technical chores, but also writing some of the site’s copy, working on the section involving career counseling and coaching, which just happens to be one of his life passions—fortunately for ImproveNow.

Meanwhile, Sean jumped right into redesign, working on a new layout, new sections, a new header, a new footer, a banner ad, new content. The whole works. He was doing nothing less than transforming the way the site looked, from something that looked a little underfed to something that looked as solid and handsome as anything you’re likely to see on the web.

Sean was working out his designs on his Windows 98 machines and emailing them to Russ and Steve. Why email instead of networking? Partly because it would have taken time to put Sean on the network and partly because everyone was using a different operating system—Sean on Windows 98, Russ on a Mac and Steve on NT, not exactly what they would have planned if they’d known how they’d be spending their weekend.

Saturday slipped by as though the clock were in fast motion, but Sean, Russ and Steve hardly noticed. “I was kind of on autopilot,” Russ recalled. “I knew what needed to be done and I wasn’t thinking about how long it would take, or about sleep or breaks or anything like that.”

One thing that gave no one any trouble: Cold Fusion. “Cold Fusion was easily scalable,” Russ said. “I built the site around session management, which is a way of tracking user information. And we never had any problems transitioning from the shared server to the dedicated server.”

There were problems with SQL 7.0—not with the program, but with their lack of knowledge about it. “We were learning it as we went,” Russ said, “and that was complicated by the fact that we didn’t have a copy of the program here. And by the fact that we had to recode the existing site to work with SQL server—1500 documents, all of which had to be thoroughly tested.”

When dinnertime rolled around on Saturday night, the guys grabbed sandwiches at the local Subway, then headed back to base camp #1, to make another assault on the mountain.

By Saturday night, Russ, Sean and Steve were starting to know each other’s workstyles and capabilities. And they were liking what they were seeing.

“I’d design something and email it to Russ,” Sean remembered, “And bingo, there it would be on the screen, looking exactly the way I wanted it to look.”

“A couple of times, I got stuck on my own code—that’s just something that happens to programmers—and Steve would come over and figure out the solution, even though he didn’t know any more about SQL than I did.” Russ said.

Throughout it all, there was constant music and a lot of laughter. “We were in a kind of delirium and we didn’t feel—or at least we didn’t show—the anxiety we had underneath,” Sean remembered.

“When you’re working that hard and that intensely with a common goal and you’re not sleeping, all the barriers between you disappear. It’s a big-time bonding experience.”

On Saturday night, Chuck’s wife Laura came in and asked if she could bring in some coffee. “Sure thing,” the guys said. “We thought she’d go out and get each of us a cup,” Russ said, “But she came back with a coffee maker and a big bag of brown sugar. I think I had eight cups of coffee within a few hour period.”

Saturday night seamlessly turned into Sunday morning and Russ, Sean and Steve grabbed a bite to eat at Fitzi’s deli, which occupies the first floor of their building. Then it was back to work.

Did all go smoothly? No. One by one, they all fell victim to an error every computer user has struggled with: version confusion.

While they were working, they naturally had several versions of the site and the individual web pages they were working on. And sometimes they found themselves editing the wrong one. “I personally found myself editing the wrong copy for an hour and a half,” Russ remembered. “And that happened more and more as we got more and more tired. By Sunday night, we were so tired we didn’t know what we were doing.”

It was about this time that Steve almost blinded himself. He was exhausted and he thought eye drops might help, so he reached for the little bottle of eyedrops, stood up, tilted his head back, got the bottle in position and was just starting to squeeze it when Russ walked into the room, bumping the door and startled him.

Then Steve looked at the eye drop bottle. It wasn’t filled with eye drops at all, but concentrated green breath mint. “I couldn’t believe what I almost did,” he said later. “I was just about to douse my eyes with breath mint drops. That would have finished me.”

By now, Monday morning was coming up fast. Pretty soon, it was 4:30 a.m.—a half hour before the site went up on AOL. “And the site wasn’t working at all,” Russ said, “and we didn’t know why. That was our moment to panic, but we weren’t coherent enough to panic.”

They were coherent enough to call VisualScape, which has an all-night service for dedicated users. “We reached a fellow named Anthony,” Russ remembered, “and he was absolutely awesome. He walked us though some things we couldn’t do remotely. Finally, we realized we’d been editing the wrong version of the site--again.”

Just before 5 a.m., AOL called again and asked if ImproveNow was ready. He told them that not only were they ready for an avalanche of traffic, but they’d completely redone the site.

Now, they sat back and waited for the hits to start. And for the first time, they had a chance to see what they’d accomplished. “We were amazed by how wonderful the site looked,” Steve recalled. “After it was all done, we were delighted with each other’s work.”

So is that the end of the story? Not quite. At 8 a.m., they anticipated heavy traffic…but no traffic was being logged. “I thought we were missing thousands and thousands of visitors,” Steve said. “So I called VirtualScape-- and got their answering machine. Then I called directly and found out that all was well—it was just registering slowly.”

By the end of the first full day, ImproveNow had registered 50,000 page views. By the end of the first week, the second target had been achieved—months early--over 200,000 page views. And people weren’t just looking at the site, they were using it. The investors’ targets had not just been hit, they’d been smashed. And five people—Russ, Steve and Sean, plus Chuck and Jim, were flying high.

After they’d rested and had time to reflect on the experience, Russ, Steve and Sean came to the same conclusion: “I’d love to do it again,” Russ said. Steve and Sean echoed his words.

By this time, of course, the nightmare was over. But so was the daydream. In the place of both: an achievement the team will remember for the rest of their lives—accomplishing the impossible, with skill and grace.