Don't forget to come to the Off the Shallow End Improv shows/recitals this Sunday or on Sunday April 3rd. The shows are at 7 PM and making reservations through ImprovBoston and coming early is apparently highly recommended.

The past week I have been working towards the send date on our press release and web site updates announcing our latest version. It has been fun times for me and includes many of my favorite start-up adventures. I haven’t worked on a tiny team of people for years and I love the nature of dealing with situations where you need to figure out how to solve problems yourself because nobody else is going to solve them for you. I became the copywriter, QA, product manager, documentation author, web site HTML designer, graphic designer, PR guru, and partner and alliances manager when I joined this gig.

The great thing is that these items are all interconnected. The product needs to have the right stuff in it to be ready for the release and it has to work. But to make the release really of some value you need a big partner that can vouch for you since your voice needs to be amplified by someone. In our case we decided that Google was as good of a partner as we could find so Chris built an adapter to their desktop search. We also decided that we could make more waves if we offered something for free, so Chris and Aaron re-architected the licensing system and the registration system – which was required anyways so that we could offer the core of the product for free. The fun part was working to time when the software was ready – sorta working with the licensing system on Wednesday, the press release was approved – Google last Friday, putting the web pages up, and most importantly getting the product live on the Google Desktop Search plug-in page.

Now I can’t say that everything is beautiful since I have been relearning HTML after having put down Homesite as an editor in 2001 only to find that Macromedia is much happier with Dreamweaver and supporting strange new things like cascading style sheets and the frightening DIV tag. I also got a chance to learn a little about using Illustrator to produce a couple of graphics. I'd rather use Photoshop but I didn’t have it handy at the time and Illustrator does a much better job than Paint. The biggest problem is that my artistic sensibilities with the visual arts are roughly equivalent to a tone deaf singer.

So the results of the release about 24 hours after we went live on the GDS plug-in page, and 18 hours after we went live with the PR Newswire feed is that we got about 100X increase for today over our average day of downloads.

We even got a sale directly attributable to the whole process. I am enamored by the ability to sell items without the long negotiation, RFPs, and calls to the board that are so necessary to sell enterprise products. So I am living with the rush of seeing my stats that I obsess over do their short term hockey stick jump and having a grand time imagining how much fun it will be to tackle Flash programming and make some animated ads that put our point across.

Tomorrow is the big ChannelWave reunion party. I am looking forwards to seeing everyone again. I heard some people like Stephen D. won’t make it but I think we will all have a grand old time reconstructing our past lives. Other people were probably thinking and searching among memories of ChannelWave. I received this note today as an anonymous reply to one of my postings…

"You were the angel I needed when I needed one, and for that alone, ChannelWave was my miracle. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your caring and patient soul."

When I see a message like this addressed to me, even anonymously, I remember what people always tell me about my father or mother being someone important in their lives because of how they cared and tried to help people. I am proud that I might have learned something from my family as I grew up about priorities and can put it into practice in what I do for work. Building a world where people feel wanted is the best way for me to feel wanted and fulfilled myself. Thanks to whoever wrote the note. I only wish I could make more enduring miracles. But with grateful words like that every day I would barely need to eat or breath and I can keep believing in my dreams of living in a better world.