I think that this blog post is hiding the fact that a team of engineers had their evening robbed from them, at no fault of their own, for something that was ultimately kind of trivial. There are numerous reasons why it's a bad idea to make engineers burn the midnight oil to rush the finishing of a product -- the first among them being Hofstader's law. If your team actually needed an additional day of work, and you didn't already have your product in the bag, you had no good reason to be courting the press in the first place. Mistakes happen in the news cycle. This is usually why you do an unadvertised soft launch shortly before a press release's publication date. This was a lack of due diligence, and not on the part of the engineering staff.
I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or "vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon.
The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of days.
Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.
It's negativity through and through here, and it's impossible to get away from it. Consider the following:
- You have a team that has been working incredibly hard pursuing a dream: that they can build a product, from scratch, that is truly useful to millions and millions of people. This is not an EA requiring engineers to pull insane hours -- this is a labor of love and everyone has considerable equity.
- It's a small team and that means each person has a lot of responsibility. Don't like ever having to pull an all-nighter? Never want to work a minute past 5? That's OK, but it means you have no real responsibility, and you will be compensated accordingly. Others choose more responsibility, and they man up when the shit occasionally hits the fan.
- Have you ever coordinated a massive press push with the top print publications? Then you have no business telling them how it should be done. It's extremely difficult, it requires dates locked down months ahead of time, and with that kind of advanced commitment, planning 100% accurately is beyond difficult.
- After this ordeal, the team posts an honest story from the trenches. Go to any successful startup and you will hear many war stories like this. Nothing is ever perfectly planned, unexpected shit happens. It's frankly awesome that they shared it and gave some insight into what goes on behind the scenes that you don't normally hear about.
- What is your reaction? You shit all over them. Tell them that they're horrible people and that they did it all wrong. Exclaim that you could have done it all right and they have no idea what assholes they are.
I have no idea what drives this extreme negativity on HN, but it's gotten completely out of hand.
I'm sorry for being a stupid consumer but I still don't understand what cue is doing. I understood Greplin (search everything I have in the cloud), but I don't get what is point of Cue.
Which problem does it solve?
Maybe I'm not such a busy person. Or maybe the problem is that I don't care too much what is happening outside my email account.
Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend. This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the event, with a link to the message.
When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes, emails, events, etc) together in the same way.
Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but doing it in a much smarter, faster way.
kudos to Daniel and Robby and the Cue team - having just finished our launch, it's always stressful in the hours leading up. Rechecking lists, re-reading docs, running through flows again and again.
The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing.
Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)
I really liked Greplin (go to https://www.greplin.com/ to understand how it is related to Cue). I vouched for its ability to search twits (and other data source) for such a long time, and now I'll probably have to search for another product, as the team stops focusing on Greplin (and possibly eventually killing it).
Don't mind me though: I'm always happy when a team changes to a product that is more worth their time, even when I liked the former product.
The product that was previously called Greplin is a subset of Cue. The search functionality is not going away. We have no plans to get rid of it. It isn't an edge case, or legacy functionality - it's a core piece of Cue, and it is going to stay that way.
The cue app has search as a core, though secondary functionality. It doesn't seem to me that they will phase it out, though they may indeed change the way the app expects you to interact with its search interface which perhaps may run counter to your use case.
Cue has as of yet never worked for me. As in, it just says "Loading..." on the Today screen, and never loads anything. Could it be an iOS 6 thing? I'd really like to get it working; it looks so cool!
[+] [-] languagehacker|13 years ago|reply
I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or "vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon.
The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of days.
Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.
[+] [-] drusenko|13 years ago|reply
- You have a team that has been working incredibly hard pursuing a dream: that they can build a product, from scratch, that is truly useful to millions and millions of people. This is not an EA requiring engineers to pull insane hours -- this is a labor of love and everyone has considerable equity.
- It's a small team and that means each person has a lot of responsibility. Don't like ever having to pull an all-nighter? Never want to work a minute past 5? That's OK, but it means you have no real responsibility, and you will be compensated accordingly. Others choose more responsibility, and they man up when the shit occasionally hits the fan.
- Have you ever coordinated a massive press push with the top print publications? Then you have no business telling them how it should be done. It's extremely difficult, it requires dates locked down months ahead of time, and with that kind of advanced commitment, planning 100% accurately is beyond difficult.
- After this ordeal, the team posts an honest story from the trenches. Go to any successful startup and you will hear many war stories like this. Nothing is ever perfectly planned, unexpected shit happens. It's frankly awesome that they shared it and gave some insight into what goes on behind the scenes that you don't normally hear about.
- What is your reaction? You shit all over them. Tell them that they're horrible people and that they did it all wrong. Exclaim that you could have done it all right and they have no idea what assholes they are.
I have no idea what drives this extreme negativity on HN, but it's gotten completely out of hand.
[+] [-] kevinclark|13 years ago|reply
This was a team decision. There was no mandate from on high - we're not abused. It was time to ship, so we made it happen.
[+] [-] RoboTeddy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlogan|13 years ago|reply
Which problem does it solve? Maybe I'm not such a busy person. Or maybe the problem is that I don't care too much what is happening outside my email account.
[+] [-] mitchellhislop|13 years ago|reply
Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend. This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the event, with a link to the message.
When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes, emails, events, etc) together in the same way.
Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but doing it in a much smarter, faster way.
[+] [-] onetwothreefour|13 years ago|reply
It's really not -- it's just a calendar UI. And at the end of the day, it's about wether you like their UI vs iCal or whatever.
[+] [-] lincolnq|13 years ago|reply
I don't see the calendar entries from my iPhone's calendar - are they supposed to appear? How can I get them?
[+] [-] asarazan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
Couldn't help but notice your logo is sublimely similar to these guys - http://www.cue.com/
Probably wanted their domain name too :) Ah, well. Have you had any problems there? I'm always curious about name clashes and how they're dealt with.
[+] [-] yabbadabbadoo|13 years ago|reply
Pls add a big, bold link to cueup.com from your blog to make it easier for readers to check out your product.
[+] [-] ericfrenkiel|13 years ago|reply
The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing.
Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)
[+] [-] DanielRibeiro|13 years ago|reply
Don't mind me though: I'm always happy when a team changes to a product that is more worth their time, even when I liked the former product.
[+] [-] kevinclark|13 years ago|reply
The product that was previously called Greplin is a subset of Cue. The search functionality is not going away. We have no plans to get rid of it. It isn't an edge case, or legacy functionality - it's a core piece of Cue, and it is going to stay that way.
[+] [-] anateus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chetan51|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinclark|13 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133148
[+] [-] mthreat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camilopayan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucian303|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetwothreefour|13 years ago|reply