Seven months ago, we had zero rigs and zero members on the site. We spent every day for an entire year in private development, hoping that one day we’d get just one rig.
We contemplated making the site live at different times and told ourselves multiple times that it had to wait: “We have to fix just this one thing! Wait, we need this as well!” After doing this over and over, at a certain point, we just decided to go live.
poof We’re just floating out in the world now.
After finally launching and revealing our baby to the world, we were hopeful something would happen. A few days went by… then a few weeks… nothing. Waking up to another day without a rig made us all want to fall right back asleep. 🥲
And then — BOOM — our first organic rig was posted to the site. It felt like Christmas. We were in shock. It felt like it might never actually happen and yet it happened. One of us woke the others up on the phone yelling, “WE GOT A RIG! WE GOT A RIG!” We were in awe and disbelief.
Then — instant anxiety hit. We were all hoping the site worked as intended. We opened the rig, looked through the products, and thankfully, it seemed to — for the most part. Though we’d been working on the site for a year, it was impossible to fully process that someone had actually gone in, picked their parts, and published a rig. We couldn't believe it.
For the next 10, 20, 30 rigs, we were hit with the same wave of emotions: extreme happiness, instantly followed by fear that something might be broken. Rig after rig, certain products were missing, so we worked to implement them. We tweaked categories and subcategories constantly to prevent weirdness with every new build.
Michael and I spent six months creating hundreds of categories to compartmentalize a total of over 179,000 products. Cameron redesigned and reformatted every page on the site multiple times. He also created a custom products feature that allowed (and allows to this day) users to input anything as a custom product. Genius!
Every day we ran into something we hadn’t accounted for — and every day it felt like there was an increasingly difficult list of tasks and infinite progress to be made.
But the more rigs that are posted now, the more we’re met with excitement — and less fear. We’ll always remember how it felt seeing that first rig go live.
We carry that feeling with us every day we work on Rig Designer.
We appreciate every single one of you. Thank you for giving us hope that hard work leads to growth — and thank you for giving us the tight-knit community we’re lucky to be growing with. The site isn’t perfect but we’re working to get a little closer to perfection every day. We’re not going to quit. Thank you everyone for all the support!
Here's a video that encapsulates why we do what we do by one of our Designers Sandra: