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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Awesome looking product and a good story of down-to-the-wire work. Great job guys.<p>Couldn't help but notice your logo is sublimely similar to these guys - <a href="http://www.cue.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cue.com/</a><p>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.
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.<p>The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing.<p>Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)
I really liked Greplin (go to <a href="https://www.greplin.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.greplin.com/</a> 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).<p>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.
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!