"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."

— Winston Churchill

Where do I even start?

On the 8th of September, 2023, the Ikọ Mafia as we colloquially refer to ourselves at 'Ikọ HQ' attempted to launch version 2 of our platform.

Ikọ--a social literary app, is a platform for building a stronger and more intimate connection between writers and their audiences.

Our goal is to --through consistent feature rollouts, deliver a product that firstly provides the writer with tools to better understand their audience.

We want our writers to have insight into the engagement that they generate, and Ikọ aims to offer writers the opportunity to engage readers meaningfully as part of the writing process.

Secondly, we want to offer our readers the opportunity to read publications from their favorite authors, as well as discover new and relevant publications and authors based on their interests.

Last but by no means the least, we want our readers to be able to have opportunities to be part of sub communities and cultures built around the shared love that they have for the stories they read and the authors they engage with.

The overarching goal of Ikọ is community and family, and our users are those with a passion for artistic collaboration and building meaningful connections.

As a social literary platform, we want you to come for the great stories, and ultimately stay for the amazing people you connect with.

So, back to the 8th of September. How did version 2.0 happen?

I can tell you for a fact that it was indeed an emotional day at our virtual headquarters -- the Ikọ Whatsapp group. The emotions varied from excitement to anxiety, from pride to fear.

For me, and my co-engineers specifically, it was a loudly quiet day. I distinctly remember being hauled up in my work space alone, eyes glued to my code editor, on hours-long phone calls as we tried to tidy up loose ends.

I personally wondered -- "What if we failed to launch?" , when we did launch, "Would our current users love the new version ?", "would new users sign up ?" , most of all-- "were we ready?"

Earlier that morning, we'd had a laundry list of tasks to finish off in order to be prepared. It was nervewrecking and thrilling at the same time.

One hour and thirty minutes to the official launch time, I could not believe that we were pretty much crossing off all the necessary Ts and dotting our Is appropriately. We were on track. We were actually going to pull this off.

Fifteen minutes to launch, all is well, slight delay in finishing off some final bits but we're good overall.

Fifteen minutes post launch time, we're finally ready to make the final push to production and let open the floodgates.

Thirty minutes post launch time , I attempt to navigate to the sign-in page from our homepage. I notice my updates have not reflected.

I check my emails and lo and behold, my final deployment failed.

This continued for at least an hour, for reasons beyond the scope of this article. The fact was, our biggest fears were quickly becoming a reality.

On the 8th of September, I learned patience and trust. Patience to not allow the fear of failure dictate my reactions to difficult situations. Trust in my co-engineers who were tirelessly working to rectify an issue we did not anticipate. Trust in our community to support us nonetheless.

You see, for that very long hour all we could really do was wait.

We could either stress about what was happening, or we could keep working to make sure that when our app did launch , our users were getting the experience they deserve.

We chose the latter. And I'm glad we did, because I personally achieved a lot more in that one hour than I would have had I let the feeling of letting my team down hang over my head.

Like Churchill said--

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."

Almost three hours post official launch time, we were finally live.

Ikọ was built with a lot of love, by a small team of young, passionate people. Contrary to what it may seem like, we have not arrived ; we have barely even begun.

The journey continues and we are glad that you've chosen to walk it with us.

With ❤️,

Emma