Status Update: Week #12

This here is our penultimate weekly update! We’re exactly two weeks out from the final Demo Day, and I’m equal parts excited and apprehensive.

The major event of the week was the first of two rehearsals, in preparation for the final Demo Day. Like we’ve done in the past, everybody got together and watched each others 8 minute demos. There was also a surprise guest, an investor from IDG, who came to listen to all of our pitches, and give feedback afterwards. Cheers, IDG! I think we’ve really learned a lot from all the previous demos, and so this time around we’ve added some personality, clarified some of our slides and script, and directly addressed common questions upfront. Of course, there’s still a lot more we could do better. In particular, I was strongly of the opinion that we should invest all 8 minutes on slides, to ensure that we didn’t have to rush everything to get our points across, and just direct people to the launched demo afterwards. This turned out to be a bad call: as people reminded us on multiple occasions, it’s called “Demo Day” for a reason. In particular, since we’ve already been dogfooding our product for the last 2 months, it’s just silly to not show it off during the presentation itself.

Speaking of the product, over the last week, we’ve been focusing on polishing what we’ve already hacked written, and all the little warts that have been bothering me (and oftentimes genuinely hampering usability) have been getting fixed one by one thanks to our efforts. There are certainly some features that we would love to add that we just won’t have time for, but I think we’re well on track to hit all the major ones.

Other than that, this past Saturday was 火花节, or “Fireworks Day” (it’s the best translation I can come up with). To celebrate this day (which to the best of my knowledge doesn’t commemorate anything in particular), the city puts on the “West Lake International Firework Displays”, and I was invited to go (you need tickets, but we managed to get them for free).

I have to admit, it was quite a sight; the Chinese certainly know how to put on a fireworks show. I’ve never really been that big a fan of fireworks, but this 40 minute show went by quite fast and I wasn’t bored at all. Unfortunately, there were also so. many. people. I don’t have any numbers, but let me tell you that you ain’t seen crowds and traffic until you’ve seen one of these events in China. It took my friend and I 2 hours to hail a cab. Frak me. Still, it was nice to check out a local event as a break from the long workdays.

Thanks for reading, and come back for our last status update from Hangzhou next week!