When we started gaining users, we realized we needed to focus on managing our servers and operations, which led us to take time off from school.

After our initial launch, we didn't see immediate success and even explored creating a roommate matching website before pivoting back to Airbnb.

We realized our users loved us because they put up with a website that was half-functional, showing their commitment to our product despite its flaws.

We weren't prepared for rapid growth when a key opinion leader shared our program, leading to 2,000 sign-ups overnight, which we struggled to manage in a timely manner.

We launched our closed beta on Twitter, which rapidly increased our followers from 50 to 10,000 and attracted 150,000 unique visitors a day.

A bug in our caching system caused the model to respond as if it were talking to itself, leading to a significant drop in user satisfaction until we identified and fixed it.

When a major celebrity announces a live stream, a hundred thousand fans can request it simultaneously, causing the video server to crash. We had to find solutions to manage this sudden influx of traffic effectively.

We grew over 700% last year, and the site didn't crash once after bringing in the right team.

Even with many flaws, we saw incredible user growth, with 20,000 visitors in the first month, which encouraged us to keep going despite initial setbacks.