Launch

It’s been about nine months now since we first started working on Pacifica. I’ve been full time on it for a little over three months. It has also been some of the most rewarding work of my life. I will never forget hearing about the first time we helped someone through a panic attack. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.

I don’t really know that I’ve ever been so proud of something. Chris and I set out to build something and here were are. We decided that we were going to bootstrap Pacifica and I think that it was the right choice. Nobody has told us what we have to focus on or what feature to build next. We built the best product we could for our users.

There’s an immense feeling of accomplishment in doing that and not having been directly influenced by money-related issues. We just built things because they were the right things to build. And unsurprisingly, the business model falls into place when you can do that.

I’m reading the Hard Thing about Hard Things right now and there’s a Jim Barksdale quote that I’ve thought about a lot recently: “We take care of the people, the products and the profits…in that order.” The context is about taking care of your employees. But when you’re creating an app targeting stress and anxiety, how can you not think about the customer first? It is fitting that this particular quote fits so well into our company’s culture.

The launch has gone as well as we could have expected. Nothing crashed and people are using the apps. A lot more people are using it than we initially expected. That’s great, but what’s really exciting for me is that we were able to launch this company on the foundation from the beginning. We’ll probably need to take on some funding soon, but our fundamental principles have been established and those will forever be the building blocks of what is to come.