You’re Kidding, Right? a story by Tim Hanson

We were deep in the trenches of launch mode, the kind where every waking moment is consumed by thoughts of success. Will people like what we’ve built? Penfriend v1 was nearly ready, our audience primed, and our marketing was in overdrive. The FoMO machine was in full swing—posts on LinkedIn were buzzing, emails flying out, each one more urgent than the last, all building up to launch day.

We’d engineered a full countdown of events, each one carefully choreographed to ramp up the anticipation. Every detail had been meticulously planned. Or so we thought.

It was during a routine call with the dev team—just a regular check-in, nothing special—when the world suddenly shifted beneath us. I was chatting with our lead developer, going over some minor bugs that needed fixing, when I casually mentioned the launch date. “Just making sure everything’s on track for next week,” I said, not thinking much of it.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. A long pause. The kind of pause that makes your heart skip a beat.

“Next week?” the lead developer finally asked, his voice laced with confusion.

“Yeah, the launch,” I replied, a knot beginning to form in my stomach. “Next Friday. You know, the big day.”

Another silence. This time, it was more like the calm before a storm.

“We didn’t know,” he said, his voice flat.

I felt my blood run cold as the weight of his words hit me. My mind raced, trying to process what I’d just heard. How could this have happened? How could we, the founders, have missed something so crucial?

The room seemed to shrink, the air growing heavy with the realization of what we’d done—or rather, what we hadn’t done. We had failed to communicate the most critical piece of information to the people who mattered most.

With just 11 days to go, I scrambled to find the words, but all I could manage was a feeble, “You’re kidding, right?”

But there was no joke here. This was real. This was a nightmare unfolding in broad daylight.

Panic set in. I immediately called the other two founders, both of whom were in London, hundreds of miles away but somehow still close enough to feel the dread that was now coursing through me. The phone rang, once, twice, then a hurried “Hello?” on the other end.

“Hey,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I think we screwed up. We, err, we didn’t tell the developers we want to launch next week…”

The silence on the other end was deafening. I could almost hear their minds whirring, trying to grasp the enormity of what I’d just said.

Finally, one of them spoke, his voice tinged with disbelief. “So, we’ve been hyping this launch to everyone, and the dev team doesn’t even know?”

“Yup, pretty much,” I replied.

And so began the scramble. A mad dash to re-align everything that had so carefully been put in place. The launch date had to be pushed back—no question about it. We tore apart our marketing plan, redoing a big chunk of it, crafting new messaging that would make sense given the delay. Every piece of content had to be rechecked, re-timed, re-sent.

But the most important step? Making sure the dev team knew the new date. This time, we weren’t taking any chances. We looped them in on every single detail, over-communicating to the point where they probably wished we’d stop reminding them.

In the end, we managed to pull it off. The launch was successful, the product well-received, and our audience knew every bit of the hiccup. So now, I can tell this story almost without any changes to my heart rate.