The Last Network - Chapter 10
Launch Crickets
He remembered this feeling. It brought him back to a time when he whipsawed between panic, rage, and helplessness. It had been a dozen years, but that cocktail was burned deep into his temporal lobe. It was a there as a warning. The last time Rabbit felt this, he’d lost everything.
Don’t fuck up again. It told his brain. Don’t shit your pants. It told his guts. Punch that mirror out. It told his fists.
Rabbit paced across the office, hands balled tight. He had to get out of here and pull himself together. He slipped out the back, started for his car, then changed his mind. He needed to walk this episode off. The bright sun and hot air blasted him as he left the office building and started down a dry cedar-chipped jogging trail. A lone black suit lost among the dog walkers and Lycra clad joggers.
The launch had gone flawlessly. What had followed was crickets.
No one was downloading the app. The few who did weren’t using it. Rabbit couldn’t tell if he had a marketing problem, a product problem, or worse, both. The plan had called for a soft launch. Get Peared into the app stores, make sure everything worked right, and then start marketing once the company felt good about things.
After the launch, there should have been a PR bump. Em had done her homework, reached out to people, and lined up all the usual suspects. Everything looked fine until the night before launch. Around nine, she heard they’d been put on a blacklist by the tech press. Someone was serving up revenge. Maybe Ka$ia had a change of heart about his departure—maybe it was Frank Meyers.
Whoever it was, they had serious pull.
The launch plan called for fifty thousand users from PR. They got two articles which yielded squat. App store optimization was their next free marketing bullet. Only no one searched the App Store or Google Play for teleportation, because it didn’t exist yet. The idea was for the news to create a buzz around the first teleportation app. Since that was them, they’d get all those searches.
No articles meant no buzz. No buzz meant no search traffic.
After a week, Rabbit had given up hope that someone would discover Peared organically. It was time to pay for what had not been given. He poured $100,000 into online marketing. It got them a little over twenty thousand installs. A tenth of them opened the app a second time. That was bad. Really bad. Something was wrong with Peared. Either it sucked, or people didn’t know how to use it.
They had tried to go general market and missed. Em’s colorful commercials had been shelved. The faucet turned off. They needed to diagnose the problem before they went back out there. All Rabbit could do right now was blow off anger. That wasn’t especially helpful, but it was a fuck ton better than smashing things.
Or people. He shuddered and told himself that this time was different.