Welcome to Ramped Media

Are you there?

Since ImThere launched, we’ve been working like crazy on it. If you haven’t checked it out in a while, or at all, have at it! If you’re wondering what all has changed, we’ve been keeping the ImThere blog up-to-date with our progress. The ImThere blog is a great place to keep an eye on, as it’s updated frequently with all ImThere happenings. See you there!

We. Are. There.

We started on the new ImThere in late December of last year, and today, we have launched. I couldn’t be more proud of the site and the incredible people behind it. I’m sitting here at Ethan’s with him and Chad. We’ve been up for about 24 hours working to get the site launched, and we’re pretty ecstatic that it’s happened. Huge thanks to the whole Ramped team. Chad, Ethan, Jeff, Tess, and Jordan have worked harder than I can describe to launch a truly awesome version of ImThere. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for the champagne.

Oh, before I go, check out the site! http://www.ImThere.com. Also, give the screencast a view for a quick guide to the site. Have fun!

Bloggin' There

We’ve launched a blog dedicated to ImThere, which can be found here. We’ll be chronicling our adventures launching the new ImThere, seeking and (hopefully!) securing funding, and all of the day-to-day craziness that comes with running a site. We’ll keep blogging here too, so keep an eye on both!

Reconstructing ImThere: The Feel

Back in November, we reached a crossroads with ImThere where we had to decide if we wanted to keep pushing forward with the site we had launched just 2 months prior, or scrap and completely rebuild it. We opted for the latter. Sure, we could have kept working to add in the missing functionality, improve the usability, and smooth out the kinks. After all, we had just spent the better part of a year and tens of thousands of dollars to develop it. Why would we make the seemingly illogical choice that we did?

It didn’t feel right.

It wasn’t poorly made, and it certainly looked pretty, but it just lacked the undefinable quality that makes a site fun and addicting. So, after some deliberation, we went back to the drawing board and painstakingly planned out the site we should have been building from day 1. The truth is, no site is quite right when it first launches. Unfortunately, we found that our problems ran pretty deep into the site’s structure, and couldn’t be fixed with a simple revision. Fortunately, we realized that early on, and now we’re well on our way to the launch of an ImThere that we firmly believe you’ll want to be part of.

This is the first of a series of blog entries that will lead up to the launch of the new ImThere. Figuring out that it had to be rebuilt was only the first step. In future entries I’ll discuss how we’ve tackled expansion, melding a service with a community, mobile integration, usability, and other issues that needed solving for ImThere to feel right.

Ramped for 2007!

It may only be half-way through January, 2007 is looking to be a fantastic year here at Ramped. In the past two weeks, we’ve received a great deal of press coverage, entered talks with potential investors and VC firms, brought on a new developer, and even began development of a vastly improved version of ImThere. The post-holiday slump is clearly not impacting us!

ImThere has been covered by a variety of high-profile news outlets. Just today, the very popular social networking blog, Mashable, wrote a glowing review of ImThere. Over the past few days, the official Wired blog wrote a very flattering piece, a number of sites picked up the press release for an upcoming 3-page interview with Ben, and a couple of sites have mentioned ImThere for being a preview, looking pretty, and having nice CSS. Ben has also been interviewed by the St. Louis Post Dispatch, a local NPR affiliate, and soon, a local Fox affiliate. Needless to say, this attention has resulted in an influx of traffic and new users.

To help everybody stay in the loop, ImThere will expand globally in the very near future. We’re hard at work on a reformulated site, which will accomplish that expansion, foster a strong community, and generally be a lot more fun and useful. Because we want to get the new ImThere in your hands as soon as possible, we’ve expanded our development team. We’re pleased to announce that Kyle Bragger has joined the Ramped team. He’s been developing Ruby on Rails projects for quite a while, and he’s a truly perfect fit. Keep an eye out for his bio, and of course, the new ImThere!

All in all, we couldn’t be happier with how 2007 has begun. With all of these great things happening, you can expect much more frequent blogging. Until next time, keep checking out ImThere, and feel free to drop us a line!

The Value of Partnerships

One of most exciting things about being involved with Ramped Media has been building business partnerships and relationships. Beyond building great products and services for the sake of doing great things, we want to build an open platform that adds value for our partners. We are pleased to announce our partnerships with the local music publication the St. Louis Sound Magazine, the recently re-launched PlayBack:STL magazine, and the iChannelMusic station that is a part of Bonneville International radio network. Whether we are providing an API for event listings, mobile integration into a website, or text messaging codes (custom ThereCodes) for a print publication, we are working with partners who want to build a great service for their users. Also, the encouragement from the Technology Entrepreneur Center IT incubator in Downtown St. Louis, University of Missouri – Rolla and St. Louis officials, and local individuals in bringing focus to the development of technological innovation in the region has been invaluable to the company. Our most important partnerships however are with individual performers and artists in which we provide them a service to promote themselves and establish a strong community. If you wish to learn more about partnering with Ramped Media and ImThere, select your favorite animal and drop us a line on the contact page.

The Delay

As some of you probably noticed, ImThere didn’t launch quite on time. Our launch party was on Wednesday, September 20th. The site actually launched on Tuesday, September 26th. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what happened…

The delay began at the launch party, when Chad came to me right before the site demo started to let me know the site simply couldn’t launch that night. Chad, Ethan, and Jeff started developing the site last March, and Jordan joined them in late June. Despite the extremely intricate coding that was written for ImThere, you can imagine the whole team was a little disappointed not having something to launch many months later. It was understandable, but you can bet we all would have had a ton more fun at the party had the site launched. There was nothing anyone could do but work insanely hard to get it up as quickly as possible, and that’s what happened.

That work began while the party was still going on. In fact, that lead to a fairly amusing moment. At the end of the site demo, I went to thank the team. As I went to point out each of the team members individually, I kept pointing in the wrong direction. They had moved to a different set of computers, as they were trying to get the site somewhat usable for the people at the party. As the party went on, they continued to work on the site. Thankfully, they did take some breaks, and were able to enjoy the party to an extent. After the party was over, and I dropped everyone off at their hotel, I told them to get a good amount of sleep, as tomorrow would be a busy day. Of course, that didn’t stop them from putting in more time from their hotels.

On Thursday, I picked everyone up from their hotels around noon. We headed to the Bread Co. (Panera, for you non-St. Louis folk) for lunch, and then the Apple store so that Jordan could buy a MacBook. That thing came in handy, let me tell you. Afterwards, we went to Coffee Cartel, which is a 24/7/365 coffee shop that has free WiFi. Really, what more could you want? Once we got there, Jordan quickly setup his MacBook, and then everyone got to work on the site. Everyone worked non-stop on the site until around 7, when we went to grab (an amazing) dinner. At the end of dinner, I said I’ll pick up the check… as long as the site gets launched before we go to bed. That was agreed upon, and we headed back to Coffee Cartel to continue. About an hour later, we realized it was time for a quieter environment. After some quick brainstorming, the location was obvious! The Business Center at the Hilton that Jordan was staying at.

Ahh yes, the Business Center



That table wasn’t so clean when we left

We really loved this place. It was an empty, quiet, spacious, and comfortable place to work from. The ‘net connection was pretty horrible, but we were okay with that. Since I haven’t done any of the coding on ImThere, there initially wasn’t a whole lot for me to do aside from provide moral support. However, an hour or two after we’d gotten there, I realized what had to be done. It was time to introduce a phrase that would get us through the night, and eventually lead to the site launching. Cut it! It became very obvious that everyone was floundering to a degree, which was because it was painfully aware that we were truly weeks away from launching the site we had planned to. To relieve the sinking feeling we all had, and to actually make an imminent launch possible, I knew it was time to go page by page and make cuts. So, I sat down with Jordan, and we did just that. I’m pretty sure the people at the front desk could hear me yelling “cut it!” The launch suddenly became in our reach, the energy level in the room went up, and the remaining tasks became clear. I think the White Castle I picked up for everyone helped too.

Chad thoroughly enjoyed that couch

Around 5AM, Chad decided to head back to his hotel room, as he needed a working ‘net connection to start getting the servers ready to launch the site. His hotel was just a few blocks from Jordan’s, so he walked there while Ethan and Jordan continued to work where they were. I walked part of the way with Chad, as we discussed a game plan for the launch. After that, I rejoined Ethan and Jordan as they finished building the site. At this point, Jordan would finish a page, show it to me, and then implement the tweaks I could come up with as fast as he could. Ethan was also working ridiculously quickly to hack together the missing back-end code. I truly couldn’t believe how much these guys were getting accomplished. I was feeling very confident at this point. About an hour and a half later, at 6:30, the cleaning lady kicked us out. We headed up to Jordan’s room to continue working until Chad was ready for us. Jordan’s room had an amazing view that overlooked the new Busch Stadium, and we watched the sun rise from there as the coding and my nitpicking continued.

Jordan didn’t want to leave



The pre-launch walk!



Arriving at Chad’s residence

At 8AM, Chad called me and said we should walk over to his hotel. We packed up the laptops, left the hotel, and walked the streets of downtown St. Louis while the sun continued to rise. Thinking that we were about to launch the site made that walk feel pretty amazing. It just felt like one of those moments that you’d look back on. At any rate, once we arrived at Chad’s hotel and went up to his (insanely small) room, we discussed where we all stood. Chad was working out some deploy issues, but wasn’t too far from being ready. Ethan continued to hammer out as many coding tasks as he could. Jordan was still working on some tweaks, but didn’t have a whole lot left at that point. Despite being up for so long, and working so hard, no one appeared especially tired. We felt confident that we were just an hour or so from launching, and that kept us going.

At 9:09AM, after one failed attempt, ImThere went online. We celebrated for about a minute (there was no mini-bar in his room!), and then jumped right into fixing the bugs that popped up at launch. Everything was going as planned, and we were all pretty excited. As we browsed through the site, watched the logs, and listened to the immediate feedback we were receiving, we started to realize that there were some definite issues that needed addressing. Everyone was working like mad to get them worked out, and it seemed like things were starting to stabilize. At this point, we decided to call Ben and fill him in. I dialed his number, put him on speakerphone, and told everyone to listen to what I was about to say. He picked up, let me know I’d woken him up (all the better!), and then I proceeded to tell him that there was no way the site could launch before Monday. While that seems prophetic in retrospect, it was meant to be a joke at that moment. He was too tired to freak out, but was he was obviously displeased. After a bit of silence, I started laughing and let him know that the site was indeed online. That quickly changed his mood, and he hopped (sorry, hoped—inside joke) up to check it out. I told him that he was going to buy us all breakfast, and we’d meet him in an hour.

I’m surprised they could hold their heads up at this point

Shortly after that call, we began to realize that the site may not be in as good of shape as we thought. Despite everyone’s quick bug fixing, the list of them was growing, and we discovered that some key functionality didn’t work. Around the time of our discovery Ben called me to talk about the problems he found with the site, and that he was fairly worried about the state it was in. He was right, and less than an hour after launching the site, we took it offline. Everyone continued to work, but I knew soon I’d had to leave to take Jordan to the airport to catch his flight. When that time came, Ethan left too, and Chad stayed in his hotel room to keep squashing bugs.

After I dropped Jordan off at the airport, I called up Chad to see how he was doing. Chad confirmed what I already knew. He was burnt out, and we were at a stopping point until everyone could get some sleep. I told him that I totally understood, and that we’d meet up later that (Friday) night. I grabbed some food, and headed home. I felt okay about things, as I didn’t think it’d take much longer to launch the site, and I was so happy with everyone for working 24 hours straight to do their best to launch ImThere. The truth is, no site ever launches without incident. Out of all of the DeskMod and ModBlog launches, I only considered one of them to be a successful launch (DeskMod v3.0). It’s impossible to discover all of the issues, even bigger ones, until you get the site into people’s hands and up on the real servers. Even if we would have had a solid week of testing, or longer, we still would have had similar problems. Like all launches though, if you take a step back, relax, and then calmly start resolving the issues, you end up with a solid site before long.

I picked up Chad, and we met up with Ethan and Ben around 10PM that night at Ethan’s house. We discussed what needed to be done, and Ethan and Chad got back to work. About an hour later, I saw Jordan come online. I checked in to make sure he’d gotten home okay. Unfortunately, he had not. He was stuck in Chicago, as his connecting flight had been delayed by bad weather until… 5:30PM the next day. Unlike the rest of us, Jordan had yet to sleep, and now he had about 18 hours until his flight would even depart. I felt horrible (especially since this was his first time traveling by plane), and told him to stay online, and I would find him a nearby hotel room. It took me about an hour to finally find a hotel that wasn’t booked. I made a reservation, faxed in my billing information, and located a taxi for him. Finally, around 1AM, he let us know he was in a hotel room and was finally ready for bed. He did make it home okay the next day, but I still feel bad he had to go through so much.

Back in St. Louis, Chad and Ethan were hard at work. Soon though, Chad and I decided to head back to the Hilton Business Center, while Ethan stayed behind and Ben went home. Shortly after getting there, I could tell that Chad was still totally drained. I suggested that we head back to his hotel so that he could sleep for a few more hours. I did the same. We all met up around noon on Saturday and continued working, confident that the site would finally go up that day. Without a doubt, we were much, much closer. The site was becoming usable, and the bug list was shrinking instead of growing. We probably could have launched the site then, but we figured at this point, it was worth spending a little more time to get it right. Saturday came to a close, and the plan was now to launch on Sunday, right before Chad had to catch his plane. Unfortunately, our time on Sunday was a little more limited than we’d hoped, and the site still wasn’t quite there. Once Chad got home, he understandably rested up for a bit before beginning work. Somehow or another, we got from there to early Tuesday morning. Finally, the site was ready.

After months of work, days of struggling to launch the site, and about 10 variations of the pre-launch splash page, ImThere was finally online. We promised we wouldn’t take it offline again. There were obviously still many issues to resolve and things to tweak, which is still the case, but we just had to get it launched. We knew once the site was launched, everyone would feel a lot more motivation to make it a great site. That has certainly been the case, and the team continues to work harder than any team I’ve been part of to make it the site we have visions of. In the not-too-distant future, I know we’ll get there.

At the very least, we can chalk this up as another amusing launch story.

ImThere Set for Launch!

At long last, ImThere is ready for launch! On September 20th, the Ramped Media team will be throwing a huge party to celebrate the grand opening of ImThere. The party is being held at the beautiful Lucas School House in the historic Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis, MO. The party will feature a site demonstration, three amazing bands, and plenty of giveaways. Here are the full details:

When: Wednesday, September 20th @ 7:00pm
Where: Lucas School House, 1220 Allen Ave., at the corner of Allen & Gravois
RSVP: Email launch@imthere.com or call (314) 563-0001

• Located in the historic Soulard neighborhood, the newly opened Lucas School House boasts two beautiful floors, two swanky bars, one fantastic outdoor patio that will host 600 of our closest friends and supporters

• Doors open promptly at 7:00pm, with a 30 minute demonstration of ImThere beginning at 7:30pm. Immediately afterwards, two great local bands (Not Just Noise and John Henry & The Engine) and one nationally known band (Jil Station) will play until 12:30am

• The launch party is absolutely free for those over 21, and $5.00 for 18+

• Giveaways of ImThere and band merchandise

• For those unable to attend, photos and video will be posted to ImThere following the party

We look forward to seeing you at the launch party and ImThere!

ImThere Launch Flyer

Announcing... ImThere!

The whole Ramped team is thrilled to announce our first project, ImThere. We’ve been hard at work on ImThere for months now. In fact, the concept behind the site has been developing for almost a year now. Needless to say, we can’t wait to finally get it out there and watch it grow. We all truly love the site, and we hope you end up feeling the same way!

So, what exactly is ImThere? Well, that part is still a secret! It’s made up of a very unique set of ideas, and there is truly nothing like it out there. We’d like to keep it that way for a little longer! With that said, you’ll be able to get your hands on it very soon.

In the mean time, why not visit ImThere and add your email address to our list? Have no fear, you won’t get a bit of spam from subscribing. We’ll send you one e-mail when we launch, and another if you’re accepted into the private preview. See ya there!

The Finalized Logo

Chi-town

Silicon Valley lore often begins with the story of a couple guys in a garage. However, where Ramped Media was founded, we didn’t even have a garage. We still don’t. What we do have is ideas, a vision for the future, a business model, and dedication. It was just a little over one month ago when the Ramped team converged in Chicago for our first face-to-face development meeting. It was zero degrees outside without even factoring in the sheering winds off of Lake Michigan, but we managed to stay toasty inside our hotel room with PowerBooks ablaze on our laps. Our highly productive weekend trip took a broad idea for Ramped out of Gorman’s and my head, and created a well-defined technical game-plan and call to action.