HipCal's 10th Birthday

The first real product I ever worked on, HipCal.com was “launched” a decade ago today. I use quotes there because it was a pretty uneventful launch. We uploaded a few hand-selected PHP files to our shared webhost via SmartFTP and then posted a barebones blog post. I have no memory of what we did after that, but it certainly didn’t involve pitching tech blogs, posting on social media, or sending out an email blast. I don’t think we even had a way to see how many users had signed up besides manually running a SQL query from the ugly cPanel admin interface our host provided.

It’s fun to look back on this as a way to measure how much we’ve all learned since that point. Members of the team have since gone on to found HipChat, ToutApp, and Balanced, among other projects.

Here’s to the next unpredictable 10 years!