Defusing a bomb (in mid air)

 famously said that doing a startup was akin to jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down.

Today it feels more like defusing a bomb that also decided to jump off the same cliff.

This morning after a great first day of  (already in the top 100 iPhone games in USA, OMG!) we were riding high and ready to conquer the world.

Then we noticed ratings much lower than we had previously in our public beta.  There we rated ~4.5 stars, but in this launch version we were at ~3.5 stars.  

Analytics also bore that out, with ~10% of players worldwide having major problems.

And in in around half of Europe the ratings were simply horrible:

Some frantic troubleshooting isolated one problem with number format, with commas used by many Europeans triggering the bug. Damn!

Given the time to get Apple to approve a fix, we had to make a snap call to withdraw from these affected countries.  Then we’d launch again there with the next update.

In the US though, only a minority were having problems so we decided to continue on. However we did make some remote server changes to improve the new user experience for everyone and hopefully counteract some of the negative ratings. Short term crisis averted.

Lesson learned: Test more, but stay nimble to handle anything.

Now on to the rest of the plane :)