Last night at 6pm PT, the Overdog team released our app to hundreds of thousands of gamers in the Xbox One Preview program (a closed beta audience dedicated to test-driving new products from Xbox developers and game publishers) in the US, Canada, and Great Britain. Crickets or crowds, we had no idea what to expect.

Well, it turns out we saw the latter. We were greeted with a crushing wave of users minutes after our introduction to the wild, and that response hasn’t slowed down through this morning with our friends in the UK making Overdog part of their Saturday morning gaming rituals.

Dealing With The Crush

That’s the wonderful, joyful part of our launch tale. The challenge? Keeping our ship afloat under such a hearty welcome from the Preview community. An hour into launch, we started to see strains on our servers and platform that were causing users to see Network Errors in the Overdog app. As usage continued to steamroll, that challenge intensified.

Thankfully, our team stepped up in force to troubleshoot and resolve the issues. Our lead engineer Kris led the charge from HQ, cranking away literally all night (and he’s still going folks!) to diagnose and fix server load-balancing issues and various computational elements related to our game-matching logic. He was joined by Richard, our newest team member, in what can only be described as a baptism by fire.

The remainder of our dev team - Brian, Clay, and Clarke - was busy lobbing snippets of code and nuggets of input from San Francisco after wrapping up an awesome week at GDC 2015. They had their laptops open in the cab to SFO and all the way through security, then they battled internet issues from 30,000 feet during a red-eye home to support the Overdog cause. It was incredible.

Looking Ahead

Over the past year, we’ve asked ourselves countless times, “Will interest-based matchmaking be something people care about?” Until last night, we only had a little bit of data and a whole lot of gut intuition to tell us they will. Well, after 16 hours in the wild connecting with Preview users, we’ve confirmed there is absolutely interest in what we’re building. Now, onto the next steps - stabilizing the platform, fixing bugs, adding new topics, and delivering a product that people love.

In building our app for the Xbox One platform, we’re doing something that virtually no other startup has had the opportunity to do to date. We will absolutely get our sea legs with this whole endeavor in short order. In the meantime, we are extremely thankful for the excitement (and understanding!) we’ve received from Preview users.

16 hours in, life is good, and it’s only getting better from here. We can’t wait for what’s next!