I’m in NYC crashing at my friend Kerry’s place (we used to live together in London), and this episode is basically the real-time chaos of launching Zelos worldwide on iOS. Two hours after the release we doubled to 200+ users, and people were DMing me nonstop saying it’s the best app ever and posting their profiles on their stories—which is exactly the marketing loop I want. But of course there was a small race-condition bug with profile photo uploads, so I was manually running a script throughout the day to catch and fix failures while monitoring the rollout. After the launch adrenaline, I did the boring-but-important founder stuff: moving billing from my personal accounts to the company (Zelos Limited), using the company debit card, and checking Firebase metrics. Late at night I finally fixed the profile picture issue properly (state guard + disable button + loading indicator) and shipped a patch to the App Store. I also spotted a scary number of Firebase reads, so I started thinking about query optimization before the user base 10–100x’s. In between, I’m still living my life: Red Bars, Pier 2 calisthenics sessions, meeting other founders in WeWork, and getting humbled by New York prices (a bagel + coffee for $20 is insane). By 24 hours post-launch we were nearing 400 users, and my next push is more content and profile design tweaks (world + country ranking) to drive shares and engagement.