Demo Apple Watch “We made a little something go viral”

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Cooky and the folks at Apple had ‘one more thing’ up his sleeve. Apple had just released the bigger version of the iPhone. And now, it was time for Apple’s first wearable on display. Tim Cook raised his arms, clinched his fists and grinned away. The Watch was here, and with the ovation it was getting, pronounced a success even before it found itself on the wrists of consumers.
Like most things Apple, Apple Watch continued to make news. It made news every day of the week, every week of the month and every month of the year since its unveiling. Stories flooded the Internet, Apple was truly bouncing back from what a critic might call a tumultuous 2013.  Two huge product releases, two significant OS revamps, couple of loud shots and Apple seemed 2011 all over again.
We at Pipes have always been enamoured by this wonderful company. As app developers, we knew we had to find our bearings soon and get onto Watch before it got out there. Unfortunately, coming from the country we do (India), we don’t get access to some of the Apple products for close to 30-45 days after release. We knew it would be different this time around. Nonetheless, before Watch came out, we thought we’ll build a web version of it all. And, mid December we began. We built 19 apps (See here), showcased Glances, Actionable Push Notifications and customised Pipes (Yeah, we’d obviously do that) to immense detail.
It took a couple of solid weeks to conceptualise, design and build. Early Jan, we were good to go.
7th of January, 9 to 5 Mac’s Mark Gurman lead a feature talking about Apple Watch’s release date to be somewhere in March a month later than what us nerds expected. This was it. This was the time for Demo Apple Watch to go out.
We sent a demo out to 9 to 5 Mac and the duo of Mark Gurman and Mike Beasley were kind enough to write about us. In the next 24 hours, the campaign blew through the roof. We received over a 150 coverages in 5 hours. Our servers got hammered. Only one in every 4 users were able to access the website.
I still remember how upset my CTO (Tushar Cheulkar) & I were. We  couldn’t port the servers without some downtime. And the latter was just not an option. Desperation, disappointment coupled with anger put us to bed that night. We had busted our assess of for 4 straight hours trying to find a solution to our crashing server only to no avail. 6 am as we uncomfortably slept on our office bean bags, my great friend and operations manager, Rahul Tikiya at Pipes called me a trivial 17 times from London. In the 3 hrs we’d been asleep, Demo Apple Watch had made waves. Over 350,000 users had accessed the website in 6 hrs. Coverages (for once) flooded through. The likes of  9 to 5 Mac, TNW, IB Times, Business Insider, Telegraph, Daily Mail, BGR amongst countless others had something nice to say.
As we woke to 8th of January, the beaming Sun echoed our emotions. We were elated. We had made a little something go viral. And hopefully, these are signs of things to come in this wonderful year by an extremely talented team.
Infographics-01
Read through a couple of Stats below:
- 750,000 unique users accessed DemoAppleWatch.com in 6 days.
- Over 550 publications wrote about Demo Apple Watch including the likes of 9 to 5 Mac, TNW, IB Times, Business Insider, Telegraph, Daily Mail & BGR.
- Cumulated time spent on the website in 6 days by users equated to 1.1 years.
- At all points for 6 days there were more than 800 users on the site every second with a maximum of 12,000(due to our Servers).
You could also demo the apple watch here.


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