An Email From Beijing
By Dan Gardner
My wife and I, in Jiaxing, where her family is from.
People often tell me the RunPee app is a genius idea. And I tell them that you don't have to be a genius to have a genius idea. If you spin around and throw a dart enough times, eventually you will hit the bullseye. And that's what RunPee is.
I didn't build RunPee because I thought it was a great idea that would make money. I built RunPee because I thought it would be a good way to learn how to build databases.
A Project to Practice On
It was 2008 and I had just quit my job at Microsoft to become a freelance developer. I needed something to show potential clients and help me find work.
RunPee.com launched to the public in August of 2008. (It was a website before it was a mobile app.) But no one used it. By the end of the year, still no one used it. And then spring. Crickets.
And Then It Caught
But in early summer, Star Trek (2009) came out, and RunPee.com instantly became very popular. I did interviews for news sources around the world. Someone in Chinese media learned about it and wrote an article.
An Email From Beijing
There was a woman in Beijing who loved science fiction movies and had a small bladder.
Avatar was about to open — 162 minutes, and that winter it was the film the entire country was fighting to get a ticket for. She wanted to see it, and she was worried about the one thing she couldn't control: needing to leave her seat partway through.
Not long before that, she had read the article: an American website that told you exactly which minutes of a film were safe to go.
After the movie, she thought RunPee was such a great idea that she wrote to me and asked if she could help me make a version for China. I agreed.
For the next few years we worked together and built RunPee China. It wasn't very popular. We were about fifteen years early.
The site you're reading is the second attempt.
And So We Met
Years later, she quit her job and came to the United States on vacation. I suggested that we meet in person. She agreed.
And so we met at the Griffith Observatory overlooking Los Angeles — the same place where the Terminator arrived in the first Terminator movie.
And we fell in love.
And now we've been married for eight years.
We live together in Asheville, North Carolina.
Jiaxing
If you're Chinese, you know Jiaxing. That's where my wife's family lives. It sits between Shanghai and Hangzhou, two cities that are bigger and more famous, and it spends its life being overshadowed by both. But if you could transplant Jiaxing to the United States, it would be the prettiest city in the country. It would make every other American city jealous.
What's Next
I am working hard to make RunPee an international app. It is a hard job because it is just me working on the app, with a handful of people who help me watch all the movies. But soon, I hope to have people around the world who will help me add Peetimes for regional movies. They will get to make money by watching movies. When RunPee makes enough profit, my wife and I can move to China.
If you'd like to be part of it — Chinese-language content, or any other language — write to us from inside the app, and put "I'd like to join the team that finds Peetimes" on the first line so I can find you.
The Word 尿点
The Chinese word for what RunPee does is 尿点 — niàodiǎn, literally "pee point." Its popularity traces back to two sources.
One is 2010: a critic wrote that Jiang Wen's Let the Bullets Fly had "only laugh points, no pee points," and that line is what pushed the word into everyday Chinese.
The other came earlier. Around 2009, an American website was passed around the Chinese internet as "the most practical movie website ever," because it told you the exact minute and second of each film when you could go to the bathroom.
That website was mine.
I built a website in English, and seventeen years later the word came back to me in my wife's language.
Seventeen years. On the left, RunPee in 2009 — that's what she read about. On the right, today.
Today
RunPee has been very good to me. I was able to buy my house and a car, and to support myself without answering to a boss for the past 18 years. (However, I consider the RunPee app users to be my boss.) And best of all, it helped me meet my wonderful wife.
Unfortunately, I'm still horrible at creating databases.