How RunPee Started
The idea for RunPee came after the opening night of Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong, a movie that runs over three hours. Jackson had just finished The Lord of the Rings, and nobody was about to tell him to trim anything. By the end we were in agony. I couldn't enjoy the ending at all. All I could think was, "When will this ape die so I can go to the men's room?"
A Line Full of People Who Needed to Know
As Jill Florio (now RunPee's COO) and I left the theater, we saw a line of people waiting for the next showing, and we said to each other, "Someone should tell them. It's such a long movie, they should run and pee during that gross giant bug scene. It has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It's the perfect time to go."
I'm not gregarious enough to tell strangers when to pee, so we had a lot of fun talking it over and left it at that. (Jill is that gregarious, and came darn close to announcing to everyone in line that the bug scene was the time to run to the toilet.)
Over dinner that night we talked about making a website for it. Then we basically forgot about it for two years. I was working at Microsoft at the time and a little too busy for side projects.
A Project to Practice On
In 2008 I quit my job at Microsoft (Xbox division) to become a freelance developer. Having Microsoft on your résumé is a pretty good start, but I needed something more concrete to show potential clients. I also needed to pick up a few new programming skills, namely PHP and MySQL.
That's when the idea for RunPee came back to me. I could build the website and the admin to add and edit the data, and use it as a sample for clients. For the next four months I spent my free time building RunPee.com.
I must confess, I never, in my wildest dreams, thought RunPee.com could become anything more than a novelty. It was a fun project to test out my new skills.
Late that summer I attended a conference, and the organizers let me go up on stage and present RunPee.com. Afterward everyone told me it was genius and congratulated me. Also, no one used it. RunPee.com sat largely ignored for the next nine months.
Leo Laporte, Dave Barry and NPR
As spring 2009 rolled around I thought, You know, I should give RunPee.com another shot. So I made an effort to see as many movies as I could each week and add Peetimes.
One afternoon I was at my mother's, talking about RunPee, and she suggested I call in to Leo Laporte's radio show, The Tech Guy, and tell him about it. The show was on, so I called. The producer answered and I told her about RunPee.com. Leo came back from a commercial break laughing and said, "I have to share this website with you..."
That was the first media mention RunPee.com ever got. It wouldn't be the last. The next few weeks were exhilarating.
Someone listening to The Tech Guy left a comment on Dave Barry's blog at the Miami Herald. Dave loved the idea enough to write a short entry about it, basically saying "this is why I love the Internet, because crazy things like this exist."
Art Silverman, a producer of All Things Considered on NPR, is a Dave Barry fan and read that entry. Next thing I know, just a few days after the radio call, Mr. Silverman phones to ask if I'd like to come on the show. A few days later I'm sitting in a soundproof booth at NPR's Los Angeles studios doing the interview.
And then...
Things got cuh-ray-zeee.
I was doing five, ten, a dozen interviews a day, mostly radio. After interviews all day, I remember setting my alarm for some god-awful hour like 4:00 AM to do one for a radio station in South Africa.
Everyone Wanted an App
All this time, everyone on social media was yelling at me to make a mobile app.
Problem: I'm a developer, but at the time I didn't know how to make a mobile app, especially for iPhone, because I'm a PC user. Learning enough to build one would take a year. Android had technically launched the fall before, but barely anyone had one.
Through a loose string of connections, I met a couple of men who had created a startup building mobile apps for athletes. RunPee wasn't exactly in their wheelhouse, but it was the sort of idea that excited them. One of the investors in their startup was Jordan Palmer, brother of Carson Palmer. Both were quarterbacks for the Cincinnati Bengals.
We formed a partnership, and they got busy building the RunPee app for iPhone. About six weeks later, on July 4, 2009, it was in the App Store. It did okay for the first few months, but we really needed to make a splash.
Hard Knocks
As fortune would have it, HBO's Hard Knocks was set to feature the Cincinnati Bengals that year. (Hard Knocks is a behind-the-scenes look at one NFL team's training camp each year.)
Think about everything that had lined up by then: building RunPee just to improve my programming skills; calling in to a radio show; a listener randomly commenting on a blog, which turned into an article, which got the attention of NPR, which led to worldwide coverage. And now the guys building my app just happened to have an investor who was a professional quarterback on the team Hard Knocks was about to cover. If someone made a movie of this, you couldn't convince me it wasn't 90% made up.
But there was a slight problem. We wanted to use Hard Knocks to get the word out, but how? If Jordan Palmer went to the producer and said, "Hey, I'm invested in this startup that built this RunPee app for this guy, blah, blah, blah," the producer would say, "That's really cool. And not really related to the show."
But what if Jordan and his brother did the interview together? And instead of saying "this guy" (me), they said "we." The producer, and the viewers, could infer that we meant Jordan and Carson, when it actually meant me and Jordan's company. It isn't a lie. We did these things together. How can we be blamed for the ambiguity of personal pronouns in the English language? :-)
So Jordan and Carson did the interview. The producer and editors took the bait, and it made it past the cutting room floor.
The show aired first in the Eastern time zone. We got so much traffic the server crashed.
Central time zone: crash.
Mountain time zone: we survived that one, because it's the least populated.
Pacific: crash.
So much traffic that your server crashes is a good problem to have.
Today
RunPee now has Peetimes for more than 2,300 movies, and hundreds of thousands of moviegoers use it. Most of those Peetimes still come from my family, sitting in theaters every week. You can meet them on The RunPee Family page.
But the starting point hasn't changed: one guy squirming in a dark theater, wondering when that ape is finally going to die.