Explosion: Becoming famous overnight

One step in the Disciplined Entrepreneurship process is interviewing as many potential users as possible. So we built a one-page website that described the idea, with the purpose of making it more appealing to more than the 20–30 friends and acquaintances we’d been talking to during the previous days. We came up with the Eternime name at 3am in one night, and launched the website next day, on January 29, 2014 at 1pm. We then went back to working on the project.

It was 3pm the same day when someone (I don’t remember who) messaged us. “There’s an article in Boston Globe about you, guys!”. We could not believe it, but it was true. It took less time to receive the next call, which was from a local TV station who wanted to shoot a news piece about the idea. “What the hell, let’s do it!”, we thought. The TV crew showed up and in the evening we were on air. People started dropping by our website.

Then CNN took over the news and broadcasted it all over US. Emails and calls started pouring in. FastCompany, Wired, NBC, Times of India, The New Yorker, BBC and many more. We stopped everything, and almost the whole team was replying to or being interviewed by journalists. We were taken by surprise, and the madness went on. People started signing up on our site. We had expected maybe to get 100 new people to interview, but we got more than 3,000 by the end of the first 48 hours since launching the website.

Businessweek China was among hundreds of publications who wrote about Eternime

Hundreds of emails started flooding from all over the world. Most of them were supportive, showing incredible enthusiasm and interest. Probably 20% of them were on the other end of the spectre, skeptics accusing us of lack of empathy, of human values, or of any kind of respect for grieving people. We received two death threats, and a Reddit message said about us that

“they look like a bunch of con artists who will steal your organs and then drop your body on the side of the road”

Everyone seemed to be excited in one way or another, to the point of awkward-how-would-we-reply kind of messages from people who misunderstood what we were doing — like someone who wrote to us “Hello mom, how are you?”.