Going Live

Eighteen days after that first commit, we flipped one flag, SITE_LIVE=true, and Bandhamster stopped being a thing on a laptop and started being a real website a stranger could find.

It doesn't feel as dramatic as it sounds. There's no launch party, no confetti. There's a config file, a deploy, and then you sit there hitting refresh on a page you've stared at for two weeks, except now it's got a padlock next to the URL and anyone in the world can see it too.

What actually went live was small and deliberately so: a proper band website, a booking-enquiry funnel that lands in your inbox not some agency's, and a look-and-feel system so it doesn't look like every other band site you've ever winced at. No musician board yet. No gig guide. Just the one thing that's genuinely useful on day one, done as well as we knew how.

We remember thinking: right, now people might actually use this. That's a different kind of nervous to “will the code work.” The code mostly did work. Whether anyone would care was the actual question, and that one doesn't get answered by a config flag.