With the conclusion of the 2024 UEFA Euro Final today (congrats Spain!), I thought it apropos to share a story about scaling one of our previous companies Airship during the 2012 championship series.

It was the Summer of 2012 and things were humming along with Urban Airship (now called Airship). We had built the best, most robust and scalable push notification service on the market and it showed. We had a laundry list of some of the biggest brands in entertainment, media and retail using our platform and things were just about to get even more wild.

When we originally started Airship, we did what we always do. We didn’t know the market or who/how we were selling to them so we needed to accelerate the pace of learning. How do you do that? You ship product and get feedback. Within 30 days of the idea for our push notification service we had it live and available for use. Some documentation, a simple SDK and a working API that was production ready. We lucked out with some timing in the market specifically around Apple wanting to launch push much sooner than we originally thought and then, for the first 90 days of Apple’s push notification service being live in the market, we had the landscape to ourselves. We landed Tapulous, ESPN, Starbucks and so many others. We scaled really, really quickly.

In June 2012 an interesting thing happened the first week of the European soccer championships; our push volumes were off the charts. What the heck was going on here?! In digging further, we realized we were powering the official UEFA (European Soccer Championships) app on both iOS and Android and their download numbers were growing very, very quickly. By weeks end we’d be at 5 million installs.

Scaling infrastructure is a non-linear kind of thing. The best laid plans don’t always work out and sometimes you don’t know how people are going to utilize your service. We had been promoting the concept of “Good Push” to our customers as a way of making sure they make sure they are sending messages users want, when they want them. The idea that an app with 5M installs would want to blast out notifications constantly during a soccer match seemed bonkos but then you have to take into account; sports. Sports fans are exactly that; bonkos.

We had spent the last 6 months rebuilding our infrastructure so that we could handle increased loads from our existing customers but we hadn’t anticipated a customer like this. It all came to a head during the Spain/Portugal match that went to penalty kicks. 9 to be exact. One kick every 90 seconds and one push to 5M devices that HAD to get delivered in that 90 seconds or they were totally worthless. Getting that right, doing it at scale and weathering that storm was something we had never prepared for but we got lucky.

Our amazing DevOps and engineering teams nursed our systems through this pandemonium. Great teams like that are hard to find and the ability to adapt under pressure, respond quickly to constantly changing requirements and putting in the extra effort over weekends and holidays was just part and parcel with the people that made up that team. Having been a DevOps person in a previous life I can say that those folks are just kind of wired differently.

It turns out we’re experiencing a similar set of growth here at CaseMark and with a bunch of Airship people in the mix. We’re seeing an astounding increase in usage from our customers utilizing our AI workflows and the challenges are daunting and not for the faint of heart.

If you are looking for that kind of challenge and want to be a part of a fast growing company and you want to make an impact on a small (but growing) team, take a look at our open positions. We'd love to chat with you if you're up for the challenge.