In a last-ditch effort, Ownable scaled the team to more than 20 people. But even though the site was finished in four months—just in time for Black Friday—it had poor design, was unstable, and unresponsive. It simply couldn’t handle the influx of users.
Load times were terrible—more than 30 seconds per page, to the point that many pages would time out. When it did work, users got lost in the confusing, arduous sign-up process, leading to a high drop-off rate.
To make matters worse, the website ended up crashing only hours into Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, causing Ownable to potentially lose out on thousands of customers and sales.