Launching a Software Product: Echo's First Bug at 1:47 AM

Launching a software product is less about finishing the code and more about handling the small surprises that pop up in the first days with real users. At Diyojen, I learned this once again the week we launched Echo, and I learned it at 1:47 AM. In this post, as the software team lead, I explain why we built Echo, what went wrong in the first week, and what stuck with me from those days.

Why did we build Echo?

We built Echo because we kept seeing our clients' blog pages sit empty. Echo is a Diyojen product that automatically writes and publishes SEO-friendly blog posts. Since Diyojen was founded in 2021, we have delivered many websites, and almost every time we saw the same scene: the business owner knows the blog matters, says "we'll write two posts a month," then things get busy and the blog page never gets past the first post.

A business owner's real job is taking care of customers, not writing articles. The question our team kept coming back to was this: could we build a tool that takes the burden of regular writing off the business and publishes posts on time, structured the way search engines like? Echo was born as the answer to that question. Working with clients every day as an agency was our biggest advantage when designing our own product, because we knew the problem firsthand, not from hearsay.

Launch morning: everything on the screen was green

On launch morning, the mood in the team was relaxed because every test had passed. It was Monday morning at our office, coffee cups were on the table, and we had Echo's admin panel up on the big screen. We all watched the first post go live together; the page loaded, the title was in place, the image had uploaded. Someone clapped, someone else said, "it shouldn't have been this easy." Later I realized that second remark was the most accurate observation of the day.

The tests had been run with sample titles we had prepared ourselves. Sample titles tend to be neat and predictable. Real-world titles, on the other hand, come in long, full of Turkish characters, sometimes with question marks, sometimes with quotation marks. The real test began that evening.

1:47 AM: the vanishing "ı" letters

At 1:47 AM, an alert on my phone sent me to my computer, and I noticed the post URLs looked broken. The problem was in the part called the "slug." A slug is the section of a post's web address that is derived from its title, with words joined by hyphens. In the Turkish word "Işık," the ı letters were dropping out of the address entirely, while ş and ğ were turning into unreadable symbols. The page still loaded, but the address looked ugly and didn't inspire trust when shared.

That same night, a second surprise turned up: a post scheduled for the morning had gone live at midnight. The cause was the server clock. The server clock is the time setting of the computer the software runs on, and ours didn't match Turkey's time zone. Here is what we fixed together with our software team that night:

• Turkish character conversion: We rewrote the rule that converts ı, ğ, ü, ş, ö and ç into their correct equivalents in the URL.
• Publishing time: We tied scheduling to Turkey time instead of the server's clock.
• Long titles: We added a limit that trims URLs generated from very long titles to a sensible length.
• New test titles: We deliberately added "difficult" titles to the tests: ones with Turkish characters, question marks and quotation marks.

When everything was fixed around 4:00 AM, I posted a single message in the team chat: "Işık is ışık again." The first reply in the morning was a coffee emoji.

What happened with the first client?

The most important thing we learned from our first client was that people love automation but don't want to give up control. The client's first question wasn't about the quality of the posts but rather, "can I see them before they go live?" It was a very fair question; every sentence published on a business's website carries that business's name.

In the first weeks, we reviewed the posts together with the client. This process showed us something else: automatically generated content works better the more it understands the business's voice and industry. The feedback gathered by our client relations team became the roadmap for the improvements after the first release.

What stuck with me from that week

The launch week of a software product is a mirror that shows how well a team really works together. That week, no one said "that's not my job"; our design team updated the error screen copy overnight, and our software team stayed at their screens until morning. These were the lasting lessons for me:

1. If your tests don't imitate real-world messiness, green lights are misleading.
2. Turkish characters aren't a detail; they are the first impression for a Turkish-speaking user.
3. Until automation earns trust, human review should be part of the process.
4. The first week will never be quiet; what matters is how quickly and transparently you solve problems.

Echo today is far more mature than it was that night. Still, as a team we often look back on that week, because that night is when we truly got to know the product. If you're curious how Echo works, you can take a look at the Echo product page.

In short

• Diyojen developed Echo, which automatically writes and publishes SEO-friendly posts, after seeing that clients' blog pages kept sitting empty.
• On launch night, Turkish characters turned out to break in post URLs and the server clock shifted publishing times; both were fixed the same night.
• The first client experience showed that wanting a pre-publication review alongside automation is completely natural.
• When launching a software product, tests need to use the messy data of real life.