So, it’s been over a month since YawnLog was created. I still look back on the 24-hour hackathon and wonder what happened. Little fragments of the evening float through my head. I remember brainstorming, saying that, “No, we don’t want to be a dream tracker, there’s millions of those. We want to track sleep, and let people tell us if they dreamed.” The elaborate planning. The mild frustration. The occasional moments of terror: “Wait, did we check to see if someone has already done this?” “We can’t use this design mockup.” “I need more information.” “Are we even going to have a closed beta?” The now ridiculously small aspirations: “Maybe we’ll get a hundred users.” We just hit 4000 tonight.

We tweeted–both as the YawnLog account and on our personal accounts. We sent out emails. We talked to people. We posted slightly delerious blog posts. We drafted an about section, a mission statement, a press release. The developers tried to answer our inarticulate questions and give us information they weren’t sure about. We encountered problems and asked the designer for help.

Somehow along the way we picked up a good number of people on our live video stream. We got people mentioning us, watching us, talking to us, making suggestions, finding us from weird places. We alternated from the calm certainty we’d be done to this terror that we really had no idea what we were doing. From knowing we would be a great success to wondering why we had ever picked such a terrible idea.

In the morning, we looked over what we’d done. It was janky, buggy, and barely functional, but it was there. We had a sleek, professional design, but, we joked, that was all there was. There was nothing more to it. It was a fun project, now it was time to go home. Some of the developers would keep playing around, and Alex kept running the Twitter, but more or less we were done. But we kept an eye on it to see how it did–to see how successful the evening ultimately was. “We’ll throw a party when we hit a hundred users.”

I went home and slept long and hard. It seemed like we had over a hundred users in no time at all. Then two hundred. Then more. We got linked from ReadWriteWeb. I was suitably impressed, and went to bed amazed at our project. The next day I was awakened by my roommate saying we were in the New York Times. Assuming this was just some bizarre dream, I rolled over and went back to sleep. “No we’re not,” I muttered.

He came back into my room. “Why aren’t you up? Aren’t you excited?” His laptop was in hand. Sure enough, there was the New York Times. It was linking to YawnLog. I stared at it, then at him. “I kind of thought I was just dreaming or something,” I said.

Still in shock, I asked Greg Marra via IM, mostly rhetorically, why we were in the New York Times, and gave him a link. He explained that ReadWriteWeb was syndicated in the NYT. I nodded, expecting to feel a letdown that never happened. But no, this was real. Somehow I knew it could only go up from here.

We kept hitting landmarks. I began wondering when we would stop really caring about the hundreds, and start caring about the thousands. We kept watching. 600. 700. 800. We were going to hit one thousand soon. What had we done? We must have hit a niche. Our combined talents assembled something that was more than just good.

A few other Internet luminaries linked to us but at this point I felt like I was losing track. 2000 users happened and I barely felt it. I was still getting over the first thousand. When was this going to start feeling real? I laughed about it, but it was reaching critical mass. We have to do something with this. This had potential.

We had a meeting–I wrote about the cheap boxed wine we were drinking–recently to discuss the future. We’re making another concerted push. The PR team is assembling, our developers are working in full, some of our own luminaries are working on contacting companies that might have an interest in the project. This 24-hour project we kind of meant as a throwaway, just to see if we can, is becoming real. I’m just still sort of in shock that it’s happened at all.