How we were born!

Wejoinin, as most Web applications go, was borne as a solution to a real-world problem. Late in 2006, I was in a meeting with leaders from a few of the Christian fellowships at UC Berkeley planning a prayer vigil. We realized that we needed a way to track people coming.

“We need an online signup sheet,” somebody said. “Preferably by tomorrow.” Then I felt all the eyes in the room fall on me.

Crap.

I went back to my apartment and slapped together a PHP script with the help of my friend Ryan. That night, a fairly crippled script flew on tattered wings.

But the important thing was that it worked. We got some positive and constructive feedback from a bunch of folks. And over the next few months, we lovingly reworked the code. We fussed with the UI. We added some helpful AJAX dialogs (even if the buzzword was a bit tacky).

Soon more and more folks requested the code for their own prayer rooms. And as this whole thing started blowing up in popularity, a few of our friends suggested that we make this a hosted service. And we open it up to all sorts of signups. And we get a cool glossy reflective logo (just kidding, we heard you gagging).

On a wing and a prayer

It happened that summer I was interning at a certain special startup with my friend and classmate, Hsiu-fan. Hsiu-fan had been giving me helpful critiques and suggestions with regards to the signup page, and he had downright ninja skills when it came to code. Well that summer we had been playing in Ruby on Rails and we figured, why not, let’s code this thing in RoR like all the cool kids do.

We tossed a few ideas around and came up with Wejoinin, the online signup sheet that doesn’t make you cry. And by not making you cry, we mean we really wanted to come up with a signup sheet service so easy your mother could use and so awesome your geeky cousin rocking a Twitter shirt could gush about…

(more to come!)