Making mistakes can hurt.

If you lose something because of the mistake, it hurts even more.

But it gets worse than that.

When other people lose something due to your mistake, that is one of the worst feelings there is.

Two years ago I made a mistake like that.

I copy and pasted one wrong line of code into PosterBurner.

Then I went on vacation.

(If you missed that story, its here)

And that line made Google think that no one liked PosterBurner.

Our traffic plummeted.

As soon as I got back, I tried to fix it.

We spent weeks trying to figure out how to get back to where we were before.

But sometimes you can't get back to where you were before.  

The path back is blocked - permanently.

So you have to figure out something new.

Once we realized that we needed a new idea, we started reading through our customer service emails.

We were trying to find out what our customers wanted that we could deliver better.

And after a few days of reading, it became clear.

People were always asking us to run our super resolution on their images.

If you don't know about super resolution, its artificial intelligence that smartly scales images.  It reduces blurriness, pixilation, and we run it on every image that needs it before we print.

But we didn't have a tool that allowed customers to use it on their own.

So we made one.

The only problem was super resolution takes a ton of computer processing power.

So we built a custom super computer just to run super resolution, and we launched it.

(you can see it here)

It started slow, but after a month the traffic doubled.  The next month it tripled.  

That kept happening, and we recovered more traffic than we had lost.

And then, out of nowhere, we went viral.

I'll explain that in the next post.

Rick @ PosterBurner