We were desperate.

PosterBurner had just doubled in size, and we could not keep up.

(If you missed the last part of the story, here it is)

And sometimes desperate people end up in Las Vegas.

People like Fred Smith.

Fred Smith is the guy that started FedEx.

And in the early days, FedEx was struggling.

They were running out of money and payroll was due on Friday.

So Fred Smith flew to Las Vegas, pulled out all the money FedEx had left, and took that money to the blackjack table.

Normally this leads to disaster.

But luck was on his side.

He won big.  

And after a long night of cards, he put all the money back in the bank, and flew home.

Fedex made payroll, and they went on to become the huge company they are today.

I wish our story in Las Vegas was that cool.

But when PosterBurner went to Vegas, we didn't go to gamble.

We went for a printing convention.

We were on a quest to find a solution that could help us handle the flood of poster orders coming in.

And we found it.

In a room the size of 20 football fields, filled with gadgets and gizmos of every type, we found the Esko booth.  

And in the Esko booth there was a poster cutting machine that blew our minds.

It is big.  It is fast.  And it cost as much as a Lamborghini.

Here is what it looks like:

And once we got it installed, it changed everything.

We could produce at nearly 3 times the rate with the same number of people.

So our trip to Vegas was a great success.

But production was not the only part of PosterBurner that was under stress.

And right around this time, our servers crumpled under the heavy load.

And for the first time, the PosterBurner servers crashed and the site was completely offline..

I'll explain that in the next post.

If you missed the start of the story of how we started PosterBurner, you can see that here.