On Aug. 29, zipRealty.com launched its online real estate brokerage site -- the culmination of all the hard work my partner, Juan Mini, and our colleagues have put in this year. The week leading up to it was the wildest roller-coaster ride I've experienced as an entrepreneur. Every few hours, the site's status and the company's prospects would careen from utter disaster to brilliant success -- and back.

Let's pick up the action just three days before the launch. To put it bluntly, the site wasn't working. ZipRealty.com team members were already fighting over what emergency measures to take if the site wasn't working on the 29th. Three weeks of incredibly long days had worn our patience thin. It was definitely not a Kodak moment.

How did we ever get into such a mess?

Simple. In early July, the company took a calculated risk and embarked on a drastic reworking of the entire Internet site. Our "rehearsal buyers" (supporters of the company who tested the Internet site in its prerelease phase) had just given us their feedback. We needed to make the site cleaner-looking and easier to use. We brought in another graphic designer to rework it. We also hired a Web-site developer to provide some new tools for home buyers. These changes cost $50,000 -- but they had to be made.

We signed contracts with these folks in early August, and they promised to deliver the finished product by Aug. 26. Then things got complicated. Our company had previously decided to move the site launch date up six weeks -- to Sept. 1, 1999, from Oct. 15 -- so we could get our product to market before any competitors in this fast-growing niche of the real estate business beat us to the punch. That left only five days to smooth out any problems.

After we selected the new launch date, our marketing and public-relations people started their campaigns. Next thing we knew, their plans had pushed the date up even further, to Sunday, Aug. 29, to allow for a big media blitz in the Sunday newspapers' real estate sections and to catch home buyers before they went away for Labor Day. There was no turning back. We had to meet that deadline.

Everything was running smoothly until the 22nd. Our new graphic designer's HTML coding didn't mesh with the existing code on the site, and the Web developer was falling behind. On Aug. 26, all parties delivered. Unfortunately, the site was not close to working. Think of it as a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle. We expected to find each piece in its place. Instead, we got the equivalent of a box of jumbled pieces. The pages were all there, but they weren't linking together properly with each other or our database. That brings us up to the tense meeting I described at the start of this saga. We needed to do something drastic, and everyone had their own opinion of what that should be.

After much discussion, we decided that Juan Mini, our CEO, and Bruce Jackan, our product development manager, would drive down to where the developers were and coordinate repair efforts until the site was working. Fourteen hours later, at 2 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 27, the site was 90% working. We made another heroic push on the 27th, and by Saturday morning, everything seemed to be on track. The online brokers came in and ran six hours of tests. We fixed the last problems. That night, I left early (it was my anniversary) and enjoyed a lovely dinner and outdoor concert. At 1:13 a.m. on the 29th, zipRealty.com came live. What a relief! What a wonderful feeling. The team had come through.

Scott Kucirek is president and co-founder of zipRealty.com, an online real estate brokerage. The company's Internet site and online real estate agents let people complete the entire purchase or sale of a house via the Web. The company's Web site is www.zipRealty.com, and you can E-mail Scott at Scott@zipRealty.com.