The Past, Present & Future of The WeedTube

TheWeedTube, if you're new here the name might sound a bit intriguing and it is. It's a story, well not only a story, but a bit of a story in the making. If you don't know me, my name is MyStonerLife and I am one of the tech guys over at TheWeedTube. You can say web developer or the guy that breaks and occasionally fixes the site. That's me!

TheWeedTube has been a huge journey not only for me but for everyone in the company itself. With the YouTube-extinction hitting everyone at unplanned times, no one had anywhere to turn. That's when I got the call from Arend, the owner, asking if I could get a website up in 3 days. Which we then thankfully stretched into an insane 7-day crunch. I'm not too sure if you guys know anything about websites, but it's not to easy to get one up. Especially one from the ground up in 7 days. Not to mention, a website where users can register and upload their own content. What I learned from that day is YouTube was not built in a week, nor a month, nor a year. It's still not fully built in my eyes, the internet itself is constantly evolving.

Before we dive into our future, let's take a look at the journey that's gotten TheWeedTube to where we stand today.

March 1, Launch Day

Launch day, oh launch day... So let's talk about our first day, March 1st. In stoner spirit, we decided to open the doors to TheWeedtube.com for the first time ever at 4:20 PM EST. We eagerly awaited till the clock hit exactly 4:20 PM and turned the website online, it was a surreal feeling. The server instantly crashed. The main reason being we had little to no knowledge on handling this much content, we kinda just grabbed a high powered server, slapped a design together as well as we could in 7 days, and opened shop. I mean there was definitely a lot more stress, sweat and lack of sleep than that, but that's the gist of it.

After getting an initial burst of thousands of people every second, we finally got the server under control and the site online. Not more than an hour after, we figured out you don't just upload a video and it streams flawlessly on every device. Not even a little bit. Apple, Android and well, pretty much every other operating system decided it's pretty tough to process those big files, so it's your job to create several custom versions of that video that you can serve to anybody. That means everything from 144p-1080p. Now at the time we had just enough money to get our server online and legal fees paid. This is not even mentioning the massive number of bugs the website had. Complaints shot through the roof as only a select number of people were able to upload or properly stream content.

Fast Forward to April 20th

After nearly a month of working with just the worst possible web design, we finally found a nice web design we could plug The Weedube into. So we spend nearly a month setting up the new design on a test domain and getting everything worked out. We finally get a nice looking website so we figured, "hey why not launch this sweet new web design on 4/20, it's only 2 days away!"

As 4/20 comes closer we lock in with a developer to help us migrate everything from our previous design to our new one. April 20th hits... the site is a disaster. The developer we paid literally came in and half-assed installed the theme package and left. With all of our work not ported over and no answer from the developer, we were left with close to nothing. Not only is the site a disaster on 4/20, but I personally was at a meetup with no wifi nor computer. Luckily the two other developers apart of TheWeedTube team worked for countless hours to get us online and functional. If anyone saw me at the Denver meetup in 4/20 sorry if I was a bit weird. I personally felt like I was letting TheWeedTube community down on 4/20 while I was hanging out with everyone, but at the same time, wanted to be with everyone.

A few hours later, I got back to the hotel and began to work alongside the team to fix the disaster we were left with. Let's just say, April 20th was less than impressive.

June 28, the Update that Changed Everything

After months and months of working with complex videos on Amazon and all sorts of complicated tools, we found exactly what we needed. Without getting into to much detail, we found a service that helped us migrate our video library to a much faster and mobile-friendly platform.

On June 28th, at around 3 AM, TheWeedTube changed forever. Mobile friendly streaming, blazing fast uploads and a pretty damn good redesign, if I do say so myself. The beginning of July was the true rebirth of TheWeedTube. Our previous system was painfully slow, not-mobile friendly and uploads to the platform failed a good 40% of the time. Let's just say July was a new beginning.

In the Months Since

Since June 28th, TheWeedTube has been a wild ride. Between paying the server bills and trying to fix up the site, we've been operating with extreme power. Since that date we have made numerous improvements to the website including a full redesign, enhancing the upload page, fixing the user profiles section and so much more. Mostly bug testing, so it's not really so much more that you wanna hear other than countless hours figuring out that you put a semicolon in the wrong spot so the whole page doesn't work.

I'm only speaking from the development side, this doesn't include the countless business meetings and trade shows we've attended to try and fund the site. I've even spoken and met with several professional web development companies that we are prepared to move forward with when we secure an investment. While all that is constantly evolving, we personally have to secure large advertising deals to not only pay our creators, but keep the site afloat and videos streaming. And may we say, DAMN, you are a heavy bunch of streamers, but we love you for it.

Moving Forward

What's next for TheWeedTube? That's a great question and one of the main reasons behind this post. As a small company, we are always striving to move forward, no matter if it's big or small steps. Like I said earlier, the Internet is constantly evolving and so are we. All you need to remember is there is a team of roughly 6 people running this huge business. And did we forget to mention that we are in the cannabis space, which for some reason, no one wants to invest in.

As TheWeedTube continues to grow, we want to know what you want from the site. What are some things we could be doing better aside from a mobile app? We understand a mobile app is the number one recommendation at the moment, but please understand that a mobile app requires a lot more work than it appears. A mobile app will not work with our current setup, we require a better design. If we just took what we had and jammed it into a tiny mobile app, it would be absolutely terrible. And if we aren't happy and wouldn't even use the mobile app why should you? This is a process that needs to be done slowly as it will take time and lots of money.

Now that that's out of the way, we want to know what you'd like to see! Could we have a better comment section? Maybe give us some tips. Could the content recommendations be better? Could the upload page use some work? Could we improve the search to deliver better results? Leave a comment below or take this super awesome Google Survey that would help us more than you could ever imagine!