In case you didn't hear about Jetson before

Jetson is a pioneering EVTOL company that aims to change the way we travel. HOQUS has been a website and sales toolkit supplier since Jetson’s online existence began. We’re delighted we can have our little input in this wonderful success story.

How did it begin?

It was the summer of 2020 when Peter Ternström approached me with a message “Hi Bernard! I’m the co-founder of Jetson and with Tomasz Patan, we’re building personal EVTOL that everyone can fly and we urgently need a website, could you do it for us?”. Of course, I could and accepted this challenge immediately. At first, Peter wanted to use WordPress, however, I recommended another (more predictable) solution and Peter approved. I created that website from scratch in 3 days, after my full-time job hours, without designs - just with the basic content specification provided by Peter in a single email and plenty of renders created by Tomasz. There was also the movie, you can see it here.

This website sold 10 Jetsons.

Second website and the first press reveal

Next year, Jetson decided to create a new website, with proper design, analysis, and improved implementation. I started working on it with my part-time colleagues, and it was ready within 2 months. There were few subpages and tons of information in comparison to the first website, we were really proud of it. Then comes November 2021 and the first, closed press reveal of Jetson ONE in Stockholm. A few hours before that event Peter called me and during this call, we rearranged half of the new website and finally published it. Designers and developers were super sad about changes but we had to believe Peter’s gut feeling. The day after the reveal, I received a notification from our cloud services provider - AWS - about an unexpected traffic spike. I checked it, and couldn’t believe my eyes. We’ve served 5TB of content to users visiting the website! It was around 1 million visits in a single day. Jetson went viral. There's a huge chance you've seen this video. It was presented worldwide in all digital and classic media. Even Stephen Colbert featured Jetson in his Late Show. Thanks to proper implementation and infrastructure setup there was no downtime and everything went smoothly. Amazon CloudFront + Amazon S3 really did a great job. Can you imagine serving a WordPress site here? I can’t.

This website sold more than 100 Jetsons.

Third website - the current one

Then we’re in the first part of 2022 and Jetson needed a completely new design that will fit the newest company culture at its stage. Okay then, here we go again. Two independent design studios were involved in preparing the proper design, content creation, and overall user experience analysis, content creation, and after a few months website was live. On 1st February 2023, 15:00 CEST we released the credit card purchase flow. It took 1,5h for the first purchase. The website is still hosted on a serverless environment but is provided by Vercel. Days, when 500GB of data has to be served to users, are still in place. Most days website is hosted for free.

This website sold more than 150 Jetsons in 8 months. 50 with a credit card in 3 months.

Important lessons

• It’s way better to build digital products (like websites) in an agile way. Currently, we’re on 3rd version of the Jetson website and continuously improving it. This way we’re gathering knowledge about what works and what is painful. Iterate, iterate, and iterate once again.

• If you treat your business online presence seriously, never consider your website finished. It can be always improved and optimized.

• When you’re ordering a website, always ask your supplier if your new website will handle one million users and how much it will cost. When they start avoiding response or asking why, they’re probably uncertain of the proposed solution. Ask for services they’re planning to use, their pricing, and what hosting bill you could expect after your product becomes a viral success. Even if there’s a small chance your website will visit one million users in one day, there’s a really small difference in scaling between 0 and 1.000 users and scaling between 0 and 1.000.000 users - trust me.

• Don’t stick to technological boundaries if you don’t understand them and their consequences. Believe in the experience of your supplier, but verify it before!

At HOQUS every project is serverless. It’s the only way for handling unpredictable traffic spikes. In crucial moments for your business, you should focus on things that matter, it’s 2023 and everyone should forget about the “503 Service Unavailable” error.

Thank you once again Jetson team for our cooperation, we’re more than happy to see you grow that fast!

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The Jetson website is one of our easiest projects. Soon we’ll demonstrate much more complex solutions we’ve delivered to our customers.

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