This is our story compiled from tweets and photos over the period of a month, we launched Lanyrd after a week of development and it took off pretty fast. This storify tries to capture those moments.
Thinking about "sanitizing" puts you in the wrong frame of mind in my opinion - you should be thinking about ESCAPING. If you're constructing SQL queries sensibly (using an ORM or a library that replaces placeholders rather than concatenating strings together yourself) you won't even have to think about that.
It was a long term honeymoon - we gave up our flat in Brighton and just set off into the world with just our backpacks and laptops. We were also ill in Casablanca (and it was Ramadan so couldn't find any restaurants open) so we rented a flat for two weeks to cook for ourselves and built and launched the first version of Lanyrd.