Your Website and Your Minimum Viable Product

You've heard the concept before, right? The minimum viable product is the best product required to go to market. It's by far not perfect. It's not the best you can do. It's the bare minimum required to start getting your stuff out there.

The concept applies to more than just products and services. It can apply to your website, too.

Case in point: my own website. It's clear to me now that the template I've been using won't do everything I need it to do. I couldn't have known in the planning stages that I would need it to do these things. This is what happens in beta.

When working at the enterprise level, you define the needs, draw up a plan, wireframe it, float it to the team, edit the plan and the wireframes, bring in the designers and programmers, get a beta to review, tweak the beta, tweak it some more, and eventually launch. then keep refining a bit after launch. (I've done this at least a few times.)

When working alone, this has to happen in miniature and all in one person.

So here's my suggestion for anyone out there building your website solo: create it and don't launch for at least a few weeks.

Keep working with the site as if it is live. Add blog posts daily. Keep refining the main pages and architecture. Keep testing your assumptions about what it's for and who it's for. Share screen shots with your closest colleagues or friends for feedback.

Eventually, go live with a soft launch that you announce to a controlled number of people. Yes, it's on the interwebs and anyone can find it. But odds are the hordes won't be swarming your site on day one. So refine some more as you watch what happens when it's live. Maybe for another few weeks. Then launch a social strategy. Keep refining and building your audience and adding content as you go.

I'm glad I kept to the commitment I made to myself and my altMBA community to launch this site by June 1. And I'm glad to have gotten some experience with a platform I didn't know well yet. And I'm likely going to have to switch templates soon because I launched quickly. Which will require extra work, though hopefully not as much as I've already put in.