Product Launch!

1 Jul

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.
- Vince Lombardi

29. Product Launch (Late April)

Now that we were done testing and tweaking, next steps were to finally get our product into users’ hands.

Figuring out how to get users & content on board had been issue I’d been trying to solve since I started building this thing. Our product unfortunately lies in the “network effect or two sided“ market. Its hard enough launching a start-up in a one-sided market… we were launching a product for which there was no existing market, AND was two sided. We couldn’t have possibly picked a tougher fight.

I knew that users wouldn’t just come once we launched. And I was right, we invited the first group of users who’d signed up through our landing page … and not one person added any content. This went out to about 15 – 20 people and maybe 2-3 even bothered creating an account.

Luckily, this wasn’t something I wasn’t expecting, very few people ever bother creating content. We had roughly 100 people who’d signed up… but I was pretty sure these people just wanted to check out our site, not create any content. And I was right, when we got done sending those invites out, none of those members added any content.

Truth be told, why would they waste their time contributing to a completely new site? After all we didn’t have the branding of say Wikipedia or Quora or Amazon Reviews. We didn’t really have anything to offer to them. Yet.

Unfortunately content was our product and if we didn’t figure out how to get some soon, we would sink. Luckily I had a mental breakthrough of sorts here. I figured the lowest hanging fruit were people who’d already written comparisons. And so we should start by having them to add their content to our site. I was pretty sure that since we were giving them an additional distribution channel for very little work on their part  they would jump at the opportunity, right?

We carefully researched writers & bloggers who’d written such content and personally invited them. We got a whopping < 5% to agree. Even though they didn’t have to create any new content… all they had to do was add their already written content to our site… there weren’t any takers. #FAIL

This was pretty disappointing for us obviously. We then decided to even offer to add the content ourselves, (under their accounts of course). This was when the conversion rate picked up… we were now getting about 25% to agree. #PROGRESS!

Lessons learned: Just because you score a ZERO with one approach doesn’t mean everything you’ve done is wrong. You have to constantly battle to figure out what works for gaining customers. Even something worth Billions had to start somewhere.

Side note – When users use your product for the first time, it’s an an exhilarating experience. When the first user created an account and added their content, we were giddy, we celebrated.

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Product Testing & Validation

22 Jun


If I got really down I would listen to Frank Sinatra’s song ‘That’s Life.’ You know, the lyrics that go ‘as funny as it may seem, some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream.’

- Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com on how he dealt with self-doubt and the skepticism he encountered from almost every investor he pitched to

28. Validation and Outreach (March)

With our Beta starting to shape up for launch, I really wanted to get the product into the market and start getting feedback. I spent most of March validating/testing my product.

Outreach to entrepreneurs

Before the product was ready to test, I reached out to people who’s opinions I respected, i.e. start-up entrepreneurs who’s blogs I read and followed on twitter. Here are a few of the people I reached out to – Andrew Chen, Amir Khella, Ben Yoskowitz, Jason Baptiste, among others. To be honest, I never expected a response from a single one of them. I sent them a personal email telling them how their blogs helped me be a better entrepreneur, talked briefly about what I was working on and attached screen-shots of the product. Being the class acts they were, they all responded. Every one of their reviews was positive and mentioned that they would be interested in checking out the product. Can’t wait to get the final product in their hands.

In addition, I also reached out to do a few guest blog posts. Here’s an article I wrote on Bill Mullins’ Weblog, a Technorati Top 150 blog.

User-Testing

The day finally came when I felt the product was in decent enough shape for users to test. I decided to use UserTesting to get user feedback. This is an awesome service – would recommend it to anyone wanting to get feedback on their product. I can’t explain how big of a step this is. Getting the product into actual users hands…even testers is a big deal! You hold your breath when you ship it out… and exhale of relief when it’s received well.

The overall reactions to the product were very positive, both from a UI & product standpoint. Small (but big) win! They brought up some issues that we hadn’t thought of, so it was great that we did this. We ended up making some critical UI changes based on their feedback.

Lessons Learned: Your product isn’t as bad as you think. Get it out there. As a founder you’re paranoid about your product, but in all likely hood you’ve done a good job and users won’t hate it. You’ll only learn how to make your product better.

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Startup Riot & Lean Startup Circle Atlanta

21 Jun

“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”  -Mark Twain

This post I wrote a while ago but it never ended up seeing the light of day. I think it needs to get back into the story. The terrible picture is me with Andrew Warner @ Start-up riot 2011.

27. Evangelizing my startup

Lean Start-up Circle Atlanta

Last week (mid-January) I talked to my buddy Pete about starting up a Lean Startup Circle here in Atlanta. I guess I was a little surprised that a city this big didn’t have a LSC already. But then again, I think that the biggest participants and drivers in LSCs are consumer internet companies so… guess its not that surprising after all (see my comments later in this post) .

I won’t bore you with the details, but we put it together pretty quickly – here’s the official meetup group, and I’m pretty happy to report that the first meet-up we had on Feb 7th was very productive. I think we had around 15 people attend. Not bad for the first meetup. My personal goal is to at least bring everyone in the consumer internet space in Atlanta together. I won’t talk too much about the LSC stuff here as isn’t the forum for it, unless some crazy shit happens :-)

Start-up Riot

Yesterday (February 16th) I went to Start-up Riot. Arguably Atlanta’s largest and best early stage tech start-up event. I’ve also been told that LessConf is just as great, if not better. Either ways, if you’re an early stage tech start-up, then these are the two premier events in Atlanta that you can’t miss.

Since I moved here, I’ve realized Atlanta isn’t a “consumer internet” town. This was initially just a feeling I had, but later re-enforced by my interactions with various entrepreneurs/investors in the start-up community here. But something that has also been acknowledged by successful Atlanta entrepreneurs like Dave Wright, Dave Payne & Michael Tavani, Dave Cummings (hmm… lot of Dave’s, just realized) etc… On the other hand, Atlanta is a great place for companies in the Enterprise, FinTech, Healthcare & Security sectors.

Anyways, onto the event. The event was awesome. A must go for every entrepreneur. I regretted not pitching though. I will definitely present next year. My original impression was that companies at this event had to be launched and have some validation. Turns out that this wasn’t the case, there were plenty of companies at a similar stage as me. Met a lot of interesting start-ups and heard a lot of great pitches. TripLingo ended up winning the audience choice award… I was happy for them. Always happy to support fellow consumer internet start-ups :-)

The highlights of the event were getting to talk to Andrew Warner, David Houser & Charlie O’Donnel. All of whom I followed on Twitter, so I was able to recognize them and had plenty to talk about. If you don’t know who they are, read up, you should. They were awesome – very approachable & down to earth.

I gotta tell you, its also a weird feeling meeting people whom you read about and follow. It was an important step for me, personally. When you meet them in person, you in a way feel that becoming a successful entrepreneur is a lot more “tangible”.  Meeting and talking to them like any other normal person makes you feel that you can do it too… that they’re not on some distant universe that you can never be part of. Maybe this wouldn’t be a big moment for other entrepreneurs, but for me, in a way, it helped break a glass ceiling.

When I talked to Charlie, one of the first things he said to me was “change your name”, Mokabla will not stick. This re-iterated what was starting to become a pattern. I’m going to be giving this whole name change thing some more serious thought.

Another highlight was getting randomly interviewed by the Start-up Riot video crew. Being my first ever live interview, I’m sure it’ll be a lesson in how not to be in front of the camera.

Lessons learned: Go to as many networking events as you can. You are doing yourself a dis-service by not talking to people at every opportunity possible.  There’s no such thing as you aren’t “ready”. That’s BS. The positives that come out of networking far far outweigh any negatives. I can go into a whole post on how networking has been critical to my start-up move forward.

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21 Must Read Resources for Startup Marketing

20 Jun

“Pressure is what you live for…if you are going to be successful in life, you’re going to have pressure.”                                            - Jack Nicklaus to Rory McIlroy

I haven’t updated this blog in a while. That’s partly because we’ve had a lot going on, and partly because I wanted to first get the big fucking monkey off my back. i.e. I wanted to wait until I started to get new users and content onto Get Comparisons. Which I’m happy to say… we’ve been successful at doing! So with a big sigh of relief I return to blogging.

It’s hard to explain the feelings one goes through when one puts one’s baby/product out into the market. You wonder whether its going to be accepted… or whether all those negative thoughts were right and you really just had a crazy idea. Now that Get Comparisons is well beyond that point, I’m happy to get back to blogging. I guess the next step is just worrying about growth :-) . In my next few posts I’ll summarize all the advances we made since my last blog, and there have been a lot: Startup Riot, user-testing, re-branding, new team members, blogger outreach campaign, new users etc.

I first want to publish a list of resources that helped me think about the “launch” process. These articles helped me think about how to get the first users, how to build initial content, how to reach out to bloggers etc… basically what to do if you’re starting from zero. Hope you guys find these resources helpful as well!

Startup Marketing 101 (in no particular order):

  1. How to create a [good] blogger pitch Stephanie Schwab
  2. How to start with 0 members Rich Millington, thought leader in community building
  3. Preparing for launch Peldi, Balsamiq Founder
  4. Startup marketing advice from balsamiq studios Peldi, Balsamiq Founder
  5. Thoughts on product launch promotion Marshall Kirkpatrick, editor & writer RWW
  6. Traction Verticals Gabriel Weinberg, Founder Duck Duck Go
  7. Startup marketing: Getting your startup noticed and covered by blogs Zferral Blog
  8. How PR professionals should pitch bloggers Jeremiah Owyang, Social Media Guru
  9. Three keys to laying out a strong PR foundation Shonali Burke, PR/social media consultant
  10. Find customers and fund your startup – before you even have a product Shonali Burke, PR/social media consultant
  11. How to pitch a tech blogger Mark Hendrickson
  12. How to pitch your startup to the media Nick Saint
  13. PR for your startup: How a bunch of Silicon Valley rookies out-launch the veterans Gagan Biyani, uDemy founder
  14. Hollywood launch 37Signals – nuf said
  15. Pitch blogging resources Marshall Kirkpatrick, editor & writer RWW
  16. Five wrong ways to pitch Read Write Web and one great way Marshall Kirkpatrick, , editor & writer RWW
  17. Mint.com: A fresh example of startup-up Web marketing Brian Jackson
  18. Fab 5 product marketing blogs Bertrand Hazard
  19. How to pitch tech journalists Ciara Byrne
  20. How to get your first 1,000 users Vinicius Vicanti, Yipit Co-Founder
  21. Find a Growth Hacker for your Startup Sean Ellis, The best “start-up growth” guy on the planet
Update – This subject of Start-up Marketing really started to intrigue me. In the interest of learning more, and profiting from others’ past experiences, I decided to start a video blog on the subject – StartupMarketing.tv. Hopefully this is of some help as well!

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Live

25 Feb

“Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don’t do the obvious thing.” - Fred Wilson,  Union Square Ventures

26. First public pitch & presentation

Yesterday was a big day for us – Mokabla went live! We didn’t give out membership access yet though, we unveiled it so that people could start checking the site out. Access will probably take a few more days as we complete building out the site and features.
Our so called “launch” occurred at an event hosted by Entrepreneur Society. Michael Tavani, the co-founder of ScoutMob was the main speaker. I was pretty happy to be launching at this event. ScoutMob is one of the few successful B2C consumer internet startups from Atlanta, and I am a huge fan of their product. As such it was great to be sharing the launch platform with their founder. Hopefully their success will rub off on us!
This is how this event came to be. I know the guys who run Entrepreneur society. A week or so before the event, they floated the idea of Mokabla getting a shout-out during the event – as an up and coming consumer internet company from Atlanta. Less than a week before the event, this vague idea morphed into a “30 second presentation” on the stage. Now, I was expecting to launch Mokabla around this time but hadn’t yet locked down a deadline to do so. With the confirmation of the presentation, we now had a de facto deadline, so we started to work towards going live on that day. Seemed pointless to unveil a product and not have a teaser at least for people to look at. Since Mokabla wasn’t ready for launch, I spent most of the week racing with my team to to get the site up. I figured to deal with the presentation later. A couple of days before the event, the 30 seconds got extended 2 min. And on the day of the event, I found out that I was actually getting 3 min on stage. Thankfully, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to present and what I wanted in my slide-deck.

This is what the day of the event was like -

6 am – noon: Work on product and intermittently edit slides
12 pm: Finalized slide-deck!
2:30 pm: Site goes live. Told some close friends to check it out
2:45 pm: Site stopped loading. Minor crisis. Realized this is because our server capacity was still at 512kb (since that was all we had needed for our internal testing purposes). Luckily our RackSpace hosting allowed us to increase capacity almost immediately.
3 pm: Went offline to force myself to stop getting sucked into product development and started finalizing script for presentation
3:15 pm: Finalized presentation. Number of times I managed to read the presentation from start to end – 2
3:15 – 3:45pm: Showered and got ready for event. Realized our home printer didn’t work and would need to stop off at Fedex to print
3:45pm: Left for event. Was supposed to have been at the venue by now for dry run
4pm: Got to Fedex. Find out that their printers weren’t working either. Begged the cashier to let me use their system to print. He grudgingly agrees and I get my presentation.
4:15: Get to venue, present once in front of friend
5pm: On stage
5:02:45 pm: Done. End of a hell of a stressful day! First ever presentation in front of around 200 people.

Apparently everyone enjoyed the presentation – got great feedback from everyone I spoke with. More importantly, they really liked the product. Especially Michael; and the other founder of Scoutmob - Dave Payne who wasn’t at the event but had been keeping track of us on Twitter . It was great to talk to Michael, awesome guy, very open, down to earth and encouraging, which was really refreshing. Unfortunately its not what I can say about a lot of people I’ve met in the startup circles here. Given the fact that they haven’t even had a fraction of Scoutmob’s success, it begs the question, where does all that ego and pretentiousness comes from? End of rant.

The most nerve racking thing about this ins’t the actual presentation, or the fact that you’re presenting on stage in front of such a big audience for the first time, but the fact that you’re presenting a completely new concept – a (you’re) wild idea basically (and at this stage, without any user adoption that’s all it still is). So for all you know, people could think you’re daft. If I was making this presentation after we had a ton of users, this presentation would have been cake. But things went well for us, and we went out to celebrate later. Coverage of late night shenanigans is outside the scope of this blog.

Oh yeah, the image is of one of the awesome t-shirt designs we had printed for the event.

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Heavy Hitter is Also part of Competition Now?!

4 Feb

“A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.”

- J.C. Penney, Founder of JCPenney

Just read an article yesterday that made me both extremely apprehensive and excited at the the same time. FindTheBest.com is a startup launched by Kevin O’Connor. Kevin, for those not in the know, is a highly respected, veteran, superstar Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. His former Company, DoubleClick, was acquired by Google in 2007 for $3.1 Billion, Google’s largest ever and probably most important acquisition.
Anyways, if you read the About section of FindTheBest, you’ll see how similar it is to Mokabla. The difference being that FindTheBest is based on curating the web for (objective) comparisons whereas Mokabla’s goal is to provide (subjective) comparisons through User Generated Content. Two very different approaches to deliver a similar product to consumers. We’ll have to see who wins out :-) Anyways, the reason the article struck such a chord with me is that FindTheBest’s traffic provides good validation for Mokabla’s concept. In addition, given that the bluest of blue chip investor’s, Kleiner Perkins, has invested in this firm, it seems that people “in the know” or at least the “smart money” also believes in this product. Although they might just be betting on Kevin. Which then again highlights the fact that people in the know (Kevin) think this space is worth putting time, money and effort into. So regardless, good validation.
Anyways I will back to work now before I start worrying too much about this. Before I leave, since we’re talking about competitors, here’s a list of companies doing something similar in this space -
For some f*****g reason, f****g Wordpress won’t save f****g line spacings in this post !!!@!##!@ It’s driving my perfectionist sensibilities nuts !#!!@!!!

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Interns et al.

31 Jan

“We will either find a way or make one”.

- Hannibal, before he crossed the Alps

25. Hiring Mokabla’s first “employees” & putting an ear to the ground

A few weeks ago (after much deliberation), I decided to bring an intern on board. I just finished interviewing them this week. I really need to start on my outreach/marketing efforts and I don’t have the bandwidth to curate and contact tons of people each day. The candidates were from the “big 4″ ATL schools – UGA, Emory, GA Tech & GA State. I was pretty happy with the quality of the candidates that came through. I’m planning on finalizing the intern within the next few days and having him/her start work ASAP.

I’ve finally setup a “listening station” to keep me up to date with any internet chatter that happens around my business (Mokabla and my blog). I’m mainly relying on Google alerts for this, the only channels that Google Alerts does not cover are Twitter (I’ve setup a Twitter search RSS feed for that) and Forums (for which I’ve setup an RSS feed on Boardreader). Here’s a great step by step tutorial that helped me set-up this listening station. And as always, there’s a great article on Peldi’s blog regarding this. Or you can skip all this pain and just use Social Mention.

Random Notes

Sample Articles

I am continuing on my quest for good article writers who can help seed the site with good information. This site - Problogger.net was recommended by the always insightful Neil Patel, so I posted an ad on it. You can see it here. So far, I have received the best quality responses from this site. The previous articles I received from bloggers on “article writer” sites only netted me mediocre content. I’m optimistic about my chances.

Lean Startup Atlanta

I have been thinking for a while that it would be nice to have like minded tech-entrepreneurs to chat with. And when I say that, I mean founders who are actively battling it out in the startup trenches. Not people who “want to do something on their own”, or claim some to be experts on the subject. As such I discussed it with a friend who had the same ideas I did and we decided to launch Lean Startup Atlanta. Given that Lean Startup Circles already existed in pretty much every other major city, it was time Atlanta had one too. We’ll have to see what comes of this, but for now I’m excited that we have this organization up and running.

New Location

I “moved” Mokabla’s office from our first official location @ Locust 151 to Ignition Alley. So far this has been a good move. Locust was a little too far for me to travel to so I never used the location. More importantly, I think the new location will be preferred by my new hire/s will over Locust. Locust definitely had much better facilities (and was more cost effective); but it just didn’t have the atmosphere of a co-working space, and thats what being in a co-working space is all about. Plus there’s the whole location thing.

More Networking

I went to a CEO-only breakfast on Jan 26th organized by the Atlanta CEO council for CEO’s interested in raising capital in the next 12-18 months. I find the title “CEO” to be a tad bit pretentious at this stage. I don’t think this is a title one should be taking unless one has at least 20 employees. I’m going to try and stick to the title of “Founder” until I get to that stage.

Coincidence

When you do a search for Startup Chronicles, the only links that show up above mine on Google’s first page are “Startup Chronicles” of companies that are located in the ATDC. Weird coincidence that both the ATDC Companies and I blog using the same heading ?

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Plugging into the Atlanta Startup Ecosystem

21 Jan

“I was not willing to give up because I was born to like taking risks and that is my way of life.”

- Alain Robert, Spiderman

24. Networking, re-designing  & brainstorming launch strategy (still)

I know I’ve dragged the marketing issue on for like 5 posts but its a pretty big issue and I’m still working on it. One way or the other it will have to be finalized before our scheduled launch in February. I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve been on the fence about partnering with a marketing agency (New Marketing Labs). I decided a few weeks ago to go ahead and take the plunge. I’m working with Red Pin Marketing, a division within NML dedicated solely to startups. Unfortunately this is going to set me back by about $5,000, but our engagement lasts 4 months (my rough estimate on the time it will take to start growing from organic traffic) so I’m not too unhappy with the expenditure. The agreement is that they will help through our Beta launch and the buildup of the initial members, until we’re off to the races so to speak. At that point we’ll revisit the deal and see what we need to do.

I’m finally making inroads into the entrepreneurial community here in Atlanta. Its not because I shied away from it before, but between my travel back to and from India, and my wedding, I was unable to drop any roots over the past few months. I had mentioned previously about being recommended to join ATDC. I finally did it and this has led to few good things already; I’ve gotten to know a few other good entrepreneurs. I was also invited to join a course called Customer Connect, the idea behind the course is to help startups define, identify and reach potential customers. While the course is interesting, its the ancillary benefit i.e. connecting with other entrepreneurs and advisors that makes it really beneficial. I’m in a group with the founders of ThundrLizard and DayZipping, and we work with an advisor, all great guys. Looking forward to the other events such as Entrepreneur night, Mentor program etc, will post more feedback as time progresses.

Networking is a pretty core step and I wish I had been able to start this before. It helps hugely to have the world aware of your product even before launch and to to be able to discuss thoughts with people who might be knowledgeable on the subject. Not to mention the numerous peripheral positives that come out such as feedback regarding features you might not have thought of, introduction to people who could be of help to you and vice versa etc. I know the early groundwork I am laying here is going to be extremely beneficial post-launch. Here’s a good excerpt from Gagan  Biyani, founder of Udemy on the topic. His startup, successfully launched and raised 1 Million from some pretty noteworthy seed investors.

“So what I did for the next six months after that, after we had failed and closed down the fundraising process, was I did what I called “tee up the fundraising.” I spent the entire time meeting as many people as possible. So I’d go to tons of Silicon Valley events. At night when I was dead tired from working all day, I would get myself up and get in the car and drive over to San Francisco or drive over to Palo Alto and attend an event and give out my business card and get business cards. And that was super important because I got to know a lot of these investors. Like Dave McClure definitely saw me 15 times before he invested in my company. He met me at conferences, he met me at dinners. I attended his events. I was friends with all of his friends. He knew who I was before I even asked him for money, which was great because it socialized me. Even if he didn’t like me, even if he didn’t know anything about me but he just knew I existed, that makes me a much more familiar face. So when I go to raise money, he’s like, “Oh, I kind of know this guy.” He’s more familiar. Do you know what I mean?”

The other thing that I’m working on is the re-design of the site; i.e. implementation of the awesome new UI design.

Finally, I’ve spent about $4,000 over the past month on design, development, copyright research & filing fees & marketing. Next month, once the beta is released I’ll post a breakdown of all the various expenses it took me to get to the launch point. I’ll also talk about where I think I could have saved money.

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Learning from Successful Entrepreneurs

10 Jan

Peldi Guilizzoni, Founder of Balsamiq

I’ve decided that I will read one post a day from Peldi’s blog. In an earlier post I mentioned how incredibly useful I believe this blog is. Its a record of the steps/execution that launched Balsamiq from idea to successful product. Plus the whole thought process behind the blog, why he started to write it, the information that he presents in it etc resonates very well with my own ideas (with regards to my blog). Ever since I found the blog I’ve been wanting to read it from start to finish. But with all the different of things I have to work on, this commitment never gets fulfilled. So I’ve decided, 1 post per day no matter what.

One thought that has come to me recently is that there are no books on founding internet startups for non-programmers. Most books and resources cater to tech guys who want to build an internet startup for tech guys. A gap that my blog could possibly contribute to down the road? Hmm…

Anyways, I’ve also decided to hire an intern to help me with the launch. This is a decision I came to back in November but forgot to mention. I posted the requirement on Georgia State and Georgia Tech’s job bulletin’s (Back in October I mentioned how when I posted requirements for beta testers, I got no responses. And I postulated that the reason might be because I made such an open ended requirement. Looks like I was right about that. Live and learn). This time I’m very happy with the responses I received. The difference being that this time I was very specific about what I wanted. Interviews are scheduled on Jan 21st, I look forward to meeting some bright candidates.

The main thing I want in the intern is to be driven and have the ability to figure things out on their own. I want to be able to hand off tasks that are very open ended, and have them figure out the solution and get back with tangible results.

Looks like I’m making good on my commitment to post more often even if it means not having good titles or pictures!

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The Better Half is Finally in the Picture

8 Jan

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly”

- Langston Hughes, Writer

So I’ve just been through the seminal event in my life. I’m married! Hence the absence from the blog for the past 6 weeks or so. Had an amazing wedding, and the honeymoon in the Maldives was fantastic (the picture above is from there in case you didn’t gather). We got scuba certified while we were there which I’m completely psyched about. Funnily enough, just in an earlier post I talked about how I wanted to be more regular with my blogging and I immediately go and take the longest break since I started blogging. Go figure.

Anyways back in Atlanta now and back in the saddle. Now that I don’t have any upcoming life-changing events to distract me from Mokabla, I’m really looking forward to concentrating on the launch.

I know I originally said I would release our MVP by early November but I realized that I needed to add one more feature to the app which was absolutely critical. I don’t know how it slipped out of my mind. Anyways adding this feature took until December. My wedding was in December so the possibility of release in that month was zero. I’ve overshot my original schedule drastically.

23. Re-designing the MVP to be UI/UX friendly for Beta launch

So here I am with a completed MVP finally in my hands, and what do I decide to do? Hold off the launch for another month. Its driving me crazy that I keep postponing the launch but my designers sent me the new design for the site last month (I was unable to see them until now) and the new designs are simply awesome. My original thought was to launch the beta version now and run it for a month or two while the new designs were implemented. Then once the new designs were implemented I wanted to release an updated version with the new look. But the new look is such a vast improvement on the current bare-bones version that I think its worth holding off for a month. I know this goes against everything the lean startup school stands for but I feel pretty strongly about this. I’ve attached screenshots of the old and new landing pages below to illustrate the difference. You have to agree, it’s night and day.

The Original Landing Page

Post Cosmetic Surgery

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