How To Launch A Startup

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

- Napoleon Hill

I wanted to talk about some housekeeping items in this post before continuing the discussion of my marketing conundrum.

16. Completion of our Logo (Oct 1st – Oct 30th)

Our Logo is finally complete! Its the image above in case you haven’t figured it out. We put in a lot of effort into it and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I would definitely recommend Stuart to anyone looking for a good designer. The reason I came up with this design is two fold, first we are a new site so I wanted to have a catchy, compelling image that would intrigue first-time visitors and secondly, and second, wanted an image that personified comparisons or a face-off – this is the image that came to my mind (the accuracy of this assumption is yet TBD).  The one thing I might change is the shade of red… I think I would like it to be darker/deeper.

Our MVP/Beta whatever you want to call it, is pretty much finished. I would love to just launch it. But I feel like if I did that, I wouldn’t get anywhere. I need to put some more thought into it and make some inroads into the target audience before it’s ready to be tested by the market. I think this process will take me a month or so. But I figure this isn’t such a bad thing, I can use this time to also build some content and make the site more UI friendly. The other thing I still need to do before launch is -testing. I’m pretty sure I will use UserTesting.com for this purpose.

We currently don’t have any plans to do any A/B testing as we haven’t really done much design work. We’re thinking of launching it as is to first get the market’s reaction of Mokabla as a product, and work on optimization later. For those who have no idea about what I’m talking about, the Wikipedia article on the subject is also a good primer.

We recently purchased another email ID. This became a necessity as people have started signing up on Mokabla.com and we needed an email for such correspondence. This was another $50 on Google Apps. I’ve also been researching feedback systems to use. We’ve decided to use Idea Informer. The other services I considered were User Voice and Get Satisfaction. These two services aren’t free though so we figured we’d use something that was free & open-source. If we don’t end up liking this service or when we get to the point where we have a lot of traffic and need to upgrade or change, I will probably switch to User Voice. It seemed like it was designed for idea gathering, which is what we want at this stage whereas Get Satisfaction seems more geared towards a support and feedback community. We have installed a Kissmetrics account which we received free through this promotion. I will update you with their reports once we launch.

I finally sent in all the paperwork for incorporation and I’m happy to put that hurdle behind me! Hopefully I’m done with that process. So far there haven’t been any costs except DMCA filing fees which come to about $105. I’m also working with the lawyers on getting our marks copyrighted. This is a lengthy time taking process, hopefully by that time we will see some good user-traction as trademarking is expensive. I am extremely happy with the service provided by my legal team and heartily recommend them to any startup.

Lastly, and the thing that I am most excited about is finally having an “office”. We signed up for co-working space at Locust 151 for $55/month. Its a neat little facility with everything an early stage startup needs. It’s great to finally have a a business address instead of using your home address all the time.