Launch it before you’re ready

I often prompt client-collaborators to launch before they feel totally ready.

Why? Well... MAGIC!!! 🪄✨✨ That's why.

If that isn't persuasive enough, here are some more concrete reasons:

Unleash the better-but-not-yet-perfect version

As soon as what we have is better than what you have now, let’s launch it and get it working for you. Let’s let your visitors benefit from the better experience.

What makes it better? Maybe it is simply fresher and more accurate content. Maybe the look and feel of the site, well, looks and feels better despite the content being similar. Maybe there has been addition by subtraction: there is less content but the overall presentation is better.

Just because it isn’t yet 100% of what we want it to become doesn’t mean that it isn’t already going to help you and your visitors better than what it replaces. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”… or something like that.

A different perspective

I have seen over and over how site owners’ perspectives change once the site goes from a secret development to a live working site. Now it is real, not theoretical. It is exciting and motivating! We can (and do) focus on what is actually going to make a difference instead of getting mired in details that may not matter. We can get real-world feedback from users and our gut feelings either fade or intensify. This perspective change is the main magic and is hard to imagine without experiencing it first-hand.

A website is made to be changed

A website is made to evolve to reflect who or what it represents. The advent of site-builders such as Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly make it simple and fast to publish an even better version at any time. Fix a typo or grammatical error? Done. Change the messaging? Check. Add a page? Piece of cake. Completely rearrange the site menus? Dragged-and-dropped.

It feels great to make small (and large!) changes and know that they are instantly online to anyone who visits the site. Again, it is hard to convey how different it feels to work on a live site rather than a development site.

Ready, fire, aim

There is a book called “Ready, fire, aim” that I have not read (but I know I heard the catchy title at some point, so thanks to whoever created it). The phrase is apt for launching a website. We want to do some “ready” activity to orient our efforts. Then we want to “fire” the website out there. Then we want to “aim” over time to evolve the site.

What we definitely DON'T want is to be spending a lot of time "aiming". I have seen projects with absurdly long delays because the owner refused to pull the trigger on launching a version that would have helped them and possibly accelerated positive iteration.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

What is the least-capable, least-developed version of the website that we can create that will help you? Let’s create and launch THAT in a minimal amount of time and get it out there for you and your visitors to benefit from. This is how a lot of product design and application development is done. The same concept can be applied to a marketing website.

Caveat: discomfort vs. pain

There is an important difference between discomfort and pain. In the case of marketing material like a website discomfort is “this isn’t good enough yet” (perfectionism) and pain is “this doesn’t feel true” (impaired authenticity). DON’T launch something that doesn’t feel true. DO launch something that is on the right path but maybe not where you want it to get to.

Put it into practice

Whether it’s a website or something else, try launching before you’re totally ready and see the magic for yourself!