If there is one thing I regret doing for my clients when I started out, it is that I helped them build a custom website focused on “unique design” before even finding their first 3 customers.
See, the truth is nobody wins. First off, there is the probability of your website actually converting anybody when you begin. It is really low. Then you probably regret hiring your web-designer and spending your money on stuff that didn’t generate any results.
I mean, I’m confident enough to even openly challenge you that – if you show me someone who has built (or hired someone to build) a perfect website the first time, with no prior business experience and actually gotten results out of it, I’d give you 100$ just for telling me about that person.
I’d still benefit from just knowing this person, their story and the lessons behind it. Only people I’ve seen pulling this off are the ones who have a natural knack for business. They often fall into the following categories
- Grew up in an entrepreneurial family and absorbed lessons just by watching their family habits.
- A person who has already built more than 2 businesses successfully.
- Someone who has built an audience already on mailing list, or in some cases social media and yet have great response rates.
- There could be few more…
For the rest of us, we have no clue when we start out. We are even worse off if we had a job for a long time where you never dealt directly with the customers.
Sometimes people with experience in sales and marketing have an edge. I say “sometimes” because I think I was surprised by some people who have years of sales/marketing experience in a high paying corporate job and yet have no clue how to start a business.
Anyways the point is, “validation” when you start with no business experience is hard. 99% of us have a massive over-estimation of how much work is required to validate our ideas. I’ve admired how experienced ones do it. I’m thankful that I could learn some of it, from them.
Today, the only thing you need to start doing some validation online is a “landing page” that promises to solve your potential market’s problem. Worst case build your website on “SquareSpace”. Even worst case, buy a template and modify its design as little as possible, then focus on your content.
Trust me, the amount of maintenance you need to do on WordPress for its updates, plugin updates, security updates, plugin incompatibilities, fragmented nature of the entire ecosystem is annoying. You’d better be focusing on actually finding your customer, delivering your product or services, getting feedback and iterating it again.
