When it comes to building an online business, or shifting your offline business onto the web, there are an endless number of checklists that you’ll find yourself trying to get through, resolve, etc… just to go live with your site.
Let me help you out here with two simple words.
These two words will help you not only relieve yourself of the stress and anxiety of trying to achieve a “perfect” site, but also of the anxiety of what people are going think about your site.
The two words are this:
Just ship.
That’s it – just ship! But what does that even mean?
Just ship, means that after you’ve done your due diligence in building your website, organizing your online business plan, and doing everything else that you can think of doing in preparation for your online business, there comes a time where you just have to go live – just ship!
If you don’t ever just launch your site, then you’ll never get it out there for people to use and play around with.
If you don’t have people using your site and playing around with it, you’ll never get the critical feedback you need to optimize and iterate your site to higher level of quality and effectiveness.
I’m telling you to just ship – just go live with your site! And here’s a list of things I DON’T CARE about as your excuse for not going live:
1) I don’t care if your site if pretty
At the end of the day, does it really matter if your site is pretty or not? Most websites find their value in “utility” not “pretty”. Just look at Craigslist.com for an example – that’s nothing more than a massively structured database of links – all mostly text and images.
Yet despite it’s “pretty-ness” – Craigslist.com is one of the most popular websites world wide. Why? Because it achieve “utility” – people find a lot of value in visiting and interacting with the site.
2) I don’t care if everything works
What’s it matter, really, if everything is working or not with your website? Trust me, I know from experience, that if you hold off on launching your site until everything is working perfectly, then you’ll never launch.
Just ship!
3) I don’t care if you break things
I love Facebook’s motto – Move fast and break things!
In fact, I’ve been told that Mark Zuckerberg has this saying on a plaque hanging above the entrance to Facebook’s headquarters.
You cannot be afraid to break things within your site – in fact, you should push your site to the max to see what your thresholds are.
Again, unless you are live (just ship), and unless people are using your site, you’ll never identify the areas of opportunity for improvement.
So… what are you waiting for – just ship!