Launching a new online solution

I am gearing up to launch our first own web solution into the world. And it is opening my eyes to a whole new world of promoting a web site. This is going to be a rocky ride simply because I am new to this whole thing. All this time I’ve left this aspect of running a web site to the clients. Once we deliver a web application it was upto the clients to promote them, gain traction and stand out. I just had to worry about delivering a slick, bug free and fast web application.

Now reading up on promoting a new web site, I am learning new things. I am not talking about things like SEO alone. I think SEO is just a part of the solution. SEO would only bring the customer to the front door. It takes a whole different ball game to entice a user to sign up to your application and in the long run, to convert them to paying customers (hopefully)!

I am reading up on things like Minimum viable product (MVP), and lean start ups, customer development process. I am also planning to pick up my copy of ‘Rework’ by Jason Fried and DHH soon and skim through that again. I will also need to use all my social media connections and networks. And hopefully drive some traffic into the site.

One of the factors that will make me work hard promoting the application is the fact that it is not a general purpose application that everyone will find a use for. It is geared towards a niche market and hopefully if I can find ways to reach these niches, the site will enjoy success.

One of the things that made me ready before I hoped I would be is getting exposed to the MVP concept. I had tons of features that I wanted to build before I launched. But getting exposed to MVP made me realize that there is no guarantee that those features will find adoption. More and more features were going to complicate the product as well as the development effort, but I had never tried them in the real world. So I ended up cutting down my feature list and ended up with a feature list which I think is what is needed at a minimum. Well a little bit more than the minimum because by the time I came across MVP, I had developed a few more features beyond the MVP. But instead of working on more and more features and complicating my product I concentrated on finishing up the nearly finished features, testing and fixing issues and slight improvements to workflows. And fix the holes around the system.

Earlier I was concentrating a lot on building subscription plans to the system. But it was one of the first things that I decided to scrap. I had some functionality that was built in. But instead of concentrating on payment gateway integrations, little nitty grities on the subscription plans, I just concentrated on the features.

So I am looking forward to launching this product and developing it along with the people who will use it. Rather than conjure up features my self, develop features that users will ask for (I think that is a bit against Rework lessons).