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How to Launch Your Site: Go for a Big Bang or a Rising Adoption Curve?

August 26th, 2008
Submitted By: Idea Khan
Posted in Experiences, Startup Resources |
Tags: launch, lessons, startup, tips

Idea Summary

• description: Startup experience, lessons and tips at Ideakhan.com
• title: How to launch your website?

Having been active in the start-up scene for 3 years now, i have personally come across this significantly important question. How (or when) to launch your website? When are you really ready? When should you let the world know about the coolest thing you have been sweating on?I have faced this in numerous web projects, both at work and on start-up projects.

A usual strategy is to keep developing in a small team, adding several features, because you want to get the best thing out. However, this is usually a never-ending process. One can get sucked into a development/brainstorming/refining cycle and this usually happens because there is no real users yet who are using the product - that is there is little possibility of organic growth within the product itself based on what users like and do.

Then arises the second question? How does one launch - try to create a sudden big bang or go for slow but surely rising one can and then one day when you are ready, email the top tech bloggers like TechCrunch, GigaOm and hope that they cover you. Very likely you will see a traffic spike if any of these bloggers write about you but that spike can be a drastic fall too (see the graph of cuil.com as an example).

Just got a link from a colleague about How to Launch Your Software? The blog described the strategy adopted by Gmail developers to launch their product. I dont necessarily think there is one better model - in some cases a big bang may work but i am more inclined to follow the slow but rising traffic model that is based on the key principle - “get your users from day one” . That is a key point and i have seen the benefits of this in my own several startup projects. Users are the acid test for your product and will surprise you by not using or recognizing the importance of a feature that you thought was “cool”.

For example, we built this very cool flex based interface to show the connections between people and people and food for ifood.tv - we called it the ifood explorer.

iFood Explorer

But we soon realized that people didnt care much for something cool - they just wanted the recipes first and then anything else.We have not involved users till completing the product and so learnt a good lesson, of getting users as early on as possible.