A lot of us business owners and website creators tend to be perfectionists. We hold off and hold off launching because we want, what we often don’t know, to be perfect. While perfection is a nice ideal it can cost you dearly in a tech market where being first can mean everything.
Well guess what! I don’t quite hold the belief that every process should be tested a 100% perfect before launch. Religiously tested until your web developers and staff have aged 10 years and here is why.
Pro tip: Always make sure you are confident in your payment system. By all means screw up but make sure you get paid first.
5 Reasons to just do it
You will likely loose more money burning time while testing than you will loose if there is a screw up. Be sure the system works and then soft launch. You will have much better testing in a real world environment and you will get paid to learn effectively.
Even crappy, broken websites make money. Some do it incredibly well. While the little bit of broken UI/UX or non perfect process might be keeping you awake rest well because you are trading and likely making some money will you can take the real world feedback and make changes to improve going forward.
Not trading is going backwards. If you are not trading you are loosing money by the hour. If your potentially going to make a modest couple thousand a day while running your loosing that by not trading. Literally that could be the difference between making a profit and loosing money at the end of the year. Companies tend to make 5-20% profit per year you could easily burn that in a couple weeks of perfection hunting.
Users are tolerant when you inform them of whats going on. If you launch under perfection and fail, users will be brutal. If you soft launch (beta) and say ‘…hey this is a beta launch. Please give us constructive feedback so we can make this better for you…’ users will rise to the occasion. Make users part of the ecommerce development process. Provide forms for feedback.
You will create an invested loyalty and advocates. Worst case the project is a failure, but hey you probably knew it was anyway and at least you won’t spend more money and time on it and can learn your lesson and move on.
You don’t know what you don’t know! If the project is truly fresh, how can you work out what is going to happen ahead of time. If the project is complex you won’t cover everything its impossible. Don’t fight it, roll with it and trade. Work it out as you go along. Sure you might fail, but you might smash it too!
Failure to launch is really just an entrepreneurs version of procrastination
