Good Enough Is Better Than Perfect: How to Avoid Burnout and Launch Your Website Faster

Topics

Set an MVP (release in stages)

• Break down insurmountable problems and projects into smaller more obtainable goals that are also releasable
  - For example, you may break down a scientific calculator project to a basic calculator - updating it with more advanced features as they are completed
  - The point here is that the basic calculator is still valuable and useable
• MVP (Minimum Viable Product) versus MLP (Minimum Loveable Product)
  - What's the difference? benefits of each?

Don't Forget Content

• As projects are developed, we've seen people forget content time and time again
• They talk about the blog posts and videos that need to fill up in their website in every meeting...but that conversation quickly gets overwhelmed with future plans, web design, and brand direction
  - This often leaves people forgetting about content until it's too late. They easily forget how much work making a blog post, or a video can be
  - Lack of content can put a full stop on a site's release indefinitely
  - In our experience, we've shipped more websites with blogging capabilities that are hidden from the public site because the site owner just never got around to using them

Perfectionism Is Not A Goal

• Many of us will get to the scheduled launch date and obsess over small things that are not app breaking, or obvious enough for the public to even notice
• This perfectionism can be a costly endeavor as some people are never done meddling with their site...and when they finally do release it it's often a mess of features that have been worked over so much that the UX is not good, or nobody uses the feature(s) as expected
• We recommend that for many projects, getting the public's feedback is king over your own perfectionism - you should want the public's feedback to influence your future updates and decision making

Monetization Hesitation

• We've had experience with clients that won't monetize their projects - even if the project is successful according to their own goals (ie lots of traffic) because they're worried about taking the next step in their project
• These worries, from our experience, can range from being concerned if people would pay for something they're currently getting for free, to the opinion that monetization will make the site look cheap
• People forget that monetization of a website, or web app is also a learned skill
  - If you perfect your website with no monetization, then start to monetize later with no experience doing so - your monetization may look very amateurish in comparison to the polished project
  - In our opinion, we find that leveling up your website/web app management skills at a similar pace to your monetization skills makes for a more coherent product
• Making money from your project can help with motivating you to work on it
• Delaying monetization can lead to a lack of motivation and a lack of desire to continue funding something that's constantly in the red

Personal Hesitations

• These hesitations vary for everyone, the hesitations covered in this episode are not an exhaustive list of potential personal hesitations
• For this episode we're defining personal hesitations as something that is solely personal and not rooted in a technical concern, or even a marketing concern. (ie I'm worried my friends will make fun of my website)
• Anxiety, embarrassment, depression, burnout are examples of personal hesitation that we commonly see
• To overcome these problems, we've found a few things that may help:
  - Smaller releases to make them more manageable
  - Tackling embarrassing things (ie if you think the images on your site don't look good, tackle that problem as quickly as possible)
  - Matt's Website Release Anxiety Cure: Release something you're proud of, something you can share with others WITHOUT MAKING EXCUSES for things as they browse through it
  - Mike's Website Release Anxiety Cure: Release an MVP as fast as possible, don't let release anticipation build up