
Your Startup Needs a Website (even if your product isn't ready yet) - tsondermann
http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/05/your-startup-needs-a-website-even-if-your-product-isnt-ready-yet.html
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bkrausz
While I agree a sales website would be useful, it can often be a lot of wasted
effort. Startups can pivot significantly before they launch, and building up a
sales website before you launch could be wasted effort if you end up targeting
a different audience.

Still, once a startup is reasonably sure that they're sticking with their
plan, no reason not to get one out there ASAP.

~~~
kranner
A sales website doesn't have to be complicated at all. A simple website with
traffic driven to it with advertising, blogging or other marketing can help
validate the existence of a market before you've invested a lot of effort in
engineering.

I'm doing this with a placeholder site at <http://codeboff.in/> and a blog
that drives traffic to the site (and private beta list) at
<http://blog.codeboff.in/>

(I hope sharing these links will not be treated as spamming in the context of
this discussion)

I went with the more time-consuming blogging approach instead of the
traditional and quick advertising pilot because I'm bootstrapping this from
India and web ads are more expensive to me by 6x to 8x (or whatever the
purchasing parity difference is) and I can't justify that expense, especially
in the light of my previous startup ideas which in retrospect have been more
or less cuckoo.

I agree that startups do pivot before launch. I think you have to agree to
take that risk against the market research advantage you're getting. It might
help to keep the blurb on the sales website on the vague side to absorb minor
pivoting.

edit: Spun off in the middle. What I was trying to say was that interest in
the blog justifies the much greater investment in engineering that's going
into my startup.

Without that interest, making up my mind about the idea would have been
pointless.

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AprilDunford
I agree that the product/solution will change drastically after it is launched
so having a site oriented around product features is pointless. What this
article is suggesting is that you should have one for 2 main reasons - firstly
to explore the problem (you can do this with a blog or other info on the site)
and secondly to start gathering names for a mailing list. The product will
change but you will have a sense of the broad problem domain. There are many
examples of startups doing a great job on this. Mint for example launched a
blog and collected thousands of email addresses well in advance of releasing
their product into market. When they did launch they already had an
established audience and some traffic built up, which takes time no matter
when you start.

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known
You need a separate website for _advertising_ your product/service and another
one for the actual _service_

