A quick story about rising above perfectionism…
Recently, I decided to turn my “side hustle” web design business into a full-time gig. My problem was that I've been so busy building websites for clients that I neglected building one for myself. Well, I had a crappy one that was really just a lame web page saying, “I make websites. Get in touch if you want one.”
Over the past 10 years, do you know how many people “got in touch”? One. Uno. Half of two. Barely more than zero.
As you might guess, that's a huge problem if I wanted to get serious about amping up my business. I wouldn't go to a barber with a terrible haircut, so I wouldn't expect web clients to hire me if I didn't have a decent website.
Although I love designing and building websites for others, the thought of doing it for myself was scary. I didn't know what I should include on the site or what I should say. I wanted it to be perfect, but I didn't know where to start.
Then I recalled a concept from software development called MVP which stands for “minimum viable product”. It means “what's the bare minimum set of features an app has to have before someone will buy it?” Anything beyond that is just not immediately necessary.
So I used that approach for my new website. I asked myself: What's the bare minimum I need to?…
I made an outline, wrote down some words, and started building a very basic site. Knowing that it was just the first of many future versions gave me freedom — I didn't have to worry about including everything or making it perfect.
It really boiled down to 4 things:
Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy when you think of it that way! All I had to do was write the website code, add the answers to those questions, tweak a few things to make it look pretty, and remind myself that sometimes “good is good enough”. I knew I could make it closer to “perfect” later.
I wanted to get past building my own site and move on to the work of building websites for others.
With the Covid-19 situation, many businesses are realizing their website is more important than ever. But some are bogged down, like I was, trying to build a new site or improve an old one. They might not know the “MVP approach” can get them to “good enough” and start boosting web traffic (and hopefully revenue, too).
What part of your business have you been frustrated with lately?
Have you ever tried the MVP approach?
Let Us Know!