Was 5 o’ clock in the afternoon and I was in that company for almost two hours, spending my time with the five entrepreneurs partners of a new online business store. At the end, they understood something so easy that, at first glance, I suppose it won’t take more than 15 minutes.

We were working in that project for almost 6 months. That represents too much time for an online project (at least, the ones I like!) At the very beginning, the idea was to open an online store that sells exclusive hand made products, so they called my company to help them with it. Yes, I supposed that in a couple months the store will be online so we started working hard on it. We quickly created a new logo, a website design and decided the ecommerce technology that the store will use. Those entire tasks were done in 5 weeks…

After that, they started to upload the products to the new catalogue. In the following 20 weeks, I figured how the company uploads and deletes products; they placed a product description and after 2 hours, they changed it to a new one; almost every picture was modified at least 2 times!. The product’s category tree was in their 4th release. And the store was not online yet!!!.

So, I met with those guys to explain them that, at the very beginning, it’s not very important that their products looks perfect, but they should be online to start face their business in the internet. After going online, they can continue improve their catalogue and other contents, but it’s necessary for them and their company, to going online soon.
 

If you remmennber how Amazon looks like when they launched, you’ll figured that their initial catalogue was not so developed as today’s one. But, going online at that moment helps the company to grow faster.

If your online business is prepared for their launch, many times is better to launch it as it is (perhaps in beta) rather than wait many more weeks. Search engines will not find your online business the very fist day you go online, and neither your potential customers. But doing a pre-launch will help your company with their positioning and their internet exposure. The spiders will smoothly start to find your initial pages and, at the time you finished with your beta release (while being online, of course), maybe your business became well positioned and with some traffic that represents potential incomes.
Finishing with my initial story, it took two hours for those guys to understand this simple advice because they couldn’t thing in nothing more than their products. It took me 15 minutes to write it down here. Be smart: If you are planning to go online, never expect to have the best catalogue before the company launch. Just do a beta pre-launch, go ahead, let your business ‘face’ the internet and improve it while it’s online. It will be healthy for you, your partners and definitely, for your business.