How we are using a free website building tool to develop our product and ultimately build our company!

Sounds interesting, but it is just another idea! Put it on a paper and see if you can convince others to build it with you! Said my brother at the other end of the line, as his voice got blurred into the sound of  HW101 traffic during one of my nightly commutes back home to the city.

For several months I struggled to start my company. I had a solid answer to the problem of a niche group of customers and I was convinced that is enough to build a company. Despite the idea and the product being so clear in my mind, I was struggling to make a progress. For many days and weeks, I had thought about it and worked on what I thought is the company's product. I had several Google sheets and docs describing it - mind you that our product is a downloadable content so in its barest form it manifests itself in the form of docs and sheets. I had even gone further and had a manifesto to describe company's values to the future employees. However, I still did not know how to take the next step between a product I thought we had and a company we wanted to build. In the simplest form, you have a company when you have a product that someone is willing to pay for it in a sustainable  period of time and you have a way to distribute the product to the target customers in a repeatable way. While I thought the product was ready but I could not make visible progress in building the company that can produce and sell it. There is a Persian proverb that goes something like this: "seven sets of pots of pants but no lunch or dinner". It resonated with me for several months as I struggled with defining the starting point.

You don't need to know the final answer to build a deck. Use the PowerPoint as a tool to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. It forces you to think within the boundaries of a page and bring your idea to life as you build the deck. Heard myself coaching one of my team members with such a confident tone as if I'm a kung fu sensei explaining the art of martial arts to my student. It sparked then and there.

Of course! the starting point is to design and build it from the point of view of the audience - may it be a PowerPoint deck or a new company you are trying to build. You should bring your idea to life through the lens of your audience. It's like what they teach you in "design thinking" workshops. Empathize with your audience and build it in a way that they can interact with it.

Empowered by my own sensei-like wisdom and fatigued by several months of not knowing where to start, I ditched everything - the business plan template, the business model canvas, the job posting to hire people to help me further enhance the product, and every other docs and sheets I had put together to build my company and instead I bought a domain name and started with a free website theme on weebly.

 A free website theme gives your three things and in my point of view that's all you need to build a company: 1) a Home Page, 2) an About Us page, and  3) A Blog. One might think a website is just a marketing tool in the age of Internet. But when website is your primary means of communications with the customers and the main channel of distribution for your products and services then it is a lot more than a marketing tool. It is the lens through which you experience your company as if you were the customer and even an investor. The three elements of any free website theme can be used with purpose to develop your product and design your company around it. And that is what we are doing these days:
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1. HOME PAGE: The Home page is where you explain what the company is about. Why the customer should care and would want to stay longer and learn about you and your products and services. It has to be short yet convincing enough to the customer who is looking for an answer or has a problem to solve.  It also has a limited space of the screen of a mobile phone and that is a good thing. Forget about the artistic elements of the home page and focus on the content. If you cannot build a home page for your website using a free home page theme it means  you do not have a clear idea of what is the value you are creating. Drop everything and go back to the drawing board or in my case back to the Google sheets and docs to rethink the the product - this time through the lens of the customer who one day might pay for it. 
2. ABOUT US: A place to describe what you do, what your unique story is, what you stand for, and who is on your team. What differentiates you from everybody else is rooted in  who you are and what's unique about you, your story, and your values. Describe them again in the limited space of the  screen of a mobile phone. Do you have something to say that is personal and interesting. Is your approach unique? How are you different from others? What's different about your team that other people cannot replicate. If you don't have the answers go back to the drawing board. You are not ready yet!
3. BLOG: Having a blog is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy to this blog post. When you start a company, your product and services may not be ready. You are most probably in a beta phase.  Even if you have a market-ready product, your ultimate product will most definitely be millions of miles different from the current version. Your blog is the most powerful tool you have at your arsenal to engage with your customers, investors, and employees. Talk about your progress, share your plans, describe your mistakes, and ask for their feedback. Your Blog more than anything else is a tool for you to shape your thoughts and commit to a progress that is visible publicly. If you are not ready to commit to making progress and talking about it, you are not ready yet! Go back to the drawing board.

There you have it. We are building our website first so that we can develop our product and design a company around it. When I started I thought it will take me couple of days to publish the website but 1 month into the process the website is not published yet. Because as I started to put it down on paper so that it can be presented on the website, I am realizing there are elements of our product that are not ready yet. We are forced to go back to the drawing board again and again. It has proven to be the most effective tool to start our company. It has given us a framework and a platform to develop our minimally viable product and commit to a progress that is publicly visible and shareable. Where I'm standing today, I still think we will swing back and forth between our website pages and the drawing board for couple of more weeks and that's going to be the engine of our progress. 

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