This is the frustrating part. My site, my darling site, that has taken almost a year to coax into being, that is almost ready, is still not launched! Its almost ready, but some major issues are holding off its full launch. The Homepage is the main thing – a designer friend has kindly offered to help out, so need to wait until this is completed. And there are a few largish bugs, but my amazing team are getting through those. I am finally changing server providers, which will hopefully mean the speed to the site improves and it can start to send out emails. So once these three major elements are completed, I can officially launch!

That means I can tell all of you very patient dear readers what my site actually is!

There are two hard things though:

  1. Slight loss of momentum. As I am waiting for the Homepage to launch and the final bugs to be completed, my work load has decreased a little, but with it, the burning desperate urge to push things forward. This is of course a minor relief, but the side-effect is that I feel things have slightly lost a bit of momentum… I’m sure it will get crazy again shortly though, so should enjoy the lull.
  2. Vague feedback from friends. As I am in soft-launch, I have shown close friends in the target market the site and asked for their feedback. A few friends have been brilliantly specific: as a result, I have had a copywriter rewrite all the help text on the site, and have redesigned the Homepage, all based on very specific advice. However, a few others have said “I love it, its amazing! But I find it a little difficult to use, in general.” Hmmm…

What do I do with feedback like this? I obviously want to make it brilliantly user-friendly, but the challenge (as, dear readers, you will soon discover) is my site is a rather new concept which many non-techies just don’t get. Social bookmarking is a fairly understood concept by the blogging community, but boy, you would be surprised to find out how many people have never even heard the term, let alone are comfortable with the notion of installing buttons on your browser and using them on other sites. And as my site is further down the notional path of bookmarking, it makes it challenging to explain the concept, let alone make it intuitive. And being told that “in general” its difficult to use is not massively helpful at this stage. OK – I admit, I probably should have shown wireframes to target market users at the outset… but the current site is a world apart from the original wireframes, and I do this for a living, you would think I could skip this step. (Are you sensing my frustration here?)

If nothing else, I am learning humility through this process. I really am not as good at everything as I thought I was…

Anyway… I’ll push on, almost there, the birth of my startup is almost upon us!