Soft Launch Direction Needed - Your Advice?

[David Young]

I am starting a new ecommerce project and would appreciate any advice on strategies for launching the initiative. The general plan is to develop traffic to a contact based site, develop a subscriber list and gradually monetise as the volume of traffic increases. However, I cant decide whether the best approach is to wait until the web site is perfect and fully populated with content before marketing OR to launch a refined/limited version first to test the waters and focus more on the marketing side. I don't want to market something that isn't build- but equally don't want to build something that will sit idle for along time. Any advice or comments would be much appreciated.

 

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[100k]

Are you going to create a Saas Product?

If so, create a minimum viable product with 1 or 2 core features and see if there is demand.

If you're going to sell a physical product - find something that is already out there and make a lander trying to sell that - if you get orders then either dropship or issue a refund.

 

[David Young]

Are you going to create a Saas Product?

If so, create a minimum viable product with 1 or 2 core features and see if there is demand.

If you're going to sell a physical product - find something that is already out there and make a lander trying to sell that - if you get orders then either dropship or issue a refund.

Thank you for the comment. I guess the next step is defining the minimum viable product. I would love to say it was a SAAS, but nothing as involved. The basic premise is a niche blog that I can develop into a community forum with a significant social network element and gamification. A simple blog with good content would therefore probably be sufficient as a MVP- if there was enough feedback it would justify taking the product to the next stage.
Thank you once again - amazing how clear things become when you start exchanging ideas.