One Entrepreneur’s Question-Filled Countdown to D-Day…

I thought I’d write a few blogs to share my experiences / feelings as I get ready to launch (in beta) www.adpropo.com. 

I feel like I am scheduled to be induced on Monday to give birth to my very overdue baby, at about 14 months.  I am nervous and excited, and very much filled with questions: Will it hurt? Have I done enough? Have I done the right things? Will anyone come other than me and my mom? What if my mom doesn’t even come?! How will I get the feedback I need? What if everyone hates it? What if it’s a huge success? Should I be spending more $? Am I risking my kids’ futures by spending too much $?  And the list goes on.

Then there are my real, live, human babies.  Will this new baby take me away from them?  How will they deal with it? Can we all get along and adjust to having a new, live presence around at all times?  My human babies caused much less angst, because I knew that no matter what, they are mine to love and nuture forever.  My technological baby is a little less certain, given the stats around start-ups.  But I am committed to it, and will do my best to raise it into a strong being, solid but flexible, and full of integrity – something to be proud of.

OK, baby analogy over.  After many months of meetings, development dramas, design decisions, sales conversations, etc., I finally get to put my concept into action and see how it all shakes out.  That is a great and scary thing.  This weekend, my last minute to dos include: clean out test content, get the real content done & loaded, create accounts for my partners, write a press release, finalize my welcome email to the people who were nice enough to sign up as beta users, create an email to announce the site to bloggers, and get my Google Adwords set up.

As I do all of that, my main struggle, honestly, is to really try to focus my message for each communication.  I like lots of words, but people in general won’t read lots of words.  My site requires some education and examples – so trying to give enough but not too much will be my real mountain to climb this weekend.

Then of course are my technology concerns.  I am not a technology person, so am relying heavily on my partners who are.  I need to trust that nothing major will break at a critical time, that processes will happen as planned, and that they are invested enough in me and my business to jump on any problems that do pop up (as they inevitably do!).

Thinking about what will occupy me once the site is live, I expect it will be around collecting the right data and using it the right way.   I know what I want to find from my beta / Phase 1 launch.  I do have questions though about how to find it.  Yes, I have reporting tools in place.  But how do I know when I have enough people involved to draw actionable conclusions?  How will the fact that this is “small scale” influence the results I get?  Will the metrics I see translate as the site scales up?

These are my reflections at about 72 hours and counting.  I will update once the site is live and me and (hopefully) my mom are a tiny fraction of the crushing traffic engaging with brands in a fun and valuable way on www.adpropo.com!