The Art of Launching a New Company

The following is a guest post by Matt Lerner, VP of product development and marketing for AllStar Deals.  Mr. Lerner and his colleagues are about to launch a new enterprise.  In the post below, he presents an interesting look, from an entrepreneur’s perspective, on launching a firm.  Stay tuned to the Feintuch Communications website (www.feintuchcommunications.com) for future developments!

For the last four months, my team and I have been pushing each day to prepare for our site’s launch. Like any tech start up, new problems arise organically and our strategy to solve them is seemingly ever changing.

After back-and-forth internal discussions as to whether or not we were ready to face the public, last week, we reached our first major company milestone: pushing the pre-launch page live for AllStar Deals.

We did this with the help of LaunchRock, which not only gave us the tools to bring our page online, but also allowed us to begin collecting a database of early users, provide share buttons to those users so they could spread the word to their networks, and track primary analytics such as user sign-ups and page views.

Putting up our pre-launch page was incredibly gratifying and it provided a great lesson: JUST GET OUT THERE, ALREADY!

Stop tinkering. Stop expecting perfection. Stop worrying. You’ll never fully grasp what aspects of your site need more work and require adjustment until you actually put it in front of people. No amount of preparation will be able to act as a substitute for the learning you’ll glean from an actual launch.

There was a fantastic article in New York Magazine called Bubble Boys last month that every entrepreneur should check out. It’s certainly worth reading in its entirety but here are a couple of the quotes that stuck with me:

“Done is better than perfect.”
“Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is what matters.”
“If ten people have the same idea for a piece of software, the one who succeeds will be whoever launches it fastest, then iterates as quickly as possible.”
“There has never been a better time to be a geek with a dream. Launching a new product is all but free.”

Since our site will be taking on the online daily deals space, there is certainly no shortage of competitors for us. In fact, there are more than 500 daily deals sites in the US alone. That said, they all do the same thing.

They hire a sales force to try and find as many deals as possible, then they blast daily emails to all their users hoping that everybody buys them. As a result, your email box becomes cluttered with deals for microdermabrasion, helicopter flying lessons, and jewelry making classes.

Our plan is to change this model by not hiring a sales force at all. Instead we will be the first site entirely populated with user submitted deals. If you find a good deal in your neighborhood, we’ll give you the tools to secure that deal and submit it to the site. The incentive to do so is that we will pay cash commission to those who submit and share the deals.

Since our site gains strength by having more people signed up, submitting deals and sharing them with each other, and since this space is only getting more crowded each day, we knew the time was now to finally get out there.

Will there be major problems we have to deal with? Hopefully not, but maybe. Will there be tweaks and changes along the way? Certainly.

One thing is for certain though, we won’t know for sure until we’re up and running.

Follow AllStar Deals on twitter at @allstardeals and facebook.