Sometimes done is better than perfect.
#6 • Stories & Lessons of Founding Baron Fig
It looked terrible. The header was a repurposed image scanned from a two-hundred year old book. There were four pages, with barely any content. If you haven’t already guessed, I’m describing our first website.
We didn’t have a product at the time, let alone pictures to show. A few vector mockups conveyed the gist of what we were trying to make, along with a couple paragraphs about why we were doing it.
There I was, a designer trained to make beautiful things, and I was pushing an ugly-ass website into the digital throngs of the web. I’ll admit, I was nervous. Many of my peers were designers, I didn’t want them to think I was incapable of making good work. (Hello, ego.) At the same time, I couldn’t spend forever trying to make it look perfect.
So I put my designer-self aside and, as a entrepreneur who needed to keep things moving forward, made the site live. I quickly got over my reservations. Everyone had positive things to say. Likes and words of encouragement flowed through my Facebook feed. Tweets came in with positive feedback on our endeavor, and retweets were popping left and right.
Between working with Adam and Scott in designing the notebook and packaging, figuring out logistics, and formulating a Kickstarter campaign, it took a few months to get the site into shape, visually. During that initial period of ultra-barebones-ugly we had thousands of visits and hundreds of email signups. If I waited for the site to look “perfect” we would’ve missed a ton of great user feedback and connectivity.
Frankly, our website still isn’t where I’d like it to be. But it’s better than it was a few months ago, and in another few it’ll be better still. And in a few more months it’ll be even better, and in a….
Joey Cofone is Co-Founder & CEO at Baron Fig. The Founding of Baron Fig shares the stories and lessons learned on the journey of creating our startup.
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