How we Changed the Entire Business Plan of our Startup in One Day

It’s a lot of work and a lot of insanity, but worth the effort. 

Let’s start with our story: Rush Ventures used to be a SaaS company, which stands for software as a service. We had built a suite of tools with the promise of helping entrepreneurs get online.

The idea was good and we had worked very hard on the tools but in the end it just wasn't exciting people. There were other companies offering similar tools that had been around much longer than us.

After weeks of hard work and money spent the company wasn’t seeing any results.

We had to make a tough decision: stick with it and fight the uphill battle or throw everything away and try something different.

The executives at the company both went home stressed and with heavy hearts that night but after a few text messages were sent between them, there was a sudden flurry of excitement.

We decided on the throw it away approach.

We took down the tools (with tears in our eyes) and changed the entire focus of our company.

We made this change in one day.

How did we do it?

We got into the office at 10am as usual. We then went immediately into a meeting room and discussed our options. In about half an hour we decided where we wanted to be and what we needed to make the change.

By 11am we started work on designing a whole new website. We hired some freelance designers and developers to speed up the process. As this was being done I personally wrote the copy for the site and worked out a plan for marketing it.

At 1pm we took lunch. Lunch is important.

At 2pm we began work on custom images for the site. We purchased stock photos, took our own photos and started doing a lot of editing and tweaking to make them fit our needs.

This tweaking and modifying took many hours and a few more freelancers.

Technical challenges included getting our former blog content re-purposed and moved to the newly designed blog as well as other minor glitches.

We decided to sit on the site overnight before launching it to make sure we liked every bit of it.

The next morning we launched.

Why so fast?

We did the change quickly for a few reasons. The main ones being that we wanted to get the new business plan out to people as soon as possible. It was a great USP and we wanted everyone to know about it. Secondly we wanted to prove that it COULD be done. Our USP is speed and getting in front of eyeballs quickly, we might as well do that on our own site.

Finally: we did it because it was fun. Building a brand new website from scratch is exciting and the creative juices get flowing.

What did we learn?

First of all, we learned it could be done. It proved that our USP was realistic. We also learned that this project is going to be a lot of fun. Every startup we help will be a new set of challenges, creative possibilities and more.

We’re excited to be moving forward with our new venture and to help others with theirs.

We are Rush Ventures if you’re interested in seeing what we do.