Evan Carmichael advises someone starting a part-time trail running resource for Ontario and Quebec to keep their full-time job, launch a basic site immediately, and work on it daily. Gather feedback from real users to avoid building features nobody wants, and share your personal story on video to build early momentum and word-of-mouth.
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How to get started. So I got a question from one of my newsletter readers. Love you guys. LPR— didn't give me the real name, LPR. Anyway, LPR wants to start a new online business to help people who are in Ontario and Quebec to do trail running. Okay, so they're running through the forest, and he wanted to create a resource, an online place where they can go to to get all the information you need about how to do trail running in Ontario and Quebec. He found that it was a missing thing in the market. Nobody was talking about it yet. And so his question to me was, should I do this right now? Should I launch it with whatever I have, or should I wait till it's a complete resource? And he said he doesn't have time to do this full-time because his wife is going to freak out on him. What's my advice? So LPR, this is a very common problem, and I'm really glad you wrote in and asked about it. First of all, it's okay to start part-time, and I encourage it. Keep your job, do it part-time, you'll keep your wife happy, but also you keep the money coming in because I wouldn't want you to quit your job, do this for 3 months, not see results, and have to quit and go back and get a job. The thing is though, do something every day, okay? Something small even, but every day you gotta do something to make this business happen, okay? I would definitely launch as soon as possible. Something small, something simple, launch as soon as possible. There's a couple reasons for it. One, it takes time. Okay, it takes time for momentum to build. It doesn't just launch a website and tomorrow you have a million viewers on it, okay? It takes time for it to happen. So let that time build. It's better to launch it small and have something up there that is still of value and keep adding to it than to wait until you have a complete resource guide. The second thing is you want to get feedback from your customer base. You want to put something up that's small and then talk to your friends who are also interested in trail running and get their feedback on it because then you can build your website around something that your customers actually care about. And this is a mistake I made early on in my career, my first software company. The most advanced, time-consuming feature in the software turns out was something that people don't really care about. Only a few people actually cared about it, but most of our customers, they didn't care about it. Now luckily we had enough other great features in the software that people would still buy it. But think about how much time we could have saved and how much of a better product we could have built if we took all that energy that went into creating this one feature that nobody cared about and put it into something else that's something that people really did care about. So I don't want that same thing to happen to you. I want to make sure that everything you're building is around customers using your website and saying, "Wow, it'd be really cool if you had this or this or this." So all the features you're adding in are based on what people actually want. That will help spread your momentum, and people feel like they're part of the process too and say, "Well, he added this just for me. This is great." They feel involved, and they're more likely to share it. The last thing I would do is is I would tell your story and put a personal message up on there. So I'd put your real name on there, maybe do a video if you can get comfortable in front of the camera, and say why you're launching this website, what people can hope to expect from it in the coming months as you grow it up, and that you really want people's feedback on it. So it gets people to have a personal connection with you, like you are a trail runner, why do you love running so much, why are you making this website happen. I feel a personal connection to you, and I also kind of give you a break because there may not be a lot on there, but I can hear your vision for what's coming. So I know more stuff is coming. I'm going to check in, and I may want to help out and get involved and give you ideas and give you suggestions. And maybe, maybe you need help with pictures or guides or something else, and seeing that video might inspire me to want to help you out. So that's what I would do. Get involved, get momentum, get feedback, make the personal video, launch this thing up, and when you do, send it to me because I want to Check it out. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, thumbs up below. Let me know what you think, leave a comment, ask a question in the comments below and I'll make a video response like this. And you want to see more videos like this, click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much, I'll see you soon.
