Order of operations for setting up MVP can be SCARY and COMPLICATED. Stuck at mailchimp registration
Everywhere you read on this site, you'll have people talking about building fast, launching quickly, MVP only, etc., but here's some stuff I found which is scary and making me a bit nervous about progressing 'out of order'.
- Bought domain from namecheap.com
- Bought cheap hosting from digitalocean.com. I have a droplet connected to a subdomain for Discourse forum. (I did not configure this yet). To finish configuration, you need to have SMTP credentials available for the forum to send emails. Stay with me here...
- OK, so I know I need SMTP configuration my forum, but before I go to mailchimp.com to create an account (free), I move to setup my primary domain. For my primary domain, I intended to register an account on carrd.co to build a landing page. The landing page will also collect emails and send to mailchimp, perfect, I'll skip Carrd account for now since both #2 and #3 require mailchimp.
- Off to mailchimp I go. At the beginning of my registration, I get prompted for an address. I don't have a business address yet, so I'm nervous to put my home address. Mailchimp has a link for alternative addresses for your business and mentions P.O Box and others (ref. https://mailchimp.com/help/alternative-physical-address-ideas/). So... wtf? Do I put my home address for now?
I'm trying to move FAST. I was planning to do all of this tonight, but I'm stuck. What would you recommend for my mailchimp registration (business address).
Yes, you put your home address if you don't any other address. I do.
Don't worry about moving FAST. I can't think of a meaningful business where you need to count your launch in hours. Also, once you have your domain registrar and hosting, you can re-use these resources and move much faster.
I agree with the general point Amin makes. Don’t let your anxiety about moving FAST counterproductively slow you down. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Give yourself grace.
With that being said, there are three parts of a business. Acquiring Customers, Servicing Customers, and Administering these two processes to make sure that you do things by the book in society (taxes, fill out forms, track things, maybe register with your city state etc.)
IANAL but at the beginning you should worry extremely little about admin (part 3). Odds are your project will fail. If it does, no one will come after you for failing to dot all your i’s and cross your t’s. If you start succeeding, nothing is unfixable with a reasonable amount of time or money. If you focus too much on admin out of the gate, you reduce your chance of succeeding greatly because it takes you away from focusing on acquiring and servicing customers. Pay your taxes but don’t spend hours or days worrying about if you have the right corporate structure for your imminently needed Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich tax minimization strategy (sarcasm). You’ll know when you have enough success to start worrying about admin. Again just my opinion.
So for your MailChimp question. You should spend less than 30 seconds on these types of questions and just put your best answer. You can always update the address in MailChimp later.
Haha, Nice Google reference there.
I can always reshuffle and change things around as things progress, right? So I suppose it makes sense to just put my home address and keep things moving.
And I get your point about measuring in hours, I understand completely. It's just frustrating when you're trying to do A, B, C, but then find out B needs C, but then you also can't do C until you do 'something else'. So what you thought was a simple linear progression becomes a big mess quickly :)
I'm doing my best to prioritize this initial setup so I can do the meaningful stuff (like build the landing page and get it out there to test for interest and email collection)