EnvioHQ

After working on the platform for the last 6 months we are officially live in our open beta! Please help us by voting for us on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/enviohq

Additionally, we would love any and all feedback. Take a look at our marketing website, branding, pricing and most importantly our product and let us know what you think!! As a startup, we have made it to a major milestone but now we need feedback loops to iterate and improve. Please support us by letting us know what you think!

You need a marketing website for your startup. You need to put something out there that defines what you are, where you are going and a way to get contacts or leads.

As a startup, the reality is it takes a really long time to drive organic traffic to your website so getting this setup should be done in parallel of building your product. I want to repeat, build your website as you build your product if not sooner.

Once you build your website, you need to dedicate hours daily to work on backlinks, blog posts, keywords, landing pages, social platforms and more to get your brand out there to drive awareness.

Your marketing website is one of the places you SHOULD put the cart before the horse. Talk about your product like it is done and ready to sell. Why? Because by the time anyone actually finds your website, you should be already at that point or your startup has gone terribly wrong.

Where we are is that we have built out our base marketing site to layout the sections, text and general branding/look and feel. We do not have our final images or copy because we do not have the final product to use for images, but I have a site to drive awareness to get a head start on the slog of getting organic traffic and just general brand awareness.

My two cents, start your marketing as soon as you start your product. The last thing you want to do is finish your product and then start trying to find customers to sell or market it to. Your momentum will be dead if you do that.

After identifying an opportunity and working with a few end users to really understand the requirements we laid out a plan to complete the full build out of the platform by end of March.

Some learnings of this process:

• Your scope will change constantly in the details.
• Your scope even in the major features will change constantly.
• We found where we are landing is way better than when we first laid out the plan because we are iterating and allowing the scope changes to occur
• Have customer sounding boards to validate your pivots and changes
• Work on it daily. This builds momentum and keeps you and the team engaged.
• Celebrate small wins like traffic to your site, finishing an area of code, etc
• Set aggressive goals because you will likely miss them so better to try and get it done faster and be late then be "conservative" and be even later.