Publisher Blueprints, Part 2: Brainstorming & Accelerating Failure
ADOTAS – Once you have pre-defined your success metrics, the next step in the process is to iterate through ideas for your new site. Generating ideas can be done in brainstorming sessions. Try to do this with a small group of people in a creative and positive environment.
Focus on ideas that are not so different that you can’t find a site that is similar in some way and already successful. You want an idea that your traffic providers will be comfortable with and that you can use other successful implementations as guides for. Choose the best idea and start on implementation.
This is the point where most ideas get very misdirected. Companies get lost spending time and money trying to develop the perfect product. Their natural inclination is that they can think of everything given enough time and that they know precisely what consumers want. This is not impossible to pull off, but the odds are stacked sharply against you.
Designing and implementing these ideas costs real money and there is no guarantee of return. Rather than taking the risk of high investment on the front end of the development, you should design for a soft launch of a scaled down prototype version of your idea.
Get the idea into form as quickly and cheaply as you can. Put live traffic on the prototype and collect as much information as possible. You can use analytical software, revenue tracking information, conversion information, etc. Collate all of this information and overlay it against your success metrics. This should tell you very clearly if your site is working and if not in which areas it is breaking down.
Focusing on those specific areas will maximize the efficiency of your development efforts. Brainstorm ideas to fix those specific weaknesses, implement cheaply, test and repeat.
The final step in the process is accelerating failure. Being able to identify failure quickly will take time. People don’t like to fail and become attached to their ideas. They feel like they have to succeed on every attempt and failure is a personal reflection on their efforts.
As I have mentioned, the reality is that the process is heavily swayed toward failure. It is impossible to correctly predict every time what consumers will want. Some ideas work for one website owner and won’t work for another because of alternate justifications. Some website owners are able to support different success metrics because of scale or access to traffic.
Regardless of the reason, rest assured that if you are trying enough ideas some of them will fail. The value in accelerating failure is to create an environment where failure is not condemned, but it is used as a learning experience for everyone.
The more failures communicated to and understood by everyone involved in the process, the faster they will learn and the faster future failures will be identified and avoided. This will lead to less wasted resources and ultimately a better ratio of success to failure when building websites.
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