06 Building in Public: Headwinds 🌬️🌬️

Good morning, May the fourth be with you, or whatever (never seen Star Wars).

This is going to be a short one (under two minutes) unless you read like me. This is because short is easily digestible (but mainly because I’m getting smoked with work).

Anywho, onward.

So, we are approaching our first setbacks. Basically, we want to tear it all down and start from scratch. Not the actual business plan and launch strategy, but the website. For one, we received an extremely average (below average?) finished product from the website builder. This forced us to build the majority of it ourselves. Not fun… Second, we’re using Webflow, which has proved very challenging to say the least.

Here’s the question: Do we start over? Scratch this website and build one on WIX (or something similar)?

The answer? Hell yeah. Let me explain.

We’re not even through the first inning of our business. Hell, we haven't even recorded one out. So to assume “we’re too far along” would just be lazy. Plus, we need to think of the wins. Here’s all the transferable information:

✍️ Website copy. We can copy this directly from the old site to the new one. Win.

🎨 Colour scheme. Again, we have the colour palette, so it’s an easy transfer. Win.

⚒️ Functionality. That’s Shannon’s domain and she’s built websites via WIX and other platforms. Win.

📐 Page layout and banners. Again, we’re happy with how these look and are set-up. It’s an easy copy and paste (kinda). Win.

But with the good comes the bad:

💰 Money wasted: ~$650. But it’s not wasted because it’s a learning experience right?? Right…?

⌛ Time wasted. This one kills me. It took three weeks when it should have taken three days. But we can’t bring it back. Lesson learned.

🐱‍💻 Aggregation and connection with Airtable. This one is the biggest pain. We’ll need to set-up the aggregation process again for the new site. If anyone is an expert in this area (or you know anyone who is) then hit me up!! Will pay $$$.

We evaluated these “bad” parts. But kept coming back to the fact we’re still so early. And we didn’t want to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

Have you ever heard of the sunk cost fallacy?

Basically, the sunk cost fallacy describes our tendency to follow through on an endeavour if we have already invested money, time or effort into it. Regardless if the current costs outweigh the benefits, and regardless of how miserable we are, we trudge along.

It’s a human weakness. I saw it all the time when I was at PwC. “I hate accounting”. Okay, then quit. “I can’t do that, we’re almost 27 and I already have my CPA!”. Exactly, you’re 27 with a CPA. Go try something else. Just because you invested three years into something doesn't mean you should spend the next 30 years in misery.

We won’t fall for the trap and neither should you. This is why we’re tearing it down. It feels good (in a weird way).

Will it delay launch? Sure. But likely by a week or so. Well worth it to utilize a system we actually like and understand…

Lesson: Don't get sucked into the sunk cost fallacy. It’s a trap! Make the changes needed and make them quickly.

Enjoy Star Wars day, nerds!