You have great products and a fabulous vision—but determining what needs to be done and who is going to do it is overwhelming.
There are countless moving parts and numerous decisions to consider—design, usability, content and storytelling, imagery, apps and add-ons, marketing, logistics, website maintenance…. It’s daunting.
If you’re launching a new ecommerce brand, it’s crucial that you get the fundamentals right.
If you’re raising capital, you have to resist the urge to over-invest in design and development. It’s easy to be misled by the notion that the only way to succeed is by going fast and going big! What you’ll likely find is that your ability to grow and iterate to respond to marketing needs and real data will be quickly hampered by your meticulously crafted, custom-built site.
If you’re bootstrapping, you probably don’t have to worry about over-designing or over-engineering but you do have to “punch above your weight”, so to speak—ensuring everything you produce looks and feels amazing!
If you’ve been operating for a while—and especially if your current site wasn’t built on a nimble foundation—you’re likely spending ever-increasing money, time, and headspace on maintenance work and little or none on impactful changes that will move the needle.
If you’re stalled due to the technical debt, rebasing to a fresh, clean, lean codebase that follows modern best-practices will give you renewed flexibility to accelerate your growth.
If traffic is not converting as well as it used to, while a refresh might not be the only thing you need to look at, it’s likely that your marketing initiatives have become disconnected from the messaging and storytelling of your website.
If you’re growing and you’re not on Shopify, you’re likely evaluating the pros and cons every 6–12 months to weigh up whether the time is right to make the move.
If you have a list of complex technical requirements, you have to be careful not to pre-prescribe your expected solutions, which can lead to unnecessary complexity and technical debt and result in a Shopify site that is just as complex as the one you are moving away from.
If you have a lot of content and customers and are investing heavily in growth, you need a migration process that is smooth and efficient—for your team and for your customers and marketing partners.
Regardless of where you’re at, adopting a pragmatic, “fundamentals-first mindset”, focused on best-practices, agility and flexibility will almost certainly get you where you’re going faster, more efficiently, and with a greater return on your investment.
Sustainable growth is more about honing foundational principles than chasing rainbows and easy wins.
In order to succeed, you feel like you need to read all the articles, watch all the webinars, and listen to all the podcasts—searching for tips and tricks and shortcuts. You find yourself grasping at straws—making half-informed decisions based on whims and personal opinions rather than learnings from real data, customers, and expertise.
Great brands grow by staying lean and nimble, using authentic storytelling and marketing to build genuine engagement. Your best chance of achieving genuine growth is through keeping things simple and focused—sticking to best practices and spending your limited time, energy, and money on the things that matter.
