In the manufacturing world, Rapid Prototyping is all the rage.

Rapid Prototyping allows manufacturers to get a minimum viable product in the hands of users very soon after the initial idea for the product arises. If you are typically an early adopter of new technology you will have experienced this concept first hand on more then one occasion. Maybe your new phone bends easily or doesn’t hold a charge for long enough. Maybe you’ve had a new and improved one as a replacement without even asking.

Getting your idea in the hands of users is much more valuable to you than continually polishing your idea ahead of launch, only to find that someone else has stolen a march on you and has launched a very similar product or service. And it’s no coincidence that this seems to happen more often these days. The reason? Well, that’s all to do with speed of entry to the marketplace. The competitor that appears out of nowhere with a seemingly similar and seemingly better product than you has in many cases used its early adopting customers as an unofficial test bed.

You can test your idea to death at home by giving it to your husband, wife, cat or goldfish to try out, but by and large they will always spare your feelings and can never be considered truly objective or wide ranging enough to be valuable to your product development cycle. No, getting it in the hands of as many users as possible, as early as possible is the only way to be sure that you are moving in the right direction. The more users you have early on, the quicker you will perfect it or reach the point where you know it’s a dud and can make the decision to dump it and move on to the next idea.

This is why I fully encourage small business owners to just get something on the web using WordPress, even if it’s DIY. This is also why I make a point of offering web development help to DIY website builders so that they can build on cheaply from their original web presence to deliver a web experience more in keeping with their growing popularity. Business is not usually how you imagine it at the outset. OK so you’ve only got a basic, home made WordPress site, but remember that on day one, relatively few people (or none at all) are going to see it, so just get it up there and start improving on it as you get feedback from users.

Even if it has to be rebuilt from scratch at some point later (it usually won’t need to be), at least it got your idea out there and helped you to test the market and launch your idea in earnest, where the alternative might have been to procrastinate and fiddle about with your site until the optimal moment had gone and the potential you had lost to inertia.

If you have an idea, get a site up today and start promoting it. get out and talk to people about it, write blog posts and share it all over the social spaces your target audience frequents. The sooner you get your idea in the hands of an objective customer, the sooner you can perfect it, at least until the next level of perfection comes along:-)

Have a look at our Starter Sites, which probably have close to everything you need to get started for just £99/year.

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