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About two months ago I announced the Beta Launch of Marketing ICE and commented on how much work creating a new company from nothing really is.

Well just a few days ago we opened the full live version of Marketing ICE with a new pricing model and a new sales message.  The response has been great so far.  What I want to comment on though today is the mistakes the Beta revealed to us and lessons learned from them.

1.  Our price was a bit high.  Not really because it was a hell of a deal at the price we asked, not a single paying beta member complained, NOT ONE.  Yet the reason it was too high is we figured out we could make more profit by selling for less.  All the metrics got better with a massive price cut.  If something make you more profit and is ethical then do it.  We did.

2.  Our process was clunky and relied on two levels of membership.  Paid and free.  We killed off true membership for free people simply providing them a password if they opt into our email system.  This makes our internal management a lot easier, consumes less resources and above all makes our CTO Benjamin Fitts' job a lot easier.   Oh and it converts to sales better to boot.

3.  Because we put our videos in a pass word protected area they were not getting indexed by Search Engines and we got no deep organic traffic.  Ben is a genius and figured out how to leave the pages open to anyone and password protect just the videos.  So the individual pages can now be indexed and the video is just seen as basicly an image by Google/Yahoo, etc.  

There were more mistakes (many that were technology centric) but the above were some of the bigger ones we corrected that an outsider would have been able to observe.  Now here is the real reason I am posting this, it is not the mistakes we made you should pay attention to, it is that we made them and that we fixed them even though fixing them was painful short term.  It required a lot of extra work and we had to let go of a lot of work we had done the wrong way.  We had a choice, put on the breaks, make the change and rock on.  The other choice would have been to accept the limitations we created and roll with them.

Rolling with the mistakes would have been easier and faster but a huge mistake.  Like my good friend Neil Franklin says, "when things don't work, just change them, there is no reason to stay married to stupid".  Now our mistakes were not massive but as we evaluated the long term health and success of the company they would have had a massive negative impact on the business as a whole over time.  

While the decision to adjust so early caused us to delay bringing in the revenue a new company needs while brand new and we had to delay that inflow of capital and return on our efforts it was worth it.  

I have seen so many companies from small businesses to Fortune 100 corporations stay married to an idea, a message or a purchase they made just because time and money were already invested in it.  Never mind the fact that it didn't work, or had a higher cost then a replacement or was in some cases killing the business.  The mantra of "we are locked into this now" kept them on an often destructive path.

Many people who have worked for big corporations in the past one day form a company of their own.  It can be like Marketing ICE (all online) or a primarly off line business it doesn't matter.  Most of these people bring the "we have to stick with it" and other poisonous ideas into these new businesses.  Let me tell you, it can and often will kill or cripple a new company.

There is just no reason for this to happen.  When your company is small and new it is also nimble.  There is a lot to be said for sticking to your guns when you have to get things done but when a process, message or service is not working change it or kill it, remember there is no reason to stay married to stupid,

~ Jack

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