It Won’t Happen Overnight … But It Will Happen

There used to be an advert on TV back in Australia for a shampoo brand called Pantene. Like most ads of its type it focused on shots of women whooshing their hair about glamorously while promising softer, silkier hair. As a person who doesn’t have much hair, about the only thing I found memorable about the ad was the slogan they used, “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen!”

It’s a great sales pitch as it ensures customers have to buy a product for some time before they might possibly come to the conclusion that it’s not right for them. But more than that it’s just a great line, and this is proven by the fact that if you say those words to pretty much any Australian they’ll start whooshing their own hair about … well maybe not, but they’ll most likely know it’s from those Pantene ads.

I think the reason the line resonates so well is it’s a great descriptor for a lot of things in life besides the potential of adding shine to your hair. It’s the kind of sage advice you might give to someone battling away at a problem or setting out to do something difficult. Personally I’ve always thought it seemed to fit rather well with starting websites.

… Maybe try hitting Refresh again?

If you’ve ever started a blog, a web app, a community, or any other kind of web startup, the chances are you’ve experienced that moment, right after you launch where you start hitting refresh waiting for something to happen.

When we launched FlashDen, it was the culmination of six months of hard work, stress, hopes and plans. For half a year we’d been building up to the launch and as dumb as it sounds I think we sort of imagined that everyone else was also building up to it. So there we sat, on launch night, refreshing, checking different pages, waiting for something to happen.

The reality was it took a while for traffic to start seeping into the site, for our various marketing plans to send some visitors, for our ad buys to be clicked on and for anything to actually happen. And even then it took weeks before anyone was buying or uploading, months before anyone was really chatting on the forums, and about a year before we felt like the site had come alive.

Why you need time

There are a few different reasons why you need time to get a site going:

1. Content Must Build Up
   Whether it’s blog posts, forum threads, uploads or products, if your site requires content, it’s going to take a while to build up. Even if you pre-populate a site, it’s not the same as month and years of organic content growth. There’s a depth that only time can provide, and since as we know the web is all about the long tail, you need that depth for a site to really get momentum.
2. Search Traffic Requires Time
   There aren’t many traffic sources that compare to organic search traffic. It’s targeted, free, and plentiful. But to get it requires a site to build links, to gain authority and to have plenty of content to match search queries. When I look at FlashDen’s traffic statistics, incoming search traffic shows very slow but very steady growth. Month in, month out the search traffic keeps building. Every now and then it flattens off for a while, once or twice it’s even gone backwards, but over time it just seems to keep plodding along higher and higher.
3. There’s No Such Thing as Instant Community
   There is simply no way at all to create a community without time. It’s like trying to make a baby materialize without the nine months of pregnancy, it simply can’t be done. For a community to develop, people need to get to know each other, conversations need to mount up, common interests need to be found and relationships need to be built. All these things require time.
4. It’s Your User’s Schedule That Counts, Not Yours
   How often have you walked past a restaurant and thought “Oh I should remember to go there *next* time I need a good place to eat”? Finding something is often only half the equation. The chances are that most visitors to your site won’t actually want or need what it has to offer right there and then. However they might do so in the future, and the longer you’ve been around, the more likely there is someone out there thinking “Oh I know just the site for this!”

Setting things in motion for use later

So some time ago I came to the conclusion that if websites need time to grow, then it might be a good idea to get sites out today that we’ll need tomorrow. It’s kind of like planting crops in spring so you can harvest them before winter when you’ll really need the food.

It’s a bit tricky to know what you’ll need in the future and I’m still experimenting with this theory, but I do have an example to share! A year and a half ago, with not much of a budget we launched a site called FaveUp that is a little design gallery site. It doesn’t do anything hugely different from the dozens of other design galleries out there, and to be honest we haven’t paid it a lot of attention in the intervening time. But nonetheless it has very slowly grown in traffic and content, and now 18 months later it’s ready to harvest.

You see back then I had some ideas about what would make a great design gallery, but we didn’t have the budget, time or manpower to build them. Figuring we might have all that in the future, we put a very watered-down version of the ideas out there, built on a shoestring. Sure enough, things have fallen into place and we’re almost ready to launch a much bigger vision of a design gallery, and instead of having to start from scratch, it’ll get FaveUp’s traffic and content to build on.

Starting Today

In many ways realising that it’s very hard to get around this whole “websites take time” constraint, is a good way to spur action today. It makes you realise that it’s often better to get something out there now in preparation for making something bigger out of it later.

For example, let’s say you have a plan to launch a killer blog, but you’re holding off until you have enough free time to write every day. You may now see that it’s in fact better to start blogging now, even if it’s just once a week, so that when you do have that free time to write daily, you’ll already be way ahead.

Or perhaps you’ve got an application that you don’t want to launch until you’ve built every last feature mankind could want. Knowing that adoption and usage take time to build, might lead you to release without some of those features because you can put them in as the signups grow.

If things don’t happen overnight, then every day sooner that you start, is one day less you’ll have to wait later. And that’s a pretty good reason to get moving immediately!