We’re excited to be sponsoring the MIT100K Business Plan Competition and have the opportunity to help the winner boost their web presence, which can help an early-stage startup have an edge when seeking more funding or funding their first customers.

Why is this important?

Having a well-designed site gives you cred. A good first impression and delivering your message effectively to initial customers (think: early adopters) or investors is key when you may not yet have a whole lot else to show for yourselves yet. When you’re featured in Mass High Tech’s “Startups to Watch” you want that traffic to convert into initial sales, inquiries, or investors, and for your design to have a positive effect with these initial visitors.

If you’re developing and selling a web application, it’s better to show what your first customers can expect to see and get them excited about it, rather than having a “coming soon page”. Even screenshots and a quick tour of your application can do wonders when it comes to converting initial customers even if you haven’t built out your application yet. In fact, this is a good way to test the viability of your web business without going into heavy development right off the bat. We call the initial mockups of an application rapid prototyping.

When you launch your initial site you should build a blog to start your search and social media marketing by developing online thought leadership and traffic to your site. Even if your business isn’t ready for launch yet, it’s important to have an excited group of primary customers who you can rely upon for beta testing or initial sales, as well as being able to update the investment and entrepreneurship community on how things are going for you. Visibility and maintaining interest from the different audiences is vital to gaining traction.

We met one of our clients RetireLife at the Babson business plan competition – here’s RetireLife founder and CEO Megan Shea’s take on the subject:

“By creating your web presence early on in your startup you can begin to understand customer preferences and ways they use the site to define and optimize your message as you scale the business – we have taken our learning from the past year coupled with the UI expertise of Fresh Tilled Soil to completely redesign our website to make it more user-friendly and fit for our target audience” – Megan Shea, RetireLife

We love talking about this. You can find us at the MIT100K semi-finals this Thursday or get in touch with Matt Boynton