August Flanagan

I love the feeling of ramping up to a new site launch. Whether it is a weekend project like www.lifechore.com or a bigger project like www.lenguajero.com there really isn’t a better feeling than that anticipation right before and right after a launch.

How’s it going to go? Am I onto something incredible here? Will I be on the front page of every industry publication before midnight?

Unfortunately, the answer is almost always “No”. Still, that feeling of accomplishment when a site goes live and is all of a sudden available to the entire world is an exhilarating moment.

My most recent project (I’m starting to really hate the word(s) “startup”) hasn’t really had that moment. In February I published a TOEFL eBook. By the end of the month sales from that ebook were outpacing revenue from my startup. And this was after only about 40 hours to get the book out there on a super basic/ugly site. It was around this time that my partner and I started considering shifting our focus away from Lenguajero and onto our TOEFL iBT site.

Unlike when Lenguajero went live TOEFL Now never had that all encompassing “this is it” moment. Instead over the months we continued to work part-time on developing the site and new iterations were pushed as they became available. Small changes two or three times a week, a relatively big change here or there, but nothing to get excited about.

Finally last week we invested in some long overdue design changes (Karlik Design is absolutely fantastic). All of a sudden I can see the site taking shape in front of me. Those cloudy ideas are starting to become more concrete, almost visible.

Of course we have a long way to go, and most of the things we want to implement on the site aren’t there yet, but a vision has presented itself, and that is the closest thing I’ve felt to a “this is it” moment since starting work on this project.