Archive for August, 2008
Landing Pages & Lead Capture
Capturing leads and directing them to the website is an important element of internet marketing. We have placed multiple landing pages for the sole purpose of lead capturing that target one keyword phrase each. All of these landing pages have search engine optimized content. The landing pages are not too big, to avoid becoming boring. They have a maximum length of 200 words and are relatively easy to read and understand.
Again, the idea is to lead people in a direction, not drive them away.
What sets our landing pages apart is that Miss Abigale is on each landing page talking directly to the visitor.
Her script is derived from the keyword the visitor has searched for that leads him/her to that page. The idea is to get their attention - by hearing a character talking to them about the event related thing they have searched for. Miss Abigale directs them into leaving their names and email addresses by speaking with them directly and calling them to action.
Also, if they are already interested in publishing an event, they can click on a link which is prominently placed on the screen. This big link distraction effectively entices them into clicking the only other link on the page (other than the back button) if deciding to bypass our opt-in form. These pages are optimized in the search engine and targeted destinations in our pay per click advertising campaigns & designed so visitors either opt-in to our email form or they click through to our set up an event wizard as the only two choices other than clicking the back button.
The opt-in will be to receive a world class e-book on promoting events through social media strategies and web 2.0 techniques. These landing pages serve multiple goals for us. We either get a new customer from this or we get a new lead that will now start receiving our email campaign written as a sales funnel to convert them into customers eventually.
We have 700+ landing pages setup using different keywords. Of course, our landing pages will have to be optimized as much as possible to effectively become the sales funnel from the internet so must each contain unique content. They will act as a net to pull event planners, promoters and organizers into our sales channel and as more and more of these pages become ranked in the top 10 of the search engine results we will attract more and more customers into our organization through this route.
These landing pages are placed all over the net with different event related content to get people onboard our journey - otherwise they would never even know whether or not we exist.
Our Launch Story
A story is a message or impression that we communicate with people. It is meant to be consistent throughout the campaign, across multiple channels. The marketing messages, blog posts, website content, emails, everything needs to be aligned to the story. Please don’t confuse the word ’story’ with something fictitious. Its just the actual and real message thats sent out for the world to see.
Today I”m just going to talk about what the core message will be around the time of our official public launch. We will of course let everyone know (via public announcements in our social networking groups and also through our email campaign) about the exact launch date. People who’d be eager to use the platform before that can try to get to it through existing members.
As for people who are already members and users of the platform (our early adopters) - we’d run a Super Promoter campaign with them hoping to attract those members who have more than 500 active fans (or followers) under them in their social networks. The idea is to get those members who can promote the site to the most number of people and give them an incentive to earn more commissions for event ticket sales.
Now, I mentioned earlier that we’d want a 21 days straight launch campaign to get as many new subscribers onto the system as possible. But before that, the number of subscriptions coming from existing promoters is anticipated to swell before the gates are opened to the public. This is going to be the time of the most rush.
Hopefully, by the time launch day is upon us we will have generated more pre-launch members through our early adopters than expected. We do not want to test our servers to the extent of opening the doors to an undisclosed number of new members without proper risk-control. So this will be a nice and measured way of doing it.
The WOM effect is simple. Every new promoter can invite as many fans who can also become promoters and build out event pages so if we allow 5,000 members to join at once and they invite 100 fans each its half a million people, if these half million then invite another 100 each our servers would simply crash.
An announcement will have to be made a couple of days out from the launch that we are going to be limiting our new member subscriptions to 1000 new members on launch day. Scarcity and server safety. Those who can’t gain access on launch day will need to leave their names and email address to be on our list to be notified of the next time we are opening our doors. In the mean time people can still become members if invited by any current member or they can request to become fans of current promoters and if accepted will get an account.
Our aim will be to control new memberships to manage our risk, and to have conversations with those leads who missed the opportunity. We can give them ideas on how to become a member through existing members or notify them of dates of our next open door launch with tips on how they can get in early this time to make sure they beat the cut off.
Our Pre-Launch Story
Our pre-launch campaign plays a significant role in our launch process - the better the pre-launch hype, the better the launch. Pre-launches are however tricky areas, if the product is still under development/testing when the campaign begins.
We know that we have to play with some extremely important mental triggers to get the kind of attention that we want. Our greatest challenge was to build a feeling of scarcity - because our product is free and available for the mass market. Our business model was to give access to the product for free so that adoption could spread via word of mouth. We get prospects visiting and using our site that we can later market specific services to; whereas they get a great website for their events. Its a win-win.
Our marketing strategy was to attract early adopters through delivery of good quality content through blogs - these early adopters will later lead the masses into using our products and are thus very important for our business. Our revenue model is to attract commercial event promoters and planners who would take up our ticketing & merchandising modules earning us a small percentage of all tickets & merchandising sold off their pages.
Building a launch story around this model that can instill a sense of value for the application is our next step. In our prelaunch phase, we also want to create a sense of scarcity and exclusivity at the same time that will prompt them to visit and join as soon as we launch.
In our case, it wasn’t that easy to create a story, considering the fact that we didn’t have a product to show and no social proof to help ease prospects. Yet, we had to get strangers to give up their names and email addresses to get on a queue to use it. Perhaps the toughest part of the prelaunch process. We’ve thought of adding dramatic videos in the hype phase to build a sense of anticipation, all the while touching upon some basic functionality details. Since the idea is to attract early adopters, we started to engage them in conversation and brought them into our launch process. The more engaged they are, the better it is for us - after all, these 100 or so people are going to be our beta level product users.
If we gave our early adopters a couple of months on the application and close the doors to the general public we would get away with a scarce community in the early few months. Lets face it, nobody likes to join ghost towns. It is human psychology to relate buzz and traction to the value of the products offered and likewise have inhibitions if there isn’t enough traction. We understand that it takes time to get the activities rolling, and so we don’t want to lose people who can eventually become a valuable part of our community.
So, in essence, what we lack in terms of volume would be made up in the form of exceptional personalized support for the early trial adopters - they will share in the launch, feedback and development process; until we know we ready to launch with a bang. To formulate this constant feedback mechanism we will have a consistent flow of communication to and fro, involving them in the thick of the process.
After the initial testing we can move onto a series of small launches for referred people only - perhaps friends of the early adopters. So, the private beta will still be going on, but with a slightly larger set of people. When these additional people are exclusively picked up (not because there names were next in line), they’d feel a sense of reward and will hopefully be able to provide valuable feedback. We’ll also get audio and video testimonies from these initial users to use in our marketing campaigns.
Some four months after our early adopters have been using the system and are completely hooked on to it, we’ll open for public. We would want to time our official public launch just a couple of months before the most festive season of the year - thats right, before Christmas - when everyone will be celebrating events and would benefit from using our platform.
Our entire launch sequence will undergo a three week cycle of extreme excitement and buzz. Hopefully, we’ll get the word around and everything will turn out good. Anyone who is launching a business or product or event, can effectively apply these pre-launch tactics for maximum effect. Remember, its all about pulling the right strings at the right time.
Eventslisted.com - Launch sequence time line
I’ll touch on the stuff that we’ve already covered before this launch sequence was published, so that you have a better feel for our pre-launch plans.
In March 2008, we launched our brochure website, video and squeeze page to capture names and email addresses of interested prospects. We also kicked off our domain optimization work, under a 6 month optimization roadmap.
In April 2008, when the brochure website was all set up, we began working on our social networking presence to build contacts. This social networking aspect has been a constant work in progress to date and will continue all the way up to launch and beyond.
This work includes: Link baiting and networking within social media platforms to introduce a softer pre-launch campaign without any fan fair and without drawing unwanted attention. Our aim has been to add one prospect at a time into our pre-launch customer list. These prospects emerge from our conversations, followings, friending & fanning strategies, on the online social networks. The idea is to approach them as you would network in actual gatherings and parties. Except that this gathering has millions of global attendees and has multiple rooms that you can walk into to find the early adopters that you need to win over to launch our site. There isn’t any magic wand here - its all about taking time for introductions, meetings, conversations and so on.
We’ll continue with this regular social networking aspect of our launch for 3 months, attracting one new pre-launch customer at a time.
In May 2008, we launched two of our blogs on Social Media & Launch Strategies and started posting content on them daily to give our social media presence some credibility throughout the networks that we have built in the past month.
The blogs touch upon explorative and informative topics in event marketing and event launch domains. The idea is to keep the content flowing with consistent quality.
In June 2008, we launched the Event Launch Guidelines blog and began to add structure to our overall blog content. We added some web 2.0 cutting edge “tactics, tools and tips” presented in an event launch step by step manner. The aim of this blog is to position our niche as social media, internet launch and online event marketing specialists and not event planning or management specialists.
In July 2008, we are following the Event Launch Guidelines blog closely by turning our Launch Strategies blog into an ongoing case-study that follows our own launch. We want our community to learn from looking at our launch, and feel like a part of our launch. At the same time we are cementing our credibility by showing that we put our money wherever we put our mouth.
In August 2008, we will launch our Joint Venture partner campaigns to a get a rush of targeted traffic to the site. We will target JV partners who are leaders in the event planning and promotions industry with a view to turning their subscribers into our early adopters - we will increase the perceived value of the application by offering these early adopters early access to the site before the public which is only available to our JV partner list members and our own subscribers placing an application full sign at the front door.
At this stage all early adopters or pre-launch customers / members will be able to invite new members onto the application but no outside member will be able to gain access without an invitation from one of the existing members.
In September 2008, with the run into Christmas on our side, this is the month we start our official public launch campaign. The campaign will run over 3 weeks and will include video testimonials from the early adopters and pre-launch users who will provide us the social proof we need to convince the public the application is the real deal.
This phase in the launch will coincide with our SEO campaign hitting its straps, by this time our page rankings should be on the top pages of the search engines bringing lots of organic traffic to the site where they will learn that to get in they must visit one of our existing members event pages & request for them to accept them as a fan.
Around this time our activity in the social networking domains should also be peaking at 10,000 fans or followers ready to be invited into our official product launch.
The launch will be covered with intense Public relations campaigns over 4 weeks. I’ll discuss more details of this phase later.
In October 2008, we launch the Official product launch. During October, we will also relaunch our super promoter campaign where we immortalize our early adopters and bigger customers by giving them their own classification, privileges and financial incentives and rewards as their own classification within the application hierarchy.
In November 2008, we will run the product post-launch campaigns where we bring everyone up to speed with the hectic past few months and outline our plans to provide services & training platforms for members.
Finally, in December 2008, around the time of Christmas, we’ll launch our official product launch campaign. Thereafter, we’ll always be post launching, pre-launching or relaunching something within the company at all times to keep the momentum moving forward.
EventsListed.com - Getting Set for the Launch
All event launches start with having a plan. I’m not going to discuss how the business opportunity was discovered, how the product specifications and development has taken place nor how we conducted our market research and early stage planning. This is because all of that work has already been done before we launched these blogs. Here onwards I’m just going to talk about what we’re doing now to launch the product which is almost ready (in testing phase).
The first thing we do is map out our strategy and list all of the sequences we are going to execute for each strategy so that we end up with a master plan that is a compilation of multiple micro plans that detail each phase of the launch that we can then put together into a master plan. We use mind-mapping software to do a lot of this so that my team are always able to see the overall strategy or big picture and can then break it down into compartments where they can also see an overview. Its important everyone is on the same page and able to contribute to the overall strategic planning. (If you are more comfortable using Work Breakdown Structures or other project management tools, that’ll work fine as well. The idea is to draw out the basic map of the launch).
Here is the high level Planning Sequence that we put in place for the Events Listed Website launch plan.
1. Register domain names & build some pages to establish your brands basic look and feel. Of-course this involves creating the required brand attributes before settling in on design direction. We chose to use our avatar (character) in Miss Abigale on the main website to introduce the visitors to the sites content. This character is consistently present in our marketing campaigns and messages so that readers and prospects can get accustomed to it. We have this step already taken care of.
2. Use robot.txt files to block search engine spiders from crawling the site until it is SEO ready. If you’re not proficient at SEO on page structures it’s important to contract SEO professionals who know their stuff to do it for you. If you get this wrong it can cost you a huge amount in terms of opportunity costs without you event realizing it. We have a team of SEO professionals working on the site content as of day one.
3. Formulate the product development and testing sequence into a time-line, so that the launch preps can be aligned with the product development. Since our product is already being tested right now, we have already undergone most of the product development modules successfully. However, I will share the timeline with you in my next post to give you a clearer picture of what it looks like.
4. Plan our blog & content strategy in line with above product development time line to be tied into our marketing strategy though we give this component of the launch its own heading on the basis that content is always king. (I’ll add more detail on this in later posts).
5. As discussed in my previous post, we would want to then define any off line marketing strategies we aim to deploy along with outlining our online or Internet marketing plan for driving traffic to the site (will add more detail in later posts).
6. With all these components of the launch listed we can start to plan our launch. We do this by breaking the launch into 3 sequences & plotting them into a time line (more detail in later posts).
EventsListed.com - Website Launch Strategy
Ok so now let’s walk through the Events Listed product website launch strategies that we are building and working on.
1- Building Traffic: Now that we have the blogs running, we need to drive traffic to it instead of letting the content go to waste. We know that there are a LOT of people out there who can benefit from these blogs, we just need to find a way to get them here. So the first step would be to generate targeted traffic to our blog posts and main website that contains quality content targeted specifically for event planners. I’m going to discus the different approaches we are using for generating traffic using social media and other strategies next week.
2- Free Information: Once we have the required traffic pouring in, we will build a blog/Vlog or video blog that will include a podcast audio track, video & text feed so consumers can read, listen or watch the free content provided in a place and time of their choice. If we present ourselves as employing the latest in media syndication strategies (which we are) through our own launch process we will anticipate we will attract high level, tech savvy industry leaders wanting to A. assess the quality of our content and B. Note with interest the way we are syndicating it.
3- Pre-launch Alpha Customers: Our strategy is to gain an active following of early adopters and thought leaders. If these people become the pre-launch customers, then they will bring the masses (or rather the rest of our targeted customers) with them. So, it’s important for us to get these people on board first and engage with them as much as possible.
4- Launch Ramp-up: Once these early adopters have tried out and tested our product website, we will obtain video and audio testimonials to add to our launch campaign to get the attention of the rest of the world (prospects).
5- Launch: Finally, once the pre-launch is complete, the official product website will be launched to the public . We are planning an extensive three week product launch campaign though are careful not to commit to a date until we know where we stand mid pre-launch.
This entire process up to the launch is going to take approximately 3 months from kicking off.
You may want to know the rationale behind targeting the thought leaders initially as opposed to getting straight into our niches. When you’re dealing with physical products, doing trade is relatively simple. Information trade, on the other hand, is quite a different ball-game altogether. All information has an original thought process (source). These are generated and demonstrated by thought leaders and early adopters. There are thought originators in every domain and industry: think about Apple’s design philosophy, 37signal’s usability philosophy, etc.
This original information is taken in, disseminated, split, dissected, rehashed, reworked and re-presented in various forms through multiple mediums down the line. Sometimes it takes years before the information is adopted by the general population and then it’s pretty much a rolling game thereon. The early adopters slowly but surely bring their friends, families, networks and everyone who looks to them as the people in their network who have the finger on the pulse. You know the people you turn to when it comes to new technology and innovation, you turn to them for their lead and authority and so does everyone else. If we get enough of these people enjoying our product early then we are assured that over time our websites concept will gain momentum. The transition from thought originators to masses can take a few months, weeks or even days, depending on what the concepts are. Generally things that have a higher learning curve (and hence a higher shifting cost) take a longer while to catch on.
For us it is important to bring people that others trust and respect already. This ensures a deep seeded market penetration that cuts to the chase. Ultimately if the early adopters end up learning about our product after the masses their response to it will ultimately have the same effect. If they are not first to try it on however they wont deem it as a viable opportunity as the first to put their name on it.
EventsListed.com - Launch Game Plan
I am going to blog about the entire website launch process from start to finish for my readers to enjoy front row seats, at a ground level. How is it relevant to you? Well the website is a product, and the product launch is an event. The same principles can be applied to launching any event; whether a night club launch or a concert. So whether you are an event promoter or a small business owner, you should be able to gather a lot of interesting tactics and steps during this live launch process.
The high level strategy is that I intend to employ the free line philosophy along with blogging strategies that we are in the process of executing already ever since launching the Eventline blogs. The same strategy can be applied for your event. If promoting the launch of a concert you could blog about the entertainer.
The idea behind our blogs (we have three blogs running simultaneously covering different areas of event launches) is to attract targeted people into our network. The better the blog content the better the quality of people we draw in. We aim to attract thought leaders & early adopters who already have a following into the blogs. Social marketing is all about building relationships of mutual benefit and trust. We will link our blog content to selected, targeted social networking communities that we would like a presence in and through quality content, draw early adopters and thought leaders into our blogs who will slowly bring their followers or second and third degree contacts with them. However, this can only be done if we get the attention of high-ranked (and looked up to) people at the top of the event marketing (or related) business fields and you can only do this through quality content. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time and expect people to respect our time as well. Mutual respect - a building block for our relationship. Leaders in any field will not respond to anything but quality when it comes to content. They will respond to anything that can improve who they are and what they do, which is why they are in the leadership role we want to capitalize on.
Driving traffic through our blogs:
Our blogging strategies involve building and tying together three separate blogs covering the following areas of discussion:
First of we have this blog - it covers Launch strategies, principles and the basic psychology behind launching successful events. We discuss ways of having high impact launches and making the most of your event launch processes. This blog has been running for a few weeks now and the content consists of the latest, proven strategies for launching events, products or services using the internet as a platform.
Next up we have a blog dedicated to social media and networking strategies that event marketers across the globe can learn from and apply to their event launches & marketing. It discusses all the interesting things that can be done by leveraging today’s massive online media. We decided to focus on social media as a marketing medium and not marketing in general for one reason; Social media is the future, todays youth are entertaining themselves online, what interests them is user generated content & social participation through multi media. They watch Youtube & download music on itunes, they network on MySpace or Facebook and connect with like-minded people in any online community that caters to whatever it is that interests them. They don’t watch TV & like I use to, they no longer read papers or publications to learn the ways of the world like we did because they can learn it from a blogger or youtuber. In a new world where anyone can launch their own TV channel or syndicate their views through online media at next to zero capital cost, the marketing and advertising landscape as we have known it will be un-recognizable in 5 to 10 years from now. Social media is the future & any progressive business venture needs to be into it in a big way. We felt that by focusing one blog on how to utilize social media as a marketing strategy we would attract a wider audience of progressive professionals attracted to the tighter, specific niche of social media strategies over general event marketing as a topic. This blog has been running simultaneously with the Launch strategies blog.
We have another blog called the Event Launch Guidelines that started running on June 16th. This blog has a slightly different format and is meant to be read as a resource center for all of the tools, tips and tricks that event managers can benefit from during their event launch steps. The content of this blog unfolds in a step by step fashion with links to cutting-edge resources that readers can immediately put to use.
The idea behind this blog was “not” to tell established event planners / promoters how to do what they already are doing for a living, it is more about introducing readers to innovative technology, applications and online services that are all FREE tools. We’re sharing the tools in a step by step format of launching an event - the process they are already familiar with and know well as a foundation.
The content of all three blogs complements each other and drives the readers into the same direction in which they can learn about how to launch better events using launch and marketing strategies and tools. From our perspective, the blogs also tie into each other as far as their directional planning goes. When we begin unfolding our actual live website launch process, all three blogs will be tying the entire story together and showing the complete picture to the readers.
High level Objective of the launch strategy:
Our high level objective is straightforward. It is to eventually become an authority on deploying social media and web 2.0 for launching events. This is in line with your product and service offerings and hence will help us build credibility and reputation with the prospects first.
We want to draw event planners & promoters into following our free content whilst drawing them into becoming a part of Events Listed community.
In due course, we want to officially launch Events Listed - the event marketing, planning and networking platform to become the community meeting place that offers both social, educational, resource and networking advantages to the community. This will be based on our community relationship building strategies and concepts discussed earlier. The Free Line meets the Commercial Line when Event Planners reach a stage where they use the platform to sell tickets through our site and we get a commission of ticket sales. Mutual benefit - another building block for our relationship.
E-Book Giveaway
Another string in the launch game plan is to offer a world-call e-book about launching events online utilizing social media in today’s web 2.0 world. It will contain tips, tricks, resources and an complete step by step launch case-study. Anyone who is launching an online business can greatly benefit from it. Not only that, but we’ll be offering it completely for free. We’ll be using it as a central feature in all of our efforts towards driving traffic.
Any business owner or event marketer can download the book by filling in their email addresses and names. The quality of the content is supposed to be so top-notch that it attracts the industry professionals to it. What we would want in return is to build our lists out of this and get these professionals onto our sales funnel towards our application. Anyone who finds the ebook interesting and useful will find our platform and services extremely beneficial to their businesses as well. So, its a win-win.
Product Development time line
This is the third step in the planning sequence that I discussed in my post yesterday.
The event we are planning this launch for is the Events Listed social networking website launch. Since the event is effectively a product launch with the product being the website, the product development phase becomes very crucial to a successful and timely launch. The event Launch plan must be built around the product development timeline.
The product development in this case must become our working clock that ticks away with everything else being built around it. If you are finding ways of applying these principles to your event launch, the best comparison would be that of launching the opening of a new venue. The launch plan must be plotted around the venue building development plan (or else there won’t be any launch party!)
If you’re interested, here is what our development timeline looked like.
Module I 17th April 2008
1. Static Pages
2. Event Category/Subcategory
3. Banners
4. Registration
5. Forgot Password
6. Manage Promoters/Super Promoters (Admin Control Panel)
7. Affiliates
Modules II 15th May 2008
1. Add Modules
2. Manage Hotels Information
3. Manage Event (Promoter/Admin section)
4. Event details/Statistics
5. Event Walls
6. Calendar of events
7. Ticket counters
8. Accommodation Map
9. Available hotel information on map (Google Map)
Module III 6th June
1. Event Listing/Search engine
2. Commission system ( Ticket seller/Promoter/Admin )
3. Manage My Account details/Stats
4. Manage Fan Clubs
5. Manage My Profile Pages
6. Messaging system
7. Tasks Manager
8. Guest Survey module
Module IV 20th June 2008
1. Promoter Forums
2. Disputes Forums
3. Static Reports
4. Ticketing
5. Manage RSS Feeds
6. Google Adsense Reports
Testing phase V1.1 27th June 2008
Pre-Launch customer trial release V1.2 1st July 2008
Product Launch start V1.3 23rd August 2008
Public release Official Launch 14th September 2008
Engineering specifications
Once we had the functional specs ready along with our design mindmaps, we had a fair idea where to go from there. The mindmaps outlined how each page needed to be designed in html and as we documented each page into our master specifications that listed every function - I knew that we had something really exciting going. The value of our product became more and more clearer during this process and I felt closer to building just what our market needs at this time.
After 3 months of solid work and dealing with all the issues, complications, anomalies that came our way - we ended up with a fully detailed and complete functional specification that included links to pages already fully designed containing all of the functionality of the entire application in them.
We searched for the best ranking developers on RentACoder which is an art in itself, we approached more than 20 and sent them a job description asking if they would send me a proposal for doing the development and a bid. The more specific your requirements, the more easier it will be to filter out prospects. I always write a 2 page outline of what it is we are looking for and I ask each bidder to reply by sending back a detailed outline of what they understand about the work and how they plan on tackling it. Trust me, only serious bidders will take the time out - those are the people you want to be talking to.
You can count on 60% of the bidders dropping out the minute you ask for this and of the 40% who don’t you can count on 80% of them ruling themselves out - because the detailed answer they present are either copied and pasted from some other work so non specific to your request or the writing and presentation is second rate.
We ended up with just 2 suitable candidates out of 20 bidders after this process. After interviewing them both the winning bidder was clear, it didn’t even come down to a choice. There was only one man standing and so far so good in regards to the work we are getting back.
Having found and finalized a deal with our engineering team it is just a matter of providing them the specification and a file full of HTML pages that link off the spec to pages already hosted on our server. They can read the specification referencing the designs on our servers and ask for any clarity they need, they can load the same pages onto their servers and start designing the database schematics. From here on its simply a matter of wiring it all up without having to risk a mis-understanding of expectations.
They can see it in our pre-designed pages and read the functionality in our specification. When it comes time to deliver version 1.1 to us, all we need to do is refer to the specification. Check off every function and test it, if its not on the new dynamic pages they designed for us then the specification is not complete saving any disputes on grounds of mis-understandings. Everything is black and white.
Sourcing engineers to build our product
Sometimes you come across people who seem like African guides walking you through a game park at night. These are gems that you need to have on your team to become successful. They’re people who have already treaded the path and know it well enough to be able to make good decisions.
In the case of Events Listed I have been the guide. Years ago I had walked the same park without guides and was mauled by lions - so I learned how to tread it through experience. Ever since this experience I dedicated my life to learning everything their was to know about the park, its risks, dangers & pitfalls to ensure I became a guide who could navigate it without depending on others.
The best lessons in life are the most expensive ones and I can assure you that the cliche that failure leads to success if experienced by an optimist is also quite true.
Where should you find engineers? There is a lot of discussion in India pertaining to the value in using Indian Developers for development. I can tell you this for FREE, Indians are great mathematicians who just have a different culture. There outlook is different to western people because their values differ. Social and cultural norms may differ but the corporate world has been flattened out so much that it hardly matters.
Even in the States, if two different people look at the same piece of art they will in all probably see different sides to it. Every perspective varies. Have you ever watched an interaction between two people then discussed it with someone else who saw the same thing you did and to your amazement, what they perceived to have happened was completely different to what you perceived. Theres a cool movie that came out recently that demonstrates this called Vantage Point. Do see it if you get a chance.
Having said that, your business logic and a functional specification need to be designed in a way which is easy to understand for anyone, regardless of cultural background. Engineers need to know what it is that you expect from them before commissioning them to build it. This reduces the risks of getting something completely different made from what you were imagining and expecting and can cause quite a negative stir to your launch timelines.
I found a good web designer to partner with me who was prepare to share the risk. He and I spent 3 months building and documenting the site from scratch. We began by listing every functionality we wanted it to perform onto power point slide layouts for every page. We then categorized them into work flows. After that we mind-mapped these work flow catagories and how they interconnected with each other until we came up with a functional spec of what we needed the site to perform. Its good to have the right team and partners with you in your venture. Trust me, finding the right people is difficult but vital, so spend a good amount of time evaluating prospects.
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