Why You don't Need a Website When You Start Your Business

why you don't need a website when you start your business.

When you’re about to start your business the first thing that comes up to your mind is creating a website. Although, it’s not the best place to start. Creating a website can be intimidating and time-consuming when you are just starting out. Often it’s useless too. You don’t have any audience, don’t know how to drive traffic to it, have nothing to offer, don’t know your audience, and don’t even know yourself yet sometimes.

As a person who spends months creating my first website for my first business, looking back today I can say that you don’t need a website when you just starting out. I could have spent this time improving my skills, building my portfolio, working with real people (to prove to myself that I’m capable of doing the actual work), connecting to people, building my audience, and collaborating with like-minded people. Instead, I spent months hiding behind the busy work, learning tech, and changing colours, fonts, and layouts. All this is important, but not when you start.

I would recommend focusing on doing things that can bring you, clients, first, and on your self-development.

Yes, it’s scary, you might feel like you’re dying inside when you reach out to people first when you put yourself out there when you can be rejected, or judged. That’s why we tend to hide behind busy work. But remember that it’s not busy, comfortable work that will bring you results.

When you start you don’t know yourself yet

Not many people really know what they’re doing when they just starting out their business, except if they’re marketing experts or people who were in business for decades. Few people do profound inner work during their lifetime. But when the core of your business is you, you don’t have a choice, but to work to discover your true, authentic self first. Everything starts from here.

What do you want to stand for in life? What do you value? W hat is your voice and how you will express it? What lights you up inside? What brings you joy? What makes you wake up every single morning? What is yours why? How do you want to live your life and why? Your business journey should start with self-discovery otherwise you will be stuck in many other areas.

Without deep inner work, it’s almost impossible to build a sustainable and thriving business and personal brand. It took me a lot of time to see and experience it. I was so desperate to succeed, imitated others, and put so much pressure on myself. I didn’t know how I could show up and why people will choose me.

When you don’t know the answers to all these questions, when there is no clarity, you feel lost, anxious, and overwhelmed. When you feel this way how can you build a strategic, website that reflects you and your brand? It’s impossible! You will end up changing colours and fonts, and layouts every single day. You always need to watch inside first.

You can start in a much more simpler way

There are a lot simpler ways to help you to start a business. When you’re not sure who you’re, when you didn’t do deep work on your brand foundation when you don’t know how to infuse your personality to create an aligned and authentic personal brand, I think that spending months and thousands of dollars on building a website is a waste of time and money.

This busy website-creating work can distract you and hold you back from doing scary work. You might feel that until you launch your website you can’t do anything else. You can’t start showing up, you can’t start creating content, you can’t start writing a blog, or connecting to people. How can you do that if you don’t have a website? But believe me, once you have a website you won’t feel more ready, more willing to do all this hard work, and you won’t feel more confident. You just have to start with what you have, trust the process and believe that you will be able to figure everything out on your way.

You can start by creating a simple landing page, blog page, or newsletter form. It takes only several hours to set up, it gives you an online presence and the possibility to connect with your audience. This way you will have an online presence outside social media, and you will be able to change and modify it fast if you need to.

Start from doing the things that will create a real difference for your business

This one is tricky. We don’t want to feel uncomfortable, be judged and be rejected. We make everything possible to run away from frustration and discomfort. But you will be uncomfortable, frustrated, and lost when you do something you have never done before when you do scary work or work that makes you quit your comfort zone. It’s a normal reaction, and there is nothing wrong with you. Our brain wants to keep us safe, it wants us to keep doing familiar and comfortable things. But if you keep doing the same things you did 5 years ago, probably you will be in the same place as 5 years ago.

The more fear or resistance you feel towards something can be a sign that it’s something that you need to do. When you just starting out the things that you might want to do before building your website are:

start creating content
start building your audience
build your portfolio or case studies
start building your email list
connect with people and reach out first
work with real people
work on mastering your skills and getting really good at what you do
do the deep self-development work on deconstructing your old beliefs and adopting new ones
get really clear on who you’re
work on getting clarity on your brand foundation

Doing all these things will naturally guide you to finding the visual brand style that you will use to build your website. Not the other way around. They will build your confidence, courage, persistence, skills, connections and trust among your audience.

You don’t know your audience and what they want yet

It takes time to really know your audience. And you can only do it by talking to them, creating content for them, and reaching out to them. All this will give you a more clear idea of the people you would like to work with.

I don’t like the ideal client avatar exercise that most branding coaches make their clients do. It’s way too abstract and has nothing to do with reality. Often you do it before you know yourself. How can you know who you would like to work with when you don’t even know yourself yet?

You create your website and write your website copy with a goal, you would like to get more clients, more visibility, to be more trustworthy. When you know better your audience and when you actually talked to them it’s so much easier to create a strategic and converting website.

You risk being too distracted and dissapointed

The aim of your website is to get your clients and get leads for your business. You don’t create it just for the sake of it, for putting beautiful pictures, and graphics there and speaking about yourself. But when you’re not clear about your audience, who you’re, your offer, your voice, and your brand story, you can be easily distracted by learning tech, and changing pictures, colours and fonts. Doing all this doesn’t help you to get clients, you just distract yourself.

Without a solid brand strategy and marketing strategy, ways to drive traffic to your website and deep inner work, you risk being disappointed when you launch your website.

When you just start out you don’t have an audience, and if you create a website by yourself you have no idea what you’re doing. Getting organic traffic takes time. It takes at least 6 months for Google to start ranking your website in the search.

So start by producing content, and writing blog posts, building an email list, building an audience, learning how the social media platforms work. By the time you actually finish creating your website, you will have some knowledge of how to drive traffic to it, and how to leverage your website for growing your business.

WITHOUT STRATEGY AND BRAND FOUNDATION YOUR WEBSITE WORTH NOTHING

Do you know what is your business about? What are the purpose and why behind it? Do you know how you would like to show up? What is your tone of voice? What are your values? How would you like to help your target audience? Who is even your target audience? And why?

What visual style do you like? What photo style feels like you? How would you like to be seen and perceived by your audience? What emotions would you like to evoke with your brand and website? How you will build a strong personal brand?

Do you see know-how building the brand foundation is vital before you create your website? Your website is the visual representation of you and your business. But you need to have clarity about all this before you create a visual representation of your business and brand. If you do the deep work on your brand foundation it will be so much easier to stay consistent with your visual style, but not change your mind every single day.

Why In the long run you will need to have a website for your business

Although you don’t need to have a website when you just starting out, you will eventually need to create one. It’s essential for growing and expanding your business. Social media can be a great tool to connect you to your people, but it should be your only tool. You don’t own these platforms. What will you do if you don’t have either an email list or a website and social media will disappear or change dramatically?

Here are some major benefits for your business from having a website:

You own it and can do whatever you want unlike social media platforms
You control what you say and the way you connect with your audience
It enhances your personal brand
It builds credibility and makes you more trustworthy
You have one place where you can store all of your content, offers, testimonials and case studies
It helps to get market your business 24/7, even when you sleep
It can help you to generate constant leads
Organic traffic through Google, especially when you have a blog
It saves your time, as you can optimize everything and have updates, and announces in one place

Final thoughts

You don’t need to have a website when you start your business. Don’t listen to coaches, gurus, and website designers who say you otherwise. You should start with creating content, building your audience, and building your email list, and you don’t need to have the website to start doing all these things.

If you do, however, would like to have some online presence outside social media, you can create a simple landing page, a blog page, or a newsletter subscription form. As you will start getting clarity on your brand foundation, your audience and you, you can easily transform these simple pages into a multiple-page website.