I disagree completely that this is a long development – our philosophy always has been to get it out as fast as possible and rapidly iterate from there.

Some things take a long time and can’t be accelerated. We have approximately 200 products on launch. Most are coming direct from the manufacturer. Each has involved negotiations, credit checks (so they can put us on net 30 billing terms), and turn-around time for delivery…in some cases we had production runs specifically done for TD to meet our requirements.

Without the products, we can’t weight them, photo them, or write much of a description. I’m not going to put up an e-commerce site with everything back-ordered and no pictures or descriptions…what purpose would that serve? They need to be weighed for an accurate shipping quote, so it’s not like that’s optional either.

There’s really nothing on that list that I view as ‘optional’. As I mentioned in a previous post (http://www.adam-mcfarland.net/2008/03/06/the-art-of-the-launch/), we started with the idea that the earliest that we could get the site out was 8/1. With everyone busting their ass we were able to greatly accelerate our time table.

We are only a four man team. Expanding Detailed Image and settling into our warehouse alone could take 100% of our time.

All in all, we’ve moved as fast as we can to produce a quality product. Our entire team has been working 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week to make all of this happen. You might feel differently, but it feels like a miracle to me that we’ve actually managed to get this thing ready for a 4/1 launch. 4/1 was the date we set before all of the chaos of the last few months happened, and somehow we’ve still managed to keep our launch date when I think a lot of companies would have taken the easy road out and delayed until 5/1 or 6/1.

Just get the site out there and rapidly iterate. Until you go completely public you will never know whether you are even close to being on the right path. This is a long development to be relatively private.