Stop Polishing Plates and Start Bringing in Guests
Your website is ready. Stop tweaking and start driving traffic — real data beats endless polishing every time.
Hey marketer! 👋🏻
Imagine you’ve built a restaurant in the middle of a field. Beautiful interior, carefully crafted menu, perfected recipes. Every day you come in, look at the menu, and think — I’d change this word here, tweak that description there, rephrase this bit. You polish the plates, straighten the cutlery, try new table arrangements. But no guests are coming. Because there’s no road leading to your restaurant in the middle of that field, and instead of driving busloads of hungry people there, you’re still fiddling with the menu.
This is exactly what I see with so many online projects in my practice. And it’s a huge shame, because these projects are often good. The websites look nice, the products are quality, the services are needed. But their creators are stuck in an endless cycle of improvements.
Two Types of People Who Get Stuck in This Loop
The first type keeps tweaking their website or online store. Obsessing over wording, debating button colors. They consult friends, acquaintances, or — and this is even worse — endlessly discuss it with AI. AI will always find something to improve because it’s programmed to give you answers. It will never tell you: “It’s done now. Launch it.”
The second type creates social media content but doesn’t think about how to actually get it in front of real people. They publish posts, watch single-digit likes roll in, and wait for a miracle that never comes.
Days pass. Weeks. Months. A handful of visitors stumble onto the website. A few followers like something on social media. But conversions? Inquiries? Orders? Silence.
Why It Doesn’t Work
The more unique your project is, the harder it is to find — people don’t even know something like this exists. And if it’s a common product or service? In the first weeks and months, your SEO won’t be strong enough anyway, and you’ll disappear in a sea of competition.
Organic reach today is simply minimal. Without paid advertising, your project won’t reach your target audience. Meanwhile, you’re analyzing the behavior of those five people who wandered in, trying to draw conclusions. But you can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from five visits.
What to Do About It
At some point, you need to say: it’s ready now. Not 100% ready — 80% is enough. Test the website on a few people. Give them two or three minutes to browse, then ask: What is this about? What’s the offer? Was everything clear? Or ask your first real customers how their buying experience was.
And then? Then you need to start driving people there in volume. That means paying for ads. Ideally, hire someone experienced who will spend your money as efficiently as possible and recommend a budget and channels.
Only when you have enough visitors can you evaluate whether it’s done well or poorly. Whether people understand it, whether it grabs their attention, whether they complete the conversion you want. And then keep refining — but on the go, with real data.
Two Tools That Will Help
Once people start coming to your site from ads, you need to know what they’re doing there.
Hotjar (or similar session recording tools) lets you record user behavior. Every visit — mobile or desktop — gets recorded as a video. You see how people scroll, what they click, where they hover. You’re not limited to blind numbers from Google Analytics.
And then it’s good to be close to your visitors. LiveChat or Intercom are customer chat tools you can connect to your website, Facebook, or WhatsApp. Many people don’t want to call — it’s a barrier. They don’t want to send emails — it’s effort. They don’t trust contact forms. But typing in a chat? Anyone can do that. And you’ll find out immediately if there’s a problem somewhere.
What This Is Really About
As long as you’re staring at your website alone at home with no one visiting, you have no data to base decisions on. You’re relying on your gut feeling, on opinions of people around you who might be biased and don’t represent your target audience.
It makes absolutely no sense to save money and rely only on organic content. It can work, but it’s a long game and you can’t count on it.
Instead of endless tweaking of words and buttons, you need to shift your project as quickly as possible into the phase where money starts flowing. Everything else can be adjusted on the go — with real feedback from real people.
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So — do you have a project that’s 80% ready? Maybe it’s time to stop polishing plates and start bringing in guests.
See you in the next one! ✌🏻
Jan Barborik
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