I built my first website in high school during the late nineties. I agonized over the homepage for hours. Actually...strike that. I agonized over it for weeks.

Then came the thirteen years of building websites for other people as I grew my web agency, HotPress Web. I can't even tell you how many conversations about homepages I had. Hundreds if not thousands...

"What should go on it?"

"What's the headline?"

"How are we going to keep attention?"

"Is there room for everything?"

Then there was those clients that were decently large with ten different departments. Everyone has to get their little piece. That's why most corporate homepages look more like the New York Times front page than the beautifully pristine lobbies they keep for their office fronts.

I've moved on

But I sold my web agency last year (not entirely to get away from the homepage discussion, but it might have contributed at least a little). 

Following that acquisition and after founding uGurus last November, I had big visions for what I wanted to accomplish. A lot of which was going to take a lot of time. 

So what's the homepage in the meantime? What do we put there when we have zero product to showcase. At the time, our product schedule had May pegged for our first product launch. 

But I wanted to build brand awareness. I guess I could have done a "coming soon" email opt-in squeeze. Why bother. The web is full of empty hype-train promises. I wanted to give our visitors something to sink their teeth into.

I met with my team and the answer was simple: let's forget our homepage for now. 

We decided to launch a site with just a blog. Even though we didn't have our first video course done, it gave us a chance to begin developing an audience. Our platform wasn't near completion, but it allowed us to test some basic functions of our system and technology stack without a big debut. 

I was able to ship something to gain traction without having to worry about investing time into our frontline marketing and branding.

So we launched homepage-less. 

[ibimage==23123==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center](traffic stats for uGurus.com March to July)

The funny thing is that we have launched several products since and our homepage is still our blog. 

I remember sitting with clients telling them that publishing content about what they did was infinitely more important than their homepage. And for the better part of 2013 I have been able to live this.

Having a blog where I could start to connect and build an audience has proved to be extremely important to how our products have performed. 

In late April, prior to getting a paid product online, a post I published went viral and hit the #1 position on Hacker News. All of the traffic went back to our site and seeded our email list. 

Even though we didn't have a homepage or even a paid product, users could connect with the brand through the dozen or so posts and subscribe to our email list.

It's finally time

Now that we are launching courses on a regular schedule, our platform is beginning to take shape, and we have hundreds of customers, I'm just getting around to investing the time needed to create that holiest of pages.

But instead of being a homepage leading to nowhere or a half baked product, it's going to invite people to experience what we've been so busy doing: creating great product. 

If you are creating a startup, instead of letting the world know what you are up to and investing weeks on creating the perfect homepage, I invite you to try what we did. Setup your blog as the front page and start talking about what you are up to. 

Show your product development cycle. Tell people what you are working on and more importantly, why you are doing it. 

It might not be for everyone, but it sure helped build a lot of traffic and fans for uGurus.