Introduction

In today's edition of Ground Control I'm going to go over the entire process of building out my website, brand identity and setting up all of the tools that I used to launch the MVP of the brand. 

For those that don’t know, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. I say that not to sound smart, but to make sure you’re aware of what it stands for.

An MVP is a very common piece of terminology in the business world and it speaks to creating a minimal version of something that is built out just enough to allow you to share it and gather feedback. Typically, the goal is to gather signals around whether the product, project or idea is valid or resonates enough to continue iterating.

An MVP is also a valuable framework to use to prevent getting stuck in analysis paralysis mode. 

I had some idea of what I wanted to build, and in the case of Ground Control was already pretty convinced of its value, so for me the MVP framework was more of a way of helping me move quickly and not get bogged down in the decision making process.

Forewarning: Quick Start Guide Incoming

Before I get started I want to mention in advance that I’ve got an excellent Ground Control toolkit that provides links to all of the tools I discuss in this article. So there’s no need to worry about clicking out to each tool as you're reading through.

I’ll make sure you have everything you need should you decide you’d like to build something similar yourself.

Branding Decisions

Starting out, one of the things that I was completely aware of was wanting to make sure that I had a distinct look, feel and tone for my brand. While there are many different ways to approach this task, many more researched than others, I followed my gut in making decisions for this stage.

Although, if I’m being honest, I’ve been thinking about what this site would look and feel like for well over a year so I wasn’t just gripping it and ripping it.

The two primary challenges I saw that needed to be addressed first were identifying a primary color for the brand and a name. The brand name and terminology came together a little more slowly so I’ll start with my color scheme.

Somewhere Between Dark Sea Green

While my version of green is actually somewhere between Dark Sea Green and Tealish Green it also moonlights as Lichen, Greenish Grey, Silver Tree and Soft Green. A lot of options right? I agree!

Right from the start I knew that I wanted to have a shade of sea green as the primary brand colors for this project. One reason is that in my mind’s eye that’s how I saw it coming together. 

The other reason is that, as I mentioned before, I had been dreaming and scheming on building this site for a long time so I’d given it plenty of thought. In fact, I’d actually built an early version of this website last January only to scrap it when imposter syndrome and self-doubt ripped through the brain.

Le sigh, where would I be today had I just stuck it out?

At any rate, once I’d landed on an approximate green tone I shared it with some people I trusted to get their feedback and together we tweaked, refined and landed on the shade we’ll from here on out refer to as PKGreen.

From there, I used a handful of free color palette generators to help me find the right palette of supporting colors.

A word to the wise, there are a lot of options out there and this can quickly become a very overwhelming part of the process. Don’t let it! Ultimately, the goal was to get this thing launched because I was counting on my WORDS to do the talking; not the font, or colors.

That said, having something you think looks good and you’re proud of is a great feeling when it’s time to start publishing those words. Speaking of which, let’s get into the brand name.

Patrick Rife

Ground Control

Navigating the Unknown

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A Little Better vs. Ground Control

While I knew the website URL would be PatrickRife.com I didn’t want to call the business/brand Patrick Rife; there’s only one of me:)

Initially, I had actually branded the entire thing with the phrase “A Little Better” because I knew this project was going to revolve around documenting the process of creating new businesses, learning new skills and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. So at first, it seemed like a good fit.

However, after sitting with it for a few weeks it felt a little underwhelming and I thought it didn’t really embody the optimism I was bringing to the project as a whole. This was something that I had anticipated building for a long time and I was excited about it. The phrase “A Little Better” didn’t feel like it encompassed that enthusiasm.

After a few more rounds of brainstorming I settled on Ground Control. Which, if I’m being honest, I love!

Not only did Ground Control have a cool ring to it but it also spoke to my desire to regain control in my life and create businesses that are evocative of where I am going. Also, with the Ground Control branding I felt like I could launch all kinds of endeavors and not feel pigeon holed.

Additionally, I was looking for a brand term or phrase that would provide me with optionality when it came to diversifying my offerings in the future. With the term Ground Control I knew I could riff on any number of space exploration and scientific terminologies. Plus, space is cool right? And I was planning on exploring so….

Bring On The Tools

Thanks for hanging in there with me as we went through the beginning stages of planning this thing out and making some early decisions around branding and tone.

From here on out we'll get much more to the point as we delve into the tools I chose to build Ground Control, and why I chose them

First up I'm going to list out all of those tools just so we have them all in one consolidated place and then I'm going to follow up and break each one out with a brief explanation of the purpose that the tool serves and why I chose it.

The Tool Box

Something that is worth mentioning is that the ground level criteria I laid out in advance for all of the tools I was choosing was cost.

It was important to me to be able to build this entire MVP without laying out too much cash. It's not that I'm not willing to invest in this project, but I knew that keeping it affordable would be beneficial for a lot of reasons. Most of all because it would allow me to have a budget to spend when I needed or wanted to.

Website Builder

When it came to choosing a website builder it was actually pretty easy because I had been poking around and looking at options for a few months.

When I built the first iteration of this website last year I built it on WordPress. That decision was largely informed by WordPress being the gold standard for website building and also because I wanted to re-familiarize myself with the platform after not having worked with it for a few years.

That being said, there's still a relatively steep learning curve for building a WordPress website and I knew that to get this thing up and running quickly I needed it to be simple. Which led me to Carrd.

I had seen a handful of other creators espouse the greatness of using the Carrd platform and I have to be honest in agreeing with them completely.

Carrd is an extremely easy and intuitive platform to build simple websites quickly. I like to think of it as the Canva of website builders in that you can go from knowing absolutely nothing to having something usable in a few short hours. Even less if you don't want to customize anything.

And perhaps best of all, it's extremely affordable. 

I know that there are a handful of other simple, no code website building platforms that are out there and I'm sure that a lot of them are just as good if not better but for me this was the right solution at the right time.

Blog

The one drawback of a Carrd website is that it doesn't have an integrated blogging feature. To be honest with you this will probably be the reason that I ultimately migrate the website to a different platform in the long run but it wasn't enough of a problem to stop me at this point.

I knew that I wanted to have a blog because I wanted to syndicate my newsletters onto a place on the website where people could go and find past editions in the future.

Carrd suggests a handful of different options that work well with their website builder; the one that I decided to go with is called Blogstatic.

Blogstatic is very simple to set up and customize, as well as easy to integrate into the menus of your website. There are a handful of challenging elements to it, some of which I still haven't sorted out, but ultimately it was a great solution to be able to get a blogroll added to Ground Control quickly.

Email Newsletter

For my email newsletter platform I decided to go with Convertkit. There are a lot of options that are out there that you can use and I definitely took my time checking out some of the others like Beehive and Substack.

Ultimately the reason that I decided on Convertkit was because it seemed to be the most all-inclusive option that was available.

Convertkit allowed me to build a newsletter, have landing pages that were unique for different capture points, and also build in products that I could sell. Due to their integration with Stripe, more on that later, it made product creation an absolute no-brainer.

And the icing on the cake is that there is an extremely generous freemium tier that anyone can get started with and build a significant early audience before needing to transition to a paid tier.

Billing

As I mentioned above when it came to choosing a billing option Stripe was an absolute no-brainer.

Not only does it integrate seamlessly with Convertkit but it's also very simple to set up and integrate with my banking system so I can get paid!

Spoiler alert: that hasn't happened yet! But it will! And when it does I want to make sure that it is easy to keep track of, easy for my customers to access and easy to scale up in the future as my business grows.

Design Tool

This one should come as no surprise as you are probably living under a rock if you haven't heard of Canva. If you haven't no offense, obviously, but you're going to love it.

Canva is one of the greatest tools that has been invented and can be attributed to putting design prowess in the hands of the most novice of designers. I'm looking at me here for the record.

While I have a decent eye and can generally get some things done, I am not a graphic designer by trade and could not fight my way out of a paper bag if you gave me Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator as my knife.

That being said, having this tool in my hands allowed me to do a lot quickly. From creating a unique headshot with my custom PKGreen background to mocking up product photos and other elements that I wanted to customize on the website, Canva was definitely the best tool for the job.

This one also comes with the free 99 price tag and has more than enough features to get you in trouble.

Patrick Rife

Ground Control

Navigating the Unknown

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Palette Generator

As I mentioned earlier, using a color palette generator was a massive help when it came to picking out brand colors that compliment PKGreen.

There are a lot of options that are out there so for this tool I thought I would share a few. To be honest with you I definitely used more than one because I liked different elements of each and they helped me think through the process and get the creative juices flowing.

Also, most of these tools are free to use so you might as well have a robust set of options available to you. Don't hesitate to play around, this is the creative part, so have fun!

Calendar Booking

I knew it was going to be important to be able to automate access for potential customers and partners to grab time on my calendar.

A big part of this project was wanting to create interest in my ideas and have people reach out to work with me. And for that to be as seamless a process as possible, having a calendar link so that I can skip the back and forth of scheduling meetings was going to be clutch.

There are definitely a handful of easy calendar booking tools on the market but for me Calendly was the best option. Not only is it extremely easy to set up, but there is a free tier that allows me to keep expenses in check.

Email

When it comes to choosing an email client it's actually not much of a thought process. At this point in time Google pretty much is the best in class for email services. Not only that, but you also get the entire Google suite of tools which make running a business or organizing a project extremely simple.

At this point in time, I'm actually using a free Gmail account that I have had forever and a day. 

As the project evolves, in fact any day now, I'm going to set up a new Gmail account that uses my domain name ie. [email protected] so I can have an email address and suite of tools that are dedicated to this project.

But for now my classic, and free, [email protected] email account is doing the trick.

Social Profiles

In the long run I know that I will expand to pushing my content onto more social media platforms and don't get me wrong I definitely have accounts on more social media platforms but for this specific project it made sense to align it with LinkedIn and Twitter as I started out.

While I'm confident that there's an audience on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for the content that I'm creating, at first I really wanted to focus on the platforms that seem to make the most sense and I was most familiar with.

If anything, choosing to focus on two platforms is one more than common wisdom has recommended. I've started by primarily focusing on building a LinkedIn audience but the dialogue that happens over on Twitter was too enticing and I couldn't help myself.

Needless to say, when launching something new it's very very important to be able to attract new attention. You can build a website and blog all day long but unless you have a place to leverage that content and conversation where people hang out you'll never manage to get anyone over there reading it.

LinkedIn & Twitter Scheduling 

One of the places that I did decide to splurge was on a LinkedIn scheduling tool called Taplio. 

Taplio is an extremely powerful tool that has a ton of analytics, content suggestion elements and some great ai-enabled features that allow for a better understanding of which of your posts is resonating and why.

I am no social media guru so being able to have some kind of feedback loop around what was working has been extremely helpful.

For Twitter using a scheduling tool has been a little less important. I've experimented with a tool called hype fury but mostly I have resorted to using the scheduling feature built into Twitter directly.

I actually really like the Twitter internal scheduling tool however it isn't available on the mobile app, so if you'd like to use it you'll need to do so from the desktop application. Which honestly isn't the worst thing in the world.

Challenges and Solutions

So that pretty much encompasses all of the tools that I have used to get through the MVP of building Ground Control. 

I am certain that there are mistakes that I have made and things that I have overlooked that will turn into opportunities in the future. I'm not too worried about it. From the very beginning I knew that building this website, brand and business would be an iterative process so I'm prepared to continue to refine revise and make adjustments as I go along. 

As I mentioned above, I know that there are tools that I'm already considering changing and upgrading so that they better meet the needs and the vision that I have as my content grows and changes. That's just part of the evolution and quite frankly a pretty exciting part as well.

If there's any specific insight that I think that I've gained in this process is that we're far more capable of tackling challenges then we give ourselves credit for. For me the most important part was to break things down and bite-sized bits and work through it.

As I said in last week's addition of Ground Control, when we challenge our perceived limitations we find that our capabilities are so much greater than what we give ourselves credit for. I'd encourage you to do the same for yourself.

Conclusion

In wrapping this post up one of the things that's absolutely worth mentioning again is that while I gave it lots of careful thought and consideration I did not allow analysis paralysis to creep in and prevent me from making a concise decision. 

I knew above all that one of the greatest risks is thinking that any small part of the decision-making and building process for Ground Control was going to be the definitive success indicator.

I knew the most important and honest thing I could do for the project as a whole was to make sure that I kept moving forward.

This is Ground Control

-Patrick

Toolkit for Building Ground Control
This is a PDF that is a quick link guide to all of the tools that I used to build Ground Control.