Build a Website in a Weekend with Matthew Averkamp

Like Father, Like Son

Matt has been building his own businesses for the past 15 years, but his first foray into the world of online courses was actually with his father. Together they created Accounting Coach, a website for online accounting courses and toolkits that’s still seeing traffic to this day. The problem was that Matt didn’t want to keep creating new content for accounting as he was much more interested in user testing and helping people build their own businesses online.

Matt started Launch Party in 2018 with a focus on being able to build an entire website, from scratch, in just a weekend. He teaches from the templates he’s created in order to help consultants and other entrepreneurs build beautiful websites quickly. Because the faster you get online and running, the faster you can grow your business.

Matt’s Nomadic Entrepreneurial Journey

Matt is addicted to travelling. In fact, right now he’s in Thailand. But no matter how long he’s travelling or where he goes, he’s always thinking about his business. That’s the luxury of working remotely and helping others build and host websites. It gives him the freedom to focus on what really matters, and this year it was split-testing. Split-testing is just a fancy way of making sure your website works the way you and your users want it to. For Matt, his year-long split test saw revenues increase by 30%, which is more than enough to keep this man comfortable as a nomadic entrepreneur.

Structure your business in such a way so that you can step away from it.

Matt’s business structure relies a lot on remote teams. He may be in Thailand, but his design team is in Canada, and he has a friend in the United States takes care of the customer service side of things. But Matt swears you don’t need to maintain daily communication to keep your business running smoothly. His strategy involves keeping everything project-based so that it’s much easier to manage across long distances.

While Matt’s team is working on their own projects, he spends his time doing what he loves most about this business: user testing. At the 27-minute mark, Matt breaks down why user testing is so important to his business model and how he uses it to create the unique structure of his Launch Party course and toolkits.

Some important takeaways from Matt’s user testing toolkit are:

• Start out small with something such as a course outline or an “about” statement to see what kinds of users are interested
• Advance with an easy tutorial to see how skilled your users actually are
• Pay close attention to user patterns and where users are having the most difficulty
• Include plenty of visual tools, such as timelines, so both you and your users can see where and how the growth will happen

Building a WordPress Site with Launch Party

Through extensive user testing, Matt was able to figure out exactly what new users needed from a WordPress tutorial because it’s quite overwhelming out there. For example, if you go searching for Elementor templates, you’ll have hundreds upon hundreds of options at your disposal. But with Launch Party, Matt created one killer feature that makes him stand out – the customisable colour option!

User testing showed that people were very sensitive to the colours used on their website, but Matt couldn’t come up with a universal colour scheme that pleased everyone. So he simply made it possible for users to modify colours to fit their own unique tastes. You just find a colour pack you like, customise the colours until they’re perfect for you, then download it and use it in any of your Launch Party templates. No other templates give you this much creative freedom!

Tune in at the 19-minute mark to hear about my favourite Launch Party colour scheme and what possessed me to try and change it all for no reason. It’s a weird element in human nature that Matt tapped into with his user testing. We all, for some odd reason, want to change things even if they’re perfect, just to see what happens when we do. Launch Party makes it possible to do this with your website, and it makes it easy to change it back if you suddenly change your mind like I did!

What Does the Future Hold for Launch Party?

Launch Party has a few new features waiting in the wings including some new colours (Matt promises a pastel pack). The future of Launch Party will also include a weekend-long course where new and seasoned WordPress aficionados can come together for a weekend and build their WordPress sites together. The course will end with a launch party for everyone’s sites, which is what inspired the name of the company to begin with. Users can look out for this course and others like it in 2019.

Wrap Up

The most important takeaway from this episode is not how quickly you can build a WordPress site, although that’s pretty amazing. The golden nugget I’m focused on most is the custom content and user testing that Matt put into Launch Party. He custom built his own LMS based on user testing so he could deliver exactly what his customers wanted. He listened to their feedback and logged their experiences on his site and tutorials in order to create a program that is not only user-friendly but also completely free. He noticed that there was no one else out there offering quite what he envisioned, and he empowers entrepreneurs like us by offering this invaluable content free of charge.