Online in seven days — mdvcapital.nl

An acquirer has to convince three very different parties at once. The selling owner wants to know that their life's work, their staff and their name will live on. Investors want a case with the numbers worked out. M&A advisers and accountants want to know whether they are referring a serious buyer.

The hard part was that the company itself had only just started. There was no row of completed acquisitions to point to, and the existing online presence was about an earlier company and a different audience. So the site could not be a showcase of results; it had to be a profile that convinces on its own. And quickly, because conversations with sellers do not wait for a website.

First establish what is true, then build. Every sentence on the site can be traced back to the positioning: what MDV actually does, for whom, and on what terms. Where there was nothing to show yet (the portfolio, the opinion pieces), there is a deliberately empty section instead of filler.

Three audiences, three routes of their own. Selling owners, investors and advisers each look for something different. Instead of one page that half works for everyone, each group got its own way in.

The site is built from separate, interchangeable sections. During the build, that meant putting variants side by side and looking at them, instead of reasoning in a meeting about which one would be better. From here on, it means the profile can grow with the company without a rebuild.

Design variants are assigned on the server. With the usual in-browser approach, you only test visitors who accept analytics cookies; everyone else silently gets the same version every time. That is exactly what had happened with a test set up earlier: it was switched on, but had never run once. Measuring still depends on consent, and testing stays off until the legal review of the cookie is complete.

The site was up in a week: seven calendar days between the first line of code and the fully set-up site. That week produced twelve pages, twenty-eight reusable sections and complete cookie and privacy handling. Since then, 168 automated tests have been guarding that it keeps working.

For a company just starting out, that speed was the point: a week later, the founder could go into those conversations with a site that tells the story. Beyond that, there is a capability that is not used yet. Testing variants is deliberately switched off until the legal review of the cookie it uses is complete, and the cookie policy on the site says so.