Carsonified

I’m definitely an early adopter. I get all my news through my RSS reader, well, almost all my news.

I’ve just subscribed to the print editions of Forbes and Business Week. Why?

I need an editor

I enjoy picking up a magazine and seeing what the editor has chosen to place on the front cover. This is his or her way of saying “This is important. Pay attention.” I like that.

With RSS, all the items have the same importance. There’s no “front cover story”. I know this is very anti-web2, but I don’t care. I think that sometimes you need other experts to decide what’s important, so you can simply absorb.

I need a break from my computer

Another reason why I’ve subscribed to these print magazines is because every once-in-awhile, I need to get away from my Mac. I’m tired of the distraction. Getting cosy with a mocha and a magazine is wonderful!

Now that we’ve built two web apps, we’ve got a good perspective on what it takes to make them succeed. This is my conclusion: You’ve got to be prepared to spend cash to advertise your web app.

I’ve been spending one day a week on Amigo and it’s painfully obvious that the blogosphere is only going to get us so far.

• Yes, Bare Naked App was a great guerrilla marketing activity (and a lot of fun)
• Yes, getting on TechCrunch was handy
• Yes, a lot of folks in the Web 2.0 community know about Amigo

However, none of that is yielding an increase in revenue. We’ve got a long way to go until we build a critical mass of people who use Amigo. This demonstrates the point of this post very well: Building a financially successful web app takes hard work, clever marketing and advertising dollars.

Signal Vs. Noise is not normal

I have a feeling that far too many people (including myself sometimes) think that the blogosphere is a free ticket to successful web apps. This just isn’t the truth. We all look at Signal Vs. Noise and think “All we need to do is launch a great blog like the guys at 37signals. It will create buzz around our app and then we’ll see the users flow in.”

Well, I just don’t think that’s the case. Signal Vs. Noise is an anomaly. It has a loyal readership (myself included) that is the perfect market for their apps. Jason and crew has done a fabulous job of creating passionate users. However, I don’t think their experience is easily repeatable.

Yes, the blogosphere is powerful

I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t have a great blog. It is definitely an extremely important part to any web app. However, it’s vital that you set aside money in your cash flow for advertising after you launch.

I called a friend today that runs a successful web app (the revenue from one app supports the entire company) and he said they often spend $10,000+ per month on advertising.

We were lucky with DropSend

So how did DropSend become successful with so little in advertising? There are two reasons:

1. When you need to send a file, you’re often desperate and will often pay for the ability to do so
2. It’s viral as it tells the file recipient about DropSend

Most apps (including Amigo) don’t benefit from these two vital elements. Most of them need good ol’ fashion advertising to spread the word.

Plan for the long haul

So when you’re planning your budget for your new web app, don’t forget that you’ll most likely need to spend money on advertising. Yes, there’s always a chance that your rocket to success because of some great press, but it’s far more likely that you’ll have to wage a long term marketing and advertising battle to rise to the top.

Having this long term perspective (instead of expecting to achieve success very quickly) will separate the truly successful web apps from the rest.

We’re busy putting the finishing touches to our plans for The Future of Web Apps in London in February. We’re having some discussion over the merits of providing WiFi to our attendees throughout the day.

There’s no argument that at an event aimed at web designers, developer and entrepreneurs there needs to be a stable, robust connection capable of holding hundreds of simultaneous connections. And with that in mind we have allocated a substantial chunk of our budget to paying a company to provide that. So there will be WiFi.

The debate we are having is whether to have the WiFi ‘on’ throughout the day or to switch it off during the presentations. We had some feedback from our San Francisco event back in September that indicated ‘always on’ WiFi is very distracting. Why? because attendees take their laptops into the auditorium and spend the time IM-ing their friends and answering e-mails instead of listening to the speaker.

You might argue that WiFi is needed for live-blogging. Well, not really because anyone who wants to blog can write their post off-line and post it at the break when the WiFi is back on.

You might say “hey we’re not children, we can make up our own minds whether to use it or not. Who do you think you are, Teach!” – okay maybe that wasn’t exactly what you were saying but you get the drift.

We don’t want to be Web Nazis but in our experience (two major conferences and over 20 workshops worldwide) people don’t regulate themselves. They spend all day performing pointless tasks online that could probably wait until the next day.

If we’re going to put our even-organisers hat on for a moment this presents a problem – because what we absolutely want is for everyone who attends the event to enjoy himself or herself, to learn stuff and to take something away from the day that they can use. We want everyone to feel like they got value for money. But if they’re messaging all day then the likelihood is that they won’t.

You can’t force people to listen but you can remove any distractions. So the question is: Is WiFi a distraction at conferences? Should we turn it off during the slides? What do you think?