Carsonified

Update: I’ve added a few more web apps to the list at the end.

My last post on Web Mission stirred up a lot of discussion so I’d like to expand on my original thoughts.

My main point was not that going to Silicon Valley to build relationships is a waste of time or money. Everybody knows that making friends and nurturing connections is of the utmost importance and I’m 100% supportive of that.

Also, if anyone is participating in Web Mission because they’re trying to establish a specific relationship with someone in the USA - more power to them.

So what’s the problem?

Getting the message right

What bothers me about Web Mission is that it sends out this message:

“Web apps need to emulate the Silicon Valley model: Funding, quick growth and exit by acquisition or IPO.”

I disagree. And I also don’t think that that’s the message we should be sending out to the UK Web industry.

David Heinemeier Hansson doesn’t agreed either and makes the point in his post Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco? I think this quote is particularly relevant:

“It [being in Silicon Valley] takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.”

There’s glory, money and fame to be made in California but the problem is that only a tiny percentage of web apps will ever find it.

More of us should be focusing on building simple, focused, small-team web apps that meet everyday needs. Am I saying we should kill our dreams of changing the world? No. But we all need to admit that YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Google and Twitter just aren’t the norm.

Instead of desperately trying to create the next phenomenon, which is highly unlikely, why not aim for something that’s definitely achievable?
If you have a team of two or three and you bring in $1M in revenue per year, I’m guessing you’ll be pretty damn happy with your earnings. And to do that, all you need to achieve is 2000+ accounts at $40 per month. With those kind of numbers, you just don’t need mass adoption.

We’ve done it. So can you.

As I’ve said before, we spent $45,000 on building DropSend. It now brings in profits of over $200,000 per year, and we don’t even have someone working full time on it.*

YouSendIt, our biggest competitor, has raised at least $10 million in funding. I don’t know how big their team is, but I’m willing to bet it’s at least 20 people. So immediately, they’ve created a huge amount of pressure on themselves to generate large revenues. With all that funding and all those mouths to feed, it’s a completely different game.

Could they crush us because they’re throwing more money at the problem? Possibly. But we’re more agile and can react much quicker. Even if they squeeze us out of the market someday, we can easily launch another niche-market web app and quickly become profitable.
I’ve got nothing against taking big risks and betting big, but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. We’re currently enjoying a lot of profit from DropSend for almost zero risk or stress. Which model is better?

Too simple?

I can see the comments already: “Ryan, you’re naive. It’s not that simple.”  Well, maybe not all of the time, but you know what, most of the time, it is that simple. Build your app on a smaller budget, with a smaller team, focusing on a smaller niche, and you’ll be profitable much more quickly.

With the advent of cloud computing and storage, it’s much easier to build more than one app with a small team. If you build three applications and two of them are mildly successful, you’ve got a great business on your hands.

There’s just no need for being TechCrunched and trying to reach the mass market.

I’m sure someone will say in the comments: “But Ryan, you’re an edge case. You’ve become friends with some of the big names in the Valley and that’s why DropSend is successful - you’ve received a ton of exposure.”

Here’s my answer: 99% of our paying customers have never heard of Web 2.0, TechCrunch or any of our events. They’ve just googled ‘Send large files’ or someone has sent them a file via DropSend so they decided to give it a try.

The bigger question

The real issue I’m getting at here is this: What does it take to make you happy?

Money is important to being happy, I’ll admit that. You need enough cash to live comfortably and feel secure. However, I think it’s dangerous to assume that your company needs to bring in a huge amount of revenue in order for you to live the good life.

Take a minute and do a little exercise with me. Imagine logging into your online banking and seeing a deposit of $10 million - right after you’ve been acquired or sold all your shares.

How do you feel? What would you do with the money? Buy your dream house? Pay off your debts? Get that Audi R8 you’ve been dreaming about? Send your kids to private school?

OK, now imagine you’ve done the things on your list. How do you feel. Any happier? I’d be willing to bet that you won’t actually feel much happier than you do now. You might feel nice for about two months, and then you’ll be itching to do something else.
Happiness isn’t found in being the next company to sell for $100 million. So that’s the whole point - you can have a small web app business and still enjoy the good life.
No Silicon Valley needed.

They’ve done it too

Here’s a list of great web apps that are small, successful, profitable and happy - all without emulating the Silicon Valley model:

BlinkSale
37signals
FreshBooks
WeLoveLocal
Flexiscale
Remember the Milk
Fogbugz (from Joel)
Campaign Monitor
Nozbe
ActiveCollab

There are a ton more, obviously. Please add them in the comments and I’ll update the post.

* I plan on changing this as soon as I get off paternity leave, I’ll be going back to work full time on Carsonified’s web apps. We’re hiring a full-time developer and we’re hoping to start on our third web app quite soon.

Today saw the launch of Facebook Chat to the masses and it will be interesting to see what impact this will have on our daily lives and communication methods.

Everybody that I know now has a Facebook account. When I’m out in bars, guys no longer ask for your number (maybe it’s just me!) but instead they check whether you’re on Facebook. I have my suspicions that this is so that they can remind themselves of what you look like the next day, but that’s a whole different subject matter.

For me the introduction of Facebook Chat means a couple of things (positive and negative) :-

For a start it means that I won’t have to try and explain AIM to my friends and family any more. For some reason, the fact that Facebook have introduced it means that they will trust it, embrace it and be chatting like chatty chattersons in no time. I think it could become for instant messaging what the internet explorer icon still is as a browser for many people.

However, for myself, it also brings some issues. I have a number of work contacts as Facebook friends as well as just my old school friends and “weekend buddies”. Whilst I love the idea of being able to use Facebook Chat with my non-tech friends to cajole them into getting ready a little quicker on a Saturday night - I’m also opening myself up to chatting with lots of people that I don’t know that well and it can become a little overwhelming, not to mention time consuming.

In an ever increasingly busy world, Facebook (and Twitter) provide a low maintenance method of keeping in touch with the people in your lives - just glancing at status updates tells you what’s going on in their lives without having to spend time on the phone or writing emails (tip: mothers always appreciate calls home this said!). What I love about this is that you can choose when to get in touch - it’s not intrusive, or should I say - wasn’t intrusive.

Facebook Chat appears to be the complete opposite of everything that I loved about Facebook. Unless you specifically choose to appear offline, any of your contacts can start chatting with you whenever they feel like it. To quote Lisa “email used to be the productivity enemy number one!” but I can easily see Facebook Chat quickly overtaking. Michael Arrington soon discovered this when he went out for dinner having forgotten to log out of Facebook, only to return to a swarm of messages.

Feedback on the Twitterverse has been mixed, but many people, myself included, are planning to stay permanently offline. Could that mean the sound of tumbleweed for Facebook Chat? Only time will tell…

I’ve noticed that TechCrunch is fully supporting Web Mission ‘08 and I just can’t hold my tongue any longer.

Web Mission exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the UK and European web start-up scene.

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Anyone who hasn’t logged on to the world wide interweb over the last two months might not know that I’ve just come back from SXSW. Anyone who’s never been on the interweb before now may also not know that at Carsonified, we’re all huge Twitter fans… who isn’t?

SXSW made something abundantly clear to me, the way that Twitter is used can change hugely depending on the following things:-

* your location
* your social circle
* your mobile device

Bear with me, let me explain some more…

The way in which I use Twitter changes dramatically depending on where I am at the time. Whilst Twitter’s become the poster kid of the web, it hasn’t reached mass adoption (yet!). I’m still repeatedly telling my friends that it’s like Facebook status updates only better. So, if I’m tweeting from home in the UK, where fewer people use it - as opposed to somewhere like the Bay Area - I’m likely to share random facts about myself (blog style) or stay in touch with my friends stateside.

However, take me to the States where far more people use the app, it becomes much more of an outreach / conversational tool - enabling spontaneous meetups (read: booze-ups) and easy organisation between friends.

When I’m not making random videos and twittering nonsense, my day job of course involves organising Future of Web Apps, so what do I think is the future of this web app? It’s going to be fascinating to see how Twitter’s gravitational pull grows and its potential usage enters a whole new dimension. More and more companies are already using it as a reputation management tool, especially given the emergence of sites like TweetScan that provide immediate feedback on their products and services. That’s bringing about a whole new level of customer service (thank goodness!), and research and development.

Something that’s fascinating me at the moment is the rise and rise of the ‘personal brand’. @Garyvee did a great talk on this at FOWA Miami and is one of the best examples I know of someone that has built a fanbase and brand around their personality. Gary recently said that building a personal brand is the best way of “recession-proofing” and it’s easy to see why. Twitter allows you to wear your heart on your sleeve and for the community to feel like they’re getting to know you (even if this means realising that you’re a little nuts) as well as an insider’s look at the company you work for. Being able to track @melkirk means that I can respond directly to people and maintain close relationships. On the flip side you also need to develop a bit of a ‘rhino’s skin’ - what some people say on the web but never in person always amazes me!

A final thought, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, there is nothing better than Twitter for breaking and spreading news right now. The impact of seeing a Tweet on my desktop is ten times greater than a mail in my inbox. Normally from the people “on the ground” without spin. Unedited content. I love that.

A large chunk of our business comes from our events and we felt it was time to invest in the backend that runs the sites and bookings for Future of Web Apps, Fuel, Future of Web Design, Future of Mobile and Carson Workshops.

We currently have this barely-functional thing we call the ‘CMS’ which was built in a hurry and is basically a pain in the ass. Its worked pretty well up until now but we’re noticing that bugs are starting to appear and it lacks a ton of the functionality that we need.

The first step

The first thing we did was sit down and decide what we loved and hated about the current system. We had to be careful here because it would’ve been easy to get carried away with adding superfluous functionality (’It be great if it did ….’).

We basically came up with a very rough list of things the system should be able to do. Once we all agreed, Adam constructed a flow diagram of the booking process.

Our main goal was to make life easier for everyone when they’re booking tickets to our events. Therefore we started with the Booking Page. Adam did a very rough layout for this (we didn’t even bother to wireframe it).

The first obvious step was to break the booking process down into steps. Previously it was just one huge, long page and it was very unwieldy. By showing the person booking the seat that there were four basic steps to complete, it would give them an idea of where they were in the process and that it did indeed have an end :)

View full size image.

By the way, you may be wondering why Adam is working on the events backend when we hired him to work on DropSend. Well, the truth is that after he joined us, he realized that he left the company he started a little too soon, without giving it a chance to really take off. It was nothing to do with us, he just realized he should’ve given his own company more of a chance before leaving it. Of course we were surprised but he’s super talented so we decided to keep working with him. This was the perfect project to team up on. Anyway, back to the story …

The power of Rails

I’m an ex-PHP developer with a Computer Science degree, so I’ve never touched Ruby or Rails. Of course I’ve heard about how you can build apps much faster in Rails, but we’ve never actually used it at Carsonified.

Holy crap, I’m a believer.

We went from a visual of the booking page to a roughly functioning app in two days. TWO DAYS. Here are a few screencasts of the system in action.

Event Stream - Part I from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Wireframe to working app in seven calendar days

Just three days later, we had added the design skinning to the process and it was looking really great. We still have quite a few copy and design tweaks, but it’s basically there. Seven days - unbelievable. And keep in mind that’s calendar days not week days.

Carsonified’s new web app - Event Stream from Carsonified on Vimeo.

What’s its name?

We’ve decided to call this system ‘Event Stream’ and we’ve done a temporary logo for it.

Once we have more time, we’ll probably redo this logo, but for now, it’s great to have another Carsonified Web App.

Well, I’ve got a ton more to share with you about the system. We’re so excited about it!

Every company is desperate for good PR - we all want (and need) to get coverage in the blogosphere, television and printed press. So what’s the secret? How did 37signals get a 4-page feature in Wired? Why is Zuckerberg being interviewed on 60 Minutes?

37signals, Facebook and others aren’t spending money on advertising so how are they getting this coverage?

The answer is pretty simple, actually. They’re remarkable companies. They’re different and they’re not afraid to talk about it.

One of my favorite quotes is “Marketing is the price you pay for being unremarkable” (Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad) and we really believe that here at Carsonified.

We’ve been fortunate to get coverage on TechCrunch (Amigo launch, FOWA Miami Panel, FOWA digg announcement, FOWA Pownce announcement, FOWA Miami Panel (again), Web Apps 101, DropSend sale 1, DropSend sale 2), New York Times, Read Write Web, GigaOm and an upcoming TV show on a major UK network.

I recently got an email from a UK production company who came across my article on A List Apart about our 4-day workweek. They want to do a television show where I go in and ‘fix’ a company with whose culture sucks. Our 4-day workweek, Idea Week, nice gear, and relaxed environment make us special. The production company believes that our company culture is remarkable, therefore worth doing a television show about.

And we don’t even have a PR company.

I’m not trying to brag about our media coverage. I’m simply pointing out the power of being a small, yet remarkable company.

I love that - being different is more exciting and it helps you get coverage in the media. What more could you want?

Why not spend some time today brainstorming how you can make your product, service and company remarkable? Just doing a good job isn’t enough any more.

Last week at FOWA Miami we announced the results of our survey to find the web’s favourite application.

We were amazed to receive over 3,000 votes in just a few weeks, and it showed that people are certainly passionate about their apps.

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