Future of Web Apps Recap: Measure & Grow Your Startup

One of the most practical talks at FOWA London came from the CEO of Freshbooks, an online invoicing app for individuals and small businesses. Mike McDerment reminded the audience of designers, developers and wannabe web 2.0 rock-stars that the excel number-crunchers of the corporate world can teach us a lot about how to measure business performance. When you’re trying to create the next widgetized social aggregation platform which is powered by supercharged virality it might not seem very sexy to fire up excel and start facing those cold white boxes. However, Mike urged everyone there to cook a monitoring system directly into their web-apps so that they know where their visitors are coming from, how many of them are signing up, and, crucially, how many of them are actually sticking around. Importantly, he urged everyone there not to assume that Google Analytics is the answer to all your measuring needs. Measuring is a business philosophy and Mike practices what he preaches. Freshbooks ads are all over the web and the ones that aren’t delivering ROI quickly are cut with the ruthlessness of a ninja swordsman.

This kind of obsession over the numbers is common among successfully bootstrapped companies. When you don’t have an enormous pile of green bills to cover in petrol and set alight, you don’t – simple as that. After spending the first two years in his parents’ basement, Mike has built Freshbooks into an extremely successful business with dozens of employees, thousands of paying users and, most importantly, extremely happy customers. Viral growth is a rare and elusive feat achieved by very few companies. Predictable growth is driven by regular measurement and informed improvement. In any case, if your app is growing like a weed, wouldn’t be nice to measure that?

@HelloApp – Almost awesome
I’ve been to a fair few conferences in the last couple of years and met hundreds of people. I don’t usually go with any kind of objective in mind other than to chat to as many interesting people as possible. However, if I had the ability to sift through the thousands of attendees to see if there was a core group of people that should definitely speak to that would be awesome. That’s where I’d hoped that Hello App would come in for FOWA 2009 (http://hello.carsonified.com). When I first read about Hello App on Think Vitamin I thought it was a brilliant concept. HelloApp is essentially Twitter-powered web-app that lets people “check in” to the conference, tag themselves, and start meeting one another. I thought it would be like conference networking on crack. However, I think that HelloApp tried to do too much. To demonstrate, here’s the list of instructions on how to interact with the app.

Checkin
@helloapp sat XXX
Categorise and tag yourself
@helloapp hello ![des/dev/biz] #tag #tag #tag
Met someone
@helloapp hello @their-username
Post message
@helloapp message your-message
Give High Five
@helloapp hi5 @their-username
Claim a token
@helloapp claim XXX

Personally I think that all it needed were the first two features. The other ones turned it into a game where people tried to “meet” as many people as possible or find tokens around the conference. It went from being really useful to being a touch gimmicky. All I really wanted to do on HelloApp was meet people who were rails coders. Although I could do this with HelloApp I think that a lot of other people didn’t bother because they saw HelloApp as more of a game than a serious networking tool. What a shame.

Cut back and make it awesome
When it comes to software, Dave McClure seems to hate unnecessary features with a passion. Instead of adding more functionality, Dave stressed that you must hack away at your app like the grim reaper until it is a simple and functional as it can be. His talk was dubbed, “Startup Metrics for Pirates”. Almost every techie I’ve ever chatted to for any length of time about an app has said: “Wouldn’t it be cool if …”. By the sounds of it Dave would like to remove this phrase from all techies’ vocabulary. His line of reasoning is similar to the philosophy adopted by 37signals where they argue that you should “underdo”, not outdo the competition in terms of features so that you can deliver a more elegant, usable solution to your customers. Although the idea of setting out to offer less than your competition might initially feel uncomfortable, it actually allows you to focus and create better, not bigger software. As McClure puts it: “Cut a feature and if your customers don’t scream, let it die”.