fowa Archive

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?
Continue reading “Future of Web Apps Recap: Measure & Grow Your Startup” »

Last week at the Future of Web Apps summit in London, Michael Galpert of NY-based Aviary and Andy McLoughlin of Huddle presented "How to survive outside Silicon Valley". I’ve embedded the video below and the slides are located on Michael’s blog.

Twitter is down again, and yes, just being down is not a story. This weekend is the Future of Web Apps conference down in Miami and from what I saw when Twitter was up, the usage is high from the conference.

Next week is SXSW in Austin where Twitter basically launched into the wild and this event will push Twitter further than it ever has been so far.

So what’s the communication plan if Twitter is down during the conference? Will we actually need to talk to another human?!?!

We wrote about Twitter’s system issues in December and offered 10 ways to deal with Twitter outages. While the entire blogosphere is in love with Twitter, when will these continual outages actually push people away? Will SXSW be the event that made Twitter and, this year, be the event that breaks Twitter?

Last month we gave away five free passes to the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami at the end of February. It was the most popular holiday gift we gave away.

Now I am back with a discount code for our readers! Enter the code ‘FOWA_CenterNetworks’ without the quotes and you will receive 15% off your registration. 

I think that this is one of the best conferences of the year. It’s very inexpensive compared to some others and the value is high. Check out our previous coverage of the FOWA conferences in San Francisco and London.

And don’t forget to let them know that you’d like the CN editor to be a speaker at the event! Lastly, if there are other conferences you want a discount for, let me know and I will work the organizers over.

The entries have been received and I am very happy to present the winners of the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami at the end of February 2008. Thanks to everyone who entered.

If you didn’t win a pass, check out the early bird discount. If this conference is like the prior versions, it will be one of the best conferences of the year. Check out our previous conference coverage.

Here are the winners – congrats to each one:

• Nicole R
• Remy B
• Daniel T
• Kevin W
• Michael G

I will be in touch with the winners this evening with more details. I hope everyone enjoyed our Ten Days of Holiday Gifts.

UPDATE DEC 29 – You have a couple more days to enter to win a FOWA pass! Get your entries in!

Day #7 in the Ten Days of Holiday Gifts comes from Carson Systems. Carson Systems puts on some of the best conferences in my opinion and they have been kind enough to give us five (5) conference passes to give away for the Future of Web Apps in Miami on February 29th. Shameless plug – feel free to let the good people at Carson know that you’d like to see CN as a speaker at the conference!

Just for readers of CenterNetworks, Future of Web Apps is offering Five (5) Free Conference Passes. To enter for one of the passes, send in an entry using our contact form. We will select the winners on January 1st! Note: Please do not enter if you can’t make it to Miami!

(I’ve turned off comments on this post to avoid any entry confusion)