Michele is a nice programmer from Italy. Maybe you don’t know him but I knew about Michele from the very same day his web application 16bugs.com was launched. Yeah, maybe you didn’t knew about 16bugs.com too, but I know and I care about it because it’s a hosted bug tracking solution, or in English, a web application dedicated to help programmers to manage the [infinite] bugs that appear during every development cycle. I’m a programmer so I like those tools…

But Michele is more than just a programmer. He’s also a successful internet business man running his own consulting firm called Wonsys, enyoing a decent income stream from 16bugs.com and running two other web apps that are starting to get results: Unilife.it and Pagety.

Undoubtedly Michele is not among the stars that are known to everybody related with blogs or webapps (I’m sure that’s just because he’s not in the Valley), but I felt very identified with him from the beginning because he’s a webapps developer from a country that’s not know because of their programmers (like I am) and because he is not afraid of creating and putting his webapps out there without worrying he’s the only one running the entire business (I’m like that too! or I try… :P).

16bugs.com is a superb webapp, much simpler and far better that most of the bug trackers out there, so when I putted my hands to write a new interview for this blog I finally had a excuse to approach and talk to him. I did that and the result is this interview:

Please tell us a little about yourself, when did you started to program?

I started programming when I was about 10. At first, they were only very basic apps, then I moved to more complex programming languages and finally settled on Ruby (even though I’m always trying new things).

When did you realize that you could make money by programming web apps?

I knew you could earn money building Web apps from the beginning, but it was only with 16bugs that I actually proved it to myself.

May I suppose you are of the entrepreneurial type or you don’t mind to be an employee as long as you do what you love?

Definitely my own boss!

16bugs is a very good app, that makes very simple to keep track of your bugs. How did you come with the idea for it?

It’s very easy: I needed it. The best things one builds are the ones you make for yourself to satisfy your own needs.

Please tell us a little how it’s to run a web app backed up by just one person. You are a web developer so how do you deal with commercial tasks?

There’s not much to say. One thing I’ve noticed is how much people love fast support. I mean, it’s obvious: I do like to have a quick answer from a support team when I submit a ticket or anything too. Unfortunately many people don’t understand this and it will take
them days to answer a simple support email.

If you do run your own web app (or even desktop app, for that matter), make sure you do answer emails in a timely fashion. I usually answer emails sent to 16bugs’s support in a few minutes and no matter how stupid it may seem. It really makes a difference.

16bugs is a little more than 1 year old now. How’s the balance? Are you happy with your results?

We’ve got a few thousand users and teams using it. It’s not making me rich, but it’s definitely standing on its own and has done so almost since day one.

How has been the adoption of 16bugs? Does 16bugs’s respects the “standard” relation between free and payed customers that the web app industry has (usually 1-2% as said here)?

At first we got a few hundreds users who weren’t paying, but after a couple of weeks people started to include 16bugs in their development platform and the first paying customers arrived. Consider costs are really low, so going break-even was kinda easy. I’d say 1-2% is a good estimate for us, too.

How has been your relation with well-known competitors like Fogbuz (commercial) and Bugzilla (open source/free)?

The point is Fogbugz, Bugzilla, Mantis and all of the others aren’t really competitors: 16bugs is dead simple which is what most
development teams/freelancers need. If you’re Google maybe you need the plethora of features provided by those packages, but the truth is they’re just too much for a great part of the people who use them, and they’re probably using it because their boss told them so, or because they don’t know there are simpler approaches such as the one taken by 16bugs.

Can you tell us how do you manage 16bugs’s upgrades?

I’ve been listening to the feedback coming in and acting accordingly since day one. After a few weeks since its launch, I released a complete overhaul of the interface: I received some great feedback and there were a few features that seemed out of place, so I spent a couple of weeks working on a refined interface.

I’m currently gathering all of the feedback we received during the past few months and we will hopefully launch a major revision in Q4. This one is going to be sweet and it will finally see the official launch of our API which has long been in the works.

Please tell us your future plans for 16bugs

As said above, a new version should see the light in Q4 and it will bring some great news. One of the things I’d like to achieve in the future is to make 16bugs more corporate-friendly and I think I know how…or at least I hope so!

Please tell us about Wonsys. How are you doing as a company?

We’re three friends. We started building our own Web apps (Unilife.it and Pagety.com) and then moved to consulting for outside customers which is what we’re mostly doing right now. We split our time between client work and in-house projects.

Knocking on wood, things seem to be going strong right now.

Please tell us about Pagety and Unilife. How are those products/websites doing?

Unilife is growing slowly but steadily but we’re not putting any marketing effort in it, so we can’t complain. Pagety is not doing much, but we don’t really care, since it’s something we built for ourselves and then decided to open to anyone: we use it for all of our websites and absolutely love it.

How’s the scene of web entrepreneurs on Italy, is there some defined group of well-known developers or there’s nothing and everybody take their own way?

Things are starting to change right now and the scene is definitely looking better with more people willing to share their experiences. A few weeks ago, we spoke at Pycon in Florence, where we met a lot of smart people, so I’m pretty positive about it. The only problem is with Italian institutions which tend to be not very keen to let a new breed of young entrepreneurs in. But that’s a different topic.

Finally, please share with us some words on your thoughts about web developers and entrepreneurship. Do you think that if one know how to program it is a must to try to start a company from a web app?

I wouldn’t say so: you need to know how to develop, but that’s not enough. Sure, you can build a great app, but then you need to market it and trust me, that isn’t easy. We faced it ourselves.

That said, I think one should start a company if you feel that you like it and it’s better to do it when you’re young because you haven’t got much to lose. If you know what you’re talking about, just do it and see how it goes, but don’t settle recklessly on your initial idea, embrace changes and exploit them!

Thanks a lot for your wise words Michele! Your example really motivates me to keep following my path as a web entrepreneur. And I’m sure I’m not the only one

A smaller scale can be perfectly your country because the juggernauts of online business are not always able nor willing to translate their success on every country with proper Internet access. This is specially true in non English-speaking countries where language, culture or degree of market development can be tremendous barriers for this kind of ventures.

If you are living in one of those countries and you were looking for an Internet business idea maybe you just have to google your way up to an existing successful Internet business and then try to adapt it to your local reality. Sure, you have to first determine if it makes sense to do it in such a scale but that kind of things are what makes business creation so funny, don’t you think?

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Although it won’t hurt if you get your URL printed on screen or paper, the truth is that almost nobody will visit your website as a side effect of that appearance. Given that the URL is printed on a medium that’s not online and therefore it’s not a link, the few people that may have an interest in knowing more about you or your website will have to make the additional effort of remembering your name or your company’s name and then search for it in Internet, and you know that human’s memory is fragile.

So unless your press appearance has an online equivalent with a proper link to your web page you won’t get any significant increase on traffic from it. In fact, if you are lucky you will get 5 or 10 additional direct visitors on your website and a few more thanks to search engines.

But there’s something good that can result from this appearances? Sure. The good part is that although very few people will see your website, most part of them will be very interested on what you do and will take the necessary steps to connect with you no matter what. These contacts can be translated in new unexpected business opportunities (people will put at least some level of confidence on your abilities because if you were featured on TV or newspapers you should be good ;)), new contacts for your network (which can open new doors for you) or in the worst case you will only receive a supportive email that can make you feel very good :). Just remember that something is always better than nothing, or as Gauss used to say: paucas et matura (few and good).

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Thanks to Phil BF for the nice mic pic.

As a geek I have personally made some of those mistakes in the past, but being very far from the Valley my mistakes have been a little different than the ones listed by Ron (I never thought that $5M are necessary to start a business because there’s not $5M available to start a business here in Chile). So I present you with 3 additional geek business myths I have seen and committed on my way as an “internet entrepreneur” mostly on the web applications field:

1. Code is the most valuable asset

   Yes, code is a valuable asset, in fact if you are on an internet business chances are that without code there’s no business. But guess what? your most valuable assets are your users, the people that make your service noteworthy.

   del.icio.us is a neat idea and i’m sure the code that runs it is good, but I can also do what they do in terms of code and so do you. What I don’t have is the same quantity of users del.icio.us has and that’s an advantage very hard to reach or surpass.

2. Marketing is worthless (in fact every Business operation is worthless)

   Chances are that as a geek you see business people as blood-thirsty vampires that only want to extract the last bit of life from humble and brilliant geeks like you. Well, that can be true some times hehehe ;), but most of the time it is not.

   Business people are necessary to run the business, and running a business requires more than just understanding about pointers, classes or hardware. No, businesses need management that oversee and [hopefully] understand all the operations involved in running a business: promoting your service, selling, human resources, finances, strategy, etc. I agree with you that code matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters :).

3. People appreciate technical advances

   Guess what? People don’t like technical advances that much, in fact they just like them when they are old and well proved. Only early adopters like technical advances.

   If you are a geek then you are an early adopter yourself, and surely your friends are also geeks so they also are early adopters, but the most part of the people are not that kind of people: they buy when everybody else bought so they believe they won’t waste their money on something that maybe won’t work.

Whether you like it or not, you will have to put aside your geek mindset when dealing with business issues. Most part of the time it will be more useful to use an entrepreneurial mindset: a way of seeing business as an integral organization devoted to create and sell products that give value for customers rather than being a way of showing technical wizardry. You can do it, it’s not that hard ;).

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For small internet business this is very common. Somebody has an idea and then she looks for partners between his/her friends. Now, if you are into this and you are a newbie to partner searching this can be a little tricky.

I’m sure that when looking for a partner you will mainly considerate those people that you know are responsible, talented but mainly that are more able than you in the skills you need in your team.

But there’s another factor you must considerate: entrepreneurial mindset.

Some people were done to be entrepreneurs. Others not. Those with the entrepreneurial mindset are willing to work for many months without seeing a dime from their effort, they are willing to work as many hours as necessary, they can lead themselves and they feel real passionate about their job.

Those who are not entrepreneurs can be extremely talented and skillful but if they are not in an employee role they feel lost and unmotivated.

So how do you separate the right ones from those that won’t help you? Well, you will easily identify people that don’t own an entrepreneurial mindset when they just don’t accept to be your partners because “it’s too risky”. But there are occasions when non-entrepreneurs accept entrepreneurial propositions for a couple of factors, resulting in a long-term damage for your organization because, although at first they are motivated, when time goes on and they see that being an entrepreneur it’s very very hard they lose motivation and start failing in their positions.

Surely you are asking yourself what are those factors that can make a non-entrepreneur accept an entrepreneurship position? Well during the years I have worked as an internet entrepreneur I have identified 3 of those factors:

• Your charisma: You’re such a good leader that you motivated them to do it, although they will lose that sensation very soon, usually when facing the first problem.
• They love you: Maybe you recruited a relative that wants to help you because she loves you instead of because she believes in you and your idea.
• They are your friends: As the song says “friends will be friends”, and even more when some friend looks for help from another one. Maybe they will help you at first but they will start failing once they start doing any other thing. That’s a sign that they wanted to help but didn’t believe your idea can be accomplished.

When people that accepted entrepreneurial positions start failing you feel sooo terrible because it seems that the problem is in you. You are seeing that the team doesn’t meet the desired goal but you also know that you can’t ask them for more help because you are not paying them, then you don’t have the right to ask for more of their time. So when that happens the better you can do is let them go remembering that it’s not a problem in your character: it’s just that they are not in the entrepreneurial mindset, which is completely valid.

I’m sure some persons are so good leaders that they can turn even non-entrepreneur people into entrepreneur ones just because their leadership power. I’m not that good leader so I have had more fails than successes when facing that kind of problems.

I hope that knowing this in advance will help you choose the right people from the beginning ;).

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My company has been in that position recently, and being a small business from Chile doesn’t allow us to spend $250 for a job listing so we started moving our network to find a good Java developer but we have not found a good one yet.

Fortunately the nice blog FreelanceSwitch.com recently started their job board with an interesting offer: You can list your job advert for free until July 1st. Now, this is a good place to look for an experienced freelancer, particularly in our case a freelance Java developer, because FreelanceSwitch.com is a blog devoted to provide resources for freelancers so the odds to find the right person there are high.

If you need to post a job advert be sure to do it at FreelanceSwitch.com until July 1st. After that it’ll be great if they keep the price low so small businesses from all over the world can take advantage of their service.

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Unfortunately, for those of us who are grown-ups finding time to blog can be very hard unless you are unemployed or you can work from home. But for people under 18 year old that can be absurdly easy if they want, and many of them have chosen to keep a blog, fotolog, myspace page or some other form of online presence.

But there’s a small minority of kids and girls that took this blogging activity so seriously that they have reached the status of online quasi-celebrities, and to let everybody know about them I gave me the task of finding the best and youngest bloggers out there and list them all in just one post. Hope you enjoy the list!

• Thilak Raj Rao from Tech-Buzz.net. I have interviewed him in the past because he’s a successful 17 year old indian blogger who’s making more than $3000 USD every month out of his blog. Thilak started a little more than a year ago with Tech-Buzz and he worked very hard during 8 months (he didn’t have internet connection in his home) until reaching the point of being able to earn some money with it. Thilak is currently a full-time problogger dedicating something near to 17 hours each day to work on Tech-Buzz.
• David Wilkinson from TechZi. David is a 13 year old blogger and entrepreneur from Manchester, England. In his own words, TechZi is “the technology blog that provides the plain-old news with a rather ‘unusual’ twist”. Personally I found it pretty interesting and I love David’s writing style, very dynamic and right to the point. Besides pure blogging, David founded the Zi Media Network that currently runs TechZi and CarZi, which transforms him into a real internet entrepreneur. What do you think? Did you have a blog network while being a 13 year old? I didn’t.

  David has been featured on Problogger.net at least two times. The first one in a post by Darren Rowse, and the second time with his own guest post.

• Carl Ocab from CarlOcab.com. Carl is a 13 year old kid from the Philippines that writes on his blog since February 2007. CarlOcab.com started as a tech blog but Carl promptly noted that he could do better writing about blogging and how to make money online, and he’s doing as he says: In just 3 months he has been able to attract 1 header and 2 sidebar banners for a total amount of USD $170 and also runs a small adsense box that, together with his traffic figures (as reported by Alexa), is surely making him some more bucks. Pretty amazing.
• Paris Spence-Lang from FunnyMunny.ca. Another 13 year old blogger from Canada, Paris wants to be a money advisor when he grow up but while achieving the proper age he started his blog on money advise for kids and adults! And guess what? He’s been receiving questions from adults (not that much but at least one afaik) and his answers are very good (he seems to know more about Canadian taxes than I do about Chilean taxes :P).
  Paris has been featured by John Chow dot Com at least once.
• Jessica Mah from JessicaMah.com. Well I must confess that it was hard to find the fifth blogger because it seems there’s nobody else so young in the blogosphere which can compete with the success of the previous guys from this list, but then I remembered Jessica Mah from an interview over at ValleyWag and I decided to add her to the list, although she’s more an entrepreneur than a blogger. She ran a successful hosting business when she was 13 and now that she’s 16 year old she’s planning to start “the ebay of hire services” and retire at age 25 with a billion dollars. Now, in regards to blogging, she keeps a personal and not-so-well-promoted blog over at JessicaMah.com, but what I found interesting about it is that she has so much potential that I’m sure she can grow her blog from nothing to be a super-online-star if she wants. She has the intelligence, the brand, the content and by her flickr account the [so f*****g damn good] connections to do it right now. Girl’s power in its more pure form!

I hope you enjoyed the list and to finish I want to congratulate everybody on it for their astounding example and work! My best wishes for you Jessica, Thilak, David, Carl and Paris!

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BTW, this post was also written to participate on the ‘Top 5 group writing project by Problogger.net’. Consider visiting it to find more good ‘top 5′ posts written by bloggers from all over the world!.

So I put my hands at work and I tried to identify some principles and practices that will give a good base for a corporate blog and here’s a recap of what I found:

Basics

1. Never start your business blog on some free provider of blogging platforms like Blogger. Maybe today Blogger is not seen as an horrible alternative for blogging hosting, but you can be sure it will end being like Geocities, and you don’t want to put your business website on Geocities right?
2. If you don’t have a domain then register yours now, and put your blog under something like blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog. If you were thinking to put the blog on your homepage think it again: most part of the people don’t know about blogs so they won’t understand a frontpage with a blog. Just put it in another place.

Content

3. If you want to have a chance of building a recurrent readership, get sure to write about your industry, not just about your products and services. A marvelous thing about blogging is that it’s a trusted communication channel because until now it has been a people’s medium instead of a big corps one, so leverage that trust and put all your effort on giving value to your clients.
4. Don’t fear your clients voices by allowing comments. Sometimes people can be nasty about your content but that’s unusual. Besides, you can always erase stupid comments.
5. Answer your readers comments always. I know some blogger say that’s not necessary to have comments to be a blog, but if you are blogging for business then not answering your comments is like not answering your phone, and your business cannot afford that right?
6. Write only original content. Period.
7. When quoting an external information source add something of value that’s originally yours and it’s related to that quote. Don’t just copy and paste some Wikipedia article.

Layout

8. Don’t underestimate the importance of a nice looking interface. It makes the difference between being perceived as the online equivalent of a successful mall versus being the online equivalent of a garage sale.

PR

9. Don’t hesitate to recognize what your competitors are doing good. Showing that you can see good things in your competitors yards will improve your reputation.
10. Link back to your competitors websites or blogs. They will something valuable for your readers too. If you are afraid of losing customers first go back to improve your business offerings.
11. Don’t link to every webpage you like. Giving links to a webpage is like saying “I swear by my reputation that this webpage will be useful for you”, will you do that for every webpage you visit?
12. Did you make a mistake? Admit it and ask your readers and clients for excuses. Then get back to work.
13. In fact, do as Wired Mag said and get naked!

Promotion

14. Promote your services in your blog, don’t be shy. Put some banner for your products as if you were an advertiser, and talk about the benefits of your products without forgetting that blogging is about giving your visitors value, not SPAM.
15. Prefer email subscriptions over RSS based ones. Blogging aware people’s sect is still very small, and most part of your clients won’t even know what’s RSS.
16. If you still want to offer RSS subscriptions explain your clients what’s that, how to use it, and why it’s great.

Advertising

17. If your blog is focused on writing about your industry rather than just about your products, then you can monetize your traffic by accepting banners from businesses that are complementary to yours. That’s giving value to your clients ;).
18. Don’t put AdSene, Kontera or Affiliate programs in your business blog. In fact, avoid any form of advertisement under 3rd level as stated by Chad Randall in Advertise Space.
19. If your blog is focused on your products instead of your industry, then avoid ads like the plague. Your blog is about you, nobody else.
20. Learn what keywords are, choose yours wisely and use them obsessively.

Following these tips will surely help you to grow your brand new business blog, but if you want just one piece of advice to have a successful blog then follow what the bests have said many times: Write quality content.

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• Dosh Dosh: How to Use Blog Traffic Exchanges to Make Money with Affiliate Programs. Want to make money with affiliate programs? Try Blog Traffic Exchange networks to increase your visitors number.
• Dosh Dosh: How to Make Money with a Video Blog: An Introduction and Guide. Maki presents us a way to make money online with videos that you have not done by yourself. Very useful and with great monetization potential. Strongly recommended.
• Dosh Dosh: How to Find Advertisers for Your Website and Increase Direct Advertising Sales: Learn here how to do your homework before starting to look for advertisers for your blog or website.
• Net Business Blog: Selling Text Links in Free Themes. Matt Coddington tell us why is not good to sell or buy text links in free blog templates, a practice very spread these days.
• Advertise Space: The 7 levels of revenue for your blog. Learn what are your 7 options to make money out from your blog and what you can expect from them.

Do you find something noticeable? The lack of any post from the Dot Com Mogul John Chow. I have said before that John Chow is a really good blogger and that I like his blog a lot, but since some time ago his blog mainly consists of payed reviews that really don’t give much value for the readers. I’m not against payed reviews, if they are useful for the readers then they are as good post as any other, but I believe John lost the north some weeks ago and now his blog is plainly boring. A great loss because I learned a lot things from him in the past :(.

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Wendy is an experienced business woman with a deep knowledge on home-based ventures. She started eMoms at Home a little more than a year ago with the intention to document the process of creating her home based business eSelfHelp.com, a business devoted to provide personal development social networks and affiliate marketing services. But eMoms at Home was largely more successful than eSelfHelp so Wendy finally decided to put the main part of her effort there and as a result eMoms at Home is one of the best blogs out there about running businesses at home, with an special emphasis on women entrepreneurs.

In fact, Wendy has done her work on eMoms at Home so well that in May 1st 2007 she started blogging on Inspired Business Growth, part of the Entrepreneur.com blog network, a job she largely deserves given her amazing blogging talent.

But what do I think about eMoms at Home? Well, I find Wendy’s writing tremendously inspiring, and you will find it even more inspiring and useful when you know a little more about her personal story and the kind of difficulties she had during her life and how she managed to prevail over all of them. You can see from a mile that Wendy really knows what she’s talking about so you will surely find in her blog very useful information on how to grow your home business with the nice touch of a woman’s view point :).

I highly encourage you to visits eMoms at Home right now to get excellent advice on how to run home based businesses. If you want some recommendations here are the posts and articles I like the most:

• Top 10 success ingredients for home based businesses. You don’t know what it takes to create a successful home based business? Read this article to give you an indea.
• Proof positive that anyone can become a good writer. I found this post really interesting given that I think my english written skills are bad (not *that* bad, but bad) mostly because my native language is spanish so I never reach the desired quality level, but thanks to Wendy now I believe I can and I will do it someday ;).
• 10 questions to ask yourself when you feel your home based business is failing. OK, your home based business’s performance is not so good so you are seeking for help… well, you found it.
• 10 signs that you are ready to start a home based business. I’m very proud because I discovered the “You are willing to start your new business in your off hours and give up some of your free time” and “You have the ability to go 2-6 months without any self-generated income” principles by myself many years ago! And I have followed them since my early university years! I’m not that far of becoming a successful home-based entrepreneur :).

Please consider subscribing to Roberto Alamos dot Com by email or RSS before leaving to eMoms at Home. I’m not saying I’m as good as Wendy, but I’m trying ;).