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Tara Hunt - Citizen Agency
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Andrew Scott - Rummble.com
Stefan Fountain and Daniel Spronk - Soocial.com

Fuel takes place on 13 June at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, tickets cost £195 (inc VAT) and include lunch and an evening drinks reception.

To sign up with your £25 discount just visit the Fuel site and use the code ryansentme.

What’s Fuel all about?

You need to have something really special about you in order to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. People are more picky about who they buy from, competitors are quick to establish and compete on price, and every one of us is becoming increasingly weary of information overload. It’s been said before, and we’ll say it again: you really need to be remarkable to be successful - to have customers who actually like being your customers, happy employees and covetable, well-crafted products and services.

Fuel embraces this and all our speakers will be talking about what it takes to be that remarkable company.

We’ll also be sharing tips on how to streamline your business, cut IT costs, up productivity and build rewarding relationships - all using highly effective, affordable web apps and online marketing techniques.

At Carsonified we depend on the web for most of our day-to-day activity. We’re not just talking our websites and email. A quick shortlist of tools we currently use includes:

- Google Docs to share our various documents
- GCal to keep organised
- Google Analytics to see what people are doing on our sites
- Twitter to be connected
- Tweetscan to see what other people are saying!
- Upcoming, Facebook etc to list events
- RSS to keep tabs on interesting things
- del.icio.us to share information among the team
- Flickr to stash our pics
- Blinksale for most of our invoicing
- Basecamp for managing our projects
- Remember The Milk for group task management
- Campaign Monitor for easy email campaigns
- our own apps EventStream for organising events and DropSend.com for sending large files
- Wordpress for our blogs
- Wufoo for forms and surveys
- Adium for instant messaging

… the list goes on.

Being a small company based in Bath hasn’t stopped us from realising our ambitions - the fact that we’re a web-orientated kind of company has helped us to set up a growing and successful business in a place that we love to be. We hope that Fuel Conference will inspire other companies to adopt the same kind of approach.

Re:Fuel at the Drinks Reception

We know you value face time with speakers and fellow attendees which is why we have included decent breaks and a post conference drinks reception (included in your ticket price) into the schedule.

Wear a Badge - Win a Prize

Pop a Fuel badge on your site, let us know about it and be entered into our draw for a £50 voucher of your choice. The winner will be announced on the day!

We value design and quality very highly at Carsonified so it’s wonderful to have him on board. He moved his entire family to Bath to join us, so we’re really grateful to have him.

Mike is an amazingly talented web designer who has a good understanding of semantic markup whilst also having incredible visual creativity. Beautifully designed websites are of the utmost importance to us (of course :D) but we were also wowed by his extensive print design experience.

You can look forward to all the creativity that’ll be flying out of Carsonified HQ soon :)

If you have 5 minutes to spare, it’s definitely an interesting read.

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.

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…

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

The description from their site says:

“Web Mission 2008 will see 20 UK Web 2.0 companies travel to San Francisco to explore new opportunities for growth with key people in Silicon Valley. This event will showcase innovative UK web talent, seek meaningful assistance for companies ready for expansion, and provide a platform for those involved to gain valuable media and business exposure.”

This is being backed by some pretty smart people, including UK Trade & Investment, Oracle, Mike Butcher, Paul Walsh, Oli Barrett, Huddle, Doug Richard (ex Dragon’s Den), Atlas Ventures, Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), HSBC, Sun Microsystems and James Murray Wells (GlassesDirect.com) … so why is it such a bad idea?

We’ve got everything we need here

I believe the intention for Web Mission was great - networking and exposure for UK web start-ups. That’s fab, but here’s the problem - this project is declaring to the whole world, loud and clear, “We don’t have what it takes over here.”

If we’re ever going to create a healthy start-up culture in Europe, we need to stop running cap-in-hand to American entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Why couldn’t we have spent the thousands of Pounds that it’ll take to run Web Mission and do something exciting in London?

This is exactly why we started Future of Web Apps in London in 2006 - to encourage web start-ups that they can do this, here in the UK and Europe.

Why not just focus on building a profitable business?

I just finished watching DHH’s talk at Startup School and I think it really sums up my position. Instead of working your ass off to get noticed by Google, Mike Arrington and Mike Moritz, in hopes of getting acquired, finding funding or getting TechCrunched, why not work your ass off to build a profitable ‘lifestyle’ business that services a specific niche?

As DHH points out, if you want to do $1M in revenue, all you need is 2,100 paying customers at $40 per month … and who wouldn’t mind being a millionaire? :)