Advice: You May Just Have Something There – So Get to Work
In our Barenaked Apps Panel at SXSW, Ryan Carson advised anyone starting a web app to plan for 3 potential outcomes: success, limited success and failure. He’s right – you need to think those outcomes through and determine how you will respond to each scenario. I’d like to add something to this though. There are many people out there with big dreams that are building web apps in their spare time these days – it’s exciting. Unfortunately I think a lot of them are building with false expectations (a post on false expectations to follow soon). They think if their app does not take right off, they should pack it in. My thinking is – don’t.
If you have a measure of success when you launch, I bet you’ve got something. What’s the measure of success? It could be almost anything, like how many visitors from to your site or how many people trial your service. How about getting someone you don’t know to pay for your service? If a person you don’t know signs up and pays out of no where – even one person – then there is a good chance you are on to something.
If you’re on to something it’s time to hunker down and get to work. Launching does not mean you’ve arrived at easy street and you can sit back and relax – it’s your introduction to the grind. The beauty is that web businesses are a ton of fun to run, so the grind can be really enjoyable.
Not buying any of this? Maybe you will find this inspiring. When FreshBooks launched, we were called 2ndSite (we’ve since rebranded) and we did not have our first paying user until month two, but we believed in what we were doing – that fuelled us – and saw trials everyday which was exciting. So we hunkered down and that graph at the top of this post is what our growth has looked like over the past 30 months (we’ve been at it for 33, but I could not get info for the first three months).
Work hard, take care of your customers, innovate and the rest will take care of itself.
This is the second in a series of posts (here is the first) I’ll be doing over the next few days about starting a web business. If you liked this one, subscribe to our feed and stick around.
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9:54 am
[...] From the FreshBooks Blog: [...]
2:24 pm
[...] buddies with extravagant gifts if it happened. But also because Freshbooks is a superb app with a growing base, more in the spirit of what Google buys, and is soon to be moving into accounting, too. And if [...]
5:56 pm
That graph is impressive! Is this total users? If so, what percentage are active?
6:06 pm
Thanks Mark!
Re percent active: It’s our culture not to talk about the numbers in too much detail (see the comments here), but a healthy chunk are active for sure – thanks for asking.
1:03 pm
Hi Mike – This is great, it definitely is helpful as we’re getting siteMighty off the ground. We follow the mantra of launch early and launch often, and we really are revising a lot of our service on the fly. It helps to measure the little successes, any successes, and then refine your and improve our product. Its really reassuring to know that you don’t need to hit a home run right off the back, taking user feedback and refining your app will continue to increase our adoption. Great post!
Chris
1:13 pm
It’s always nice to hear we are helping people in our community – thanks for the feedback Chris.
11:12 am
[...] by my participation in a panel at SXSW, this post is one in a series of posts regarding the building and operation of web application [...]
2:36 pm
Great article. We are in the rebranding process right now and it is a challenge.