Diary of a Startup: I’ve Just Applied to Seedcamp

Date: 2012-01-13
Seedcamp is basically the UK answer to Y Combinator or TechStars. In a nutshell these programs can provide seed funding, monitoring and network events for tech startups, an awesome idea! I’ve known about Seedcamp for a while however never felt the need to apply as when setting up my last company Welford Media Ltd (2006 prior to Seedcamp) there was no need to go after funding, I bootstrapped the whole thing and it worked out ok.

This is different. Recensus is a web app that requires as much help as it can get, that includes mentoring from people who’ve done it before, very experienced developers who can build something scaleable and cutting edge, and as much press as possible. I’ve been following Seedcamp for a while and from what I’ve seen, out of any program in the UK, they will help us the most and give us the best chance of success.

Anyway, I’ve submitted my application (with 4 hours to spare) and can only cross my fingers and hope for the best. Last time I spoke to my key developer and soon to be co-founder was before Christmas so I emailed over the applications to him and this was his response “Looks good, I read it through and am excited about the product again! I want to build it now ”. Hopefully that’s what the judges at Seedcamp will think too.

Diary of a Startup: Create a startup for £14

Date: 2012-01-07
This post is the first in a series discussing my new startup, proudly named recensus.com (latin for review). So after spending about 24 hours trying to find a .com domain name I was happy with here were my steps.

1. Domain Registration
Registered the domain name with 123-reg.co.uk. I choose them because they are reasonably priced and you get control over the DNS records which they don’t charge you extra for and they haven’t gone down in. (Cost: £12)

2. Setup Cloudflare
Cloudflare.com is an amazing service that give you a DNS server which blocks spam, protects against security attacks, caches content using a CDN and a lot of other features. Well worth the free price tag, takes about 10 minutes to setup, I only wish they gave you the nameservers at the beginning of the setup and they had Google App’s DNS settings as a one click button. (Cost: free)

3. Setup Google Apps
Just in case you don’t know Google App’s give you Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites and Google Docs all under your own domain (free for up to 10 users). Again well worth the free price tag (although you have to look hire for the free version), just don’t forget to setup the subdomains. (Cost: free)

4. Setup Webspace and Upload Holding Page
I’ve got my own server (well Welford Media Ltd has) and I’ve just created a new domain and uploaded my holding page. If you haven’t got hosting you could go to Hostpapa.co.uk and click install wordpress, then download a coming soon template (see http://www.net-kit.com/12-free-attractive-themes-templates-for-coming-soon-pages/ or http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/coming-soon-templates-tutorials/). (Cost: £2 per month)

5. Signup to MailChimp
Mailchimp enables you to send out tracked email newsletters to subscribers and they have a free account which give you 2000 subscribers! After signing up put the signup form on your website. (Cost: free)

That’s the easy bit done, now i’ve just got build the app, do the sales and marketing, convert leads and make money. Also if possible get funding, find mentors and hire staff.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter July 2011

Just clearing through my inbox and found Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. This is exceptionally useful for most of my clients.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter 2011, Volume 1, July 2011

1. Introduction Welcome to the first volume of the Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter! This month, we are replacing the standard “benchmarking” report in your Google Analytics account with data shared in this newsletter. We are using this newsletter as an experiment to surface more useful or interesting data to Analytics users. Data contained here comes from all websites which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics. Only those website administrators which have enabled this anonymous data sharing will receive this “benchmarking” newsletter. You may be wondering, how many websites are in this “anonymous data sharing” pool? Currently, hundreds of thousands, and we’ve endeavored to make all of the metrics here statistically significant. The date range of comparison for this newsletter is from November 1, 2010 – February 1, 2011. Comparison is done with data from November 1, 2009 – February 1, 2010. Absolute metrics such as total # visits, pageviews, or conversions for all opted-in websites are not reported. To simplify the prose, the phrase “websites” will represent “websites which have opted into anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics” for the rest of this newsletter. 2. Site Metrics Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.   11/1/09 – 2/1/10 11/1/10 – 2/1/11 Difference Pages/Visit 4.9 4.5 -0.4 Bounce Rate 48.2% 47.0% -1.2% Avg Time on Site 5:49 5:23 -0:26   2.1 Breakdown by Geography Our anonymous database has aggregated geographic breakdown at the country level. Here are a few representative countries and their respective aggregate metrics. The first number in each cell represents the metric for the date range 11/1/10-2/1/11. The parenthesized number is the Year over Year delta compared to a year ago.   Country Pages / Visit Bounce Rate Avg Time on Site United States 4.7 (-0.1) 42.5% (-6.1%) 6:06 (-0:10) United Kingdom 4.9 (-0.3) 41.5% (+0.2%) 5:38 (-0.27) France 4.4 (-0.4) 49.7% (+1.4%) 4:40 (-0:08) Brazil 4.1 (-0.1) 47.8% (-2.9%) 5:20 (+0:03) China 4.1 (-0.1) 58.2% (+1.0%) 3:46 (+0:37) Japan 3.9 (-0.1) 48.6% (-9.0%) 3:47 (-2:59)   For bounce rate, the distribution by country is plotted below:   The distribution above is annotated with some countries — which seem to indicate a story of leisure and stage of economic development. For a related metric: average time on site, the distribution by country is plotted below:   The type of countries annotated in the average time on site graph above seem to be in reverse order as those in the bounce rate distribution. 2.2 Breakdown by Traffic Sources Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium”"” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.   Traffic Sources Pages / Visit Bounce Rate Avg Time on Site Direct 4.0 (-0.5) 47.2% (-4.0%) 5:21 (-0:07) Referral 5.0 (+0.1) 43.1% (-1.1%) 6:36 (-1:48) Organic Search 4.9 (-0.1) 47.9% (-1.1%) 4:43 (+0:06) CPC Search 5.6 (+0.0) 41.4 (-1.7%) 3:57(+0:07)   2.4 Conversion Rate Distribution Many marketers’ favorite metric is conversion rate. Here is the worldwide distribution of Google Analytics “goal conversion rate” by country.     Would anyone have guessed that states which are known for conversions are also high for their citizens’ goal conversion rate? Note that for some states with few population, the statistical significance of the conversion metric comes into doubt. 3. Traffic Sources Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.   % Visits from Sources 11/1/09 – 2/1/10 11/1/10 – 2/1/11 Difference Direct 36.5% 36.8% +0.3% Referral 21.0% 19.4% -1.6% Search Engines 27.0% 28.0% +1.0% Other 15.5% 15.8% +0.3%   4. Operating Systems Browsers and Operation Systems (OS) are identified by the “referrer” string sent by users’ browsers.   % Visits from OS 11/1/09 – 2/1/10 11/1/10 – 2/1/11 Difference Windows 89.9% 84.8% -5.1% Macintosh 4.5% 5.2% +0.7% Linux 0.6% 0.7% +0.1% Other 5% 9.3% +4.3%   5. Comments This is the first volume of our Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. We hope that it provides useful insights. If you have specific comments or suggestions on how to improve this newsletter, please send your feedback to: analytics-benchmarking@google.com. Happy analyzing, Google Analytics Team

How to Take your Start-Up to the Next Level

I’m always on the look out for new great “how to” videos or books for setting up and marketing web apps. I’ve always liked the presentations and talks from Aaron Patzer from Mint.com, which he started and sold for $170 Million within 3 years. He’s talks are very open and frank and I think they make a lot sense.

Just found this great talk from FOWA Miami 2010. Some of the key points Aaron makes are:

• Solve a real problem (in a large market)
• Will the problem exist in 5 years time
• Have a real revenue potential (get an idea of revenue per user)
• Sustainable advantage (best user interface, quickest, best features etc)
• Share your idea
• Validate the idea (ask people in the street)
• Buy a great domain name
• Get alpha users
• Interview using Top Grading approach (ask why a lot when interviewing new staff based on the book Top Grading)
• Hire an aggressive PR company, when you are ready!

The Agency Dream

The agency I have now is not the agency I wished for!

What do I mean by that? I had a dream of being the ‘best’ agency around, with work that everyone would envy, designs that would make people say wow to, an agency that people who are passionate about the web would aspire to design like and want to work for, basically an awesome agency. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got great staff, I’ve got a great office environment and we work with some great clients but we’ve bent too many of my/our morals on the way.

My agency would be amazing, if it wasn’t for clients.
We would produce stuff of dreams, with no boundaries, no ‘make my logo bigger’, no compromise and no IE6 but we would also be out of business. At the end of the day we have to pay wages and bills and the only money we get are from clients, so although they’ve ruin my dream they also make my dream a possibility.

Don’t get me wrong we have tried to draw a line, we have tried to explain to clients that a bigger logo isn’t the way forward, we tried to explain that it’s not wasted white space, its part of the design and brings balance to the page and increases usability, we’ve tried really hard to explain that it’s not what you want that matters it what your visitors want to see but in the end it’s up to the client. The only analogy I can think of is trying to explain to a child that sweets aren’t good for them, no matter what you say, no matter how many white papers or proofs you bring to them they are still going to eat sweets.

I have come to a few conclusion:
1. That to produce something amazing we have to produce it for ourselves for no other reason that we simply can; without the annoyance of clients, money or a brief. The only issue with this great idea is time and money.

2. We need to produce a product that we can love, like a web app with features and designs we decide upon, with users that want to use our software without the ability to interfere.

3. Sometimes we need to stand up for our principals and tell clients that we are unwilling to make the changes they want, despite the cost or emotional turmoil that may bring.

So what are am I going to do about it?
We are going to dedicate 1/5 to 1 day a week to a internal project of our choosing, but until we make our millions from our internal project we will still be saying “yes, if you really want..but you really shouldn’t because…” to clients.