Impressions from Fowa Dublin 2009

Notes

Last Friday i attended the Future of Web Applications conference which was held at the Liberty Hall Centre in Dublin, Ireland.

It had been 4 years since i had left Ireland after living there for 1 year working at MLE. I had a great time walking around the city recalling nice memories and catching up with some old friends.

Here comes a selection of what i liked most. The other talks were also quite good but i’m just writing about what I felt was more useful or interesting to me.

Highlights

keynote and how to sell your web app - lessons learned from the acquisition of dropsend.com

Ryan Carson gave an interesting keynote followed by a talk with some helpful tips for people trying to develop web applications to make money.

Short summary:

Start promoting your app way before the actual release.
Use APIs for recurring billing and invoicing. It’s something that you don’t want to code yourself if you can avoid it. He recommended spreedly and xero.
Charge in $ unless it’s a niche app with a local market. If you do so open a bank account in $ to avoid loosing money in exchange rates.
Use A-B testing and Google Web Optimizer.
If you think you might end up selling your app start a separate business for it. If you don’t, there will be probably more obstacles on the way to your acquisition.
Focus on giving good customer service easily. You should have automatic mechanisms for recovering passwords, sending invoices to customers and a fast and easy way of doing refunds when things go wrong.
Focus on usability during the wireframing process. He recommended balsamiq mockups.
You need a lot of stats in order to have good control: page views, cost of acquisition per customer, etc.
Try having between 60% and 70% benefit per customer. That is supposed to be realistic for a web app business.

unconventional web apps

Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe from Contrast gave a brilliant talk about breaking the conventions of web applications. I didn’t write down notes during this talk because of the fast pace of the speakers: 9 seconds per slide! They certainly captured my attention. You can watch the slides here.

They spoke about breaking conventions in a positive way:

Increasing the marketability of your product by standing out against your competitors. Be different.
Real innovation usually happens when conventions are broken and people think about something again from scratch (new user interfaces, etc.)
Change the world, change the way we do things.

They also went through the current conventions on the web that we should avoid following:

3 column layout with header and footer, logo on the left, etc. Why do all websites have to look the same?
Signups. Why do they have to be always so painful with many fields to fill out, security questions, etc.? Giving your potential customers a way to have a glance at your site (demo mode) before signing up is also something they’ll appreciate.
Home page or dashboard. All applications seem to have one these days even if there is nothing to put there.
Copy. There are many features in web apps that exist because they have been copied over and over and all over again. Try being different. Example: “You have successfully logged in” is a standard but it does not provide any useful information to the user. He probably knows already because he is seeing his homepage. Why not say hello to your customer in a nice way instead, like Flickr does?
Stop the sell. If a user is already your customer don’t put big logos on the screen, don’t fill the dashboard with self promoting news, etc. Let your customer own your product. He is paying for it.

how to build amazing web apps - lessons learned from building twitter.com

Blaine Cook spoke about OAuth and the future of real time feeds in web apps. He mentioned a few innovative techniques and approaches:

OAuth is an awesome way of providing authorisation to APIs, web apps and mashups.
Using the Jabber XMPP protocol to push data through APIs
Webhooks, which for example is used by github to trigger custom post-build hooks.
La.conica is an awesome open source twitter clone that can be used to build new apps.

How to build desktop apps that help your web app succeed

Matthew first talked about how last.fm introduced the concept of scrobbling (sending info about the music you listen to out to your profile). The idea is to have content generated by the users and offer advantages for them without changing the way they do things. If they listen to music on their desktop don’t try to change it. Last.fm for example sends the info to the web app without requiring the user to do anything special apart from installing the client and they can have something in exchange by visiting their profile and finding music neighbours, listening to recommended music based on their taste, etc.

Privacy and trust

If you want people to use your desktop client which will be sending potentially sensitive data to the web, you should try to build a relationship based on trust. You should provide public APIs and easy ways of exporting data (it’s their data so they should be able to take it with them if they want to). Making your desktop software open source will also drastically reduce user concerns about privacy issues.

120 seconds of madness! start-ups pitch their ideas

I became really excited about Robin’s project Decisions for heroes. It’s a web application built specially for rescue teams and emergency services with detailed tracking of all incidents and powerful analytics.

doing a startup in the real world

David Heinemeier Hansson’s blasting talk was about launching your business on the web. It wasn’t exactly new but i still enjoyed it. Short summary:

Charge money for your app. It’s the way business is supposed to work.
Don’t try to build one of these huge viral apps like Facebook or Twitter. It is possible to succeed but there are only a few that have actually managed, and it’s pretty much like winning the lottery. It’s much easier to build a small successful business.
Don’t take VC money. It’s hard to find in the current economic situation and if you do get it you will get plenty of money that will you have to spend (even if it’s not needed) and you will be forced to give away a part of your new business. Starting a new business as a side project is a very good way of avoiding VC money. Their first product basecamp was launched as a side project while they were consulting to pay their bills (it took 1 year for basecamp to generate profit).
You don’t need much money and you also don’t need much time. The initial basecamp product was developed spending 10 hours in coding and 10 hours in design a week.
Use different ways for doing revenue. Sometimes you can take something and monetise it in various ways. Their company 37 signals for example generates revenue from their products, their talks, their books, the job postings on their blog, etc.

You can watch DHH’s talk at Startup School which is more or less about the same topic.

What i didn’t like:

There were no free drinks or food. At least some free coffee would have been nice.
The WIFI wasn’t able to meet the requirements of 200 web geeks with iphones and laptops. I also would recommend to have a separate broadband connection for the speakers to avoid problems when demoing.
No one announced the start of the talks. Sometimes you were deep in a conversation and suddenly you realised everyone was already sitting in the auditorium listening to the talk.

The presentation slides and videos haven’t been uploaded yet but i’ll update this post when they are available.

Overall it was a great conference. I enjoyed it a lot and i will attend again next year if i can.

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