I've just reached a major milestone in my life: I'm now working full time for my startup Project Bubble and it feels awesome!

I can't tell you what an amazing milestone this is and how excited I am about it. A few months ago I blogged about the amazing privilege it is to work full time for your own startup. At the time I was a few months away from this milestone and there was still quite an up-hill climb to make.

However this October I've been working full time for Project Bubble and it has been an utter delight, although slightly scary financially! I thought I would share some background in to this.

The Summer

This year I've worked harder than ever before. I wanted to basically be full time for one of my startups before the end the year. To support myself, my family and the high cost of living in London I had to take on contract work to make up the shortfall. The income from Project Bubble has been growing lots since I finalized the pricing in January and I calculated over the summer that it would be approximately November before I could work full time for Project Bubble and then I wouldn't need to take on any more contract work. Until then I had to work as any normal freelancer would but in my 'spare' time I'd be working insanely hard on Project Bubble.

Over the summer I had the amazing opportunity to do some great contract work for some really cool companies including zferral and Analytics SEO doing UI and UX design consultancy. These companies are startups too and the best part about working for them was that I felt like I was really contributing to their 'early days' and I knew they were surely going to be big-time in a few years. It was also a real privilege working for companies that understood what it was like for a bootstrapper entrepreneur who needed to balance paid work with growing his startup. I salute you guys.

The Now

Now it's approaching the end of October and things are looking good. Project Bubble can now just about support my wife and I to work full time. I'll be managing the direction of the business along with doing development, and my wife will be managing accounts, finance and a bit of support. Hopefully next year we'll be able to make our first hire so I'll need to figure that one out.

Being full time for my startup means I can actually commit proper focused time in to development (not evenings when I'm really tired). As a result of the amount of time I've had to spend on development this month a whole new API has been launched, which has been a lot of fun to build. I can also get to the office and spend time thinking about the direction of the business without getting distracted by lots of emails about a freelance project I'm working on. It's so cool.

I always knew that the first thing I'd nail when I was full time was the API for Project Bubble and a big marketing strategy around that. So the next big project is to network with lots of developers and try to get lots of cool apps, add-ons and integrations built. I'll also be contacting some of the big companies to try and get featured on their apps pages. The best thing is that I'll be doing all of this 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, not 12AM at night!

Advice for Other Bootstrappers

I have to say that although I'm enjoying the rewards now (such as having the time to write this post!), it's been a year of real hard work. I've been working hard for my clients to pay the bills but also working hard for my startup and only now can I actually step to one side and think about what I've learnt so far on this journey. Here are some tips I thought I'd share.

Be 100% Sure

It's scary financially to take the plunge into working full time for your startup. Although we run a SaaS business model which brings in regular recurring revenue, it's still a little scary when you don't get the growth that you wanted, or you get a stream of cancellations for no apparent reason. You have to be 100% sure you can do it before you tell your clients you are no longer taking on contract work. Don't burn all your bridges and continue to be available at evenings or weekends if your clients need extra work. Also don't forget your clients were the ones that helped you along the way to get there in the first place.

Don't Make Wild Predictions

It's easy to look at the graphs, draw an imaginary line with your finger and then say "in three months we'll be making $50,000 per month judging by this graph!". Things can change quickly and you might find yourself in the unfortunate position where your server has issues and you lose a load of customers, or perhaps you have to take on expenses that you didn't anticipate such as extra hardware or development work. Be conservative with your estimates. Fortunately I have my lovely wife to help me with this, because I'm often the one making wild predictions and my wife puts me right.

Do it Yourself

When things go well it's easy to start saying, we'll hire a freelancer for this or we'll pay another company to do that. However if you do start earning more than what you need it's really useful to save up a pot of cash for that unexpected expense that you might get, such as legal expenses or server upgrades. Think 'can I do this myself?' when it comes to some aspects of the startup. For example recently I was thinking of hiring someone to build our API for Project Bubble, and I would have loved to have worked with someone else on this aspect. However it would have been a luxury that we couldn't have afforded, so I learnt all about API development and did it myself. It took longer, but saved us quite a bit of money. If you're a self-learner I suggest this approach to lots of things!

Patience

The obvious one. There were lots of times I was a bit fed up with not being able to work for my own startup and have to work for someone else (as cool as those companies were). Nothing really compares to the joy of being able to put your time, effort and passions in to something which you own because you get the immediate rewards but also the long term rewards too. However to do this you need to be patient and know that it takes time to get there.

Honour Your Clients

Remember that your clients helped you get to where you are and if it wasn't for them you wouldn't be able to even work part time for your startup because you'd have no money to support it. I tried my very best to make sure I was being as honourable as I could be with the hours I was working for my clients. Holding off on support emails, phone calls, even thinking time. I wanted to make sure that I was fully committed to the project I was being paid to do and putting all my energy in to that one thing. It was hard, but I felt like by doing that good things would come back around to me, and they have done. Your clients may be paying you a day rate for a project, but also they can be your friends and perhaps be really helpful in your success later on too. You may even partner with them somehow later on, so like I said earlier keep the bridges open and honour them in your contract work.

Get Little Rewards

You might have to put in lots of your spare time, such as evenings and weekends, or even your own cash, and you might think that you're not going to see the rewards for months (when the revenue your startup makes can afford you full time). However you can get little rewards too. For me the 'little rewards' were getting customers emailing me back at 1AM while I was still working saying things like "You're still working this late to build this feature for me? You're awesome!". Other rewards are things like looking at the revenue growth chart and saying "this growth spurt happened when I worked that whole weekend on the Time Tracking feature". Sometimes you need to just appreciate the small details before you can take a step back and enjoy the whole picture. Reward yourself with these little milestones.

Not There Yet

Just because I've now hit my milestone of working full time, I'm not 'there' yet. In fact I've only just begun because now I've got a massive responsibility. I've got to really earn this amazing privilege and work hard to not only grow the business for myself and my family, but also for future employees that might want to join the team later. There's loads of foundations I've got to lay to make this startup in to something even more awesome than it is already. That's going to require a lot of work. We're there just about financially, but we've still got a long way to go in lots of other aspects. Again patience is the key, and lots of hard work. Now that my startup can afford to support me and my wife, it's time to think about who (and what) else it can support with the revenue it makes.

So I'll blog probably at Christmas time with maybe some more lessons learned about life as a full time bootstrapper.

How cool!

I'm blown away! I found an amazing REST client for Mac OS X that's not only awesome, but free too! My productivity for API development and testing has just gone up by about 400%.

I'm working on the API for Project Bubble and I needed something to be able to help me test my API calls. I was using CURL from the Terminal and it was a pain having to edit each command line entry. What I really wanted was CURL but with a GUI.

There are lots of REST apps in the App Store and I was going to buy one for a few quid, but then I stumbled upon this which is in active development. It's practically bug free, really stable, lovely user interface and it JUST WORKS! I'm so happy with it right now it's basically increased my productivity by about 4 times.

So look out for an awesome Project Bubble API, which has been aided by an awesome Cocoa REST Client.

You can view their Google project page here:

http://code.google.com/p/cocoa-rest-client/

 How are you converting your leads to sales? Are you relying on sales copy and beautiful call to action buttons? I have another tool you can try which will increase your conversions dramatically!

OK, firstly there's nothing wrong with a cool Call to Action Button and they do work really well, however there are a lot of other great ways to convert your leads to sales. One of which I'm going to tell you about and review is SnapEngage, a tool that aims to connect your web visitors with you before they leave your site.

I covered this briefly a while ago when testing out whether it was a good idea to Engage Your Visitors or Annoy Them, and after months of testing this app I can definitely tell you now that it is worth the small possibility that you will annoy them for the amazing results that this tool will bring to your conversion rate.

What does it do?

SnapEngage at its basic level is a tool that lets your visitors connect with you via email and live chat. So it's useful on a Help page or FAQ page so that you can provide answers to questions that your visitors might have.

It's really easy to set up because once you have created an account you simply add your instant messenger details (for example Google Talk) in to their system and then embed their Javascript in to your website. That's it.

Once you have embedded the Javascript a cool little widget will appear on the edge of your screen where visitors can click and then connect with you easily.

Proactive Chat

However the power with this tool lies in it's proactive chat ability. Let's say your customer arrives at your site and then goes to the pricing page. Normally they might have a quick read through then leave the page after 40 seconds. They may have questions or things that they don't understand about your pricing, but they can't be bothered to send an email to you and ask because they simply don't have time.

This problem can be solved by the Proactive Chat. You simply grab their attention before they leave the site and ask them if they need any help, much like you would in a real store. All you do is enable Proactive Chat and set the timer to 35 seconds (which is a good time because it's not too soon and not too late). You will automatically appear to them (without you needing to do anything) and ask if they have any questions, then if they reply you will be notified and then you can start answering their questions.

I swear by SnapEngage and can tell you it has increased my conversion rate by up to 20%, simply because I'm leading the customers to the cash register while answering their questions. It's beautiful.

There are other tools out there, but to be honest I have been so impressed with their support and how easy it is to use I wouldn't switch to anything else. It's also really affordable too!

So, check it out and let me know if it's been useful to your business!

Last night I had the awesome opportunity to go to a simulcast of the Startup Lessons Learned conference in SF.

I met some great entrepreneurs who were all discussing this concept of a Lean Startup and asking various questions around it. What is a Lean Startup? Why be lean? What benefits does employing this methodology bring to your startup? How do you define a startup?

The evening kicked off with lots of free beer and pizza (which in my opinion is a great way to engage lots of tech geeks in a room), and then pixels forming Eric Ries were blasted on to a wall. We were able to hear and see everything in the conference, live streamed to the agency floor who were kindly hosting us, and it honestly felt like we were actually there in SF. At one point I even started clapping when a speaker came up and felt very embarrassed when I realized I was the only one!

Ries started by defining what the Lean Startup movement was all about and shared some great slides explaining it in great detail.

He said that a Startup is basically:

"...a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

Basically, in his words, a Startup 'is an experiment'.

I like the fact that Ries basically welcomes the uncertainty principle in to the world of startups. Taking risks and being brave is totally encouraged, and the overall game to play is 'Try, Fail, Adapt, Repeat'. Also Ries was saying that really the Customer is the most important part of the production line, meaning that we should be listening to what our customers want out of the product or service we are offering, not what we want to offer them.

This means that the original process of spending months defining the offering and then building it gets totally turned on its head. Instead of spending months building a product that nobody wants, we build the absolute MVP we can, offer it (broken as it may be), get feedback from our customers, then tweak and define it. I absolutely love it because it's fast and it's agile.

We are going to be seeing lots of new creative entrepreneurs embracing this methodology in their startups over the next few years I am sure. It also got me thinking that it's something I've been employing over the last couple of years without even realizing it. Project Bubble was founded on these principles because I wanted to be as agile as I possibly could and build something that my customers actually wanted, rather than what I thought they needed. It's been a blast.

So if you want more resources, follow Eric on Twitter and be sure to get a copy of his new book. Another great resource is this book by Rob Walling which is aimed towards developers who want to be lean and get their startup off the ground without any outside funding. Recommended.

The awesome showcase of the best web apps has moved! Great Web Apps is temporarily going to be re-housed to my blog for the short term, and then it is going to be rebuilt in to a completely new website.

It's been fun doing the Great Web Apps blog and I met some great people doing it. I met Jeff Epstein from zferral, Adam at Wistia, Ryan at ShiftPlanning plus lots of others including Matt at TechInch. I also was able to cover some apps before they got famous, such as WuFoo, BidSketch and lots of others. It's been a blast!

However, it didn't make enough money for me to pay someone to keep it going and I didn't have the time, so it was time to sell it and move on. With that said though, I want to keep aspects of it going on my blog here, and I want to work on a new project with Jeff which I can't talk about right now, but more info will be released shortly.

So stay tuned because I'll be setting up a new category called Best Web Apps and will feature some great apps here on my blog.

I've been thinking a lot recently about what difference the physical location of your startup can make. Does it make a difference if you are in San Fransisco, London, Berlin or even the countryside?

As you'll know if you read my blog, I've started my projects in the countryside, nowhere near any 'tech hub' and have been fairly successful so far. Recently I moved to the London because I wanted to meet more people like me and also because we wanted a change and a new adventure.

I've heard a lot of stuff about how 'rubbish' the startup scene is in London, however I don't have much other choice. In 2007 (and 2010) I tried to move to the US attempting various different visa routes, however both failed and it was quite disappointing.

In 2011 I decided to quit trying to move to the US and make the most of my own capital city, London. So we made the move and so far we've been enjoying it. I've been to a TechHub meetup and tomorrow I'm going to the Startup Lessons Learned conference with Eric Ries, which is happening about 15 minutes walk away from my house - so cool! I'm also trying really hard to connect with other startup founders who are in the same place as me to learn off them and perhaps share some of my own experiences.

The fact is that if you are in an area with lots of other people in the same industry as you, and with the same passion and drive, then you are sure to do well because you can learn and grow together. However there will be other issues that I may run in to later around investors, tax, and office space - but lets see how it goes.

I want to give it a good go and make the most of what I've got. I really hope I can make things work here and don't end up joining the 'London haters' who complain that London just isn't good for startups. I'm going to give London a good shot and who knows in a couple of years maybe London and the 'silicon roundabout' will be the next hot-spot for young entrepreneurs.

If you are in startups and are in the London area then let me know, I'd love to meet up.

Image courtesy of Wired.

In about 4-5 months it looks like I'll be able to work full time for my main startup if things carry on as they are. I'm so excited!

So after spending a few hours looking at spreadsheets, analyzing finances and plotting charts the projections are looking good. I will be able to work full time for Project Bubble in September if the trends continue as they are. I can't express how much this means to someone who has spent his whole career working for other people doing what they want me to do.

In 2008 I decided I wanted to stop working for clients and instead develop my own applications which I could sell as SaaS so that I could basically earn money while I slept and not have to send out another quotation ever again.

The Struggle

It's been nearly three years now of really hard work (lots of bootstrapped startup founders will identify) and I've had a lot of scary times along the way.

I remember chatting to my wife about six months in and she was telling me about how much we need to be making compared to what we were actually getting in. I had just taken a few weeks off to do a load of development on Project Bubble and get a new feature built and we had just started charging for it, but when you're developing your startup it means you're not getting paid for any contract work and therefore the bills start stacking up.

After our chat we realized that basically unless Project Bubble started making us loads of money (which it wouldn't for quite a long time because it didn't even make enough money to afford an SSL at the time), then I would have to go back to contract work which I did.

The frustration of not being able to work for your own project when you've tasted what it's like to be able to work full time (albeit a few weeks) is extremely hard to bear. However it's something I just had to do, because that's life.

I would work for Project Bubble as often as I could, evenings, weekends, and whenever I didn't have any contract work on. I was also doing some work for some other cool startups around the time such as usability consultancy, and Halogy builds and support. I always loved the times I booked out just to work on a new Project Bubble feature and I loved the joy this would bring to those in the Project Bubble Beta community, even though these booked times were quite rare and very work intensive.

Then comes the time when your startup can actually afford to pay for its own bills, like servers, SEO, SSL certificates and video hosting. This happened after about six months of charging and I remember how awesome it felt to be able to afford my own dedicated server with Rackspace.

The Rewards

A couple of years later and with really steady growth, the opportunity finally came when I could work 2-3 days a week for Project Bubble. This time came about a couple of months ago but I haven't really been able to appreciate it until recently because I've been busy with lots of other little projects and a house move.

Now I'm sitting here in my nice office in London and writing a blog post while on Project Bubble time, and effectively getting paid for it. It's a great feeling.

With the time that I now have to work part time for Project Bubble I can develop stuff that's long over due (in my opinion, not my customers), such as the API and language translation instead of bug fixes and critical updates that I would squeeze in to an evening. It also means that I get to appreciate weekends with my wife and work less evenings. I haven't been able to do that for a long time.

The Future

So in September I'll be able to work full time for Project Bubble as managing director and lead developer. Who knows, a few months after that we may even be able to make our first hire, such as another programmer to extend and develop the backend and the more technical aspects which aren't really my strong point.

The challenges of MD will then shift to a completely different level as I have to worry about managing a team and perhaps the expectations of investors. Nevertheless, challenges I'm looking forward to.

I was chatting to a guy I'm working for at the moment and his startup has its own team and office. He has the awesome opportunity to cultivate his own distinct culture for his startup and team. They already have something really cool going on there, in particular I love the free cookie jar and unlimited supply of Moam sweets!

It's things like that which I think are really exciting aspects to building a startup beyond just you sitting on your own in the spare room with your laptop. You are not just giving yourself an awesome reason to go to work that day, but you are doing it for a whole team of people too who also believe in the product that you have built.

So these are exciting times and I'm looking forward to embracing the challenges as well as the highs. Sometimes when you are on top of the mountain you just need to look back and take a photo.

Snap.

Prince William and Kate get married on Friday. To celebrate I set up a website a few months ago and built some technology as a bit of fun that aggregates feeds from various sources and builds a news site automatically, in this case a news site all about William and Kate. These are the results.

Firstly the website is here: http://www.prince-william-kate.com

What is the technology?

Everytime a visitor comes to your site the system will scan the RSS feeds that you gave it and update the site with content. Basically over time a site will be built automatically with archived news as well as Twitter searches and a featured article that changes every hour.

My experiment

I built the system in a few hours and only pulled in a few feeds from various news sites. I whipped up a home page with some info from Wikipedia and then then left it to it for a few months.

Now it's a couple of days before the royal wedding and I'm getting 50-60 visits a day and searches mostly from Bing, but also Yahoo and Google too - and this is without doing anything!

So if you want to get hold of this CodeIgniter project let me know and I'll stick it on BitBucket. If you want to buy the Prince William Kate domain let me know, you might be able to monetize it!

So big congrats to Prince William and Kate on their special day!

After launching the private beta of Fowndr and getting 1000 invitation requests, something occurred to me which struck a chord with my own experience in startups. I think there is a real lack of great tech mentors that are easy to reach out to and connect with.

I just wish there had been a group of founders I could have asked questions to a few years ago when I started my SaaS business. Quora didn't exist then, and now there is a surge of similar websites where people can ask questions - and that's great. But what about being able to really reach out and be mentored by them.

It seems evident that there are lots and lots of startups out there wanting to learn, grow and belong to a community of founders who they can follow and be mentored by. I know because I've seen a massive interest in @fowndr.

What I, and others want, is a place where we can read stories about how startup founders have tried stuff out, how they've learnt lessons, how they've experimented with PPC or Reddit advertising, how they've gained a reputation for great customer support. While reading this stuff I want to be able to actually discuss it with them and ask questions, I want to be able to vote up their post and give them experience points, I want to be able to find others who also are learning off these 'mentors'.

So that is how I want to position Fowndr. At the moment it's taking on a Forrst style posting system but there aren't a huge amount of founders sharing their experiences on there (ok so there's only 50 of us actually in the private beta at the moment!). The reason why, I think, is because there is no real incentive for me as a founder to be vulnerable and share my failed projects, likewise I'm not sure that I want to share my best kept secrets about say 'increasing goal conversion rates' to everyone without knowing who is following the thread and perhaps gaining a bit of kudos for doing it. I want to know who I am actually helping.

There needs to be a real vision and drive behind Fowndr and a good reason to come back, so that's why I'm introducing a new feature that will effectively form the ethos and the building blocks of what makes Fowndr.

Introducing Mentors

So when you log in you will be presented with a Dashboard saying who your current mentors are, and who your followers are (anyone can be a mentor, you just need to have something you want to share). You'll see recent posts from your mentors (that's the stuff I really want to read and look forward to seeing), and you'll see posts from everyone (public posts).

If you see a public post and like what someone is saying you can request for them to be your mentor, then if accepted you can Up-Vote their posts and give them experience points.

Each mentor will have a channel (or tag) which they tend to post in. That way you will be able to filter and search through your stream by what you are currently needing help with, for example 'pricing models' or 'pivoting'.

Remember, that as a mentor your posts will only be read by those you accept to mentor (unless you want to share with the wider network). This provides a certain level of trust and allows you to know who is reading your posts.

Incentive

Yes there is still the old chicken and egg problem in trying to get mentors to share experiences, but I hope that by making this feature the drive behind Fowndr (instead of the casual Forrst style posting), there will be a lot more incentive to share lessons, stories, tips, experiences and thoughts on Fowndr. Why? Because...

• Mentors will get experience points based on the success of their post
• Mentors will be able to find out who is following them and connect
• Mentors will be able to get feedback on new ideas they want to try out

All of this will happen inside a private network which the mentor creates, and that private network will be made out of a wider private network of founders who have only come in because they too have been invited and trusted.

Anyone can be a founder, but it takes more to be a mentor who is willing to share what they've learnt, and that is what I hope will really make Fowndr a success.

The feature won't take me long to build so I'll be working on that this week, then I'll bring in another batch of users from the waiting list hopefully by the weekend.

I've improved the Fowndr logo a little adding a tree vector. Here's a bit of info behind it.

The typeface is Gill Sans as before, but I thought it was important to add some kind of marque or graphical element to it. I thought a good idea would be to have something around growing (as it's about startups growing together), so the idea of a plant or tree obviously sprung to mind. I know, not very original - but hey!

So I found a vector template online and reworked it so it would look good small as well as big, and added a little shadow underneath it. I'm fairly pleased with the results though it might have a few refinements over time.

I'm kinda getting used to using Illustrator now - it's only taken 8 years!