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!

I'm excited to announce the launch of my very own, brand new PHP5 framework that allows programmers to build apps in minutes! You can have your own project management app or Facebook style social network with just a few simple lines of code.

There are so many web apps out there these days and often they are so similar that I thought it would be a great idea to build a framework that would save developers lots of time doing all the hard work that usually takes months.

The new framework is called Build Me Apps and it allows programmers to do the following:

• Create applications with a few lines of code
  e.g. "basecamp_style_app();" will build a Basecamp clone
• Build a really cool, ultra slick user interface with a single helper function
  Meaning you won't need one of those annoying arrogant designers that moans on about tooltips and the importance of 'good interaction design for the semantic web'
• Select what app you want to clone the home page design for
  For example "$config['home_page_design'] = 'Campaign Monitor Style';"
• Select what pricing model you want to use easily
  e.g. SaaS, Freemium, Open Source etc
• Auto submit to Hacker News, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb helpers
  Saving you lots of time having to email the tips@ email addresses

For more information and to see the documentation click here.

By the way, this was an April Fools Joke. But it's a great idea for a framework none the less!

Coming soon is a private network for startup founders and co-founders to discuss projects, share files, ask questions and network with each other.

I've had the idea for some time, before I ever heard about communities like Forrst. I wanted to have a safe place where I could share my own thoughts and questions with like-minded entrepreneurs.

Since I've already built most of the framework with apps like Kroud, Gigshare and Favwork it's been relatively easy to build this.

Invite Only

Founders will have a certain amount of invites when they join, and they will be able to invite others to the public network. Once inside you can then 'network inside the network' effectively creating private private networks.

This means that only people who are trusted and respected by one another will be able to join in and share.

Post Questions and Files

You'll be able to post questions, but also files too, such as PDFs, images and videos in a really simple and easy to use interface.

The app should be live in a few weeks time. You can register your interest by contacting me and asking for an invite (be sure to detail your startup in the email).

Here's a common theme in my life. It's 11.30 AM, I have lots to do this week, I have lots of great ideas and I want to achieve so much before Friday. However I can't even plan my week out. Why? Because I'm tired.

It happens in the mornings (usually Mondays because I'm out of routine) and it often happens after lunch (about 3PM). The times when I'm feeling most productive are usually in the evenings or at night time which sucks because that's family time.

I constantly have this battle with lethargy and being tired. It's not so bad that I am literally falling asleep at my desk or anything like that, however it's so often happens that the part of my brain that handles programming, planning and logic is often asleep at the times I need it to be awake. This can be so frustrating when I want to get things done, but I simply cannot engage my brain!

Last night I watched a program that documented the lives of some Aussies from the ages of 13 to 47. It was very interesting and got me thinking about what I've achieved since the age of 16 when I started working. To be honest, I think I've achieved a lot already and I'm only 28 years old, however my goals of being a millionaire by the age of 30 still haven't been achieved yet and so often I reckon that I am simply held back by being tired and procrastinating.

How much time do I spend reading the Delicious hotlist, or checking out feeds on Facebook when I could be programming or designing? How much time do I spend in bed when I could actually be up building my latest project, or adding an amazing new feature to Project Bubble.

I heard that humans don't really need more than 5-6 hours of sleep, and a lot of great entrepreneurs get by on roughly 5-6 hours. I spend about 8 (sometimes more) hours in bed and when I try to get up earlier I feel so tired it usually doesn't help me. I think, if I could just get an extra two hours out of the day (not sleeping) I could do so much more.

Then there are other times when I get up in fairly good time (like today), reply to emails and get administrative tasks done and out of the way and finally sit down and prepare to plan my development for the week and my brain just will not engage!

I have a Sticky in front of me titled "Partial Payments" (a new feature I want to develop for Project Bubble which I believe will really bring in a lot of new business), however I can't even write the first bullet point on the list because I can't think straight. "What the heck are partial payments? How the heck do I start designing the database schema for this!?".

Is there a solution?

I often Google "how to overcome lethargy", but I've still not found a decent article that covers it. A lot of people talk about eating fruits, drinking water and going to the gym in the mornings. The fact is I eat healthily, I go for walks and I do eat fruit, so do I just need to do more of that? Should I join a gym? Should I just get up a lot earlier and develop a routine?

I guess I'm not really looking for solutions or a personal trainer, I'm just expressing my frustrations that I'm sure a lot of busy-minded entrepreneurs share - and that is that we want to be so productive, beyond what our circumstances or physical bodies will probably allow.

Maybe I need to lower my expectations for the week...?

Na, definitely not. :-)