I’ve been working on a new service lately, called ReceiptFarm. The idea of it is to take the pain out of doing expenses.

It works like this:

1. You send us your expense receipts once a month.
2. We scan and input them.
3. You get a report about your spending and a digital archive of your receipts.

We’re looking for beta testers at the moment, so if you’d like to be one of the first people to try it out, head over to the site and sign up for free. Save me from my expenses!

I’ve been researching some new business ideas lately and it struck me how rarely people seem to discuss quick and cheap ways of testing the critical assumptions upon which business models are based.

Often we’re keen to play with Excel, but less keen to check that the numbers we’re typing in are grounded in reality. The result, I believe, is that people end up taking far more risk than they need to when starting out.

Fortunately, there are some smart people out there who do recognise the importance of testing your assumptions and having a toolkit of techniques to help you do so.

Here’s a nice presentation on the subject from Steve Barsh:

Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours

The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event. This time, it was Launch48, organised by a couple of friends of mine, Ian Broom and Adil Mohammed. Thanks to lots of great work from Ian and Adil, some generous sponsors who provided important things like office space and free pizza and drinks on the last night, and the boundless energy of around 70 enthusiastic participants, it was a great weekend.

We started on Friday night with a vote for our 4 favourite ideas out of a series of rapid-fire elevator pitches by anyone who fancied suggesting an idea. Excitingly, my idea was one of the four that was chosen. 15 or so people duly signed up to work on the idea over the weekend, and a whirlwind 48 hours was underway.

Local Vouchers

Our idea was to let people find vouchers for local retailers using their mobile phones. So you might, for example, be out in cental London and decide you want to get lunch somewhere. You pull out your phone and our service tells you that the cafe round the corner is offering a free dessert with their lunchtime menu. Great. You ignore the Starbucks next to you and head off to claim your bargain.

It didn’t take long for our team to get stuck into the problem at hand, figure out everyones’ talents and get to work. Luckily we found that we had a really nice spread of skills and abilities. Two intense days of design, coding, business planning, market research, PR, sleep deprivation and burrito-consumption later, VouChaCha was born, destined to bring local vouchers to your mobile phone.

A million thanks to the VouChaCha team for your immense efforts over the weekend. You were amazing! It was an incredible couple of days and a pleasure to work with you all.

What’s Next?

Well done to the other three Launch48 teams, CharityPie, DecisionsDecisions and ILikeUCoz, too. It was inspiring to see so many people come together (some having traveled very long distances to be there) and producing such neat things. What I liked best was the simplicity of all these ideas. I think they all have the potential to go somewhere.

A follow-up meeting is planned for 6 weeks’ time, so it will be exciting to see where we can all take these ideas between now and then.

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Can You Help an Exciting New Startup?

If you think you might be able to help VouChaCha out in some way, we’d love to hear from anyone with experience/contacts regarding:

• partnering with retail chains, especially restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars
• vouchers, especially mobile vouchers

We’d also love to hear from any companies interested in sponsoring us by providing a few hundred pounds to cover our costs for the next 45 days. This is a fantastic sponsorship opportunity for somebody and you’ll be really helping us out.

If you think you can help with this or anything else, please get in touch. Thanks!

John Buckman, founder and CEO of Magnatune.com (and founder of BookMooch), gave a really interesting talk on how to be successful as an Internet entrepreneur at Loic Le Meur’s recent LeWeb08 conference in Paris. He had a lot of good, practical tips about what he sees as the ‘right’ approach to entrepreneurship.

His presentation is pretty concise and to the point. Worth watching if you have a few minutes.

Here’s a summary of his points:

Finding a good idea

1. Start thinking of ideas. Write them down.
2. Do nothing for 3 months (most of your ideas will be bad)
3. Are they still good ideas? If so, pick one.
4. Explain your idea in 15 seconds to a friend in a noisy pub over a beer. Do they stop drinking their beer to listen to you? If not, it’s probably not a good idea.

Developing Your Idea

1. Before you do any work, write the first line of your press release.
2. Write the first paragraph of your homepage.
3. Make the homepage.
4. Hunt for unique names (but don’t worry too much – it’s not that important)
5. Don’t borrow money. Figure out how to do the idea extremely cheaply.
6. Make a mock-up. Show it to people. Get feedback.
7. Launch way before you’re ready. Get more feedback.
8. Pitch it to bloggers. If no one cares, drop it.

Other notes on entrepreneurship

• Don’t quit your day job.
• Only quit it once you have enough money.
• Sales people are an extremely bad idea. They’re expensive. Your product should be great enough to spread via word of mouth from a few early users to the wider world.
• Read a lot of books about how to run a company.

How to get great press coverage for your startup

• be really interesting
• convince two influential bloggers to write about you
• focus on freelancers, not staff writers (freelancers tend to have to find interesting stories; staff writers get given them by their editors)
• become a cause that a freelancer would like to adopt
• once a couple of people have written about you, more (often more mainstream) people will write about you
• think of as many edgy/juicy story angles as possible to give to journalists

Product/site development

• Use a technology like PHP that is well proven and cheap to hire developers for
• Don’t skimp on graphics
• Be technical (if you’re not already, learn)

Can Sales of Desktop Apps Predict Successful Web Apps?

Attending FOWA a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about web apps in general. With the move from desktop to web-hosted software, I’m wondering if what’s selling now in desktop versions will be a good predictor for what people will pay for in web app form? (And note that I’m talking about paying. Popularity of free apps would be a different topic entirely.)

For inspiration, have a look at Amazon UK’s current software bestseller list. Here’s how it breaks down…

This is based on a categorisation of Amazon UK’s 100 best-selling software products by units sold.

The results are no doubt skewed towards the Amazon buyer demographic. I’d guess that gamers, for example, are under-represented. Also, the average purchase price varies quite significantly by category. Education items, in particular, tend to be quite cheap, whereas operating systems and office software are rather expensive.

Anyhow, it does give an interesting idea of what currently sells in large volumes. Hidden within those categories (especially ‘Other’) is a multitude of niche products, each of which manages to sell in healthy quantities.

But Web Apps are More Than That

Of course, moving online isn’t all about who hosts your software. It’s also about easier communication and collaboration (think Facebook, for example). Top web apps won’t necessarily just be online versions of anything that existing previously in desktop form. But many will, I think, take an idea that’s worked well in the desktop era and give it a few tweaks to take advantage of the web. See Gmail, for example.

Ideas for your Next Web App

In summary, if you’re looking for inspiration to build a web app, you could do worse than finding a popular desktop app that has yet to make it to the web.

photo credit: alexliivet

It’s time to put your thinking cap on.

The UK government’s Power of Information Taskforce last week launched a £20,000 competition for good ideas about how to use a raft of public information. Alongside the launch, the government is making available a number of new sets of data and APIs, including a database of schools in England and Wales, public notices from the London Gazette, health care services information from the NHS, transport information from Transport Direct and a new API to access neighbourhood statistics from the Office of National Statistics.

To enter, all you need is an idea for now. The competition is open until the end of September and the winner is to be announced in the second week of October.

It’s great to see more public data being made available in this way!

I just came across these guys: http://www.brownbook.net/

They’re a sort of open yellow pages where anyone can add, edit or review businesses. This is very similar to what sites like WeLoveLocal and Yelp are already doing, but in a world where many small business owners have yet to really get to grips with online marketing, the analogy with something as familiar as the yellow pages could still be powerful.

BrownBook’s listings are currently mainly for the UK, but they are accepting entries from other parts of the world. Their revenue model is based on charging business owners to ‘claim’ their businesses. Looks like an interesting idea.

photo credit: Tony the Misfit

TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors.

Meetro’s idea was to let users download an application onto their wifi-enabled mobile phones that would then allow them to find other Meetro users nearby to chat with.

Paul Bragiel, the founder, cited the following reasons for the start-up’s demise:

1. The location problem: the service only became interesting if there were other users nearby. Critical mass gained in one geography didn’t help in other geographies.
2. The realtime problem: the service would only connect users who happened to be online at the same time. Multiplied by the location problem, this severely reduced the chances of finding other Meetro users nearby.
3. The download problem: the service required an app to be downloaded and installed on a user’s mobile phone. Most people were not interested in doing that.

It’s good to see that StreetSize and Localmouth each only suffer from one of these three problems :-)

photo credit: sowri
Here’s a neat idea… these guys are selling words from a dictionary.

photo credit: Robert Scoble

So you’ve got a great idea for a killer Web startup but you’re not a techie yourself? You’re looking for a technical business partner or CTO; someone who understands business but can pull the technical side of things together and make your ideas real? This kind of person can be hard to find. The right people are in demand by established web development firms and other startups. Here are a few ways you might go about finding one:

1. Start hanging out at web/startup events such as Minibar (if you’re in London). It can be a good way to get familiar with the big technology trends of the moment and start making some contacts in the web development / startup community.
2. Put the word out to your extended network by posting on LinkedIn.
3. Go along to a weekend event such as StartupWeekend, BarCamp or Social Innovation Camp. You’re likely to meet a few startup-minded folk who know what’s what in Web technology.
4. Attend web-related Meetup events. These can be a good opportunity to pick up some handy Web know-how and ask around for contacts.
5. Find some local startups with websites you like and get in touch with them to ask for advice. They may have friends or other contacts who would be interested in working with you.

Lastly, if you’re based in London and your idea is Web-focused, let me know. I might be interested myself.

Good luck!