Benchmarking material for web apps
Continuing the “building a web app”-topic, a quick reflection on the panel which Ryan Carson moderated (slides!), Barenaked App:The figures behind the top web apps. Which compared to the previous panel we covered, Web App Autopsy, it primarily discuss development costs for web apps and not so much the actual figures in terms of revenue and profit regarding Dropsend, Mobissimo, Freshbooks and Maya’s mom. A couple of them were up front with their profits, for example both Mobissimo ($450 000) and Dropsend ($106 044) are making good sized profits for being web apps.
The most interesting facts are about the maintenance costs and that they’re actually building business rather than web apps. The web app is the tool for the business but that alone won’t bring you to profit. Freshbooks spent $430k before reaching break-even, much of it went to marketing, which is why Freshbooks is an interesting example to bring up. It’s a company that don’t have a Signal vs. noise kind of blog and actually building the customer base from zero. Similair to a traditional company, which is an evidence of the importance of creating an audience before you release something through a blog or a community.
But building a business is different than just building a web app, Mobbisimo is spending $150k a month on costs to maintaining the app and bringing it forward.
Will be really interesting to get the podcasts from these panels.
[tags]Sxsw, Freshbooks, Mobissimo, Maya’s mom, Dropsend, Ryan Carson, web apps[/tags]
Bloggar.se: Dropsend, webbapplikationer, webb 2.0, sxsw, inkomst
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One Comment
- Ryan Carson replied:
Hey Jonas,
Glad you enjoyed the panel!
Kind regards,
RyanMarch 13th, 2007 at 6:09 pm. Permalink.
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