I recently attended [Future of Web Apps 2009](http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/) an annual conference held by Carsonified in London to talk about our industry and where it’s going. I find it good to get out of the office once or twice a year and get a fresh perspective on things. I met up with fellow Web App developers and all round great guys [Ben Bodien](http://twitter.com/bbodien) and [Marc Roberts](http://twitter.com/marcroberts) of [Neutron Creations](http://neutroncreations.com/) and settled in for two days of being a sponge and soaking up some knowledge,
To be honest, I found the first day a little disappointing compared to past years. The exception being [Mike McDerment](http://twitter.com/MikeMcDerment) CEO of [Freshbooks](http://www.freshbooks.com/) who’s talk on “Three vital marketing systems for a successful web app” I found really resonated with me. And coming from a guy who has grown a web app to a million users, and is profitable and generating good revenue, one should listen. I was fortunate enough to meet Mike on the Friday and have a chat with him, which just reinforced what a nice guy he is and why Freshbooks is such an industry leader. Mike invited me to a Freshbooks dinner, which I really should have gone to but I was just exhausted from a tough week so I sadly turned down the offer.
Friday was a bit more about real business’s and less about ‘social’ type apps. For me this is important, and reflects where the industry is going. I barely heard anything thing about advertising supported models and a lot more about freemium. Freemium is more than just a free service with some add-ons to generate revenue now, it’s more of a “great paid service” (like vzaar) with a free add on to allow users to test and play.
Two web apps that launched at FOWA and certainly interested me, were [Go Test IT](http://go-test.it/) and [Aware Monitoring](http://awaremonitoring.com/). We’re already using Go Test It and hope this will take a lot of the manual strain off testing, allowing for quick deployments. I’m really keen on checking Aware Monitoring out, as soon as my beta invite comes through. I think this will be “Pingdom on Steroids” and allow for us to really monitor more deeply in our application.
Friday had a lot more laughs in it with a great talk by Dave McClure called “Start Up Metrics for Pirates” which you can [see here](http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/start-up-metrics-that-matter/). Aside from some retinue burning colours it was inspirational and important for anyone trying to run a real business. It wasn’t dissimilar to Gary [Vaynerchuk's](http://garyvaynerchuk.com/) closing talk “Be passionate, work your arse off, care, or go home” talk.
My take home from all of this, is that the web isn’t much different from any business. Find a problem you have, solve it better than anyone else, and work you socks off. It doesn’t guarantee success (nothing does), but not doing it certainly guarantees failure.