Successfully Running Online Businesses: Michele Finotto
So the time has come to publish my second interview (in the first one I interviewed the impressive indian kid-blogger Thilak Raj Rao). For today’s interview I decided to search for a person that’s not a blogger but that’s doing good businesses online, and then he came to my mind: Michele Finotto from 16bugs.com.
Michele is a nice programmer from Italy. Maybe you don’t know him but I knew about Michele from the very same day his web application 16bugs.com was launched. Yeah, maybe you didn’t knew about 16bugs.com too, but I know and I care about it because it’s a hosted bug tracking solution, or in English, a web application dedicated to help programmers to manage the [infinite] bugs that appear during every development cycle. I’m a programmer so I like those tools…
But Michele is more than just a programmer. He’s also a successful internet business man running his own consulting firm called Wonsys, enyoing a decent income stream from 16bugs.com and running two other web apps that are starting to get results: Unilife.it and Pagety.
Undoubtedly Michele is not among the stars that are known to everybody related with blogs or webapps (I’m sure that’s just because he’s not in the Valley), but I felt very identified with him from the beginning because he’s a webapps developer from a country that’s not know because of their programmers (like I am) and because he is not afraid of creating and putting his webapps out there without worrying he’s the only one running the entire business (I’m like that too! or I try… :P).
16bugs.com is a superb webapp, much simpler and far better that most of the bug trackers out there, so when I putted my hands to write a new interview for this blog I finally had a excuse to approach and talk to him. I did that and the result is this interview:
Please tell us a little about yourself, when did you started to program?
I started programming when I was about 10. At first, they were only very basic apps, then I moved to more complex programming languages and finally settled on Ruby (even though I’m always trying new things).
When did you realize that you could make money by programming web apps?
I knew you could earn money building Web apps from the beginning, but it was only with 16bugs that I actually proved it to myself.
May I suppose you are of the entrepreneurial type or you don’t mind to be an employee as long as you do what you love?
Definitely my own boss! 
16bugs is a very good app, that makes very simple to keep track of your bugs. How did you come with the idea for it?
It’s very easy: I needed it. The best things one builds are the ones you make for yourself to satisfy your own needs.
Please tell us a little how it’s to run a web app backed up by just one person. You are a web developer so how do you deal with commercial tasks?
There’s not much to say. One thing I’ve noticed is how much people love fast support. I mean, it’s obvious: I do like to have a quick answer from a support team when I submit a ticket or anything too. Unfortunately many people don’t understand this and it will take
them days to answer a simple support email.
If you do run your own web app (or even desktop app, for that matter), make sure you do answer emails in a timely fashion. I usually answer emails sent to 16bugs’s support in a few minutes and no matter how stupid it may seem. It really makes a difference.
16bugs is a little more than 1 year old now. How’s the balance? Are you happy with your results?
We’ve got a few thousand users and teams using it. It’s not making me rich, but it’s definitely standing on its own and has done so almost since day one.
How has been the adoption of 16bugs? Does 16bugs’s respects the “standard” relation between free and payed customers that the web app industry has (usually 1-2% as said here)?
At first we got a few hundreds users who weren’t paying, but after a couple of weeks people started to include 16bugs in their development platform and the first paying customers arrived. Consider costs are really low, so going break-even was kinda easy. I’d say 1-2% is a good estimate for us, too.
How has been your relation with well-known competitors like Fogbuz (commercial) and Bugzilla (open source/free)?
The point is Fogbugz, Bugzilla, Mantis and all of the others aren’t really competitors: 16bugs is dead simple which is what most
development teams/freelancers need. If you’re Google maybe you need the plethora of features provided by those packages, but the truth is they’re just too much for a great part of the people who use them, and they’re probably using it because their boss told them so, or because they don’t know there are simpler approaches such as the one taken by 16bugs.
Can you tell us how do you manage 16bugs’s upgrades?
I’ve been listening to the feedback coming in and acting accordingly since day one. After a few weeks since its launch, I released a complete overhaul of the interface: I received some great feedback and there were a few features that seemed out of place, so I spent a couple of weeks working on a refined interface.
I’m currently gathering all of the feedback we received during the past few months and we will hopefully launch a major revision in Q4. This one is going to be sweet and it will finally see the official launch of our API which has long been in the works.
Please tell us your future plans for 16bugs
As said above, a new version should see the light in Q4 and it will bring some great news. One of the things I’d like to achieve in the future is to make 16bugs more corporate-friendly and I think I know how…or at least I hope so! 
Please tell us about Wonsys. How are you doing as a company?
We’re three friends. We started building our own Web apps (Unilife.it and Pagety.com) and then moved to consulting for outside customers which is what we’re mostly doing right now. We split our time between client work and in-house projects.
Knocking on wood, things seem to be going strong right now.
Please tell us about Pagety and Unilife. How are those products/websites doing?
Unilife is growing slowly but steadily but we’re not putting any marketing effort in it, so we can’t complain. Pagety is not doing much, but we don’t really care, since it’s something we built for ourselves and then decided to open to anyone: we use it for all of our websites and absolutely love it.
How’s the scene of web entrepreneurs on Italy, is there some defined group of well-known developers or there’s nothing and everybody take their own way?
Things are starting to change right now and the scene is definitely looking better with more people willing to share their experiences. A few weeks ago, we spoke at Pycon in Florence, where we met a lot of smart people, so I’m pretty positive about it. The only problem is with Italian institutions which tend to be not very keen to let a new breed of young entrepreneurs in. But that’s a different topic.
Finally, please share with us some words on your thoughts about web developers and entrepreneurship. Do you think that if one know how to program it is a must to try to start a company from a web app?
I wouldn’t say so: you need to know how to develop, but that’s not enough. Sure, you can build a great app, but then you need to market it and trust me, that isn’t easy. We faced it ourselves.
That said, I think one should start a company if you feel that you like it and it’s better to do it when you’re young because you haven’t got much to lose. If you know what you’re talking about, just do it and see how it goes, but don’t settle recklessly on your initial idea, embrace changes and exploit them!
Thanks a lot for your wise words Michele! Your example really motivates me to keep following my path as a web entrepreneur. And I’m sure I’m not the only one
