And finally, my final post on Startups.co.uk reflecting on Web Mission 08 and what it has meant to Skimbit:

I have been back a few days from my Web Mission expedition to San Francisco. It’s taken me this long to recuperate and take stock of everything that went on.

I’m still in a state of shock and awe. It was a beyond successful week, exceeding even my overly ambitious expectations. Pretty much everything I’d hoped would happen, did happen.

What, you ask? Well, firstly, and most importantly, forming strategic partnerships with bookmark aggregators like Gigya and Add to Any. They were both San Francisco/Valley based, so I managed to set meetings up with them while I was there, and I can joyfully report that both companies completely understood my business, Skimbit, and agreed to include our ‘Skim this!’ badge in their bookmarking buttons.

I then managed to meet the team from AddThis.com at the Web 2.0 conference I attended in San Francisco, and managed to get them on board too. This is a huge win for us, and puts us on the same playing field as Digg and Delicious, though with a different enough focus and target market to compete effectively.

Then, potential customers for our white-label service, Skim-in-a-box… I had hoped to get leads for new clients, but as I didn’t have any meetings booked, my expectations were low. However, I was introduced to several incredibly exciting and high profile web entities, who you will all know, and they expressed not only interest, but a serious intent to partner.

I won’t spill the beans yet on who these companies are, but they will totally make my business when they come through. Understandably, I’m pretty chuffed.

From a funding perspective, my expectations were also very low, as I’d been repeatedly told US based investors won’t consider UK based companies. However, I had a meeting with a high profile seed investor, who said the distance issue – although challenging – is not insurmountable, and they are currently considering investing in Skimbit.

I had hoped WebMission would attract a lot of very much welcomed media exposure, and to my glee, this also turned out beyond expectation. In the last week I have been TechCrunched, on the BBC, the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and soon to be in The Telegraph and Spectator. Not bad for a tiny little start-up!

But I would have to say, without a doubt, the best outcome of WebMission was the networking, interaction, and bonding that went on with the rest of the WebMission team. What really stood out to me is how innovative, supportive, and ambitious us Brits (well, I’m an Aussie, but you know what I mean) are, and that although going to the US was helpful and educational, we should be darn proud of what we have back home.

So now, as I deal with the avalanche of work, leads to follow, deals to execute on, and investments to finalise, I am buzzing with joy and elation that I’m on the right path, and the light at the end of the tunnel is bright and beckoning.

Some more exciting news for Skimbit… Web Mission 08 is a competition for the top UK based start-ups to head over to Silicon Valley to promote our businesses and form strategic partnerships. Initially I didn’t think it was for Skimbit - to enter you had to indicate how ’socially sustainable’ your business was, and if selected, had to contribute a sizeable sum of cash, certainly more than flights and hotels in San Francisco would have been if I bought them directly. But - I reckoned - it was a great opportunity and worth the effort, so I entered.

And when I found out I was accepted, although I was pleased, I do have to admit I had a fleeting moment of thinking "Well, I bet not many people applied, its not such a big deal…"

So imagine my surprise when I found out that over 100 start-ups had competed, and only 20 were selected! And that the judging panel included Doug Richard and Mike Butcher! And that there is huge press coverage of the event: Skimbit even managed to appear on TechCrunch US!

And looking at the agenda, I now totally realise what a fabulous opportunity this is! I’m busily trying to organise meetings with potential partners in the Valley and San Fran (if you are one, or know of one, let me know!), and am meeting with some US-based PR firms to help my ‘launch’ in the US. Very exciting stuff!!

If you haven’t already noticed (and shame on you if you haven’t!), we have finally updated our homepage to a new and funkier style. Our original homepage design was a legacy of our ultra-bootstrapping days, when I had to ply my designer friends with wine and meals so they would create a homepage design for me on a nonexistent budget. And now that things are getting better, and I can afford to pay a designer, it was time to freshen up.

So please check it out and let us know your thoughts. Better yet - become a featured skimmer by telling us about the clever ways you use Skimbit.

One interesting piece of feedback I received from the ex-Dragon’s Den judge - Doug Richard - was that I should not market Skimbit as an all-purpose research and decision-making tool (because people don’t realise they need this), and instead market it as a solution to very specific problems, and to pick a few of them. For example, its a service for organising group holidays, planning weddings, and making important purchases. And then, he says, to make this the primary message of the homepage, and indeed the whole application.

Interestingly, quite a few other people have come back with similar feedback, so its definitely something I will factor into the next version of the homepage, and definitely something I will do with my forthcoming PR and advertising campaigns.

It is fascinating operating in this web environment having come from a software development background where development lifecycles were 6 months long, and if you changed your mind about a requirement, you had to wait 6 months to request it. These days, with web applications, it is not only easy, but necessary to make rapid iterative changes to design and functionality, to see what works best. It is indescribably difficult to take a step back sometimes from something I am so intimate with, and see what will work and what won’t, so chatting to new people who hear about Skimbit and visit the site is a highly educational and useful thing to do.

So I hope you like the new homepage, and find it communicates better what Skimbit is all about, especially to those not-so-technical people out there. Bit by bit we will work our way through the whole site, so it eventually will glow with brilliance (we hope!).

I am very thrilled to launch the new and improved Skimbit blog!

Up until now, Birth of a Startup was about my experiences creating Skimbit over the last year and a half. But things are different now… our operations have moved from Sydney to London, I have funding from the bank, I have a fantastic customer for my Skim-in-a-box product, and there is starting to be a bit of buzz about what Skimbit is all about. So it made sense to revamp the blog into something vaguely appealing.

Let me know what you think of the new design… created by the brilliant team of Jason and Stéphane of Research & Development.