Admittedly, Skimbit is still in beta phase. So it shouldn’t really be totally humiliating to have a bug.

But, in the last month, Skimbit’s traffic has tripled, so suddenly, bugs are a bigger deal, as they can potentially affect more of our users. And I LOVE my users, truly! I can’t describe it… but to have complete strangers want to use, and benefit from, something that I have worked on so crazily hard for so long, is the deepest compliment coupled with the deepest responsibility.

And so, when something goes a little wrong, I can’t abide that people who have put their faith in me and my product are experiencing any type of inconvenience. I am so prepared for them to rush off and never come back, or to be angry, or even worse, to just leave and never come back or think of Skimbit again.

Imagine, then, my joy this week to meet a user who not only has come to my site because he has a genuine need to use it (as opposed as a mild curiousity to see what my site is vaguely about!); but he also notified me of a bug, and helped me solve it. What a blessing!

Yes, there was a slight bug in the way we sent invitations to friends from the Address Book, and it took a while to find out the root cause of the bug. I kept expecting the user to get fed up and throw his hands up in disgust and frustration, which terrified me because he was a true advocate of the solution. But to my immense joy, he not only persisted, helped find the problem, tested it, and kept sending me updates, but he also - bless - apologised for hassling me! What an angel!

Thankfully, we have now corrected the bug, fixed a misunderstanding on the site, and somehow still have the attention of a user who invited 20 of his friends to use the site - what an amazing man. I can’t stop with the superlatives, it just completely blew me away how kind and helpful strangers can be.

It takes me back to those web 2.0 seminars, where all the speakers raved about "Your users will tell you when you are doing something wrong, they will be passionate advocates of your site!" and I kinda doubted it could happen. But, I just experienced the charity of users, and feel even more passionate about doing a good job for them!

The last few weeks have been crazily hectic. Most start-ups have a management team, so the responsibility of finding funding can be allocated to one person, whilst the rest of the team continue to run the business. No such luck with me, unfortunately, I am a one-woman funding/project management/product management/strategic partnerships/operations manager entity. And its exhausting, but I’m pleased to report its going well.

There has been lots of interest, great feedback, and thankfully the business is running along steadily so I can dedicate a bit of time to the hunt for funding.

I’m pleased to report I have one large offer already, so hopefully the round can close soon, and I can get on with running my business. Then one hard part ends, and another hard part begins… hiring, expanding, designing, rolling out, selling… the real meat of it all. If anyone knows of a brilliant web applicationi product/project manager or a bright full-of-initiative operations manager who wants to work in an exciting start-up based in central London, please let me know!

What a whirlwind it all is though! I’ve met some extraordinary people, gotten incredible advice, and am full of ambition and plans. I’ve never been happier!

So, just need to push on and close this round, and hopefully 2008 will be the year of Skimbit!

In the past week I have met with several potential investors for Skimbit, and presented my spiel.

They were both really interesting and different experiences.

I found it fascinating how different views and priorities could be amongst parties that all make their money in similar ways. One party thought I should keep the Skim-in-a-box white-label solution and the other thought it best to divest of it and focus purely on Skimbit.com. One party thought I should focus on profitability and a strong business model and the other thought I should forget a business model until I have a large enough userbase.

Interestingly, I totally agree with both ends of the spectrum. The biggest web start-up sales have been of companies that had no business model and that had only a web site to worry about… certainly focusing on Skim-in-a-box distracts from building a large userbase and the gearing on businesses with white-label sales is much less than on businesses with a large loyal and active userbase.

However, I am convinced that I structure my company so that the Skim-in-a-box sales are managed wholly by a quality Sales & Account Manager, and that product development is not dramatically altered to support this business model at the expense of the free Skimbit.com, that I can make it work. That I can have a solid underlying business that I can build a free web service on top of, which surely will insure me against any major swing in user affinity towards social applications.

The other key reason to retain both sides of the business is the wealth of business intelligence it will produce. By retaining the anonymised aggregated analytical information of a diverse group of individuals and businesses, I surely build a lucrative database of information about what products people like, and what factors drive that decision-making. I dare anyone to say that is not a valuable resource.

Anyway… the journey has only just begun. I am courting investors as we speak. If anyone knows of an Angel or VC that might be interested in investing in Skimbit, please contact me!

This could be a potentially risky post, considering the number of people who read this before meeting me for business discussions. But I am a big believer in honesty and openness as the key to my business success, so I will persevere on this front until it proves fatal.

I am embarking on an investor roadshow shortly to secure the funding I need to take Skimbit to the next level. To do this, I obviously need a robust budget and business plan. Obviously, I have versions I have done a few months back when seeking funding from the bank, but that budget was based on surviving on £25,000, which meant stripping things back to absolute bare-boned essentials. I could continue to operate in this way, but the truth is, it will kill me, and to get to market faster and make a real impact, I need staff and I need a marketing budget. So I now need a new budget and plan to reflect this alternate path.

The challenge is coming up with customer growth figures. All revenue projections hinge on customer numbers (unique users for www.skimbit.com and new clients for Skim-in-a-box), but I can’t get around the fact that it is all pure estimation. My other entrepreneurial friends who have secured Angel funding say that of course it is, and that I should be prepared to defend wildly optimistic figures as the basis for the kind of revenue projections that will interest Angel investors.

Now, this is where being an inherently honest person gets me into trouble as an entrepreneur. I have trouble saying my site will be used by 20 gazillion trillion people in 3 years, because although it is possible, it is largely luck that determines what site becomes the default for a particular category. You can certainly influence luck, and I absolutely intend to try, but I can’t tell you with certainty that Skimbit will achieve this. I can give sensible estimates based on the uptake similar sites have achieved, but it is still all totally finger in the air stuff.

And with business plans, the advice I have been given is to aspire to deity-like status, which again, I have an issue with. There aren’t many deity-like sites out there, and I am pragmatic enough to accept it may not happen to Skimbit. And it needn’t: a good quality site can still generate a healthy profit without being the new Facebook. And in my opinion, a presentation to investors that stated this, is surely more believable - and therefore I am more believable - than promising what is clearly a wildly overstated estimation created purely to seduce investors. I can’t believe smart successful Angels are so gullible as to believe it, so why state it?

So, I am making a stand. I will propose what are sensible realistic growth numbers, and clearly state that although I might not change the world, at least I will make it a little better, and if you approach that task with integrity and transparency, there are enough people out there that will respect that, and make you profitable. Well, that is my hope anyway.

How do I intend to do this? The trend for social shopping sites seems to be to push products (that of course they have a vested interest in), or to try to alter the way you search (which people find intrinsically suspicious). I have adamantly stated from the beginning that Skimbit won’t alter the way you search: you have your way of searching the internet, which you trust and understand, and I don’t intend to replace that. I do offer an embedded Google search in Skimbit, and I do earn a little money if you click on a sponsored link from the search results page, but everyone knows that, and its a fair and transparent contract between me and the user. Also, there is an advantage to using the Google search embedded in Skimbit, as Google over time works out what sites are more attractive to people that use Skimbit’s embedded search, and over time the results are even more relevant to Skimbit users. Again, nothing surprising or evil in that.

And I do offer advertising on Skimbit: currently its Google ads, but I will soon offer advertorial-type ads directly to advertisers. This will be transparent, relevant, and hopefully useful to the user using Skimbit to research a purchase decision. I will be launching another innovative advertising format (to be announced) with the goal to create unintrusive yet appealing forms of advertising that users are willing to engage with. Its the Holy Grail, of course, but worth aspiring to.

Anyway, wish me luck as I tread along this path of honesty and openness. I may not make as much as other ruthless players, but I do believe I will make more than enough, without compromising my morals.