LiveAps joined Every Single One Of Us as friends on the 6th January 2009. To mark the occasion, I caught up with Fletch and managed to arrange an exclusive interview with him about his magnificent service that, at the time of writing, had recently been featured on TechCrunch.

Lets get the low down from Fletch, the man behind it all.

JMac: So Fletch, I saw on Techcrunch that you’re giving away 50% of your revenues from day one to global partners. Isn’t that overly generous?

Fletch: On the surface it might look like that JMac, and I’ve often wondered if I’m nuts following my instincts…but my gut feeling is that a software product with a network of intelligent and driven people motivated to help shape it and drive the viral marketing likens to a very healthy garden with more than one plant in it.

Yes, I do have a strong vision for what I’m trying to provide people wanting to publish to the web, but I’m also the first to admit that I’m entering into unknown territory and I’ll listen to partners who are likely to be more experienced than I am in this kind of venture. And strangely, the spreadsheets support this.

I get to keep my company core small and lean (and that’s reflected in the costs), and if my partners do well, then I’ll do OK too. I’m not motivated by trying to amass huge wealth, but more by having a nice enough life of course, and at the same time making a difference for web people currently incurring high costs to achieve what are basically fairly simple things.

JMac: So what does that mean in terms of your VC discussions?

Fletch: Firstly, I’ve had some fantastic free advice by entering into discussions with potential investors. For instance, Carlos from Doughty Hanson gave me over an hour of his time and I moved forward weeks in my thinking as a result of this, so of course I have appreciated these discussions.

Some of the people I’ve met have truly been extremely clever and insightful, but at the same time I find the whole investment process very time consuming while holding no guarantees of funding. Then I asked myself the question - why am I trying to raise money for marketing when that’s going to take at least 3 months to get done, and I want to be going to market now?

Then I started thinking about the thing my father used to say that “salesman who spend time on seat always on bottom”, and decided to test out the potential for people power via partners - and it has worked. I’m now dealing with like minded entrepreneurs in the UK, USA, Canada, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Brazil, and Australia - and if we all pretty much do the same thing ie., keep the local media informed as to what we’re doing and network properly at local industry events, the marketing power generated will be awesome.

So in terms of VC’s, maybe in future there might be reason to carry on these discussions. At some point I’d like my company to be public so my friends and family stakeholders have a method of trading their shares and that will cost quite a bit of money, but for now I’m really happy to just be getting on with the real business of developing, delivering and evolving the product - and not have to be putting time into fundraising documents and provision of information.

Interestingly, some growth funding has come directly from one of the partners which has a kind of karmic resonance to it.

JMac: You’ve been in private beta for a year. What did you learn from your beta community?

Fletch: The first thing I learnt was this is not an us and them situation. People have connected with me as real people, and I’ve done the same in return. I know as things scale this will get harder to do logistically, but somehow I’m gonna need to find a way to keep the conversation going. Maybe the blog is a way that this can happen.

Secondly, what people have been using the software to do has astounded me.

- One family used it to collaborate online about a European holiday, while another chap at a USA University is going to use it to replace exercise books for the next semester so students just type in their work as full multimedia webpages, and the Professor can log and mark the content.

- A UK primary school is trialling it to create a school site, then class sites, then individual pages for pupils.

- An online retailer has used the product not to replace his site but to enhance it. He normally worked in Dreamweaver, and has simply copied a page into liveaps, and is building all his new pages using our software and is saving himself he reckons about 80% of his time doing so.

The third thing I’ve learnt and this is really important is that the product doesn’t have to be perfect (in fact is anything ever perfect? Being in a constant state of evolution seems right to me). Stable yes, functional yes, but this whole Web 2.0 notion of a highly designed (and expensive) sell site for liveaps and GUI would be nice but is not essential. Enough people have joined liveaps to give me confidence, and yes I will evolve the online experience as fast as I can, but I don’t have to go and raise finance to do so before engaging with our customers.

JMac: When we first started talking a year ago, you were thinking of an ad-supported ‘freemium’ model. What made you change your mind to subscriptions?

Fletch: It all came down to one thing really. Do we have something that someone is willing to pay for? If the answer is yes, then let’s get on with it, and we are. I don’t know how many what-if spreadsheets I’ve built over the last 3 years trying to work out what to do, but what has become obvious is that the simpler things are then the better they are. Trying to calculate CPC and CPM variables in a fast-changing market is a nightmare. I used to have a huge variables list but now it’s short: local pricing, server costs, development and support costs, and a lean managment overhead.

Combine this with a revenue split for partners, and you’ve got something that you can focus on without entering into the fields of academia.

JMac: What is your vision for long-term sustainable growth?

Fletch: I’ve thought about this a lot as I have a responsibility to do so now I’m involving the future of my partners’ families and not just my own. And you know what? I think it’s taken care of by the business model we’ve created. We are kind of of an ideas melting pot for not only me, but also our partners and our customers. As long as we keep this philosophy, we’ll be OK for product evolution and growth.

I kind of liken this to Google. They started with a nice search algorithm that worked, and entered the market at a fortuitous time - and look what they’ve built by taking into account all the thoughts of their employees (and also most probably customers). I love the way their staff get given paid time to think, and also how they create applications they would like to use themselves and offer them to the public.

So as we say back home in New Zealand, “She’ll be right mate”.