FlairBuilder has released the first beta of its 3.0 version. The new version comes with UI improvements and a lot of new features like page layers, a new editor, a sitemap view, the possibility to add annotations, improved drawing tools and much more.

FlairBuilder is a wireframing and prototyping tool aimed to help web designers and UX designers better communicate design concepts to their team or clients. It’s a cross-platform application built on Adobe AIR, and it provides the tools to quickly put up wireframes and interactive prototypes for websites. It came second in the Startup Challenge of last year’s How to Web conference.

FlairBuilder is, at least for now, a one man show. And that man is Cristian Pascu, who has been kind enough to share with us some insights on the new version and on his working behavior.

HTW: A lot of new features in this version. Were most of these features requested by your users or are they things you came up with?
Cristian Pascu: Version 3.0 means mostly a rethinking of the UI. So it’s not necessarily things that users asked for, but rather things that users complained about. I also ran a series of queries on the data I’ve collected from how users are using the application, and I came to some (surprising) conclusions. I understood that users are mostly using very few of the features, so I tried to make those features easier to access. In the same time I came to understand that some other features were not used because their complex implementation. I spent a lot of time, and I really mean a lot!, trying to figure out a better (I can’t say best, just yet) way to implement those features.

I think the secret of a good UI and a good user experience is to incorporate the feedback from hundreds, if not thousands of users into your own vision. Each user does not really know how the application should look like and behave, you know. But the user is the one that is using it. So it’s a two ends problem. A critical problem.

HTW: For how long have you been working on this? When do you decide to stop including stuff as updates and keep it for a new version?
Cristian Pascu: The latest big release was back in March. So, it’s been like more than 6 months now. I really wanted to get things right this time, so I took all the time I needed. One feature at the time. I pretty much had a clear vision for what I wanted to include in this version, but I also changed my mind on the way. Things kept adding until I ran out of time.

I generally try to have an important release for the high sales periods of the year, that is the Autumn and the Spring. The rest of the time I release smaller updates.

HTW: Could you name a few of the most important features/improvements that your users are going to love, and tell us why they will?
Cristian Pascu: I think the best new feature is the usability improvement, which I hope users will appreciate. And I’m thinking mostly about the new users, which will come with more sales. That’s the whole point, in the end.

Secondly, is the sitemap view. It’s been a high requested feature. Being able to see your new website as a whole, in a sitemap layout, is very important to UX designers.

Lastly, the ability to annotate the wireframes with numbered post-it like notes on the side. Soon, I will also add the ability for my clients’ clients to add their comments too. But that requires more hands. Which brings us to your last question.

HTW: Are you still flying solo? Do you plan on keeping this up forever?
Cristian Pascu: Yes, still ‘Captain Solo’. And is getting very painful. There’s another tool similar to mine, also developed by a Romanian, called Wireframe Sketcher. He’s in the same position like myself. He’s developed a strong tool, and he’s making good money with it. But, I’m sure he feels the pain of being alone too. Plus, when you take a vacation, you can’t really be in vacation, as you still have to support customers from the beach. Which is really not that bad, but… By the way, the feeling of sales coming in while you’re on vacation is priceless.

However, I will absolutely expand the team as soon as possible. I will also look for people to help me on some other aspects of the business. Like for instance a community manager, someone that will stay online and in touch with users, will blog about features, tips&tricks, and stuff like that. It’s really needed and I don’t have the time or energy to do it myself.

There’s actually a lot of aspects of my business I’ve been neglecting, only because I haven’t got the time to do it myself. Stats are very important in a startup and I haven’t done much of them until recently. And other things I won’t mention now.

A few months ago, we covered the Instamap for iPad launch. Back then, Stefan Filip and Raul Andrisan were promising an update that would make Instamap availabe for iPhone also. And here it is, new and enhanced, available for both your mobile i-devices. Let’s take a look at how the app works and the new features that were introduced since our last chat with the guys.

Instamap is a client for the Instagram social network. To use the app, you first need to have an Instagram account. When you first open the Instamap application you will be asked for you Instagram credentials.

Subscribe to your favorite locations, tags and users

Instamap allows you to define subscriptions that are easy to create and delete. You can subscribe to specific locations, tags or users, meaning you start following that specific entity. That’s indeed a Twitter-like follow that allows you to see all the pictures from the defined subscriptions. When somebody posts a new photo corresponding to one of your subscriptions, it will appear in real-time in your gallery. You can chose to view pictures as tile or on a map. Thus the app name -  Instamap.

If you select a photo, you can see a larger size of it and also pieces of information about it like title, the name and avatar of the author or its timestamp. You can see and post comments to photos as well as “like” them or share them on social networks like Twitter or Facebook. You can also send a photo via email, and the receiving phone will be able to open it in Instagram.

View users’ profiles and follow streams of photos

A new feature introduced is user’s profile, which can be viewed by clicking the user’s avatar. The “Profile view” gives you a peek at the latest photos posted by the user, his followers and followees. Besides the subscriptions, you have access to streams of pictures like My Stream – which contains photos posted by you and the people you follow, Popular Photos – which will show you the photos determined by Instagram as being popular, or My Liked Photos – which, as the name says, will show the photos you liked.

The downside to developing a client for someone else’s application is, well, somehow depending on them. Thus as much as I like the Instamap app, I can’t use it on my fav Android phone, because there’s no Instagram for Android app. I would also love to have the app more permissive with native uploads. And how about a “shuffle” mixture for photos?

Since the launch, Instamap has sold about 4000 instances, 600 in the last 30 days. If you like the sound of it, give it a try and let us know what you think about it.

I know we have tackled this subject on a previous occasion, but it is too juicy to leave aside. Why are business incubators successful and advantageous on both sides? We will assume the cause of viewing the subject from both perspectives: in part one from the investors corner, in part two from the entrepreneurs side. So, let the boxing begin.

Part 1: Investors

Business incubators are programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services. Therefore, if a promising start-up embarks on such a program, stats demonstrate that there are rising possibilities of achieving business success and confirmation. If in the beginning stages, incubators seemed to be there just to burst the tech bubble, now they are coming back. The best even provide networking, technical leadership, and seed funding, as well as investors waving money at graduates. Some of the best incubators out there which we also do recommend are mentioned: here , here and here.

The primary goal of most business incubators nowadays is to strengthen the local economy, and commercialize new and promising technologies. Then, why are investors interested in catching a glimpse at graduates from start-up incubators? My humble opinion is because startup graduates deliver more. They have the resources, the man power, the business feel to succeed in their ventures and most importantly they show for it. The key value of startups incubators is the possibility of networking like crazy, building genuine relationships, selecting and engrossing a real marketing opportunity.

No one expects “free” money and “out of our hearts” services, neither from the investors part, nor from the entrepreneur side. What both expect is a Magna cum laude graduation from promising startups and the ability to stand on their own two business feet during and after the program. Just as we have seen in some cases on the Romanian local market, there are cases when investors are looking for a 100.000$ or 500.000$ investment venture, but have troubles in finding the adequate startup to invest in. And this leads us to the idea stated in the beginning — perform with or without the immediate help of an incubator and investors will be dropping money along the way.

Part 2: Entrepreneurs

In this case, the answer is more straightforward. What does an incubator supply a startup with? At first,we can name valuable business mentors, programs to increase marketing and business efficiency, fast amount of resources, both business wise and technical wise.  Then, there are flexible spaces and more than once at a lower price. We can also add networking with other entrepreneurs as well as investors, wide opening to live lessons and business orientated events or initiatives and on and on.

What does an entrepreneur have to put forward in order to raise to the desired level? Basically, everything. Don’t get me wrong, I am not making a hint at agreeing to 90% of your company shares. Let’s take a well-known example such as Seedcamp. It’s as simple as in gets: “Seedcamp’s standard terms are €50000 for 8-10% per cent of the company.” But, in return, the startup receives a year-long support in growing their company, countless events, and of course a fast track to all the brilliant mentors and investors that Seedcamp can have access to. And they actually do have a powerful data base. Their objective is to offer entrepreneurs the tools to raise a company from a promising start to an awesome business. And they are doing just fine — simply look at UberVU or Brainient, both winners of the Seedcamp competition.

Therefore, business incubators are most of the times the first step to take for business success: receive mentorship, collaboration, and support to help create and launch companies for a generally minimum percentage of the company (usually 6%). Direct advantages are numerous. For investors, startups that come out of an incubator process are far more lucrative, productive and business orientated. For entrepreneurs, incubators answer basic needs such as: Legal (IP, Financing), Product (Design, Development), Marketing (Distribution, SEO, SEM, Viral, Social Network Applications), Back-end (Architectures, Hosting, Storage, Scaling) and Administrative (Payroll, Benefits, Accounting).

We’re sure looking to hear your view on the matter, so don’t be shy and drop a line. We’re listening too, not only writing.

Squeeqly, the social shopping start-up based in Romania, has recently announced it’s closure. Squeeqly has had quite a life, gaining awards in it’s early stages and attracting investment, but in the end proving not to be viable. Let’s have a look at the life cycle of this interesting start-up and see what we can learn from it’s experience.

The idea, the development, the launch

Squeeqly’s founders, Mihai Rotaru and Alexandru Rada, created a product that would help e-commerce companies  increase their sales with the help of social networks. The idea was to integrate into the e-commerce sites the ability to share impressions about products directly on social networks, and to encourage it through different incentives. Squeeqly’s product and strategy attracted both funding from SeedMoney and prizes at the 2010 How to Web Conference and E-nnovation contest.

As the product development went on, the two founders increased their team with two new members. After a few months of work, Squeeqly signed a partnership with Romania’s market leader in e-commerce platforms, ContentSpeed, and the service went live on the stage of The Next Web Conference. After just a few months, Squeeqly’s blog announced that the project was being closed.

Users might contradict your predictions

After a little chat with Alexandru Rada, one of the founders of Squeeqly, we found out that after it was put out on the market, the product didn’t reach the expectations. “Users’ behavior was one of the main reasons it failed: people won’t share their purchases for some reason”, said Alexandru. He also considers that being part of Eastern-Europe didn’t exactly help: “Being from Eastern-Europe restricted our access to a global connected network. Probably it could have had another ending in a more entrepreneurial environment.”

“The most important things learned are about the customers and the users: you need to be permanently in touch with them to get a constant feedback of what you’re doing”.  With this in mind, and the experience gained during developing Squeeqly, the founders are moving on to starting other projects.

Seeing other social commerce startups struggleing or going out of business, like Blippy, who went out of business this May, we dare to ask: is it a problem of people’s social shopping behavior that poses problems to startups in this area or is it indeed an environmental problem or cause of other nature?

The Romanian Startup Appscend has acceded into the final judging stage of the NetHope Stop Human Trafficking App Challenge. The winner app will be implemented by a Russian NGO to help victims of human trafficking. The creators are also competing for a grand prize of $20k.

The application was developed by Sebastian Vaduva, Gabriel Dobocan and Andrei Marinescu, co-founders of Appscend. “We chose to leverage the power of Appscend Mobile Platform and rapidly setup an efficient app concept for Nethope and the “Stop Human Trafficking” project. It’s a great reward for us to see that our ideas were well received and that we could make it into the final phase of the competition. We’re really looking forward to see this app implemented and constantly contributing to Nethope’s efforts and honorable causes.”

Application features

Appscend has developed a complex mobile application that allows ex-victims to post their stories, including images and videos. To best serve the NGO’s scope, the application also includes a donations section, a “panic button” to be used by people in danger and a section for missing persons announcements.

The application is built on top of the Appscend platform

The thing that set the Appscend app apart from the other contestants was the fact that the developers built the application on top of their own platform – Appscend, a platform that offers an easy way to build fully featured and custom applications.

The developers have also created a short presentation video for the app. You can watch it here. If you like the idea and feel like supporting the team, you should hit the Like button under the video. The number of YouTube likes will be part of the final judging.

Romanian startup SunnyTrail got accepted into the Canadian accelerator Growlab. The founders, Octav Druta, Andrei Soare and Vlad Berteanu, will be attending a four month bootcamp program in both Canada and the Sillicon Valley, with access to funding and mentorship.

The idea, the opportunity

SunnyTrail offers companies that run a subscriptions based business an easy way to follow  their users’ subscribing behavior. This will allow them to find out how much money the business is making, how loyal customers are and how long they stay with the business. In Octav Druta’s words: “With SunnyTrail we create a visual environment that supports better business decision-making for SaaS companies.”

Once admitted to GrowLab, SunnyTrail gains access to four months of intensive training in Vancouver and San Francisco and the access to seed funding of up to $25k. We asked Octav what were the attributes that got them accepted into the program. He responded: “I think that the decision related to our admission was impacted by a combination of factors. Our team’s capabilities, the opportunity we picked and our product were probably among the most important.”

Chosing the right accelerator and getting admitted

How did they choose to apply to GrowLab and what are their expectations? Here’s what Octav said: “We are generally interested in business accelerators that bring together people whose opinions and experiences are relevant to what we do. We hope to pick the brains of many experienced people and meet potential customers.”

Regarding the admission process and the challenges of being Eastern Europeans, Octav stated that: “Everything went smoothly, the process was straightforward. Maybe just a bit more challenging, since we had to apply for Canadian visas.”

SunnyTrail will be attending the 2011 fall program. Think your startup fits too? Applications for the spring program are open here: http://www.growlab.ca/apply-to-grow.

Now that’s something quite out of the ordinary. Romanian company Zitec has recently announced it’s investment in the American startup Zipongo. Zitec will be holding a minority stake and is in this together with investors Founder Collective, co-founders of Flickr, Dr. Neal Baer, producer of the TV Show ER and Peter Dolan, ex CEO of farmaceutical giant Brystol Myers Squibb.

Zitec is a Romanian company specialized in online products and applications development. They have a history of getting involved also as investors in projects they feel passionate about. This time, it was Zipongo that got their attention, an application meant to help its users maintain a healthy living.

In June, Zipongo released the Healthy Deals application, that offers information, suggestions and discounts on healthy food products. Deals are currently available only for a small American market, as partnerships with local stores are in the process of being negotiated. Apart from Healthy Deals, Zipongo is working on zLife, an application meant to offer guidance and the ability to share your lifestyle – nutrition, activity, sleep experiences, mood and overall wellness.

We got in contact with Alexandru Lapusan, Zitec’s CEO and founding partner. Here’s how our conversation went.

HTW: What are Zitec’s expectations for this investment? What will be its involvement in the project?
Alexandru Lapusan: Of course, we want a good return for our investment, and so far Zipongo is looking very good. As usual with our projects, we tend to get involved in the product development far beyond plain execution, we’re simply not just your “regular offshore development team”. From simple suggestions to coming up with new approaches to business problems that need to be solved on a daily basis within a start up – it always helps to have a fresh insight and a well organized multi-cultural team on your side. In this case we are seriously considering more than product development and actually launching Zipongo grocery deals on a local level in Romania, so we’re now looking for a suitable local partner.

HTW: What are the attributes of a startup that attract Zitec’s attention when it comes to investing?
Alexandru Lapusan: I think it’s mostly about the founder of the start up involved. It’s also about reaching a certain level of trust. Being part of the project at the very core also helps, as we’re seeing the true progress and not only well-polished investor targeted spreadsheets.

HTW: You mentioned that you plan to bring Zipongo to the local market. Do you think the Romanian market is ready for such a product?
Alexandru Lapusan: Zipongo has a clear goal: making healthy food more accessible to the public everywhere, through healthy deals and tools to help users plan and track their diet and exercise. As a cliche, when thinking of obesity, Romanians look only towards US, and as usual, ignore our own problems: The Romanian Diabetes, Nutrition and Infectious Diseases Federation is not drawing a nice picture of obese Romanian. According to them, 25% Romanians are obese and 50% are overweight. That is 1 out of 4 obese and 1 out of 2 are overweight. What’s worst is that the next generations aren’t going to fix this, quite the opposite: Romania is ranking 3rd in Europe for kids obesity. Not sure how the statistics look in 2011, but I have a hunch it’s not better, quite the opposite. This is not about looking “good”: the increase in obesity will lead to more health problems as people who are overweight have a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and other diseases including cancers. We might be too early in a country obsessed with pork meat and alcohol, but given the trend we’re seeing in 2010-2011 young people are more health-aware, have started to use bicycles more, are cutting down on fast-food and sugar-based drinks and more. So we might be on to something here, I hope this trend will continue. Plus, I am sure interested in loosing some weight myself.

HTW: Zipongo has officially launched in June. Do you have a few numbers about it’s evolution since then?
Alexandru Lapusan: We’re 60 days since launch, and things are looking very very good. While a lot of experimenting and changes are happening through an extremely agile approach, we are seeing very high conversion rates (especially compared with regular deal websites) and are extremely pleased to see the average customer returning many times and making multiple purchases. Deals offered are always over 50%, and average order value has dramatically increased since we launched multiple deals. It’s healthy, it’s tasty and you save cash – what’s not to like?

HTW: Does the fact that you’re investing in a project together with Flickr’s co-founder and the producer of ER give you a plus of confidence that you made the right choice?
Alexandru Lapusan: It’s an honor to be accepted alongside with such big names, and yes, it does feel better to know that important and proven business people believe this project is going to hit it big.

HTW: Zipongo is an American startup. You deal mostly with the American market. Why is that? What makes the American market more attractive or what makes the European market unattractive?
Alexandru Lapusan: So far we have financially supported two US based startups, mainly by invoicing discounted prices for development services. As Zitec is mostly providing software development services for the US market, and US is the IT startup heaven – we’re simply looking at a good match. US founders have easier access to funding and critical networking contacts, but more important, have an entrepreneurial mind-set. Not only this is a powerful combination, it’s the only combination that has real chances of success. We’re using our skills and technical expertise to help US entrepreneurs transform their vision into reality and be successful together.

Bored of reading those too general business magazine articles? Looking for a more hands-on approach to entrepreneurship? Here’s a list of our favorite blogs in the tech-entrepreneur field.

We tried to keep it as short as possible, so you’ll probably notice some of your favorites missing. Comments are there for sharing impressions and extra info. So please, share and we’ll kindly ask the ones hungry for more to keep scrolling.

Mark Suster – http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com

Mark Suster is an entrepreneur turned into a VC. He is a Partner at GRP Partners, he is involved in multiple startups as an investor and he is the founder of Launchpad LA. He writes pieces of advice for startups, articles on raising venture capital and pitching to VCs, together with other industry related stuff.

Fred Wilson – http://www.avc.com

This is a must read VC’s blog. Fred Wilson is “a VC from NYC” who shares his experience on financing and a lot of interesting thoughts on tech subjects. He is founder and  managing partner at Union Square Ventures and Flatiron Partners.

Paul Graham – http://paulgraham.com

If you’re searching for insides from one of the biggest startup accelerator programs in the world, check out the blog of Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator. Paul Graham is also a talented programmer, being one of the two developers of the first web-based application, called Viaweb, which was aquired by Yahoo in 1998.

Dave McClure – http://500hats.typepad.com

Dave McClure is a VC and one of the founders of 500Startups. He has been in the Silicon Valley for over twenty years and has worked with companies like PayPal, Mint, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Intel and Microsoft. His blog is, according to its tagline, “A blog about Geeks, Entrepreneurs, & Startups in Silicon Valley. The Internet Revolution, Act III. “

Andrew Chen – http://andrewchenblog.com

Read the blog of an entrepreneur interested in the consumer internet. Andrew Chen is also an adviser and angel investor for a few early-stage startups like Appsumo, Cardpool or Catchfree and a mentor for 500Startups. He was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures and director of product marketing at Audience Science.

Mark Peter Davis – http://markpeterdavis.com

CEO and co-founder of Kohort, Mark Peter Davis is involved in multiple entrepreneur communities.  He is a mentor for TechStars, ER Accelerator and FounderLabs. His is a blog with great tips for entrepreneurs on how to raise venture capital.

Brad Feld – http://www.feld.com

Brad Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over 20 years. He’s one of the co-founders of TechStars and is on the board of directors of companies like BigDoor, Cheezburger Networks and Zynga. Currently he is managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital and chairman at National Center for Women and IT. Read his blog and get a glimpse on his thoughts.

Venture Hacks – http://venturehacks.com

Venture Hacks is a blog with “good advice for start-ups”, by Nivi and Naval, two guys who founded companies like Epinos, invested in companies like Twitter or Foursquare and helped start other companies.

Steve Blank – http://steveblank.com

You must read the blog of the man who “was lucky enough to arrive at the beginning of the boom times of Silicon Valley ”, co-founding startups MIPS, Zilog, Rocket Science, SuperMac, Cinvergent Technologies, Ardent, ESL and E.piphany. Steve Blank is currently a board member at California League Conservation Voters, a trustee at US Santa Cruz, a comissioner at California Coastal Comission and a teacher of entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School, the joint Berkeley/Columbia MBA program and at the Stanford University Graduate School of Engineering

Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com

Learn about lean startups straight from the originator. Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, which states that lean startups are born following the use of free and open source software, the application of agile software development methods and the use of ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration. He has previously worked as a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, he was a co-founder, CTO and VP Engineering at IMVU and a senior software engineer at There.

Fred Destin: http://www.freddestin.com

A blog about “Open source venture capital” and “How he learned to stop worrying and love entrepreneurs” by VC Fred Destin. He is currently a partner at Atlas Venture and a board member at Seedcamp, AdSafe Media and Inspirational Stores.

The European Pirate Summit has recently unveiled a more complete speakers list for the event which will take place in Cologne on September the 20th. We were pleased to see that Eastern-Europe is there through speakers like Alexandru Lapusan from Zitec and Cristian Pascu from Flairbuilder, and a dedicated panel. But wait, what?! Pirates?

What is a pirate and what is the Summit about?

In 2010, Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, published a blog post with the title “Are you a pirate?”. He was then defining a new type of pirates – the risk taking, risk loving entrepreneurs, who just wouldn’t be happy with a regular,  maybe even extremely well payed job as someone else’s employee. In 2011 it seems that this comparison is catching on, and we see a team of people creating a whole event around it.

The European Pirate Summit is an exclusive Start-Up and VC conference. It’s going to be a day of speeches, workshops and panels focused on problem identification and solving, with special panels on Eastern-European founders and Start-Ups and women founders. Networking opportunities are promised, with networking slots and rooms for private meetings. Start-up pitches and competitions will take place at the end of the day, followed by a well deserved party.

Who will be attending?

The speakers list also includes names like Mike Butcher from TechCrunch Europe, Stefan Glänzer – co-founder of companions.de, companionsTV, ricardo.de and myblog.de, Christoph Janz – co-founder of PageFlakes and DealPilot.com and investor in SaaS start-ups Zendesk, FreeAgent Central and Clio, Jan Henric Buettner – founding partner of BV Capital and Lars Hinrichs – founder of Xing and HackFwd.

The conference is expecting 150 to 200 participants, half of them international, thus the event language is English. For more information on the event, visit http://piratesummit.com or follow the official Twitter hashtag #eps11.

How to Web is event partner for The European Pirate Summit.

123contactform is a Romanian start-up which offers the possibility to create personalized online forms. The start-up has managed to attract angel-investor Adrian Gheara‘s attention after last year’s How to Web conference.

We thought we’d do a follow-up with them and see how things are going after almost a year since the pair up. So we had a chat with Florin Cornianu, one of the founders of 123contactform.

HTW: What makes 123contactform successful? How does it attract clients?
Florin Cornianu: It’s simple. That’s our philosophy.  It doesn’t matter if you need a simple contact form or a complicated order form with payment integration that is linked to SalesForce. We make form building as easy as 1-2-3, and it doesn’t require any technical knowledge. On top of that, we add A class customer support. Our clients come from all over the world. We serve webmasters, design agencies and small businesses that want to sell online.

HTW: Following the 2010 edition of the How to Web conference, you partnered with an angel investor. Can you tell us a bit how it went? What was it about 123contactform that got the investor’s attention?
Florin Cornianu: We met with Adrian Gheara at How to Web 2010, during the first day. Later at the evening party, after a beer or two, it was easy to pitch him and get his attention. We already had a steady income and about 70.000 users, but I am sure that he spotted immediately the room for improvement.

HTW: Was it planned or did it just happen? Did you come to the conference with the idea of pitching one or some of the attendants?
Florin Cornianu: When we first heard about How To Web and discovered the “investor way” of doing business, we began to think about attracting someone who could help us take 123ContactForm to a new level. Our main objective at How to Web in 2010 was to get feedback on 123ContactForm.

HTW: How did this investment materialize? Was it just the money, did the investor get further involved in your business?
Florin Cornianu: We negotiated for 2 weeks and then reached a complex agreement that involved money, shares and the thing we needed the most: expert guidance during the following years, not only in the beginning. Adrian is still helping us establish the company strategy.

HTW: How did the investment impact the business? Where are you now and where do you think you would have been without the investment?
Florin Cornianu: After the investment, we released a major update to 123ContactForm that includes a new design for our website and many new features. Because of that, our income raised with 50% and our user base increased a lot. Bottom line is that the investment really took us to a new level that, honestly speaking, couldn’t have been reached without Adrian’s help.

HTW: 123contactforms has been on the market for two years, yet this was the first investment it got. Was it planned as a bootstrapping company from the beginning or did it just take a while until you got to the right people?
Florin Cornianu: We didn’t plan to attract any investment when we launched 123ContactForm. But, at some point, we decided that we needed guidance to overcome our limits. Basically, it’s not that much about the money. For us, it was the know-how that mattered.

HTW: What is your current customer profile? How is 123contactforms going to develop in the future?
Florin Cornianu: The online form market is quite a complex one. Our clients need a fast, easy and cost effective way of creating an online form that they can publish on Facebook, on their blog or on their website. They particularly like that they can link their web forms with 3rd party services, such as Google Docs, MailChimp, SalesForce and Twitter, with only one mouse click. Our future plans include hiring more people, creating new features and growing our number of clients. Yes, it is a 1-2-3 thing.