One of my goals with this blog is to meet and learn from the people who come to Mixergy events. So I interviewed Matt Browne yesterday. He organized Happy Hour 2.0 in San Diego.

Matt Browne, is the co-founder of Integral Impressions, which develops Web-based applications.

Who needs big investors?

Many Web entrepreneurs look for investors to fund their companies. Matt went in a different direction. His company started out building Web applications for advertising agencies and marketing firms. Those projects helped fund his company and allowed him to build applications like nouri.sh and outlandi.sh.

Steps for building Web applications

Since he built so many apps, I asked Matt for tips for building an application from scratch. Every project is different, but here are some important steps.

  • Know who you’re targeting – Before you decide what you’re going to create, you need to ask yourself who you’re creating it for.
  • Whittle down your features – Get a list of every feature you want to add to your site. Then prune the list based on time, money and fit for your audience. Use your constraints to help you decide what’s your project’s core purpose.
  • Go beyond the wire frame – Once you know your features, design a “pixel perfect” version of your site in Photoshop. Before they program an app, Integral knows exactly what it’ll look like, right down to the error messages that users see.

Tips for creating forms that people actually fill out

One of Integral’s apps, Outlandish, allows users to create landing pages which generate leads. So I asked Matt for tips on creating online forms.

  • Keep the submit button above the fold – don’t make people scroll to find out how to submit your forms.
  • Make the submit button’s text as descriptive as possible.
  • Don’t have more than 5 to 7 fields – you’re not going to use all that data any way.
  • Match the search engine – if a user came to your site from a search engine, your headline should match the keyword she searched.
  • Avoid extra links – resist the temptation to make all your forms look exactly like the rest of your site. Get rid of any unnecessary links that will distract people from filling out your form.