Tell us about yourself

My career trajectory is a bit like a sawtooth wave, where I do something until it’s successful, then start again from scratch. I wouldn’t say that I thrive on taking risks, but it seems to be something that I’m drawn to.

When I was a year away from completing my Astrophysics PhD, I quit to co-found a web software company. Ten years on, the company was generating revenue in the millions, had two award-winning web apps, and was creating websites and apps for the caliber of brand-name clients I could only have dreamed of. So the obvious thing to do was to pack it all in to travel the world for a year with my wife and write this book.

We set up a small content strategy company, and six months later our work got noticed by Facebook, who headhunted my wife for a job. This led us to sell everything in the UK to start fresh in San Francisco. I’m just about to start on the next upward line of the saw wave, with a couple of new apps in development.

What inspired you to write this book?

I suggested the book idea to Mark after a particularly frustrating read of some books out at the time, which seemed to contain a lot of opinionated rhetoric repeated across multiple chapters, but little realistic, practical guidance on how to create a profitable app.

I’ve been lucky enough in my career to have the opportunity to fail, learn and ultimately succeed at every part of the web app business. I started as a developer, and then out of necessity discovered how to make sales, price apps for profitability, ensure quality, tweak interfaces for usability and inexpensively market a new app to customers. This is the first book that covers the entire lifecycle of a web app, from validating your initial idea through to measuring a demand curve to maximize profits. I’m really excited about it.

Who’s the book written for?

My editor and I were careful to make the book useful for a wide range of skills and situations. It’s packed with practical information on how to create a profitable web app for little or no money, with just enough detail that anyone from a sole developer or entrepreneur to a large corporate team can use it.

Isn’t that a lot to cover in one book?

Well it took eighteen months to write and weighs in at over 360 pages, so I guess it is! There are 25 chapters in the book, each covering a different aspect of web apps.

Part of the reason it took so long was that I wanted to make sure that, unlike the books that had originally frustrated me, it was thoroughly researched from multiple sources to provide definitive best practice for each topic, not just personal experience that happened to work for me.

I like the idea that anyone who wants to create a successful web app can read this book and learn something new from it. I think that the diversity that I seek in life – the desire to know something about everything– is well reflected in this book.

What’s next for you?

I’m just starting to understand the weird inner workings of Silicon Valley, and the strange back-to-front app strategy (growth before profitability) that investors here seem keen on. I’m also trying to remember to say “TomAYto” rather than “TomAHto”.

I’m working on a content strategy app and a smaller app that’s an offshoot from one of the processes in the book, and will be contributing to a panel at SXSW 2012 about app interfaces. You can also find me on Twitter @zambonini and my blog.