Many of you may know the name Gary Brewer from his succesful BuiltWith site.

As a serial tech entrepreneur, however, Gary has worked on a bunch of other sites - some with greater success than others.

I had a chance to grab Gary and ask him a few questions about himself, his sites and his thoughts as a tech entrepreneur.

Check it out…

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So Gary, what’s your background?
My main skill is programming and writing Microsoft C# web applications. I have a financial media background and have worked on enterprise and small business web applications for various companies in London and Sydney. I became interested in the entrepreneur tech scene after a few of my work mates and I went to STIRR Sydney in 2006 which was really the spark which motivated me to start thinking of ideas and putting them into action.

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How do you decide to start a new project?
I try not to start a new project at all now because there’s so much that can be done with existing projects. Previously the ideas come around from finding a problem that doesn’t really have a solution or none that really solve the problem.

My main focus is BuiltWith.com as it is the only one that has a steady revenue stream, everything else are just small projects of my own personal interest that I like to share with everyone else.

TwitTruth.com for example came about when I sent tweets to various people and not getting a response so that set me wondering about what the chances were of people replying. When I looked into the API there were loads of other interesting stats that came out of that, the entire project didn’t take more than two evenings to build.

Global Surfari came around because Google Maps API had just come out and I wanted to have a go at that and I was really into surfing but living in London so I had some time to spend building that. I am lucky in a sense that programming is not only an occupation but also my hobby.

Creating a web application and putting it on the internet is the easiest part of any project, getting people to visit the site and marketing it is much more difficult for me personally, especially as my background is programming, so it’s a learning curve for me as I go along, having to be a sales person, a marketing person and the customer relations person all at the same time and learning how to do those roles.

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What are your goals for BuiltWith?
The goal for BuiltWith.com  is to grow its subscription base and improve the core optimization product by introducing new features that increases its value for money for the customer. I also plan to expand the white label customer base and hope to work with some companies who would be interested in trialling it and using the optimizer as a SaaS solution for their own customers.

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How you going numbers wise?
The website optimizer has over 28,000 registered users at the moment and web traffic  top sources are Google, direct visits, Yahoo and Bing (in that order).

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Do you think you’ll keep working on all of the sites?
I work on BuiltWith.com the majority of my spare time, the other sites don’t change very much unless I get feedback about them. For example, for TwitTruth.com I recently added profile updates and previous profile comparisons after a few people on Twitter thought that would be a good feature.

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Any of them generating revenue?
Yes, BuiltWith Optimizer has a freemium business model that allows website owners who are interested in improving their site to upgrade to basic and pro subscriptions. The site also has white label and affiliate options which are being used by a few companies mostly located in the United States.
Global Surfari has a subscription XML/JSON API which has customers and Google Adwords integration.

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Care to share how much that revenue is?

I’d rather not give exact figures but it’s not enough yet to work on full time, which is what I’d really like to do.

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What are some words of advice you give other tech entrepreneurs?
The main thing I’d tell other entrepreneurs who haven’t got things off the ground yet is to just get on with it. This might be easier said than done and difficult for different types of situations. Personally my projects require very little financial outlay with the only outgoing cost being to pay for a dedicated web server, the rest of it is just time spent working on the ideas, if your idea fails then you can move on and take away whatever you’ve learnt to the next idea. I normally ask myself the following questions before doing anything new

• What is it? – The answer must be a described in a single sentence.
• Why will people use it? – Must have at least two reasons.
• Are there any competitors? If so why will it be better?
• What is its BUY IT NOW button? Basically how is it going to make money? Ads aren’t normally going to be enough to support a website unless it’s huge. I normally try to stop myself if I can’t think of a solid revenue stream, with TwitTruth.com and TwitLinks.com being exceptions.
• Why, how and where will it get press coverage? Knowing how you’re going to promote your project is very important and you need to be realistic about it, will tech blogs be interested in your idea or if not do you have a niche which you can target?
• Silver lining if it fails? What will you be able to take away from it if it all fails? For example, will you have a new skill to put on your CV?

Asking your friends what they think of your idea is also a great way to get feedback and when you’re building the site open up the homepage in front of them and don’t say anything, watch what they do and you’ll learn loads about your user interface.

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Ever had a project fail?
I’ve had ideas that I’ve started working on that have not taken off, this is more down to me either not doing enough research or not being 100% passionate about the subject, which is something you need to be as you’re going to dedicate a lot of time to it, this is a recurring theme that people will tell you all the time and its very true! However I’ve always been able to take something away from a project that never takes off, in that you learn and have experiences that you know to avoid next time.

GENNIT.com for example, a code generation website that uses industry standard frameworks, is an example of a project I am no longer actively working on. It is an extension of my own personal tool I use to rapidly prototype websites but requires far too much work as frameworks change more frequently than I have time to spend updating all of the code. However, I learnt lots of new techniques building that website and how to manage customer expectations which I then used when building the BuiltWith website optimizer site.

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A big thanks to Gary for taking the time to chat and for sharing his thoughts.