Two significant events for the buildabrand.com team occurred in December last year: the roll out of the beta site, and the arrival of Justin’s son Leo.

Here we have picked out some highlights of the interview where Justin speaks about the challenges of starting a business at the same time as becoming a father:

How do you find the balancing act between Leo and buildabrand.com?

“It has been a balancing act from the start. I started working on buildabrand.com full time and the baby was conceived in the same month. It then took nine months to get to “the release date” for both: beta launch and birth. Since then it has been 24/7 of nurturing the business and our son. It is challenging and at times exhausting but extremely fulfilling to see progress in both on a daily basis.”

Is it advantageous to have the flexibility of owning your own company as a young father?

“To be honest, I don’t know how I could make the situation as successful without having the flexibility to be at home when needed and not miss those precious first moments. Mixing being a parent and an entrepreneur is very natural, almost like having twins.”

Justin continues that flexibility is just as important for a web-based start-up as it is
for a father:

“Our team is in multi-locations and having all our assets in the ‘cloud’ enables the business to fit into everyone’s daily life.”

With a young child and a young business, sleep must be difficult to fit in. How hard do you find it to stay motivated and energised?

You find new resources within yourself you didn’t realise existed. The buzz of the birth gives you a tremendous amount of energy, having quick achievable goals and small wins within your daily work schedule is also great for motivation.”

How does starting a business compare with starting a family? Which is the more nerve-wracking – birth or speaking to 450 people?!

“I’d say birth! Talking in front of 450 people is always going to make your nervous until you get started, but with birth you feel the earth move! For me it was euphoric, Katya had a natural birth, 33 hours, it was long a journey and an adventure. When you start a business, you often have a more or less clear idea of your objectives and strategy, but when you have a family, you just want to be happy.”

How does it feel to become a father for the first time and what is your advice to young fathers who are also entrepreneurs?

“When Leo was born, it was the most amazing moment in my life. Use your entrepreneurial spirit to create as many opportunities to bond with your little one as possible, make sure you enjoy every minute of parenthood and have fun!”

Click here to read the full text of the article on pages 65 & 66 in the online version of FQ magazine.

As a start-up ourselves, it’s fantastic to hear you believe buildabrand.com has the ability to “empower small businesses”. What you really highlighted was the growing need for accessible brand building amongst start-ups and entrepreneurs.

We learnt that 38% of you are start-up entrepreneurs, 22% are running micro-businesses, a staggering 52% are technology and web focused and 8% of you have a “revolutionary new idea” (we like that!).

Most of you were interested in buildabrand.com as a low cost way to build a brand. You felt that the site has made branding less challenging and more accessible, leaving you with time to focus on other business activities.

A staggering 87% of you plan to use your new buildabrand brand on a website, followed closely by 66% who would need business cards and stationery bits, whilst 63% of you would want to get your brand out on display and shared through Twitter and Facebook.

Your feedback has been invaluable in shaping up our product and strategy, we’ve been listening and implementing as much as we can in closed beta. Listening to everyone who uses the site is really important to us, its your product and we love hearing what you have to say.

A whopping 1023 wrote us personalised feedback in the survey, we are working our way through them and will contact everyone who has asked us questions. To give you an idea of what’s being said, we created a word cloud below using wordle.net

Some of our favourite words used to describe buildabrand.com were “outstanding”, “inspiring” and “revolutionary” and it’s fantastic you believe the service will “help a lot of people realise their dreams”.

A few of our favourite comments from the survey are highlighted below:

“Love the concept, love the clarity. Looks simple to use and it’s making it [branding] more accessible to more people. Also love the fact that you can do everything and come out with a finished product to do business with. Wish you every success with this.”

“Very good initiative. Reusable and easy-to-reach expertise in all commercial aspects is a big asset for all small size companies.”

“Buildabrand sounds like a great idea for entrepreneurs like me who have little money, but big ideas.”

“I offer business planning and marketing services to other entrepreneurs and small-to-midsize businesses – there is a HUGE need for products like yours. I’m tired of having to help them coordinate amongst web, printer and branding designers/agencies.”

“Your idea is brilliant, I’ve worked with logo designers already but I did not find a single One Stop Shop as you are. Brand building online is very difficult and you make it easy.”

Just when you thought it was all over…

We have a brand new survey (‘Brand’ new! Get it?) click here.

As an incentive to spending 2 minutes filling this out, anyone who takes part will be entered into a competition to win a brand and $150 worth of Amazon vouchers!

We’re look forward to hearing what you have to say next and don’t forget to get in touch!

This event is all about building more influence, more recognition and more results from your business and personal brand. When you consider that getting your brand right is a key part of building a successful and valuable business!

Speakers include…

* Mike Harris – Founder of Egg, which floated for £1.3B just 3 years after launch.
* Kanya King MBE – Founder of the MOBO Awards, seen in 57 countries by 250M people.
* Sabirul Islam – A best selling author and international speaker at just 18 years old.
* Peter Thomson – The creator of over 150 products.
* Dan Wagner - On the Times Rich List, founder of Venda, pioneering internet entrepreneur.
* Justin Champney – Top brand builder and founder of Buildabrand.com
* Mindy Gibbins-Klien – Has helped over 300 people write, publish and promote their books.
* Deirdre Bounds – Founder of i-to-i Travel, which she grew from nothing to over £20M in 10 years.

See you there! Expand Your Brand

(We don’t condone this sort of behaviour but love the outcome it creates!)

Our beta testers have been really impressed with the ease of use, functionality of the site and ability to create relevant brands. These are some of the brands that have been created so far… (let us know your favourite in the comments)

There have also been plenty of suggestions for the team to take on board and excellent feedback to help improve the branding experience; we are now working hard to make these last few tweaks!

Here’s a round up of our favourite feedback so far and we’re really looking forward to hearing more…!

- we LOVE @buildabrand – we made our brand in 30 mins flat! love it. thanks chaps @engagefirst

- Having so much fun with @buildabrand Beta that I am not getting any work done today. oh well, this is much more entertaining. LOVE IT!!! @McGrosheim

- @theycallmeShua: @iwearyourshirt oh and i got an @buildabrand invite today. its cooler than i expected i have to admit

- @TriFunk: thanks for the invite @buildabrand wow! just playing around in the site and I am blown away. this is going to change the world! love it

- Thanks a lot!! Just made my first logo. Really cool end easy at first glance. Looking forward to test it in full … andersbn

- jonlongoria: Davey, want to say ya’ll did a great job. Left a lot of constructive criticism in feedback, hope this takes off! @daveshanley @buildabrand

- @buildabrand Yes…I had so much fun…I’m wondering what to do with the last of it [credits] because we do other things here…so I’m saving them @TheMarciFactor

- thanks a lot for your email! I was really looking forward to it…Merry Christmas and thank you for the great gift - Aspiring Entrepreneur in Maritime Equipment and Services

- I starting playing around with the site and it is fantastic. Love the usability and design. Ariel Remer, Aspiring Entrepreneur in Clothing Line

- The whole process is really intuitive, I like it. – Benjamin Larralde, Apiring Entrepreneur in funding platform for individuals

- Thanks so much for the invite. Your team has built an impressive site – Dennis Lyandres, Early-stage non-profit organisation

- Simple and clean interface generally.  Good staged process – Philip Wilkinson, Founder & CEO at Crowdstorm

- I saw a few logos there that really inspired me, and that could become new the logo for our company! – Alicia Navarro, Company Founder and CEO of Skimlinks

- Worked really intuitively and easily – Kate Siddiqui, Marketing and Editorial Manager at start-up company – www.leaveitout.co.uk

Buildabrand is complicated. In fact, it’s very complicated! To give an example; we used quite a lot of JavaScript on the site interface to make the brand building experience clean and swift. Some people have even assumed that we were using Flash because of the fluid interactivity. There are currently over 5,071 lines of custom JavaScript used in our interface. Just to give you some perspective; you can write JavaScript versions of classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Tetris in less than 400 lines!

There might be some Finnish super hackers out there laughing at 5k lines of JavaScript code, but this is just the start of the story! We have used a lot of different components to build different tools and services. Our architecture is primarily Java based. Naturally that meant lots of pure Java code. As a matter of fact, right now there are 35,231 lines of pure Java code in our closed beta.

On top of all that code we have over 300 different configuration, language, and visual display files. They contain: 12,356 lines of HTML/JSP, 1,358 lines of XML and 6,185 line of CSS / XSL. So as you can see, it is now a case of making sure that 35k+ lines of Java, 5k+ lines of JavaScript and all our configurations, content and display code work together. It also means making sure it works in your browser and that you get a fluid experience.

For a comparison, lets take a look at the source code statistics for the worlds favorite web browser Firefox: http://www.ohloh.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest.

As you can see, the scale of the inner workings of builabrand are not all that different to something like Firefox!

Another important fact to mention is that we don’t have a large team of developers (yet). We are still only a small team. I have personally tried to grow more arms so we can ramp up our products and features quicker, but no matter how much glow in the dark paint I eat – it just won’t happen.

Since our Techcrunch article we have added over 9,000 lines of Java to the project, new features, new enhancements, and a complete e-commerce system (not running in the closed beta). However, I can safely say that it’s almost ready! Our closed beta testers are rolling in now and the last few quirks will be worked out. We’re be throwing open the doors to everyone very soon!

If you have any questions about the technology or if you would like our advice with your own architecture, then give me a shout at hellodave@buildabrand.com.

Cheerio for now,

- Dave

Jason will pop up across the web on Flickr photos, Twitter messages, YouTube video posts and on the lifestreaming site UStream, shouting about buildabrand.com wherever he goes.

We are really excited to have Jason promoting our brand and look forward to seeing the coverage he creates. Keep an eye out for his buildabrand.com t-shirt on the web tomorrow and let us know what you think!

You can also follow Jason tomorrow on his blog or his twitter feed @iwearyourshirt

But before we send the invitations out, we’d be really grateful if you would first complete a quick survey to help us put the finishing touches to buildabrand before you get your hands on it. There are only a few questions.

If you’ve already had an email from us about this and you’ve completed the survey, thank you. You can expect to hear from us very soon.