One of the founders of Woofoo just wrote a terrific article on what it takes to build a web application called “Web App Autopsy“.  They were lucky enough to get some great information from three other firms, Blinksale, Feedburner and RegOnline.  I think the charts and information they put together are great, but if you dig into the numbers a little deeper you start to see what it really takes to build a web application.

From a time perspective (you have to exclude RegOnline because it was a nights a weekend project) it takes on average about 5 months to launch one of these applications and you need roughly 3 or 4 engineers to get it done.  My guess is that most of these companies boot strapped their development but current estimates say developing a web application costs anywhere from 50k to a few hundred based on complexity.  It’s also great to see these rapid development frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, are accelerating development and time to market.

Lastly, I would also emphasize their focus on business processes. Many early stage companies completely neglect support needs, such as returns, customer compliants, etc.  It can end up costing you a lot of time and money if you don’t have systems on the back end to handle customer support issues.