The tough thing about being a startup is that no one is willing to share their numbers with you.

With that in mind, we’d like to announce the 2009 TechCrunch Web App Survey.

It’s an (optionally) anonymous survey where we can all share a bit of data about our userbase, traffic, financials and more. The more you’re willing to share, the more you’re going to learn from everyone else.

The whole goal of this project is to shed some light on a subject that very few people are willing to talk about publicly. It will help web startups understand how they compare to other companies, and then make decisions accordingly.

Here are the Questions:

1. Number of active users
2. Average monthly revenue per active user
3. Time it took to acquire current number of active users
4. Average marketing cost to acquire each active user
5. Average monthly marketing spend
6. Average monthly page views to marketing web site (not web app)
7. Average monthly unique visits to marketing web site (not web app)
8. Percentage of monthly unique visits that convert to a paid account
9. Percentage of monthly page views that convert to a paid account
10. If you have a ‘Free Plan’, what percentage of your users are on it
11. Bootstrapped or funded
12. If funded, how much
13. If bootstrapped, how much was spent to build the product
14. Average monthly costs (overheads, salaries, marketing)
15. Average monthly revenue
16. Number of full time developers
17. Number of full time designers
18. Number of full time marketers
19. Number of full time managers
20. Number of founders
21. Total number of full time staff

Here’s How it Works:

We’re going to collect the data from Aug 11th – Sep 4th and then we’re teaming up with Carsonified to collate, sort and evaluate the data.

I’ll reveal the results live at FOWA London 2009.

Carsonified will also be designing a full PDF report and website to showcase the findings, which will be available one week after my presentation at FOWA. The report will be completely free to view and download.

Let’s Get Started!

Just head over to this survey and fill it out. All form data will be kept strictly confidential on an individual basis, only the aggregate data will be released and we won’t disclose the names of the startups that participated.

Just click here to get started.

Image credit: Mykl Roventine