Vinny Lingham is the CEO of SynthaSite and founder of global Search Engine Marketing company incuBeta. He's also a bit of a celebrity in South African online circles for having achieved global success - he managed to secure significant funding for SynthaSite, his most recent venture that offers free websites and website building capabilities to the public.

Finding a time to interview Vinny was understandably no easy thing to do - he’s a very busy guy. Between having won the Industry Standard 100 Innovation Award a short while ago and launching a few new features on SynthaSite he’s said on his own blog that he’s only getting about 3 or 4 hours sleep a night. Despite this I managed to catch him for a chat on Skype a few days ago and transcribed below are the highlights…enjoy!

Congratulations on your award – can you tell us a bit about what it means for you?

Ja, it’s very cool. It’s business as usual, it’s nice to win awards, but day to day you’re just trying to build the company...I try not to think about these things, they just sort of happen…Awards should be a recognition of performance and achievement and you should be focusing on that and not on winning awards.

You’ve been involved in a number of business ventures – what has been your greatest learning? Do you feel there has been a progression to this point?

Without a doubt. I think you always build upon what you’ve learned previously. I don’t think I’d be where I am today without the lessons I’ve learned in the past.

It’s one of those numerous lists, I’m trying to think now, I can’t point out anything in particular – it’s just an overall demeanor. Time builds upon who you are…I’m the type of person where if I did something one way three or four years ago, I would still think about it this time and make sure the variables are all the same.

The recent market crash has been quite tough on startups – what are your thoughts on that?

I think it’s going to be tough, obviously, for a lot of startups, but I think the startups that are building real value shouldn’t have a problem raising finance. I mean VCs are still there…the investments run in cycles, so the investments of today turn out to be the big wins of tomorrow. I don’t see a major issue right now.

Did you find it tough to get funding for SynthaSite?

Absolutely; often you have to take the trade off between who the investor is and how much they’re putting in. I’m lucky I didn’t have to sacrifice one or the other. I was able to get an extremely strong investment through Swiss based Columbus Venture Capital, so good credential investors and a good amount of funding.

It wasn’t easy. I spoke to a lot of people; especially the corporate South African guys who have no knowledge of the web and they just didn’t get it and that’s fine.

Do you have advice for other startups looking for funding?

In South Africa there are no real VCs. You’ve got Hasso Platner Ventures, you've got HBD Venture Capital & InVenFin...There are really only about three VC funds in Cape Town that I know of. But in general it is difficult getting funding.

Seek out other entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs tend to understand each other and understand opportunity and are more willing to invest.

SynthaSite works on a free business model, can you explain the thinking behind that?

This is the future. In the online space things are so competitive, you can’t possibly charge for the basic product. The basic product has to be free. You’ve got to get mass adoption and then you’ve got to up-sell.

How has user adoption been for SynthaSite?

Well, we’re up to about 35 people now and we’re up to about 600 000 users. We’ll be a million users by the end of the year.

You have various plans for building revenue – and as I’ve read before, one plan is to build revenue by recommending online marketing companies to your users – what is the time frame for that?

That’s not happening yet, but it will probably happen in the next 12 to 18 months. It’s going to take a little bit of time. We’re trying to build the platform first, but once we have that...The key is to get our users to get traffic to their sites. So once you have a site, how do you get the traffic? That’s the question.

Do you have an idea or understanding of what type of people your users are?

We’ve done some surveys. Most of our users, funny enough, are probably between the ages of 25 and 55. It’s really the middle of the range user. We’re still trying to figure it out, but we’re finding it’s mainly users that want to create businesses online and want to create jobs online. We’re quite interested in seeing that we have a lot of older people using it as well – we have an 88 year old granny using it which is great.

So it’s safe to say it’s entrepreneurial personalities who are getting involved?

That’s what we’ve seen and I think that’s just the start, given the fact that we’ve had a product like this out there. I think now that we’ve got blogging and domain registration, shopping carts and those sorts of things in place, you’re going to find more people going online to start their own businesses.

Your most recent award was won in a community and social category – do you have a community built up around SynthaSite at the moment in the sense that users are interacting with each other?

We have a forum on GetSatisfaction.com. There are some very passionate users on that forum. I think we’re one of the top forums on Get Satisfaction. They’re a very embracing community.

You’ve most recently launched blogging capabilities and a number of other features on SynthaSite, is there more we can expect to be added in the next while?

The stuff we put out now is what we call the minimum threshold features, the minimum that we think needs to be out there to do the job. We’ve got a whole list. If we didn’t hire more people we’ve got enough work to keep the existing team busy for another two years. There’s a lot on our plate.

Where is most of your team currently?

23 people are in the States and 12 are in Cape Town…

We just flew our whole team across from South Africa - Cape Town to San Francisco. So we had the whole company together for the past two weeks and it was quite cool – the Cape Town people loved it because they had a nice little trip to the US…we rented a bus and we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge. Ja, we looked after the guys, so it was good for morale and teambuilding.  We also got a chance to improve our processes as a company - split offices are difficult to manage.

How would you describe SynthaSite’s company culture?

It’s a fun culture; fun and serious at the same time. There’s a lot at stake for us as a business and everyone’s just working really hard to achieve it.

Is there anything you miss about Cape Town?

Yes, everything…I’ll be moving back in a few years, hopefully...