Our Q&A Wednesday today is with SpanningSync founder Charlie Wood. Their technology will help you connect Google Calendar to your iPod, mobile phone, and most importantly for most users, iCal. We caught up with Charlie last week, and he agreed to give us the scoop on the company.

Give us the elevator pitch for Spanning Sync.
Spanning Sync provides two-way synchronization between Apple iCal and Google Calendar, which lets you combine Google’s powerful sharing and notification capabilities with iCal’s beautiful interface and offline operation. Lots of workgroups, small businesses, and families that use Macs use Spanning Sync to coordinate calendars among multiple people, and power users use it to keep their multiple Macs in sync. Plus, since Spanning Sync uses Apple’s built-in Sync Services technology, your calendars are also automatically synchronized with your iPhone or iPod. Over 20,000 people use Spanning Sync every day to keep their schedules in sync.

How did you first get the idea for the company?
My wife and I have twin boys, and as they got older we started to find that coordinating their schedules between the two of us was becoming a challenge. I set up a shared Google calendar so we could both update it and be notified of any changes the other one made, but I used iCal for all of the other events in my life, and the lack of integration between Google Calendar and iCal was a pain for me.

At the time, I had been working on developing an online service to sync information between Salesforce.com and Google Apps, and it occurred to me that there were probably a lot more people like me–Mac users who also used Google Calendar–than there were Salesforce.com users. So I set aside the Salesforce project and started working with my friend Larry Hendricks, who is an incredibly talented Mac software developer, on Spanning Sync. I thought I already had most of the server-side code working, and he assured me that developing the Mac application would only involve “two weeks of casual coding”, a prediction I will never let him live down. Seven months of twelve-hour days later we released Spanning Sync v1.0.

How have you funded the company so far? Do you think you’ll be seeking additional capital?
Larry and I worked without salary during the initial development of the software, and I funded the company’s other expenses out of my own pocket. Since we’re tiny (it’s just the two of us plus a part-time contract customer support engineer) our expenses are very low. I think our total cash outlay was around $3,000, which was mostly in server hosting fees, to get going.

We occasionally get calls from VC’s (who are usually Spanning Sync customers) about taking investment to grow the company, but it’s not really a VC-appropriate business. It has low capital requirements, was profitable from day one, and in its current incarnation will never grow to be a $100M business. To us, a million dollars a year is great; to a VC that’s chump change. But that’s OK with us–we’re very happy with the way things are.

It’s been a fascinating experience to grow a business from scratch, and doing it without any outside investment has forced us to be not only thrifty but also creative in how we solve problems. We learn something new every day, which is one of the greatest benefits of doing everything yourself.

When did you have that first “A Ha!” moment when you knew you were on to something?
Before we launched v1.0, Larry and I had talked about what “success” was to us, and had come up with revenue targets for the first month and the first year. By the end of our first week of sales, we had passed our first-month target, and by the end of the first month we had passed out first-year target. At that point we knew we had found something.

Our biggest challenge in the early days was scaling fast enough to meet demand. Late last year we realized that we needed to revisit some of our original assumptions about scale, and rewrote much of the sync engine. It was an enormous amount of work, most of which was entirely invisible to our customers, but the result is that we can now support essentially any number of users simply by writing a bigger check to our hosting provider. The economic model scales nicely.

What can we look forward to seeing from the company in the future?
We’re currently working on Spanning Sync v2.0, which will add Contact syncing so your Mac Address Book will stay in sync with your Gmail contacts. We’re also working on a new service built for iPhone users that has nothing to do with sync, and is probably more appropriate for outside investment. Check back in three months.