Tim Rees

Start of the month

Tim Rees — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:05:06 +0000

1st of March and I am a busy boy:

KickStart

This is a new modelling competition I am involved in and it has just gone live. KickStart. The idea is very simple – to find some new talent and help “kick start” their modelling career. Winners are selected each month by a panel and by text votes. At the end of the summer there will be a big final and party where an overall winner will be decided. Any profits made will also be shared out with Cancer Research UK

The first month has over 80 girls competing for 2 places…

View the kickstart facebook page or visit the KickStart site for more details.

Besinful

Besinful is entering a new phase now. We’ve done much of the basic site development and testing and are beginning to see good registration and uploading statistics now. Soon we’ll be adding some large new features such as webcams which will really raise the time spent on the site. But even now we have enough traffic to begin optimising the whole site and user experience. The first 2 areas we’re starting to test are the registration/payment pages, and the membership pricing.

From the business perspective it’s important for us to get the best membership pricing to get maximum profits. But even more importantly, from the customers perspective they need to be receiving the best value membership to encourage them to extend their memberships over many months. We have a unique business model with Besinful where girls are paid for posting content to the site, so the challenge becomes balancing member value, with maximum reward for the girls. Too low a pricing means we can’t afford to give the girls anything, and premium content dries up. Too high pricing and members won’t want to pay, full stop. I don’t know where the perfect balance point is, but I intend to find out!

AdultSeeker

Development on AdultSeeker had dried up for a few months before we were really able to finish the site and give it a big push. We had to instead focus on making Besinful profitable. With this now being the case, taking on more developers and having spent some time in the Ukraine planning exactly what needs to be done, we’ll be working on final fixes and updates to AdultSeeker to put us in the position where this baby can start getting lots of active members too

My own time over the next few days is going to be spent in preparing wireframes for new pages to test on Besinful, and on general improvements to AdultSeeker.

Back from the Ukraine

Tim Rees — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:13:10 +0000

I am back from the Ukraine – and very happy about it too.

I went out for a week to see the new office, review progress on a few projects, meet some of our new developers and iron out a few issues. On the whole a successful trip, but we’ll soon see how the new developers and project manager fit in. I’ve raised my expectations so the challenge is no on to see if the team can deliver!

But the week ended in a bit of a downer. My journey home was a nightmare following this series of unfortunate events:

My connecting flight to Kiev looked to be delayed because of ice on the runway. Things looked good when we did get clearance to fly with plenty of time to make my next flight, sadly it all went downhill quickly….
An airport official who has stopped me but II refused to pay at his subtle “you help me, I help you” prompts. This resulted in a long questioning and full search of all my bags and clothes by him and an colleague.
Landing in Kiev I strolled from one terminal to another and got mugged by a nice chap with a gun.
I still made it back, but instead of flying to Gatwick I had to fly to Heathrow and get a bus to Gatwick to get to my car.
And finally my trip back up round the M25 was a little stressful as my car wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

Going to the Ukraine is always such fun! Still I have discovered that they get a hell of a lot of snow out there, and there’s some good slopes, so next time my next winter season trip I’ll so a little snowboarding too.

It’s a tough job…

Tim Rees — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:12:14 +0000

At Real Interactive we employ a number of people. At the moment they are mostly technical, and dedicated to the development of new sites and upkeep of existing ones. Most of these technical employees have a series of routine tasks which need to be done related to the site they are assigned to; it is for example the responsibility for one person to put together the Besinful.com newsletters which in this case are written by Amylu.

I must at this point stress that Besinful is not a porn site. We have very clear boundaries. But what we do do is cater to a market that likes to be titillated, and we can provide that in abundance.

The particular individual today that takes care of composing these newsletters is still on holiday so I decided to have a little go myself. If you don’t know already I am pretty much good at anything so I am not phased by doing a little bit of email coding. (joke – I am actually useless at everything).

This is a screen grab of what I my computer looked like at the time.

I only hope that all those people involved in this website do not resent me being subjected to work like this!

Happy New Year

Tim Rees — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:12:36 +0000

OK – so I am a couple of days late with this, but I hope everyone saw the new year in with style and are having a good one so far?

This year I’ve decided not to make any specific resolutions, because lets face it, they get broken very quickly! Instead I’ll just be keeping things simple. I hope to do a little more exercise and have fun whenever I can…. but I am making no promises.

I did have very high hopes for 2009 with regards to growing Real Interactive. If I look back at my first post of last year: http://www.timrees.net/2009-and-onwards/2009/01/02/ it’s fairly obvious I did not achieve all I set out to in the last 12 months. Quite frankly I did not grow the business anything like planned, monthly revenues are actually lower now than 12 months ago across the majority of sites, with overheads being higher.

This sounds like bad news, but I’ll explain why I am not worried:

2009 was not about growth and marketing, in fact next to zero marketing was done. It was instead very much about development. I migrated from one office and development team to another and now have a very economical development centre in Kharkov, Ukraine. We frustratingly shelved 12 months work and developed a whole new platform for Besinful.

The work in 2009 has led to us having very solid foundations for a profitable network of websites, some live, some still mid-development. 2010 will be very much about making money from all these websites. Besinful has already taking off even without some of the features which will set it apart from competition in the same market – such as live webcam chat. I expect to see a similar sales growth trend with the addition of new sites and features, all of which require no further increase in operating costs. Any cost increases in the short term are purely about adding to the bottom line.

So there we have it. 2009 was great. Lots of time and effort put in to technology development and the set up of an office in Kharkov. 2010 is about growing brands and making money.

I also had another daughter, Madeleine, in 2009 which of course makes it a very special year for me.

Peace out people. Have a happy 2010!

TabooPleasures.co.uk launches

Tim Rees — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:07:27 +0000

Wow. Not a single post in nearly 2 months! The reason being… actually, no, there is no point in making any excuses. I am just a very lazy boy!

What’s new?

Lots has happened but for now I will focus on just 1. Our new sex toys and lingerie site TabooPleasures.co.uk has launched – just in time for a festive and very naughty Christmas!

I will follow up with more information on the site, and on Becky Holt, the lovely lady who has recently become the general manager.

Here’s a little photo to wet your appetite.

Reflecting in the sun

Tim Rees — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:01:59 +0000

I am currently sat on the terrace of the villa in Tenerife where we are staying, soon I will be floating on the blue pool sipping a nice ice cold San Miguel.

I’ve managed to do very little work this past week, which is rare for me. The little work I have has been reviewing the new designs for AdultSeeker and BeSinful, both of which are looking pretty awesome even if I say so myself!

The best thing about going on holiday (apart from spending time with my family) is that I’ve managed to clear my head and do a little reflecting. Which is particularly important as next week I need to finish a business plan. Once the designs are ready for our 2 sites the marketing will begin. As soon as we have ironed out any problems and worked out how to max the conversion of free to paying members we’ll roll the sites out internationally, first to English speaking countries, then translate the sites and launch in carefully selected markets.

Something else that I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on is the general state of our backend system as we’re basically about to drop 18 months work in favour for a new framework. That’s a lot of time, a lot of development costs and a lot of missed money we should have been making!

It will take a little explaining but I’ll paint the whole picture so you can understand my initial annoyance, and why right now I am feeling quite happy despite things taking much much longer than they should have.

Our sites share a lot of features, and it was my intention to have things developed in such a way that we could quickly launch new sites by taking a shared back end, choose the features that are needed, then just customise their appearance and settings to create a new site. Obviously this should increase development speed, reduce support cost and also make it possible to make improvements across different sites running the same features without developing each separately. The reality of this perfect set up has been a little different.

We ended up developing a site powered by an overly complicated framework, front end changes were not simple template changes and bugs appeared which were highly difficult to trace and fix.

In theory I could have kept things as they were, made it work and made the fixes. But this had to be done by the same 2 developers who had done most of the work. The only way to speed things up would be to take more developers on who would shadow and learn everything that they did for months. Because of the development set up we had at the time, we were paying top salaries, and massive management fees to a company that found the developers, placed them in offices, and managed them. But they became overpriced and there were no economies gained in growing our development team in this way.

However things were taking so long that I had no choice but to expand, so when we did it had to be in a new location, and brought completely in-house. When the new team began work on a new site I had to decide whether to stick with our existing framework and have them spend a long time learning it, or develop a site from scratch. We decided it would be much quicker to launch a new site developing it from nothing! Soon after this we needed to make a series of major improvements to the site already running on our original platform, and again we decided it would be quicker to re-start rather than continue to use what we already had!

So now you know the full details you can understand why I was feeling rather annoyed about the whole thing! 18 months spent on something that will not ever be used again.

But, I am a little more philosophical about it all now…. Had it not been for the problems and long development times I would not have looked to expand our team before finishing and launching a site and making it profitable. But in doing so I was forced to relocate our development office to make it affordable. As a direct result we now have a much larger and more cost effective team, who have achieved in 6 months as much as we did in 18 before. We have changed and reconfigured our servers so that sites run faster, and on less servers saving us further money.

Had development all gone as planned, yes, we would be making more money now, but I would not be in a position to scale up the team like I can now. And we do finally have a system that allows us to launch different sites quickly – when we need to.

I am very happy with what we will have up and running next month, we also have a webcam module that can be plugged in to any site. But the most exciting thing to have come form this is that we have such good economies and efficient development that we are launching a new company, to be housed in the same offices, developing projects for other clients – at very fair prices!

If you’ve read this far you must be bored as hell. So time for me to shut up, get my beer and get out floating across the pool on my lilo.

Breaking my silence

Tim Rees — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:03:33 +0000

Sorry for the suggestive title, but the only silence I am breaking is the lack of updates on timrees.net! It’s been over a month since my last entry and as you might imagine quite a lot happens in that time. So, here is a very brief round up.

Madeleine’s naming day – Had a great day with friends and family celebrating our latest family member. If you were here thanks for coming, thanks for not complaining about my barbecue, and thanks for all the lovely presents
AdultSeeker.co.uk launched – New homepage design going up tomorrow and lots of extra features being added over the next few weeks
BeSinful.com continues to grow – Seeing lots of new members and models on the site. We’ve started work on a new version which will include bigger and better model profiles, more membership options, webcams and so much more.
Ukraine trip – I visited our Kharkov office to review progress on the above 2 sites, other smaller projects, meet new team members and go out for a few drinks.
Check out the pics here
Outsourcing – Following my trip we’re well under way to also launching a software and web design outsourcing company to allow others access to lower cost, high quality development

Hope to bring you more news on our sites and projects as they happen.

AdultSeeker.co.uk

Tim Rees — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:14:29 +0000

AdultSeeker is the world’s best adult only social network (though only for UK members right now!)
We’ve come up with some pretty innovative and cool ideas for this site. So you’d better join it!

BeSinful.com

Tim Rees — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:50:17 +0000

BeSinful is our glamour model community

An amateur and glamour modelling site which allows girls to manage their portfolio of photo albums and videos. Each girl has their own personal fan page charging members for access their premium and exclusive content and to enter live to chats.

Real Interactive

Tim Rees — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:10:20 +0000

Visit our company website - realinteractive.net – We promise to jazz it up when we’ve got time to be a little more concerned about our own site rather than the websites we are build for our members.