Tim Rees

After a period of steadily declining revenues from subscription sites the trend is back on the up!

The reason for this decline is that I wanted to make a shift from having income that came purely from marketing other companies services/sites to being more focused on our own. Historically most of the income to Real Interactive has been from running websites powered by other companies software, hosting and billing. I won’t deny that this is a great way of making money – no overheads or start-up costs, but I have always felt a little bit uneasy about not having 100% control.

So while we’ve not been marketing these sites their turnover has steadily dropped, all our profit going in to development. I was never sure how quickly sales would decline so it was difficult to know exactly how much to spend on development of new sites. In hindsight a better mix of marketing and development could have worked out better. But all’s well that end’s well….

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:

1. 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….
2. 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.
3. Landing in Kiev I strolled from one terminal to another and got mugged by a nice chap with a gun.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.



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.

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
• 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.

Well it’s certainly been an interesting couple of weeks.

There’s been some significant changes to our companies development office in the Ukraine.

To increase productivity and reduce some overheads we’ve gone form having a collocated development team in Kiev and Kharkov to having just one office in Kharkov. As part of the move we’ve doubled the size of the office there and taken on more developers to increase the overall size of our team.

So – as I hope is pretty clear, there’s plenty going on, plenty to be excited about, and plenty of exciting news to announce very soon.