Tim Rees

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.

Eventful event!

Tim Rees — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:48:42 +0000

Last weekend BeSinful.com was at the USC show promoting the site and brand, we had a hot tub and 4 lovely ladies. So by all accounts a pretty good mix!

The lead up and the show itself was not quite a smooth operation!

Bit of a f*ck up with mobile set up contracts, as a result our shortcode was not allocated until the last minute. Testing and printing was more than a little rushed, and not as good as it might have been.

Promotional clothing all printed with wrong colour logos

Business Cards printed incorrectly

Calling cards came after we got back from the show

Overcharged for posters, order placed on much lower pricing and we didn’t really need them!

300 posters we did want not printed at all

Canvas banners order got lost by printers, then they got lost by courier

Hot tub only began to get up to heat at the end of the second day

Hot tub and stand sabotaged – filled with mud final night so 3rd day we had nothing

My car broke down!

Despite all the problems we had, we did get most fixed before the event, just in time! We’ve got everything for the next time and we have some much better ideas about how to make sure things run smoothly and get us really noticed – whatever we do next will be even bigger and better!

New look

Tim Rees — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:21:07 +0000

I forgot to mention – this site has a brand new look, and I think it is pretty awesome. So, there you are.

I have no idea what % of people that read this do so from an RSS feed, so they would be unaware of the update, and what % visit the site. But either way, worth mentioning.

Hope I shall be able to point you towards more sexy time sites soon!

1 year on

Tim Rees — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 09:33:33 +0000

Last week was exactly 1 year on form me leaving World Dating Partners and focusing full time on my own ventures. So I feel it’s a good time to do a little reflecting.

What if anything have I achieved?

Though it doesn’t feel like a lot, and I often feel like ripping my hair out because all the plans and ideas that I have take much longer to bring in to production than I would want. However it is something I have to accept, and I will be the first to admit that I could have managed things a little better, I’m always learning. The migration of development from one team to another turned out to be the headache I feared.

One year ago I worked form my home office (I still do in the evenings), I had 2 developers working from a shared office in Kiev. Now we have a larger development team, which has already outgrown the office they moved in to only a few months ago. After a discussion with my project manager Igor last night it sounds like we may need to some additional developers, growing that team to over 10. They will be supporting existing sites, developing a couple of new ones and working on related projects.

I work from a nice little office here in my hometown Newbury, with a fantastic new Business Development Manager Amy. She is only a few weeks in to her role but showing great promise already, especially with promoting BeSinful.com. I hope we’ll begin growing this office. The intention is to bring all outsourced agency work such media buying in-house.

So size wise we’ve been growing, but I know that is no indication of success! We are now finally entering the stage which I am most excited about and which all the team have been working so hard towards – the launching and marketing of new sites. Watch this space.

Quick Preview

Tim Rees — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:49:14 +0000

Our very own Amylu striking a cheeky pose for Mr Joby Rawlings!

I’ve been lucky enough to get a sneak preview at some of the sexy photos from last weeks shoot besinful.com @ image1st.

I’m hoping we’ll get to do a lot more with these guys – they’ve done an amazing job.

Also well done to our four sexy and sinful girls of the day. Amylu, Kate, Keira and Cassandra.

Few more behind the scenes piccies here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timjrees/sets/72157621448473985/

Lots happening right now

Tim Rees — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:11:32 +0000

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

Things are beginning to happen on besinful.com – lots of members and models joining every day with the site still in an early version.

For girls joining the site as models the biggest news is we have began to work exclusively with image1st, one of UK’s premier model and celebrity photography studios, who’ll shoot our competition winners. Just yesterday 3 of our models and site manager Amylu shot a series of individual and group photos. The images will appear on the site and also be used in promotional material for several upcoming events (details to coming soon!)

Our first proper venture in to mobile has also been finalised. By the end of the month some site features and content will be available from most handsets.

That’s not quite the end of my news! 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.