23) Run a popular website

The last 7 years has been dominated by family and business, after making the jump to being self-employed. It's no coincidence that my ability to post blogs took a nose-dive around that time too.

Back when I made my 100 Things To Do List I had the aim that I wanted to make a cool website. But in reality it was quite out of reach. Firstly, I didn't have the ability to build anything cool, or helpful enough to warrant people bothering to go to. The desire to do so is what first got me trying to come up with ideas.

An ideas man... only

The first thing I wanted to build was an indie game database, similar to IMDB (I had originally callled it IGDB). I built part of it for my University disseration, but stopped when I realised that the scope was too big. It would require having a huge following as the data would need to be crowd-souced.

My second idea was something to help make hitch-hiking safer. I really like the idea of hitch-hiking, it's a nice "help a stranger" thing, the kind of mentality I wish the world embraced more. I stopped on this for many reasons that I won't bore you with.

Something I learned quite early is that I prefer working with other people. On a trip to Croatia I convinced Liam, Craig, and Mike to work on a fun side project together, the outcome was Battleshots... and the early formations of a "team" which we called Team Pterodactyl, after the... nevermind.

The birth of BKK Events

The first real attempt at building something really good came when somebody I met in my first contract moved to Thailand. He struggled to find things to do in Bangkok, but knew there were loads of stuff. The internet there (at least at the time) was much less "evolved" with fewer sites providing information like that. We set out to build an events/activites discovery platform, BKK Events.

Working with Adam on BKK Events was great. He was a really talented designer, and I had started to learn the skills to build a half-decent app. Obviously, it was a lot of hard work, but we worked together really well and encouraged each other along.

 

I had a vision that we could "white label" the events site, to make it easy to set them up in other areas. Early on this had a lot of success, with us launching BCN Events in Barcelona, one in Chiang Mai, Taiwan, India, and a few other places. I think our most successful was setting up sites to cover festivals, giving people an easy-to-use timetable.

With so many unlinked sites, I thought it would be best if we try to build a "brand" that would persist across them. This would allow us to create the foundations of a proper business going forward. We came up with the name One Place Events, rebranding the sites to "bangkok.oneplace.events", and so on.

Enter Tipster

Note. For this whole thing I'm calling it "tipster", so it doesn't come up in search. It's pretty obvious what I'm talking about. I've just done a find/replace.

Whilst developing One Place, the found out we were expecting Amelie, and started going to NCT classes. It was at the second class I met Damien.

Damien was a sports tipster (somebody who tells you who do bet on to try to make money). He had a shitty Wordpress site, and wanted something better. After a few conversations with him, it was recognised that no individual tipster warrants the development cost of their own website... but there is definintely a gap in the market for somebody who can offer a white-labelled site. And I was all into white-labelling at that time (see above).

We set to work developing his new Terry Tipster site, but with the whole thing being white labelled under the brand Tipster Engine (after recognising later in the process with BKK Events that it needed an overall brand). Bringing together my Team Pterodactyl we built the first version.

 

This was actually a huge techincal feat, and one that we were all very proud of. Using a data feed, and a load of automation, we built what we recognise as the first real tipster verification platform. We quickly signed up some tipsters who brought across their members to the new platform. The business model was that we won't charge for the site, but we'll take a 50% cut of membership sales (an industry best at the time).

But there was something we hadn't counted on, two big problems. Firstly, good tipsters are good at sports, not running websites, bad tipsters are good at marketing. By verifying we're exposing bad tipsters, appealing only to the people who cannot market themselves. Secondly, these tipsters considered the website "theirs", and even though they weren't paying they expected to be able to have it changed however they want. Knowing that constent a "yes" is the death of innovation, we tried to think of something new to make the business viable.

With help from a friend, Simon, we redevloped the brand to be "Tipster" and pulled all of the individual websites into a single home, tipster.com. It was clearly the right move, as traffic upon launching skyrocketed and we opened up the ability for anybody to quickly start their own profile.

Back in Bangkok

Using all I was learning on Tipster, from a business perspective, I started looking back at One Place and if/how it could become a viable business. It was only ever intended as a fun learning project. I recognised three possible options. 

1) We could sell the system white label, as we had with the festival

This wouldn't work, Adam was great at the commnuity aspect but wasn't a salesman.

2) We could sell promoted event spots

This probably wouldn't work for the same reason as the first. And we didn't really have enough traffic to warrant it (we floated around 11,000 a month)

3) We could sell tickets

This seemed the right approach. We set about developing ticket-selling capabilities.

It was around this time Adam met Eliot, and we naively gave away half of the business with the belief that he could grow it big. Asia hadn't yet had companies like TicketMaster, EventBrite, etc grab huge chunks of the industry - so the hope was to grow fast enough that they may want to aquire One Place in future. Although I'd probably say the move was a mistake, it's hard to know how things would have turned out without. Plus we learn more from our mistakes than our successes...

Somebody believes in us!

In 2016 we met the greatest investor who believed in our vision and wanted to be part of Tipster. Whilst I, being somewhere around "realist" but drifting into either camp, thought there was no chance of it going ahead, Damien somehow pulled it off. Beginning 2017 we were able to focus 100% on Tipster, without me having to keep dipping into contracting to fund the business.

With the investment I put together a plan for a really awesome new version 2 of the platform. I wireframed it all, and worked with an amazing designer (who I still work with now) who could create statics of them. We developed the whole app from scratch, and were really, really pleased with the results. After an incredibly challenging year, we launched just weeks before 2018. Very few people know about my experience of launching, for the first two weeks getting a maximum of 2 hours sleep a night.

Unfortunately that's about where the stories of each have to take a long break, because of the following chapters...

Tick off the list? Run a popular website

The full version of that line is that it needs over 1,000 visitors per day, for at least a week. That is 7,000 a week (put that calculator away)... or around 28,000 per month.

Here's a screenshot of our analytics very early in the Tipster life, maybe around 9 months after we first brought the sites into a single place, and shortly after beginning to rebuild the site from scratch.

Boom! Smashed it.

 

Afterward: Leaving Bangkok

In 2018 we were approached by Masii, one of Thailands top 10 fintech companies (and recently called one of the top 100 fintech startups worldwide). They wanted to aquire One Place. I have wrote many things and then deleted, being careful of what I should and shouldn't say. So we'll pretty much leave it there, with the official announcements.

 As a project I consider One Place a success. I went in develop my skills in building apps and understanding business, and I absolutely did that. I'm very proud of what was built, and it gave me my first public "exit".

Afterward: Exiting Tipster

For everything I can't say about One Place, there's probaly 100 things I can't about Tipster. At the start of 2019 Liam and I had expressed our wishes to move on to new things. We were in talks with a few companies who had expressed interest both recently and over the years. It was decided the best fit was NI (Natural Int... damn Google's high indexing of Blogger). As part of the agreement it meant Liam and I could move on almost immediately with only some requirements, and Damien could stay on to keep going with our vision.

Liam and I were in the planning stages for our new business, and the sale meant we could fairly comfortably build it without requiring early investment.

Here are some screenies of the Tipster sale.

I put that one there because I got a little quote shout-out. Even though what I actually said was way better, it's fine being paraphrased into something I didn't say.

Whew

Well that was long, right? You read it for a few minutes. That was like 7 years for me. But, most importantly, I've crossed number 23 off my list, "run a popular website".

Hair today, gone... pretty much today

I am now 31, and only five days away from being 32. I now have four children, two businesses, and a wife. It is quite a world away from when I was 21 (no children, no businesses, and no wife, for a start).

Back then I had a lot of hair. Quite a lot of it. So much so that I apparently looked like every other person with curly hair. It kind of became "my thing" (at least before the headband).

When I was 19 I unexpectedly and unplanned(edly?) did a photoshoot for a workplace magazine. Back then I had long emo hair.

  

During the photoshoot they suggested they make my hair curly, which I thought was going to be pretty lame, but was happy to go with it. I actually quite liked the outcome...

 

So from then I was a guy with curly hair. The photographer suggested I get an agent, and put me in touch with one, and that is how I got into doing some modelling. If they needed someone kind of studenty-looking, I had the hair for it. I wasn't particularly good at it, it was all down to the hair.

And I had that hair for many years. Arguably for too long. When I was 28, with a manbun, I was starting to realise I'm in risk of becoming the 50 year old that's holding onto their youth by having a ponytail... it really hits home when you're able to take a picture like this...

 

You know it's no longer cool when you're also a fat c**t. It was time for a change. I started going gradually shorter (my hair, not my stature).

But I wasn't ready to give up doing stuff with my hair. I had always wanted to try different colours, and at this point I was pushing 30, and every year I left it would make me look even more like a dick if I were to do it. So I went for it. 

I tried blonde...

 

Silver/purple...

Blue...

White...

And even pink/red... (actually, this is the last time I saw my nan before she died, introducing Cato to her)

 

And once I'd finally gotten it out of my system, I went back to normal.

It was a fun few months, but I was mostly worried about damaging my hair by keep bleaching it. Especially considering you're not supposed to have it on your scalp, but it was too much effort not to, so I went for it (and yes, it burns). If it wasn't so much effort I'd alternate between brown and silver.

But then one day something happened. I was blissfully minding my own business, when I see a picture Brandi had taken, and I had a very obvious bald spot. I thought it was a trick of the camera. I couldn't be going bald. My mom and dad both have good hair, and hair was my thing. It was only one day later that my sister said I seemed like I was "thinning on top".

When I got home I decided to take a look. Until that point I hadn't. I hadn't even considered going bald. I thought only bald people went bald, and I wasn't a bald person. I held the camera up to the mirror, and saw this.

... What the fook is that, right? It looks like I intentionally had a combover. I had never knew, because it was kind of hiding behind me. Maybe other bald people didn't realise? Maybe they too would be gutted when they find out?

My mom was sympathetic. She had noticed. She bought me some soap that is supposed to help. Brandi had already searched for how much hair transplants cost (before I had even realised, because she knew I'd be upset).

So now things have changed. What once was part of me has an expiry date, which I didn't know. It was kind of like finding out my best friend, hair, had cancer.

I didn't, don't, know who or what to blame. I went back through pictures to figure out when this happened, and how I didn't notice. I looked at pictures from 2016, and I could see it a little lighter on top. It felt like that scene in The Truman Show when he realises his wife didn't love him, and crossed her fingers at the wedding. Maybe it's the kids fault? But no, they're awesome. Maybe it's work? But I don't really get stressed... It could be to do with bleaching a shit load of times, but surely not. Though I guess it doesn't really matter what caused it, that is the case, and my hair, much like the hare, which seemed so promising, will eventually lose the race... of time... to the tortoise (my scalp).

The above picture was a year ago. The bald spot actually seems to be a little better (thanks mom's soap!) and the hair loss had seemed to have slowed. Maybe I was out of the woods, and could live with being a bit "thin on top". 

That is until recently. I got my hair cut about a month ago, and today it's pretty much the same length. If I go in water the remaining bits group together and looks like I've only got a few strands.

But I can't be upset about it forever. For now I'll keep using my hair soap, and research how to look good bald. And keep working on the business, to hopefully get enough money to do what Elon Musk did...