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".
