This Business and Moment...

I've just pushed the Cheezus BETA release to the Google Play store. Got to wait for the review, but am so pleased. 2 more features to be added, but they're being worked on now. Then it's pretty solid for v1.0 and I can start building up a **** load of cheese data. Once I've run the beta a bit, and got the iOS side sorted, I'll do full release.

Got some wicked stuff planned though! Adding some events section, some blog post sections and it's cheese, so you know... cheese.

Also, sent the emotuit API to the customer, now to see if I can make some cash out of this.
 
New job starts 2nd March. Working my months notice. There's developments coming in at my current employer which is going to be a pain for my department for a while. But that's all happening around Easter time onwards so I'm getting out at the right time.

Feels like I'm cruising at the moment. Work is quiet, I'm only here for 12 more working days as I've got a week off next week. It's oddly liberating.

Lots of people are upset to see me go which is nice though.
 
Hehe offer in the post :)

“Lead Technical Advisor” for quantum computing (mainly cryptography).

My role is to be a C-level advisor/aid partly presales but mainly building and maintaining relationships (“consultant” being a bad word) based on my experience of building out the capability and delivering quantum solutions. Cutting through the jargon to really solve the problems without the BS.

should start next week.
 
I'm waiting on the bugger to sort out my iOS side and a couple of bugs and things for cheezus, which us frustrating and I want the iOS one out to push more. I also want them all to the same level, so I can start the V2 ideas. I have people using it but I need more and can't when it's not as it should be. Work was good up until now but now comms have slipped and he's getting lazy. Cracked the whip a bit, so hopefully it'll get better. We're at 35 active users on Android, but I know so many iOS people that it's just annoying. I have spoken to loads of companies interested in listing their stuff on the app, but I need to get these last things done.

I've got the company in the US who have now built a solution using my emotuit API. Will work out what comes of that... just leaving it with them to see at the moment but it's cost me $450 to get to this point and hopefully it'll lead to some increase of work. Had a call with someone else wanting to use it as well, so will see if that leads to anything.

While I'm in a bit of a wait, which is frustrating, I've been manning social and rebuilt the Cheezus website: https://cheezus.co and then read a forum thread about the woman who won that house for 2quid in the house raffle. Thought it would be interesting to have a site that allowed people to list their houses as competition prizes on the site. No upfront fee, set the value of the house and cover all stamp duty and fees. The site only takes a cut of successfully completed raffles. Raffle tickets not all sold, the money returned to users.
It all seemed pretty easy and found a few little things to make it easier, but last night I built it :D (told you I have issues): https://rafcity.com
Cost me about 5quid so far, about 2.99 for domain and I use a $5 a month VPS for hosting. Has fully working listings, with raffle ticket assignment and allotment. Even does live draws at the end, too. Paypal checkout sorted. Mailchimp newsletter sorted out and facebook linked page/ Fb shop as well. About 3hrs I think it's taken me.
 
randomshenans said:
It all seemed pretty easy and found a few little things to make it easier, but last night I built it :D (told you I have issues): https://rafcity.com
Cost me about 5quid so far, about 2.99 for domain and I use a $5 a month VPS for hosting. Has fully working listings, with raffle ticket assignment and allotment. Even does live draws at the end, too. Paypal checkout sorted. Mailchimp newsletter sorted out and facebook linked page/ Fb shop as well. About 3hrs I think it's taken me.
Click to expand...

That would need some changes - it wont work if run like that - the vast majority of these competitions do not result in the house being awarded as a prize but instead result in an alternative cash prize being awarded. They are pretty scammy in the first place - sticking them all together in a single portal would just highlight that most of them simply aren't viable.

The home owners/prize organisers (though often greedy with the fees/costs) will need to spend a lot of time/money on marketing, you'd basically lock in a loss for most of them if refunding upon failure to sell the required tickets.

The charity donation thing is sometimes a feature of these competitions but at £1 per ticket is a potentially quite a big chunk of the ticket sales.

The escrow could cause a problem too I'd strongly suspect that a lot of (if not pretty much all) of the organisers of these competitions will dip into their share of the ticket sales (they often allocate say 25%) in order to cover the marketing costs required to generate further ticket sales. Unless you were proposing to fund the marketing yourself in return for the fee you take.

You need a skill element to the entry process - this is often some trivia question, if you make it too easy then you might also need to allow for free entries too.

Lastly Paypal specifically don't support house competitions so that PayPal checkout is redundant to begin with.
 
Last edited:
dowie said:
The escrow could cause a problem too I'd strongly suspect that a lot of (if not pretty much all) of the organisers of these competitions will dip into their share of the ticket sales (they often allocate say 25%) in order to cover the marketing costs required to generate further ticket sales. Unless you were proposing to fund the marketing yourself in return for the fee you take.
Click to expand...
That's the idea.

dowie said:
Lastly Paypal specifically don't support house competitions so that PayPal checkout is redundant to begin with.
Click to expand...
No? Where does it say you can't buy tickets with paypal? I just haven't seen it. Or looked for it tbf!
 
randomshenans said:
That's the idea.
Click to expand...

Fair enough - but that then involves you potentially spending some 5 figure sum for every house you want to list and then taking a hit on the majority of them if you're giving the owners a free roll too and not doing the draw unless target hit.

No? Where does it say you can't buy tickets with paypal? I just haven't seen it. Or looked for it tbf!
Click to expand...

It's been reported in a few stories - just had a quick google and found this one from the Sun for example:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/1071...was-supposed-to-be-simple-but-left-us-losers/

The Gambling Commission spotted she had failed to offer a free entry option or set a closing date — issues which were both quickly rectified.

But a week later, PayPal froze her account and refunded all the money to people who bought tickets. They have since ruled that PayPal cannot be used for house raffles in the UK.

Renu then sold another £7,000 worth of tickets through Eventbrite but it too later refunded ticket holders and has since refused to support raffles.

The ASA quibbled over her wording about the cash-prize alternative and even the charities she hoped to donate to withdrew their backing.
Click to expand...

The free entry option is going to be an extra faff if you're potentially going to be sorting through thousands of postal entries for each competition too.

It's a pretty dodgy area to be involved in and your plan re: refunding the whole lot makes the idea pretty much a non-starter - your site won't work as planned unless you're prepared to take a hefty fee, award one to the property owners too (else where is the incentive for them) and do the alternative cash draws for some fraction of the prize pool as per most of these competitions. Unless you've got some way of marketing these things that others haven't tried before.
 
dowie said:
It's been reported in a few stories - just had a quick google and found this one from the Sun for example:
Click to expand...
Thanks man, that's really useful. I'll enable stripe instead.

dowie said:
The free entry option is going to be an extra faff if you're potentially going to be sorting through thousands of postal entries for each competition too.
Click to expand...
Yea, not doing that, sounds like too much faff.

dowie said:
It's a pretty dodgy area to be involved in and your plan re: refunding the whole lot makes the idea pretty much a non-starter - your site won't work as planned unless you're prepared to take a hefty fee, award one to the property owners too (else where is the incentive for them) and do the alternative cash draws for some fraction of the prize pool as per most of these competitions. Unless you've got some way of marketing these things that others haven't tried before.
Click to expand...
OK, valid point. Might have to structure it as others. Cash prize of X% of the total prize pool sold so far. Split marketing fee with owners like you mentioned for incentive...

For once I hadn't put a ton of thought into it haha I just needed to get it out my head. I appreciate your feedback though, I really do.
 
randomshenans said:
Thanks man, that's really useful. I'll enable stripe instead.
Click to expand...

sorry to bring more bad news but a quick google shows that isn't a feasible one either:

example:

http://rafflemyhouse.com
Unfortunately, we did not reach our sales target due to Paypal & Stripe pulling out as payment gateways during our competition period. We had over 300,000 unique visitors to our website mostly due to the articles published in The Sun, Daily Mail, Birmingham Mail & the local newspaper Halesowen News.

Full refunds are available due to us not being able to offer a cash prize because the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) recently found a similar competition which gave away a cash prize breached the Cap Code Edition 12 8.2 & 8.15.1 (Promotional & Marketing).
Raffle My House is currently in talks with ASA about our next house competition. This competition will be postponed until the ASA gives us approval on our Promotional & Marketing campaign.
Click to expand...

There are potential legal issues too aside from the obvious with the gambling commission, ASA etc.. stuff like you not actually owning the house, house not being as described - requires some up front costs in terms of surveys, legal work etc.. you don't want to have some nasty surprise where an owner pulls out or the house is subject to some dispute etc..
 
Work have decided to set up CCTV cameras across the office over the weekend, one of which is pointing directly at four of us in our office.

There's been no internal information regarding this.

Anyone have any idea what rights we have, or don't have? It's made us all feel really uneasy.
 
randomshenans said:
It all seemed pretty easy and found a few little things to make it easier, but last night I built it :D (told you I have issues): https://rafcity.com
Cost me about 5quid so far, about 2.99 for domain and I use a $5 a month VPS for hosting. Has fully working listings, with raffle ticket assignment and allotment. Even does live draws at the end, too. Paypal checkout sorted. Mailchimp newsletter sorted out and facebook linked page/ Fb shop as well. About 3hrs I think it's taken me.
Click to expand...

What good is this? I can't buy any tickets lol :p
 
Does that include a ban on setting up new websites/businesses?

Because if he's grounded to his room then we should expect even more tomorrow!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom