This Business and Moment...

With this huge reorg in my contract place, as I've mentioned I need to think about what I'm going to do. My good friend who's on the T1 leadership team is arranging a sit down with myself, him and the other T1 heading up all the product line teams in the future org. My mate sees me as a good fit for the product line manager role, heading up a product line on the business side (I said to him I'd do dev tools or business tools lines) and it'd be a perm position. Thing is, the contract rates are getting hammered down here, so I think I'd be able to wangle a pretty high FTE base salary. I'd aim for about 150-160k for the role (it's Associate Director level, under the head of business products) and that's not far off my contract rate. Then I'd get paid holiday (jeez not had that in 10yrs!), great pension and bonus. As much as I'd like to be like meh, I'll find another ****** contract and push on with my own stuff, I have to also think of both sides of the coin.

Everything with my stuff is going well... but it's always slow and it's not paying me so I can't put any eggs in that basket. I want to not care about this meeting coming up, but I'm bloody swatting up on a ton of reading prior to it. It would put me above my current manager, and think it might rock the boat a bit, especially coming from contractor to that. It's not until Sept so I have some time to finish these books I'm reading. I even took a refresher Coursea course on Product Management to brush up like a massive nerd.
 
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Been an interesting week so far, I'm off to Croatia on Saturday, so I've been trying to hammer through a lot of the backlog. Started a bit of a pain. After having a full blown argument with our outsourced Dev dude (even longer story tbh, threatened to sell our code to the Russians on the black market lol I ******* swear I've seen/ heard it all now) we settled down and committed to finish our app off. I need it shipped yesterday.
Pushed beta to TestFlight on iOS, downloaded it... issue using login with Auth0, wasn't working. Lost a day on that, but he fixed the issue and we're a go again. Spent a long time going through the app and listing all bugs/fixes/items that needed fixing.

Most of it is small ****; italics need removing from a screen, some formatting stuff on a smaller screen, making some fields required before searching etc. but it's getting there:

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You'll notice the prices are a little on the cheap side as well, so the calculations on that are screwy, same as the 0 VOL number, either way, progress. Aim was to now be able to test it with our backend. You're supposed to click request and details of the user and flight etc. are sent to our partner portal in the backend.

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Shame it doesn't... so main issue at the moment is I'm not seeing the trip details sent via the API to the backend. That, and I'm arguing with the dude that the expected behaviour is that it should send the data to the backend, but at the same time pop up saying "thanks for your request, someone will follow up soon" and redirect them to the Trips screen in the app, where they'll see the pending trip in the trips table. It's like talking to a wall sometimes. The other 2 guys are in Australia, one lives there and the other is on holiday. One of those created the trips API and built the backend. Timezones are bitch.

Anyway, once that is resolved, it's really getting there, we're not at all far off, but obviously every one of these small last things is a ballache. Really I shouldn't have to deal with this and it should be done by one of the dudes in Aus, as CTO, but that's another thing I need to sort :P

Things I can control are partnerships, and it's where I like to think I'm pretty good at sorting **** out.

We've now got the no. 1 luxury private island resort on board as a partner:
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I'm waiting to hear back from Velaa private island; they wanted exclusivity on our Black tier for the Maldives, so we couldn't show Soneva to the people in the Black Tier, but hey it's all good.
I spoke to North Island as well in the Seychelles and they're interested so sending more info through tonight. That'll be 3 of the best private island resorts in the world on board, and I have follow ups to do with 2 more on that list.

Also had a great call with the regional director of Marriott BonVoy hotels covering luxury in UAE and Africa. She's interested in coming on board as well and wants to get their Seychelles resorts and Mauritius one on there too.

Resorts are going pretty well! I also had a great call with the MPH Club https://www.instagram.com/mphclub/ who are happy to be our exotic car company covering Miami. We have Royalty Exotics in Vegas and I'm not trying to cater for NY, SF, LA and Chicago for probably the main US ones.

Did some mockups to show the potential partners what it will look like for them:

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This part is going to kick off being built as soon as this v1.0 is out, hence my push!

Great thing about these guys as well is everything that goes through us to them is on a 10% commission. This is why I'm trying to get this out as much as possible. These guys all know huge clients who fly private and are down for recommending us to their clients too.

I feel I'm ahead of the rest of the guys, so obviously I am pushing to get us all running at the same pace. Which is my ******* pace haha

Don't think many read my huge ass posts but I like them, it's like dear diary :D

Now to go and kick someone in the head to do what I need.
 
Management don't need to have the skillset though. They should understand, based on your explanations that you cannot cope. You need to explain where exactly you're having issues and what will **** up if you dont have support. If they cannot help draft in support or resources to help you, explain that they need to prioritise what is most important to them for you to focus on. Simple. You can't manage by yourself but without making it 100% clear to management what is going on and what will happen if you get no support, you don't cover your own ass,.
 
9th testflight release update on the VolAir app... ******* frustrating. Not that there are 9, but that every time the ****** fixes *fixes* one thing, there are like 3 things that break, or he stops from working. We're on 11 new bugs found on this release. GAHHHH! I want all these things done and released by end of sept. The dev is complaining of the time he's spent on this, as it was a fixed price, but I'm like "dude, if you ******* did it right and were better, it would not have taken you so long you massive ****"
Now he won't commit the latest code without payment, but I'm not paying him this last bit until he ******* delivers what he was supposed to, so in a bit of a stuck place and just have to hit the ***** to get him to sort **** out.

Flipside, had some amazing meetings this week. Flying into london next weds to meet a really great guy who used to work for JetSmarter. The guy has so many connections and he'll be great on board managing that side. When we meet weds, we're going to plan some partnership meetings for while I'm over there, too. :)
Then day trip to Monaco in Nov and lining up some meetings there too. Just need to pull the ******* tech in line. I'll be having a big ass word with the "CTO" when he's back from holiday...
 
Thought you might like a bit of a saga story.

Guy who came on board to start with to do dev for tokens. Sweat equity type agreement. We were pleased with his work but he said he was too busy and didn't want to continue with app work so we said OK fine. He hung about in slack and was always a bit of a difficult one to manage. It's hard when it's technically non paid, but at the same time, he consumed a lot of my time. I think he quit about 4 times, threatened suicide a few more. Yea, was hard work. I actually spoke to the hiring manager he has now and got him the job in IT (he kept complaining of being poor and having nothing, but then going for warehouse jobs!) so did a lot for him.
Anyway, we pulled in this outsourced dev to try and finish off these last bits. We are on update 9 in testflight and he was slowly getting through the stuff. He uploaded to testflight but didn't commit code as he said not until payment etc. a pain, yes. He also caused me ****. Yet, when someone has your code, I tried to keep it all good.

Last week I was reporting latest bugs in slack and he turned around and said it was hard fixing the bad code from the first dev. Obviously that first dev took this well and called him a naughty word rhyming with hunt. Cue a massive **** storm of name calling like petulant children. Dev 1 said he wanted all mention of his name off the site and nothing more to do with it. Dev 2 said he's not committing the code, can't continue work as he's been insulted. So I ended up kicking out Dev 1 from slack and have tried to get in touch with Dev 2 but he's now ignoring all correspondence. We've lost about 3 months worth of code. I am in the middle trying to just pick up the ******* mess in the middle.

So, that was my last week.
 
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He said we should just take where we are currently and finish it off ourselves... this person is supposed to take on CTO responsibilities but has done very little in the last 12 months along those lines. He's now moving jobs again, but hey, I'm trying to sort out a new internal job at the same time as doing my current job, as well as doing this and with 3 kids... I am going to get shouty.
 
malachi said:
So whats happening now, the dev market is oversaturated because everyone is jumping on the bandwagon?
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Yep. There are so many now, and from all over the world and as I've found, even if you think you're getting one from one place, doesn't mean you are. Everyone is a dev now, having taken a course online once. Trying to validate that person's experience is hard, too. You can look at portfolio, github, but they find a way to cheat it. I've seen it all.
 
Prophet said:
Last week we celebrated our 2nd anniversary. Since opening the doors, my business partner and I have grown the business to have 50 managed service clients, and 6 team members. We've just won a contract with a FTSE 250 company and continue to grow purely though referrals. We were nominated for the NatWest Small Business Entrepreneur award and made the finals!

We're competing with businesses who are 10 to 20 times our size and regular beating them.

If you're thinking of starting your own business don't worry about being disruptive or reinventing the wheel. Put your team and customer service as the two main priorities and focus on delivering a great service.
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That's amazing stuff. Well done man!! Properly motivational stuff that.
 
So I decided to make the jump and do something I have been meaning to do for ages... I started a youtube channel for "business-y" stuff. I have learnt so much stuff along my journey that I wanted to share that. Not all good tbf lol just look at old Akshit above, but they're good stories too.
We have a bucket load of resources available to us today. I was doing a full do-over, each time I do things differently based on things I've learnt. I just want to share that with people.

It'll be a mix of my tips, resources, tales like Akshit and upwork, and random stuff like, I once lived for a week at a conference in Orlando on $10 as that's all I had. I remember when on the first day I realised lunch didn't come with the ticket and you had to buy it. I didn't have the cash to buy a single lunch. I lived the week off food from the coffee breaks and sneaking my way into sponsors "after parties" at the end of each day :D so yea, it'll be a mix.


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIhQsQ_KXjLKMpXkq9AXcUA

Feel free to subscribe and stuff.
I just did a video on value proposition/ business model canvas stuff when you have an idea for a business that's uploading... will be up in about 937468735483754 hours if my internet has anything to do with it. Next one is building a business online presence (facebook, twitter, instagram, website inc. domain) in under 1hr - Think that'll be fun.
 
Thanks man! Appreciate that :P

I uploaded the vid on business model canvas. It's what I'd recommend to anyone thinking of starting a business or with an idea. Or as I mention, anyone in a business looking to make changes.


This is my first time making videos, or using premiere pro :P haha it might take a while for me to feel comfortable with it.
 
Basher said:
I think the key to life is different for everyone. Stability is great for some, but bores the hell out of others. Figure out what your ‘why’ is and do everything to get there is generally what I go by.
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See, I'm wired backwards, as I hate not learning and developing. Stability for me, often comes with a lack of that. I always have to be doing something interesting to me, learning and feeling like I'm getting something more from life. This, for me at least (I'm sure it does exist), has never existed in line with the comfort and stability.
 
I had an interesting call yesterday with the CEO of Ciright systems. They're interested in finding a technology partner for emotion API. They do hardware and systems for multiple applications where they'd like to use it. One is interactive maps at universities, to change content if people look confused. Only want to just use our API, which is fine. There are about 5 use cases they mentioned, so I asked them to send through the number of POS/ hardware places they would have and what the use case for each would be. It's not a model we've priced for before, so I'm trying to work out how to make it a. competitive b. cover our costs and be worth it for us, too.
I was looking at the AWS model and thought I'd try and replicate that one but see if I could make it cheaper... just need to be able to handle the potential millions of monthly calls to the API and it not cost us a ton in infra. Will see what the brief is on the units and uses they have and I'll try and put something together.
 
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