23 Jan, 2009
Why is it only 24 hours in a day? I would need at least 12 more hours to per day. I would use those extra hours to work-out (New Year’s resolution) be with my friends and take care of my girlfriend. A couple month ago I remembered I read about a man in Sweden that only sleep for 2.5 hours, he took micro breaks for 25 min every fourth hour.
Since I got back from my vacation I’ve had a lot to do, both at home and at work. At home we are finally getting settled in the new apartment and we only have a few more paintings to put up on the wall and after that we will have a welcome party for all our friends. At work it’s been a lot of focus on key metrics and measurable values that we can benchmark over time. It’s always important to keep a look at the competitors and what they do. And for me that means keep an eye on their newly added review sources and partners on each market.
In the beginning of each new year we set goals that should be achieved by the end of the year. One of my goals this year is to launch another 16 markets for Testfreaks. And today we welcome Testfreaks Denmark to the family. A couple of other markets is also in the pipeline, but I will get back on that later.
One good effect with the financial crise is that the amount of programmers and freelancers outside of Sweden have increased and it’s much easier to find good workers. However it’s still seems to be very difficult to find programmers in Sweden that will join the Testfreaks staff. On our swedish site we have a couple of different jobs listed, take a look here. Work at Testfreaks (sorry about the swedish). Mainly we are looking for people with knowledge in Ruby and that wants to work with Ruby on Rails.
9 Jan, 2009
This Monday when I returned to the office after a well needed three weeks vacations in Thailand I had over 400 unread mails in my mailboxes (yes I have more then one). So basically the first day of the week was spent reading through old mails. 50% was spam or people trying to sell SEO, SEM or PR services. About 20% was mails where I was just put on cc. So over 70% of the mails I read was more or less a waist of time.
Tuesday was bank holiday here in Sweden.
After that I’ve been debriefed by our team leader for operations of what have happened during my time away and what’s the status of certain important projects are. Since the new year started when I was away I spent a couple of hours in Excel making really good looking graphs over last years performance.
By the end of the 2008 we had launched Testfreaks on 24 markets. All though 5 of them was launched on the 28th of December. In 2009 we will launch another 16 markets bringing the total to 40 sites by the end of 2009. All of this will demand very hard work and long hours. Our team will most certainly grow in order to make this possible. We have started to focus a lot more on the quality and will set up measurable targets for the quality of the sites.
If you look at our US site we know have over 100 categories, and we continue launching new ones. We’re adding new review sources every week, but we’re finding it harder and harder to find new sites that keep the good quality. Many of our competitors don’t care about the quality of the review site they add to their site. Therefore it sometimes seems as they have as many sites as we do or more, but there are a lot of sites that we don’t list on Testfreaks, sites that are made just to make money from adsense or other affiliates. We want the sites we recommend for our users to have high quality and really give the user what he/she is looking for when they do their product research.
Anyway, to sum this up. I’ve had three weeks vacation and haven’t feelt this eager to work hard in a long time. 2009 will be the year when everyone on the Internet will learn to know about Testfreaks and how good we are. Our tech team is constantly adding new features to our sites and hopefully you will like them.We are also looking for more programmers, please check out this link. Work at Testfreaks. Sorry about the swedish… if your not speaking english send us a mail and we will help you from there.