Niklas Hammarstr̦m РNews, Interest, CV

The summer is on it’s way and with that comes all these questions on what fun things to do during the summer. I was thinking on going on a road trip with some of my friends, we haven’t managed to decied where we’re going. But I was thinking of driving down through Denmark, Germany and try to reach the eastern part of Europe. I’ll write more about this later…

The biggest news at the moment is that I’ve left Testfreaks. The economic recession and the fact that people don’t buy as much consumer electronic products as before have gotten our trafic and conversion to go down. The company therefor decieded to let 5 people go inkl yours truly to cut some of it’s costs.
My task when I got to Testfreaks was to found a operations team outside of Sweden that  could provide high quality work at a resonable price per month. And this I have been doing with a fantastic achievement. We started working with a Ukrainian company that have evolved into a very good relation. We do also work with Chinese, Philippines, Russians, Brasilians and Indians to mention some of the other people working with Testfreaks.
When I left Testfreaks my operationsteam was a well oiled team with 25 people working close together with Skype, msn, gtalk, YahooIM and other communication plattforms, to make Testfreaks the largest and best review site in the world. .I will still keep my stocks in the company and I’m still convinced that the company will do great online.

Due to the recenssion and the fact that the company needed to save money I figure they will cut the spending on some of these workers and therefor they also thought it would be best if I left as well. I’ve done a great work and have the best recommendations from our CEO but now it’s time for me to do something else. The big question is what?

Currently I’m working together with an old friend of mine with his new mobile application that will be release on the techcrunch meet up in Stockholm in the end of may. I promise you it’s a great product. Available on almost all platforms except Windows mobile. (The iPhone app is really great).

I’m also evaluating the possibility to either take a new job or create my own company. I’ve also had a thing for e-commerce. I think there’s still big potential for e-commerce in Europe and especially in Sweden. I haven’t found any e-commerce site that have done what I want to do regarding design and functions. This is also why I’ve started experimenting with a Magento which I think is a great back-end system for e-commerce.

When I was working with Testfreaks I couldn’t find the time for all my small projects that I been wanting to tryout for several years. What I have done during these 2.5 years I’ve worked with Testfreaks is to write these idéas down and bought some domains for it. Now is the time to start working on these idéas.

I’ve gotten an office space in central Stockholm (Kungsholmen) thanks to my friend Per at Grandriver. So I will use that space three days a week and the other two days I will work with the mobile application company that I wrote about above. But you don’t become a great entreprenuer by just working 5 days a week. So you will probably see me with my laptop on coffee house during the weekends as well.
If someone with a great idéa or company are reading this and would like to hire me either for work or for something else don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m available on this blog name @ gmail.com. You can also take a look at my Linkedin profile or follow me on Twitter.

Just cut my American Express in pieces. I’ve been using it on and off for the last year. I mainly use it to pay for transactions online. They wanted me to pay an anual fee of 1250SEK (150$) to continue using the card. Why would I pay to be a customer, when there are a million other companies offer the same product for free. And I don’t even need a credit card, I have money in the bank. I think it’s greedy of them to both charge the customer and the merchant that accept AMEX in his/her store.

No more American Express for me!

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.

I can’t get enough of this nice music service, so today I installed Wine for Ubuntu in order to run Spotify on my Linux laptop as well. I also installed some new speakers for my computer, Lacie’s new USB speakers.

The speakers really look good on my white desk and the sounds is great. I tried to install them on my girlfriends computer as well but I didn’t manage, Windows got some kind of conflict with the USB port… Crap XP.

Does anyone have a good party playlist for Spotify? If so give me a comment about it so I can add it.

Finally it has been revealed, I’ve been waiting so long for this cell-phone. I was planing to buy the first version of the Iphone but since it didn’t support 3G I skipped it, instead I bought a Sony Ericsson K850i. I haven’t been that satisfied with that phone, I wanted to take good pictures and have it syncing with my Outlook. I can’t say that it does any of these things very well, so I really hoping that the Iphone 3G will be the new next thing.

One of the new cool things are the built in GPS that’s beutifully integrated with Google maps. I also read that it will support syncing with Outlook, both calender and mails. I wonder if I should prebok it right now, or wait and see what the first customers things about it.

Anyone want to buy my old Sony Ericsson K850i with 5 Mp camera?

Today I took a new step in the working model we have at Testfreaks. As I’ve written before we have a lot of our staff sitting in countries and time zones all over the world. Lately I’ve had too much work to do, and I’ve wanted an assistant for quite some time. Until two weeks ago I’ve been thinking of hiring an assistant here at the office. But that wouldn’t suite our need for availability 24/7, and since most of our programmers are situated in other time zones it would be great with an assistant in another time zone then me that could bridge my work when I’m home sleeping.

I’ve been thinking and drawing a lot on paper on an outsourced way to clone my self, and now I got found the solutions. Some of my programmers have been working with me for more then one year. And today I made the best one team manager of the rest of the team. Our team has grown a lot and is now more then 20 people in 9 different time zones.

It’s an odd feeling of knowing that you could scale your organisation a lot more, but you – yourself are the bottle neck. That’s basically how my work situation have looked like the last couple of month, but from now I will have a lot more time to improve Testfreaks and work more strategic. The business model we have chosen for this project is very interesting and I don’t know of any other big online company that work like us, but please give me a comment if you know of any companies working like this.

Hi, my name is Niklas. I’m 28 years old, living in Stockholm – Sweden

I’m currently working with the new 2.0 start-up Testfreaks.com

I’m in charge of the operations. At the moment I have a team of 15 people working full time for me, from all over the world! Thanks to programme like Skype, MSN, Yahoo IM and Gtalk my people can sit where ever they want in the world. At the moment most of my staff is situated in Ukraine, China, Philipiness and Argentina. The diffrence in time zones make me work 24/7… Do you think my girlfriend likes that?