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.

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.

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.

As I’ve previoused written I have a large team siting all around the globe working close together with me and the other in the team. At present there are 23 people to make sure the perform at the very best all time. And that’s not easy, but it’s easier now when they know eachother and the fact that I can benchmark them and send reports each week that shows there performance over the last couple of weeks.

I can then use this benchmark when we are negotiating contracts and fees, since I’m always paying for performance this kind of measuring numbers are important. I’m working on more keyfigures that can be used to measure the work they do.

Another thing that was and still sometimes is a problem for me is how you demo a new function in the system. I mostly use Skype, Msn, Yahoo IM, Gtalk and other instant messenger clients to chat with my personal. But sometimes you need to show them a demo as well, and I’ve been experimenting with shared desktops, video tutorials, text tutorials with images but still I haven’t found the best way.

What I’ve noticed is that programmers often tend to learn faster with text and images, and for other services we can use shared desktops. But I also have people working from places where 0.5 Mbps are considered high speed internet. For those people I’ve been unable to use shared desktop, so we have tried with video tutorials. All these different kinds of system take a lot of time, not to mention the fact that we are constantly changing things in our systems.

From the beginning I was uncertain that I could trust all the people in the team, I therefore didn’t not share contacts with them. I was the only person that had contact with the rest, but as some of them have worked with me for two years I now have no problem giving them access and the possibility to talk to each other. There’s a lot to win on this. Instead of them asking me things, they start by asking the other people in the team. And if they can’t solve it together they ask me.

All this sounds great, but I can still sometimes have the to much of there work are depending on me. We have therefore decided to hire a new person that will report to me and handle a lot of this work. I will be working more strategic. This will be great and it will also make it much easier to scale the team.

The summer is finally over (hm… good/or bad?).

Slowly everyone is returning to the office, and the developments of Testfreaks are speeding up again. I’ve had a great summer, with a lot of fun thing. I have been working all summer, and I really need a long vacation. But instead of having a long summer vacation I’ve been planing on going to Thailand over christmas and new year.

This morning when I got back from a week in England with no internet connection I had over 600 mails in my inbox. Most of it was actually spam, but after spending three hours setting actions on the 10% of real mails I had I could finally focus at work.

Working with a decentralized organisation, is very special. And when your going on a vacation you need a way to make sure that work will continue even though I’m not at the office. And thanks to Niel, my team leader on the Philippines I could focus on having a good time with my girlfriend.

In the near future we have decided to make Testfreaks bigger, and we will be hiring new people. Both in Sweden and outside of Sweden. This will ensure a bigger and even greater review site in future. Our focus is still to be the best and biggest review site online, and we are soon there

In the next couple of month we will add a lot of new categories on Testfreaks, and we see great potentials…

One big part of my work is research, since I always need to know how much review sites, and manufacturer that are represented on a market before we enter it. Much of this research (95%) is done by online market researchers. I always try to find local people living in the country, it’s always easier because they often know of these sites before we start the research.

I found it to be very important that the researcher have an interest in the area that they are doing the research. Two weeks ago I gave the exact same project to two researchers, just to see the difference. The result got me to question all my previous research projects. I wanted them to find me as many good review sites as possible in a big Asian country, not China. I told them I didn’t want forum, blogs or any spam sites (MFA).

Person1, lives in US but have language knowledge of the specific country and have a strong interest in all sorts of gadgets, came back with a list of more then 100 review sites.

Person2, lives in India and have worked with online research for four years and and have language knowledge of the specific country, came back with a list of 15 sites and told me there was not possible to find any more sites. And he had been working for a really long time.

I can also tell you that the cost of the research had big difference, person1 cost 150$, person2 cost me 50$. One of the reasons for person1 cost me more is that he’s located in US, but that was something I knew from the start. I just wanted to compare a online researcher from India with a research from US.

When I told person2, that I already had found more then 100 review sites in the country he wanted to try again, and a few days later he sent me a list with all the 100 first sites he had found in Google, mostly crap sites. It was e-commerce sites (without reviews), forum, blogs and other sites that I had no use of at all. I told him to seek work in another work segment. I told him that he had made a bad and sloppy research. Then he told me that I was a very bad buyer that didn’t understood the quality of my work, and then he told me that Americans where much better buyers and never distrusted his research.

At the moment I have 10 projects for market research running in countries all over the world, and I’ve stopped using the cheapest one. On all these projects there where a lot of Indian firms and freelancers bidding on them. But as always I raise a warning for these firms and people, make sure they really have the language skills that are needed and ask them for some kind of examples of research in the specific country.

Good luck with all your online research

Today I launched new categories in several of our sites, we also added Pixmania prices as a complement to shopping.com in UK market.

At the moment there’s a total of 13 viable categories on testfreaks.com, and the new ones from today are in the US.

Xbox360 games
Playstation3 games

In germany we launched

Xbox360 spiele
Playstation3 spiele
Heimkinosystem
Monitore

And in russia we launched

Игры на Playstation3
Игры на XBox360

Next up in US is GPS Navigation, multifunctional printers and more gaming categories. In Sweden we are working hard in gathering new gaming sources so we can launch this here as well. A funny thing hit me, most of the swedish gaming sites have english names.

For those who are more interested in my work, can follow my micro-blogging on Jaiku.

Last weeks I’ve been working with the quality on Testfreaks concerning new products and future categories. And a thing that hit me is the problem with product names and different markets. Since Testfreaks will be launched on several markets we need to keep track on product names on different markets. Same product but different names, and we need to know of this. By giving the product several names in our system we are making this possible, but still – why make this so complicated? Why can’t manufacturer just keep one name on the products.

Another thing that struck me is the lack of good images on products. The big manufacturer like Sony, Pioneer and JVC for examples are good. But most of them are really crap at giving good images on there products. This is particularly a problem with older products, the only good images out there are 100 x 100 this is not worth showing. Do anyone know of any good site with really good product images?

Internet makes the shopping more difficult since you can’t actually touch a product, instead we look at images and read good reviews. So if the manufacturer don’t provide good images, are we just going to skip buying there products? It’s a big focus on new products but there’s also a big secondhand market with consumer electronics, and they are also in need of good images.

And please, all manufacturer that use flash, remove all flash from your pages, since this is impossible to crawl in a good way and the site is much harder to navigate etc. Not to mention extract images from.

Sure, it’s very cheap to use freelancers on the internet but beware of the quality in there work. Of course, most of the people working as freelancers are very good. But as this market grows each day, a lot of non serious persons are entering the market. If you hire freelancers on the internet, make sure that they know what they are doing and they can deliver what you want before you start working with them.

Since we are about to launch Testfreaks soon, I’m handling all the quality checking (with help of freelancers of course). When I look at our competitors on the net, I see that they are more interested in having lots of products with even more reviews rather then a good quality. They have totally missed out on the quality in the service they delivering. On we want the user to comeback over and over again, because of the good quality in our service.

I talked to a friend that needed some help with his php programming and hired an Indian freelancer from one of the big sites. The prgrammer promised to deliver within five days, after five days my friend asked for the finished function but was told he needed another three days. This function was very important for my friend, since his site really needed this upgrade. Nothing happened after three more day, my friend had now lost two weeks of time. Two weeks are a long time on the internet if you should try to keep your regular users. My friend finally gave up and hired a freelancer that I recommended him, and got the job done on two days. Always beware of freelancers that promise a lot and have no feedback from old users. All the mayor big freelancer sites on the net show feedback of there users.

Good luck everyone.

Take a look at our new category page, camcorder reviews.

Yesterday I returned to work again, after a short vacation (2 weeks).

Since Testfreaks are almost ready for beta launch (sign up here), there’s a lot of work to do at the moment. Most of my work right now is to ensure the quality of the data we are going to present on Testfreaks.

Hopefully you will love our new review service.

Today at lunch I was finally ready to start work, how is it possible to get that many mails and questions from my freelance team and other people? I was away for two weeks and my colleagues have done some of my work during his time. Still there’s a lot of stuff that I’m behind in the schedule (my own schedule).

Once again I’ve been disappointed when hiring Indian personal, they fail to deliver. So from now on I will never hire another Indian freelancer for work on Testfreaks. Instead I’ve started up a new long-term relation with a programming company in Xi’an, China. They help me with the Chinese part of Testfreaks.

Our plan is to initially launch Testfreaks in Sweden, US, UK, Germany, France and Spain. But there are more market coming right behind, hopefully Russia and China will be next along with Scandinavian markets.