It’s All About Me

I wrote earlier about the idea of home exchange for surfers. Now we’ve built the feature. So far my house is the only one listed, but we”ll get there

We’ve also re-done the front-page and changed navigation meny, hopefully easier to understand the site now, and it’s much better from SEO perspective. Lot’s of fun, let’s see what happens.

Wonder if it’s a good idea… Maybe something for glissers, one day…

I’ve added text ads to Glissers, mostly because I wanted to learn more about how Google Adsense works. It took me 20 minutes to include the code on the site - amazingly easy to do. Here’s how it looks.

Yes, it hurts to sell out, but I have to put bread on the table.

Glissers has opened a shop!

Go to Glissers Goodies and have a look.

My favorite is the cute little bear. That will be my default Christmas gift to friends and family…

Spreadshirt.com is way cool btw. It took me 1 h to set up the shop, design some products, and receive my first order (from myself, but still).

Glissers has had a good week.

First, globalsurfari.com and Gary Brewer added glissers accommodations to their global surf forecasting tool. You’ll see a list of surf accommodations close to the surf spot you selected, “powered by glissers.com”. Nice

Secondly, the guys at Nordsurf wrote about a nice piece about glissers, and asked their community to help out with the directory. Nordsurf is something as interesting as a Swedish producer of surf equipment, and their boards are supposed to be top quality.

More about Nordsurf and globalsurfari.com on glissers blog.

Glissers has its own blog now - glissers.com/blog. One month ago I didn’t have a blog at all, now I have two.

Looking forward to putting this blog post in my Skype mood message. I’ll use Skype to promote a blog that promotes a blog that promotes a site that promotes surf accommodations. That can’t work, can it?

The problem with sites that depend on user-generated content is that you need actual users to generate the content. If the users don’t create anything, your site is dead. After screaming and kicking at all the surfers I know, I still only had 40 accommodations on www.glissers.com. Which is far from the 500 I need for the site to be really useful. So what to do? Call India.

I now have an Indian friend helping me populate the directory. He doesn’t have Hemingway’s natural way of expressing himself in English, but he’s friendly and hard-working. I pay him 2 GBP / hour, and he works over the weekend. I like that a lot.

The surf project is ready to leave the womb and crawl out into the blinding sunlight. I’ve spent a few days testing it out, and it seems like most of the stuff is working ok. But it’s still a closed beta - we don’t know if it will crash and burn when more than 2 people play around with it at the same time. If you want to try it out, just email / Skype me and I’ll give you passwords. I’d really appreciate help.

So, glissers.com is a directory of surf accommodations around the world. The destinations are added and reviewed by our members, who also can book the destinations from the site. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s a product I want myself, since I find it pretty hard to find good surf hostels, surf camps, and B&Bs when I’m planning a surf trip. Hopefully other people will find it useful. If not, I’ve failed miserable. That’s ok too.

Glissers has been built by coders and designers found on RAC (rentacoder.com), and without actually exchanging a single spoken word. All we’ve done is chat with each other on MSN / Adium, and emailin. It’s funny - speaking seems way too intimate. For all I know “Jason” migh be a 56-year old Chinese grandmother, not a 21-year old American dude.

To finish it off: the name comes from “glisse”, which is French for “glide”. “Sport de glisse” is for example surfing and snowboarding (at least I think it is). If you turn “glisse” into an English version, you have glissers. Tada.

I found a designer who seems to be able to deliver good and simple design for my surf directory project. His name is Tahir, and he’s from Pakistan. He made the home page design today, and after some iteration I’m happy about the look and feel.

It’s pretty interesting to compare rates between countries. This is how the designers quoted, depending on their country:

Just as I do with wine when I’m nervous, I picked the 2nd cheapest option.

I’ve been spending some of my time lately on developing the concept and business model for a “global directory of surf camps”. Think of it as www.yelp.com, but for surfers only. Although it’s hardly something that will revolutionize the world as we know it, it is a fun project, and I believe there’s a real demand for this service.
The development of the site has been coming along nicely, but we’ve had some troubles getting the design right. Right now we have an ad out on rentacoder for a complete re-design of the site, so let’s see what comes out of that.