The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

Until January 2005 Stuffed Guys was actually me alone working from home full time. I’ve also used several freelance programmers whom I knew from my previous place of work (big publishing house here in Moscow, responsible for Russian versions of Cosmopolitan, Mens Health, Playboy and other magazines).

Everything started in 2001 when the publishing house decided to close the internet project where I was working and so I had to decide what to do next. At that time I had already one permanent customer from London, UK for whom I was doing small web programming work. It happened so that the same week when I’ve got fired I had a trip planned to visit that customer on-site to see in person how his business is working (the customer had a small but very successful online business selling prescription medicines).

For the record, that customer was Shakil Khan and I am very grateful to him for taking me through very exciting 2 years. Without Shak there would be no Stuffed Guys now.

So I flew to London and spent several days there. We were talking about our current and future projects and it became clear that I could easily work full-time only for Shak and be a happy person, no need to search for a new full time job. And that was the moment when Stuffed Guys has really taken off.

In 2002 I’ve developed Stuffed Tracker, which is a tool to track effectiveness of online advertising campaigns. Shak needed it as a marketer and I thought it was a nice idea to create an application that I could sell on my site as well. I’ve always wanted to create and sell my own software.

I can’t say that Stuffed Tracker was a big hit. It lacked and still lacks a lot of important features, but it was good enough at the time when it appeared and Shak used it heavily and (I think) it helped him a lot in his marketing efforts.

For me personally Stuffed Tracker was a success. I’ve got several new clients for custom programming projects through it, including Twinroom — my biggest client to date, for whom I’ve wrote a full blown online hotels reservation system. It is written in Perl and consists of 49245 lines of highly optimized code (1765.27 kb in size!). It is called Twibo and it is my greatest professional accomplishment.

At the end of 2004 I’ve created a new strategy for Stuffed Guys. I’ve decided that its time to expand and move from home to office. I’ve hired 2 full-time programmers and we are now working from our own small-and-nice office near the center of Moscow.

  

The main part of the new strategy is developing 2 web applications. The first one is a full rewrite of Stuffed Tracker in PHP with a lot of new features that I’ve always wanted to include in the product but couldn’t due to its simple initial design. The second one is a project management system, which I’ve called Factory Nova, specially targeted at small-to-medium sized businesses that want to manage their own work online or want to communicate with their customers online in one centralized place. Above all, we need a system like Factory Nova ourselves and we couldn’t find what we need among current offerings on the market. Factory Nova is also written in PHP.

PHP for web programming is also a part of my new strategy. I love Perl, but to create competitive products we have to do them in PHP nowadays. It is obvious that right now much more people are looking for PHP based products then for products written in any other language.

This is where we stand right now. And from now on I plan to cover our life in this blog.