Fusion101 - Long & Winding Road
From success, near total failure & (hopefully) back - three times!
Having made some very bad decsisons early on by allowing two separate developers to effectivley lock me out of my own website (I was talked agasint my instincts into paying them to build a completely new platform. When it was complete I offered a profit share - but I ended up trying to invemt ways to pay them more anyway to hold things together until the project was complete by adding optional payments to fusion for photos and quick approval - I still don't know why it costs £2.99 to upload a picture - I am hoping to fix this soon!).
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The 'platform' was however unrealisic and more to the point totally unecessary for a tiny outfit running on a shoe-string and I was prevented from improving Fusion without going through them (and got lots of stick from frustrated members who had no idea what was happening). The end result was my hands and the site were tied for around 9 years. It ended with me very sick with stress, bed-ridden with migraines and other RSI's and hospitalized from hours at the PC worrying if anything would ever be finished, but I've never had a late invoice.
At the same time as having to watch fusion going under I had to take time away from Fusion to help my father's business which was also going under through no fault of his own - except like me he had allowing someone else have access to the 'keys' so to speak and effectlively lock him out of running his business also, before which point, like fusion it had been going great guns. So as you can imagine - not a happy time for anyone in my family.
The ironic thing was that fusion all this time was running on a £80 a month server yet the company was turning over ad revenue of about £130-50 per day. I would be having frequent arguments with my father (kind enough to do my accounts) wanting to know where this income was being spent but by this time I had 5 expensinve unecessary servers and various developers I brought in to try to procure the 'platform' I never asked for!
The solutiion was simple my developers reminded me - hand a % of the site ownership to them and we will solve all the problems and keep it secure from intruders. Errr... aren't you supposed to be doing that anyway? But of course this is human nature. The real problem lay with me and my daft decision to get individuals and not a company involved in the first place. What else did I expect? Hindsight is easy.
When the 'platform' never materialised and still locked out of my own 'house' so to speak, and unwilling to hand over any more money through fear of losing even more for nothing - I then trumped myself and lost it anyway over the next 2-3 years spending £100K Fusion ad revenue (during this time I paid myself between £8-13K average to live - pls see our accounts) trying to get this 'new platform' completed elsewhere to no avail running out of cash but was finally (as of 2013) able to find someone willing to carry out the original simple request I made in 2003 for a few hundred quid - to give the old site a quick new look. It took a few weeks and I felt incredibly stupid for having let this happen and practically ruining my health and fusion.
We also improved the site features a bit for members with lots left to do (still wating for CMS/newsletter/basic forms of communication with members etc). The lesson is that if I had worked with a compay rather than individuals, Fusion would have been unthinkably further on (it didn't change for the end-user from 2003 -2013!) and I would have avoided the near complete mental breakdown of myself and near collapse of the site. My bad decisions cost me my health and a small fortune. It has been very difficult but you live and learn and hopefully things will now change! I left the original site up as it was before all this happened as I'm fond of it!