About Me
I’m Adrian. I live in a small village in the south of Spain called San Enrique de Guadiaro with my wife, Katie, two dogs, two cats and a variable number of chickens!
Despite all this I’m really a tech nerd. I was fortunate enough to do well in the Internet boom of the late 90s. This success has enabled me to achieve a good work/life balance, and have options that aren’t available to most.
Read on below for more of my work history & experience, and you can decide for yourself whether it’s worth reading or listening to some of my opinions & rants or not!
The Early Days
When I was 14, a Commodore VIC-20 came into my life and I was off and running. I would carry a textbook around school where I worked out the assembly code to write the next game I was working on.
My first success was called, “Track Chase”, and appeared on the pages of a magazine called Your Computer. I was paid £70 for the double page spread. The article invited other youngsters to spend hours typing in indecipherable code in the hope of getting a copy of my game. They also had the option of sending me a cheque or Postal Order (remember those?) for £2.50 and I would send them a cassette tape by return with the program on it.
After this, came Owls In Space. This time I sent it to all the software publishers I could find in the UK to see if any would take it on. A small company called R&R Software offered to publish it for me and pay me 20% royalties. They also sent me a Commodore 64 so I could work on some games for this newer model. Sadly, they went bust before the game reached the market, and my first and only game for the Commodore 64, Erik The Robot, never got completed.
By this time I was approaching 17 years old, and sold all my computers so I could buy a car. Ford Escort MkII 1.3L in red with vinyl roof and remould tyres for £600 if you really want to know.
It was about this time that my parents were going through a divorce. My dad had been with the Royal Air Force, but had now moved on to a sales job for a Computer Software company called Pinnacle.
One day, I heard from my mum that my dad had a computer (PC XT with 20MB hard drive, and green screen monitor) for me for just £250, so I went over to his house to collect it. He wasn’t there, so I took it away. Turns out it may not have been for me, but too late now.
Off to University, like you do. In my case, Birmingham University to study Mathematics. Trouble was I had this new computer, and I was learning rapidly, and it was far more interesting to me. In my room at University I started developing software. First a game called Maths Invaders that appeared on the floppy disk stuck to the front cover of a magazine called PC Plus. After this, a hard drive backup system called FLEXIBAK.
Having spent all of my time in my room coding (maybe playing games as well), University wasn’t going so well, so in the summer of my first year, I dropped out. Little did I know at the time that this was the secret code to being an Entrepreneur!
My dad managed to get me an interview at his company, and I got my first real job, programming in a ‘4GL’ programming language called Sculptor.
During my 2 years of having a ‘real’ job, I carried on with my own software development, and got involved with the Shareware community. The idea was that software was given away for free, but you could pay the author for the latest version, maybe with some enhancements, a printed manual and technical support.
My main two products were the FLEXIBAK Plus and the Nildram Menu system. At this point, I need to explain that back in the day, computers didn’t have a lot of memory, and while it was nice to have a user friendly interface (this was before Windows), such things normally took too much memory. Mine was different because it took no (nil) memory (dram). Which not entirely coincidentally was also my surname backwards. Thus was born Nildram Software, Nildram Online and finally just Nildram Ltd.
In 1991, I decided to quit my job and focus on my own software full time. At the same time, I set up a computer with a modem and started the Shareware Support BBS – a Bulletin Board System. Pretty much a precursor to the Internet as we know it today. For the next 4 years, not much changed as we bumbled along as a 2-3 man business developing software, running the BBS and distributing some US software in the UK. At one point we were UK agents for Epic MegaGames (now just Epic Games) – the company now behind the blockbuster hit Fortnite.
1995 was a significant year as we purchased our first leased line internet connection. For the sum of £15,000 per annum we had a majestic 64Kbps connection. This ran into our office in Tring where we had a bank of around 6 modems to accept dial-up connections for which we charged £10/mon.
This is when business started to grow exponentially, with each year being about double the previous. By 2000 we had an office in Aylesbury with over 30 employees, and the broadband revolution was just beginning.
With my first daughter due to arrive at the beginning of 2001, and the business consuming most of my time, it made sense to merge with another local family-run business so they could take over the day-to-day management of the business and I could focus on the technical, and have some time for family too.
Our motto was, ‘Real service in a virtual world’, and we meant it. Being technically led, we relied on the quality of service and word of mouth to bring in new customers. At one point we were signing up new broadband customers at the rate of around 100 a day!
Most people in the UK don’t like to complain about poor service. We’re more likely to leave a tip in a restaurant and then never go back than we are to complain about the service and withhold the tip. Our most profitable customers were the business customers, but we also had a large group of gamers. They were different because they actually did complain. They were also heavy users, and so not very profitable for us. However, we learned a valuable lesson in business here. We focussed on keeping the gamers happy. If you keep the 1% happy, then the other 99% are also going to be happy as the service improves for all. Those 1% are also the strongest word-of-mouth customers.
In this way we established a strong reputation for performance and reliability.
With all the crazy growth though, one thing niggled at me. The company became so focussed on signing up new broadband customers, that other elements were neglected, such as Domain names, Web hosting and Email services. I thought the only way to move forward with these would be to create small teams within the company with specific focus on these topics and P&L responsibility for those alone. When I couldn’t get my business partners to move forward on this, I chose one to focus on – Email services. I set up a separate business to focus on just that, and sell the service back to Nildram plus white-label it and sell to other service providers as well. That business was APM Internet Ltd (some more original thinking there, using my initials!), and it was set up at the back end of 2002.
Nildram kept growing, and eventually was sold to Pipex in 2004. They in turn sold to Tiscali, and then eventually TalkTalk.
As for me, well I behaved like a typical young man who had just sold his business and engaged in a very expensive hobby – motor racing, during which my second daughter arrived in 2007. Then a few years later, an even more expensive hobby – divorce! Following that I learned to fly and did some aerobatic competition. Then got married again, and moved on to competitive golf, which was not only cheaper, but also safer! This eventually led to me living in Spain!
While all this was going on, APM Internet continued…
APM Internet became rebranded as The Very Good Email Company – a very British approach. At the time, there were lots of Ronseal adverts. “Does exactly what it says on the tin” was the tagline, and that was what we wanted to convey.
We also have the faxtastic! brand for Fax to Email and Email to Fax services, but fax is pretty much dead nowadays and mostly used by lawyers faxing long documents to each other.
MessageBunker is our Email archiving product.
The business grew initially to about 9 people, but over the last few years has downsized to a core team of just 4 of us, all of whom have been with the company for at least 15 years. Mostly working from home, we have a small office in the village of Wingrave, Buckinghamshire for the occasional meet-up in person.
Email isn’t ‘sexy’, but it is essential. We have faced competition from the big boys over the years. Google launched Gmail, and Microsoft moved to a subscription based model for their Office software, bundling email services for ‘free’. What we do offer that they can’t is a fast, reliable service based in the UK (all your data is stored in the UK in a data centre in Milton Keynes) and support from real humans who know how to fix things and answer questions quickly and correctly.
We have recently started offering Domain names and Web hosting as well to our direct customers in response to demand, and hope to offer the same levels of service with these going forward.
Thirty years after first getting involved in the Internet business, I find myself with a decent work/life balance, and still coding (learning lots of new things, and using AI to help me), helping users understand our systems, move domain names, fixing bugs and so on. But then I get to escape to the golf course, or hide away in my house in the mountains for a few days, spend time with my family etc, so life is good!