Andrey Butov

I promise this isn’t another product announcement.  We’ve had five of those this year alone — four just over the last few months.

This is a status update to let you know where Antair is right now, and where I see it going over the next few month (read, it’s a relatively slow day, and I feel like rambling on a bit).

This year has been a hectic one. Quite exciting really. Our BlackBerry spam filter product has really taken off, and Antair is now a fully functional “family supporting entity”. This tiny little company that I started and raised from nothing…a personal investment of $1000 back in January of 2005, and a self-promise to either make something out of it without adding a penny more or shut it down, has met and far exceeded all of my seemingly unrealistic expectations.

Over the course of the year, since the introduction of the spam filter (following 2 failed products), we’ve released two more versions of the spam filter, three BlackBerry games (Gavin is an uber-programmer), and a BlackBerry Call Screener program. As I’ve mentioned earlier this year, my accountant is standing firm that starting this year “releasing your revenue numbers publicly is not a good idea”. My quarterlies are due in a few days, so I guess I better listen to him. Suffice it to say, Antair is doing quite well.

From a daily workload perspective: we nearly drowned over the past few weeks/months. My wife has been helping out, and Gavin has been simply indispensible, but the core of the workload, and more importantly customer support, remains on my shoulders, and it has become an almost unbearable burden. The solution — well, believe it or not, a software solution really helped. Ian’s HelpSpot is a miracle app. I can’t say that I enjoy customer support, but at least it’s manageable now, which is several orders of magnitude better than where the situation was a few days before Antair bought a HelpSpot license (3 minute installation, by the way.) Great job Ian! Now, if Ian can just get his 2.0 out the door anytime this year, maybe we’ll be able to meet up for drinks more often than once a year.

From a company growth perspective: some of you may already know that we did pass on a VC funding offer a while back. In hindsight, it was a good idea. Honestly, money isn’t an issue at this point — time is the scarce resource. If I can find the time to go out and find a bigger office, that would be time well spent, and would allow me to actually hire some on-site full time devs. Both of these tasks take an incredible amount of time. The few hours a week that I can spend perusing the locals for office space are not proving to be very fruitful. Everything available is either a 100 sq ft shack, or a 10,000 sq foot store front. Honestly, why is it so difficult to find a nice, clean, networked building with a space for, say 3-5 developers working comfortably? As things stand, the situation is like a thread deadlock — can’t hire anymore developers until we upgrade the office space — can’t upgrade the office space until we hire a few more developers to allow me the time to go and find a proper office space. Something will give eventually. I just hope it’s not my sanity.

I think we’re done with BlackBerry apps for a while. I’ve been claiming for over a year now that Antair is a no-niche software company, and all along we’ve been spitting out BlackBerry dependant software. Our upcoming product line is going to be a bit more diversified. Gav and I are already about 40% done with our next game (Windows and Mac, this time around), and the next two applications will be business-focused — one purely for the large-scale enterprise space, and one for smaller, to mid-sized businesses.