1. It was born in a shower

The idea for Eye on Spain actually came to Justin whilst having a shower way back in 2004 whilst living in Kent. It was a real “Eureka” moment and he stormed out of the shower sopping wet to tell Susan about his brain wave.

He still gets his best ideas whilst showering, but going off his recent lack of good ideas maybe he’s now given up showering!

2. It’s time to roll the sleeves up

Being relatively short of cash and unable to afford to pay a web programmer, Justin trotted off down to the bookshop to find a book about building websites. A whole wall full of books about hundreds of programming languages stared back at him until one caught his eye: “Building Dynamic Websites with Asp.net”. EOS was officially in the making...

Justin still has that book and sometimes even refers back to it. We think it’s time he bought some new, more up to date ones!

3. The wrong launch date

12th of July 2004 was the date that Justin chose to launch EOS to the world (just a small world, actually a very small world). But that was a bad choice of date. 12 of July is Susan’s birthday. Was she happy to share her birthday with a website?

Justin has secretly been trying to change the official birthday of EOS but too many people seem to know that it’s actually 12th of July. Justin’s going to have to live with this one for some time to come yet.

4. It was different back then

The original concept for Eye on Spain was to keep off-plan buyers up-to-date with the progress of their developments, through monthly progress photos and a message board for buyers to chat amongst each other. The service cost just €99 per year per community.

It was a complete disaster. An average of three orders a month meant Justin couldn’t even fund his weekly Kit Kat Chunky intake. Time for a rethink.

5. A letter to Sir Alan Sugar

During the launch of EOS, Justin managed to get it into most of the Spain and property related magazines. He was even filmed for the “Living in the Sun” TV program but later rejected....something about being dull we think! But his moment of glory was having his letter picked up by Sir Alan Sugar (now Lord) for his page in the Daily Mirror.

Lord Sugar made Justin’s letter the main feature of his page the day it came out in the paper. With an estimated readership of 4 million people Justin felt that his time had come. He sat by the phone that day waiting for the rush of orders to come flooding in....but they never did.

The newspaper story brought just 50 visitors to the website that day....and no corresponding orders.

Feeling totally disheartened Justin didn’t even bother to read Lord Sugar’s advice....much to his regret.

6. The money’s gone

Having totally misunderstood the costs of moving to Spain and setting up a business there, after about four months Justin had totally run out of money. Armed with his new programming book, Justin started advertising for clients to build websites for. He got a couple to do and it kept him, his family and EOS going a little longer.

To say Justin’s websites back then were rubbish is an understatement and I’m sure he’d like to apologise to those clients someday.

7. The big deal that never was

Justin finally got round to reading the advice that Sir Alan Sugar had given him. He had basically said that Justin should approach the agents and developers to get them to offer the EOS service to their buyers as an independent progress monitoring service.

This was actually brilliant advice and buoyed by this Justin started talking to one of the “big boys” on the Costa del Sol.

It all looked great. The deal was going great and finally it seemed that EOS was going to make money, well, at least enough to live off. Contracts were drawn up, Kit Kat Chunky future looked rosey until....the marketing manager, who Justin had been dealing with, left. He left the day before the contract was to be signed.

The next day the new marketing manager thought it was a silly idea and knocked it on the head. So much for Alan’s advice.

Maybe Justin should have used this as an opportunity to knock himself on the head.

8. Time to get a job

The money runs out again and Justin gets a job building real estate websites. The only problem is that these are not in the programming language that’s in his book. Justin blags his way to getting the websites done in the language he (sort of) knows.

Trying to see a way out Justin wonders if anyone will give him a thousand Euros for the doesn’t-make-any-money website which is EOS. He even considers simply turning it off.

There are no takers.

9. Adsense to the rescue

A chance meeting with someone one day opens Justin’s eyes to the opportunity of monetising the website using Google Adsense ads. Still not sure it will work he doesn’t bother doing anything with it for a good few weeks.

The day he does he then kicks himself many times for wasting so much time.

EOS starts to make money.

10. No going back

All of that above that was just some of what happened in the first year of Eye on Spain. The truth is that had Justin and Susan not sold up in the UK, they would have gone back after just three or four months.

EOS is a website which continues to flourish purely by desire, sheer determination and a considerable amount of sweat.

Maybe it’s time Justin took another shower!