Avoid.com - The Project - Part 1

you can’t trust positive reviews. Fake positive reviews lack the motive to be challenged. No business owner is going to challenge a fake positive review and ask for a site to take it down. One of my loan sites – QuickLoans.co.uk – I’m almost certain someone left us a fake positive on a major review site. Will I sign up as a business and ask for it to be taken down? No chance. Fake positive reviews make every positive review unreliable. With negative reviews, the motivation is there for businesses to challenge fake negative reviews. With the processes we have in place, we can remove those fake negatives better than any other review platform.

The second reason is that people want to know what’s wrong with something, why they shouldn’t buy it. My belief is that if there are 500 reviews for a hotel, humans have a natural instinct to skip the 498 positive ones, and read the 2 negative ones. Avoid.com just cuts to the chase, why should I book this service.

The third reason is, platforms delete negative reviews as it harms sales. I have seen this with a number of my negative reviews, and I’ve heard this from others, it’s widespread. If these negative reviews are held on a third-party site like Avoid.com, selling platforms can’t remove reviews that harm their ability to make money. A neutral site like Avoid is key to this.

I have some nice .uk domain names that I lease out for small amounts of money. Property is mortgaged and I have a good few years left to pay on it. I drive around in a 20 year old Renault Clio van - not kidding. It's fair to say I could raise cash if needed, but I'm not cash rich.

This is just me, I have nobody helping on this. I'll probably be forced to reach out to people along the way, but at the moment, I'm just making it up as I go along.

I have a very basic knowledge of websites and coding. I use Joomla as a base for my websites, I have had great success with them over the years and would never change to Wordpress. I’m not judging Wordpress, I just don’t understand how it works or why it works like that. My natural instinct is to try my hardest to make Wordpress work like Joomla, so that would explain why it doesn’t work for me.

One of the Joomla Dev's said to me 12 months ago that Worspress is trying to do battle with WIX and those types of sites, Joomla is that more serious level up. Joomla 5 that was released a year or so back is on another level.

Slight downside for me is that the offg the shelf extensions don't seem to be as well coded as those available on Wordpress. There are about 20-25 very well coded extensions in Joomla, then you sort of hit a bit of trying to make do.

Thankfully for the Avoid.com project, everything I need is from that batch of well coded extensions -"Jreviews" "Akeeba Security" "Advanced Module Manager" and couple of others maybe.

(mostly .co.uk and .uk). I don’t tend to sell them, instead I form companies and lease domains to those companies that then run with them and try to turn them into businesses. A lot of these domains I own are in the UK loan industry.

I have recently stopped buying names because I have projects in the pipeline that will never be finished. I need to stop and focus on what I already have, the main one being the Avoid project.

I prefer to work from home, don’t have an office.

This will be that story of one guy sat in his home office trying to start a business to take on the big boys. My aim is to try and take this idea as far as I can without going corporate, I hate that world. It’s a very lonely dog eat dog world and I want nothing to do with it. I shudder at the idea that for my family to eat from the cortporate table, I have to sell my soul and say men can give birth. No thanks. You DEI lot are bonkers, stay away from me, I'm 100% into meritocracy. I will never put myself at the mercy of those crackpots. I will try to build this business profitably from day 1,

Profits mean independence rather than reliance, and reliance will ultimately go onto mean compliance - and that's not me.

Started out at McDonald's, worked there full time for almost 3 years.

I was once in Royal Marines training, I tapped out and didn’t complete it until the end. I did 7 days then asked to leave. It’s not something I really talk about all that much in great detail as I don’t know anything about the service, never did anything and never went anywhere. If you want advice on ironing, then I'll give you some tips, but that's about it.