The first forumite

15th Jan 02 Celtic but nowhere near the first as i recall , one and only username.

Well nearly anyway

Redcar was one of the 2000 mob.

Good point Punch , i was one of those but only a matter of weeks not months.

No worries Celtic

Sorry - a 'latey' 1st July 2001

Until relatively recently your start date was when you opened your account. You were automatically on the forum if you wanted to be. I didn't post until March or April 2007 and presumably that applies to earlier s/ds

This has come up a few times. The poster "Johnny Walker" is generally accepted to have had the earliest joining date which was in June 2000. No idea if they still post or not

Unfortunately I'm a 00! Rarely post but check in quite regularly

Yes SHE was

Andrew Black - 'Bert' -  the 'First Forumite', surely ...

Betfair Memories 1

It feels like an age ago that we launched Betfair and it’s hard to remember everything that happened back then – it’s a shame that I didn’t start blogging earlier.

When we launched the website we were operating out of a converted house in Russell Square – I think there were 22 people in the company at day 1. The developers were on the second floor, the management were on the third and the operations team were on the fourth. I had my own private office on the fourth floor, though it barely qualified as such. It was little bigger than a broom cupboard and it was so hot in the summer that I could hardly concentrate on anything, but it was where I wanted to be.

The first version of the website was very simple compared to today’s site, but it was effective.
We elected for an uncluttered design with plenty of white space and no photographs.
A feature of the front page was a table listing how much had been traded on the site in the previous seven days – we traded £32k in the first week and the numbers went up from there.
It was a great talking point in the office and it showed the wider world that we were doing proper business on the site.

We launched the site on June 9 2000, and we were soon into Wimbledon

The Open followed Wimbledon, and Tiger Woods was just starting to make his mark on the game.

The day before the golf started we had some prospective investors into the office, and Ed gave them a demo of the site functionality. I generally tried to keep away from investor meetings, but Ed asked me to come down and introduce myself. Woods was 9/4 to win the Open – Ed thought that this was a false price and he explained that Betfair gave punters the opportunity to take advantage of such hype.
To illustrate this he logged in to his account and offered £50 at 4.5 – I wandered into the adjoining office, logged in and immediately took the bet. I could hear Ed next door – “Wow! Look at that! My bets been taken already!”. Woods was on fire and won by eight strokes, which was a particular pleasure.

In the months that followed we revamped the site several times, and made changes to the front page.

A new feature was introduced – the Betfair forum – which I think was Jojo’s idea.
It was a clunky effort at first, but it worked and quickly became busy.
We created an account with the username ‘Betfair’ so that we could answer questions directly, and after a while I pretty much made this my own, going in to the forum regularly to talk to customers.

The Betfair forum account was a revelation for me, as for the first time I was talking directly to our customers. Most of it was good stuff, but I was quite firm in my views and from time to time I would get into arguments over policy, and this was a concern to the others.
On one occasion I got into a lengthy argument that may have been about reduction factors in racing – I couldn’t extract myself from it. I wandered into the management room just as Jojo was raging to Ed – “bloody Bert is winding up the users in the forum again…”. She looked round and saw me – I turned and walked back to my office. I was so upset that I didn’t talk to her for two weeks – it was the only blip in what was otherwise a great working relationship.

Shortly after this Ed sent an email around saying that the staff should not go into the forum any more and it should be left to the customers.

I didn’t object – the bigger the forum had become the more difficult it had been to communicate effectively through it.

Good post onlooker   

A pleasing post onlooker!

I am an oldtimer

he was 2 years after

ricos had the most accounts

200 losers
300 ell ens

wasffctlcb

Blunder