New features on our web sites have been slower than we would all like inside Fubra. We love adding new features and really love it when our users help us develop them by requesting them.

Unfortunately new features that our users would notice have been a little thinner on the ground in the past year or so. That's mainly because we have been working so hard on our behind the scenes platform which we will base all our new features on as we move forward.

The effort on this work has been amazing and very tough for everyone in the company. We have worked on so many crucial systems that are almost invisible to our users. So it's well worth recapping on some of them. We have been building our server infrastructure, our support systems, the Fubra Passport system and web services, our accounting and payment systems, our content systems, porting to version control, our domain and DNS systems, our data crawling systems, our outbound email systems, our partner and advertiser management systems and much more.

In fact just about everything that most companies outsource we have done in house and this has prevented us from pleasing our users for a while with new features that they really love. If I am honest it has been really tough and pretty demotivating at times because we all love building things that people love too so working for the greater good on more thankless tasks is really hard. I am really glad though that the end result we have already finished and have nearly finished is well worth all the work. I'd like to thank everyone at Fubra for keeping the faith and working so hard through all this difficult work.

Now as we start to build out features on top of our platform we should really be able to wow our users and create some really great services which will not only get seen by lots more people but which will only be possible because of all the technology backing them all up.

The other reason for this post though is to explain to the five people who have sent me letters and emails over the past year containing new ideas which are usually pretty obvious and have the cheek to ask for money in return. Ideas are easy! It's building them and making sure they work for lots of people that is the hard bit. If you want to make money you should give that a try.

Since execution is everything I hope you don't mind when I tell you I will not be sending you any money. In fact quite why you thought I should feel any obligation to pay for an unsolicited suggestion I am still confused about. Instead I'll keep the money pay it to the people who help me get on with building ideas.