# Draft email to Adam + Mark — Duty Free direction (2026-08-20, rev 3)

> Recipients: Adam and Mark (SEO). Hamish is NOT on this thread.
> Style note: no em dashes (rian's preference).

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Subject: Duty Free Professor: my thoughts and what I'd like to do

Hi guys,

I'm glad I got to be on the call today. I'm genuinely excited about the new direction
for Duty Free Professor. When we first talked, I was still picturing the existing model,
WordPress as the backbone, and new features like the scraper becoming plugins. Now that
I understand where you're heading, a live pricing database and duty-free directory
first, editorial second, I 100% agree: this should be built as a custom app, not a
WordPress site.

I read through the mockup and Hamish's proof of concept, and it's good work. The
Firecrawl numbers match my own read, and the finding that Avolta runs dozens of airports
on one platform is the important one. That's what makes broad coverage affordable. The
one thing I'd add from experience: scraping in 2026 is a cat-and-mouse game, and it's
likely only going to get worse. Retailers change layouts and add bot protection, so a
collector that works perfectly today will quietly break a few weeks from now. That
doesn't change the plan. It just means you should treat this as a living app, with
monitoring and sensible handling of stale data built in, and budget data collection as
an ongoing cost rather than a one-time build.

My honest recommendation, whoever builds it: put the energy into building
dutyfreeprofessor and dutyfreecompetition as custom apps now, and hold off on the
Melbourne redesign. The design will emerge from the duty-free build, and once you're
happy with it, the competition sites and professor sites can migrate into that same
ecosystem. Even if we pushed a bunch of new work through WordPress this year, by this
time next year you'd almost certainly be making this transition anyway. For Mark, I'll
add that this direction is quietly a big SEO play too: a live product and airport
database can generate thousands of fast, structured, schema-marked pages that
hand-written posts never could.

I'll also be honest about why I'm stepping back from the redesign, because it's not
just about cost (or income, in my case). I learned a hard lesson with the last design
push. Trying to bend the existing WordPress network into a new design turned out to be
the expensive path. I sank in dozens of hours and more cost than I care to admit, and I
left you disappointed with nothing to show or bill for. That experience is a big part
of why I believe the recommendation above, and for both our sakes I don't want to
repeat it.

So, on my involvement, I'll be straight. Hamish clearly knows what he's doing, and
Replit is a legitimate way to build this. But I'd like to put in my pitch to lead the
custom app build. AI-first product development is what I've been doing daily for the
past year, and honestly it's the main thing competing for my time and attention these
days. I build and run custom apps end to end on my own hosting platform (design, build,
deploy, monitor), and I already know your data and backstory: the competitions, the
winners, the medals the new site needs to plug into. I think it would be a great
project for me, and I'd bring a lot to it.

That said, you should go with whoever feels like the best fit, and I mean that
sincerely. If that's Hamish and Replit, no hard feelings whatsoever. In that case my
role should be supporting the WordPress networks while things transition. The one place
I'd push either way: we should stop building new features onto WordPress and treat it
as a stable platform winding down as the new apps take over. For the same reason, I
don't think I should take on the Melbourne redesign in either scenario.

On cost:

- WordPress support: as mentioned before, I've been bad about billing. I'll send an
  invoice for a block of support hours as soon as I can, and I'll be more disciplined
  about tracking as we continue supporting the existing networks.
- Custom app: an exact quote isn't possible yet, because the features will grow and
  change once you see it come to life. What I can do is a working proof of concept for
  $1,500, delivered by end of next week. Not a wireframe, a working slice of the real
  thing. That gives us a chance to feel the product and make educated directional
  decisions in a review meeting, and then I can quote the next wave of features
  properly. I'll be upfront that income is a secondary consideration for me right now.
  I mainly want to work with folks I like, on projects that excite me, and if you're
  going AI-first, this checks both boxes :)

Whichever way you go, congrats on the direction. I think it's the right call, and I'm
happy to help make it real if you'd like to bring me along.

Cheers,
Rian