Flashback from 26.04.2010 – my first freelance seminar in New Bulgarian University discussing radical concepts like “telecommuting”, “flexible work hours”, “results-only working environment” (ROI-driven) and more.
Six months later, we organized the first freelance conference in Bulgaria, gathering 130+ people exploring side income or switching to full-time self-employment.
To all “generation Z” who were still kids at the time:
This was NOWHERE NEAR as common 16 years ago.
Remote work was not a thing. I was studying 37signals (Basecamp) and Automattic on principles of running remote companies. Very very few were managing to do it – GitLab, Zapier, and a small handful of examples.
The Internet was not as widespread everywhere; smartphones were just being invented as a concept (the first iPhone was announced in 2007 and was definitely not mainstream), and laptops were expensive and slow enough to be hard to obtain.
Then again, this all worked out a decade later. We actually went fully in-house around 2018, pre-pandemic, and faced the exact opposite backlash for ~6 years (until all of big tech returned back to the office at least hybrid, along with the banking sector and the rest of Fortune 1000).
I’ve been early, horribly late, missed boats on innovations and opportunities. And I’ve had some pivots early but still on time to ride the right waves.
1. We took on WordPress in 2012 when the global market share was 11-12%. It scaled up to 44% at the peak.
2. Became one of the first handful of WordPress SaaS implementation vendors (a top 5 builder of SaaS platforms in SaaS) in 2013.
3. Coined “WordPress retainers” in 2015. Turned the web industry around educating hundreds of other agencies in the coming years to adopt that model.
Pivoting into adops and 100MM+ pageview publishers, B2B SaaS scaling Series A and above, training camps for young engineers (way before this was mainstream), switching to GTM/RevOps for SMEs and then, mid-market PMI/FP&A, the last two shaping 50% of our business today.
The biggest burden of pioneering is looking like an idiot for the first 2-3 years, avoiding all the unproductive conversations from naysayers, having a hard time with recruitment when talent prefers funded VC brands or corporations with impeccable offices. Creating categories is also insanely expensive.
But as far as innovation is involved, we’ve made a real change with several of these. And I’m excited about the latest groundbreaking discoveries we’re now applying to mid-market and private equity companies.
(Also, DevriX is hiring in Sofia for marketing/account/engineering roles. Jobs listed on our site.)
