Direct Approach vs. Philosophy Culture

When I was in high school, I joined a forum for philosophers. I was an observer, just monitoring the active users discussing different points of view on the same general principle, or cosmic factor. Later on, I started reading different books on personal skills, psychology and communication. The Esoteric Book The most amazing thing I found was a book. Actually two books - same title, same table of contents. One written by a US writer, the other - from an Indian philosopher. The difference between both books was unbelievable. The US one was completely "how to" with homework assignments after each… Continue Reading

Content Marketing For Business Benefit

One of the things we did at DevriX in 2014 is focusing more on content marketing. Back in 2011-2013, we kept maintaining a 10-page website with no content since we believed that there are way too many sites out there sharing WordPress tutorials or business tips. Wrong. Ever since we started our tutorials section, we kept growing our visitors base, together with our list of followers and people sharing our resources. Admittedly, there's a lot of work that we need to improve and increase our quality, but we're working in that direction and the numbers are quite positive. Publish For Profits Jennifer… Continue Reading

14 Common Misconceptions About Email – Gmail’s Toolkit

"Slack is Killing email", "5 reasons Slack will change the workplace", "Slack, the office messaging app that may finally sink e-mail". For some odd reason, the media is eager to bury down the idea of email, and put an end to its usage for the entire world. Whether it's Slack, HipChat, Skype, social network, or some project management tool, media outlets are impatient to sink email as an official method of communication. In the meantime, marketers are celebrating their success with the best ROI results for email: According to GetResponse, email's ROI is $41 per dollar spend: Email remains unbeaten, with ROI… Continue Reading

The Problem With Investors And Scaling – Uber Examples

Note: I started the post a few months ago, so there may be some slightly outdated facts. I'm a great proponent of bootstrapped companies, and I've always admired successful businesses that managed to grow without taking on seed funding or various types of investment. We're in our fifth year as a team at DevriX and while we're always hesitant to get a hold of more resources and speed up our growth or launch some of our products, we're still relying on a self-growth model instead. Uber [caption id="attachment_11728" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Photo by diginomica.com[/caption] Uber is a great service - an alternative… Continue Reading

Ask Me Anything on ManageWP – Sep 14, Open Floor

Since I've been moderately quiet online over the past year, it's about time to get back with some fresh ideas, insight and tricks from my long business journey lately. I delivered a presentation on remote teams at WordCamp Europe in Vienna, but haven't posted a recap yet due to some presentation format issues with both Slideshare and Slide Deck, so it's pending as well. There are a few things planned over the next months, including a slight face lift of the blog here since the homepage is not even usable to me! :) But that will come after we've wrapped up the… Continue Reading

Why Are Estimates Challenging For Custom Development Work?

I've been browsing and replying on Quora over the holidays and one of the questions made me think deeper about the estimation challenges when quoting custom development work: At DevWP I've already blogged about why I avoid estimates and the reason we do provide retainer services for our ongoing accounts. I'm no stranger to budget constraints and upfront expectations, but unlike the products business, services may vary drastically. [caption id="attachment_12201" align="aligncenter" width="1241"] dilbert.com showcases estimates in a nutshell[/caption] In the Quora example, the customer needed a drawing solution for his website. However, there are plenty of variables, such as: What features… Continue Reading

WordPress Salary Requirements Revealed and Company Pricing Breakdown

A known problem in the WordPress industry are the $500 projects and hundreds of thousands of clients looking for free and warez plugins and themes, unwilling to pay a few pennies for a premium solution, and completely baffled by any estimate that is equal to the actual salary of a developer. They often proceed with DIY solutions or site builders, and don't understand the cost of building a professional solution that is scaled for growth, stability, compatibility, speed and security. And some customers simply don't need a professional solution - they're just starting and haven't faced the challenges of a… Continue Reading

Let’s Talk Business and Cash at WordCamp Sofia 2016

Bulgaria is hosting yet another WordCamp this coming Saturday and I'm happy to join the speaker forces (despite having to wake up at abnormal hours on a Saturday) 💤 DevriX will be present at WordCamp Sofia 2016 and our team would be around over the weekend for any questions regarding WordPress development, business growth, remote working or building SaaS solutions. Additionally, we're sponsoring the event and presenting with 3 team members of ours - talking management, sales, and WordPress business market overview. I would cover a sensitive topic for developers who are struggling with finding market opportunities for selling their services. We'll talk about the… Continue Reading

Talking SaaS at WordCamp Netherlands This Weekend

The Netherlands is one of the most active communities in the European WordPress ecosystem, and I'm very much excited to talk about Software as a Service applications in the WordPress context this weekend in Utrecht! WordCamp Netherlands is hosted in Utrecht this year, with a Contributor Day on Friday, Oct 14, and a couple of days with talks in two parallel tracks on Oct 15 and Oct 16. I'm basically closing the WordCamp with the last talk of day 2 talking about "Building SaaS with WordPress" while Franz Vitulli is talking about Slack and internal communication in the other room. I will share… Continue Reading

DevWP Redesign – UX Recap and Content Planning Flows

The last redesign of DevWP was about a year and a half ago (give or take), but I'm really happy to announce that we've done some minor updates in the internal structure plus a brand new landing page for the main domain: Our previous redesign (again by our Creative Lead Alex) did follow my overall idea, but wasn't as functional as I wanted it to be. My initial goal was staying closer to what the internal pages print (overall structure and a sidebar) in order to be consistent, but that led to various limitations - either repetitive information in sidebars and the… Continue Reading