14 things I will do differently in my next startup
We are in a great place now. Incredible team and all the numbers are going UP! But during 5 years, I've made a bunch of mistakes that delayed our growth. Go ahead, learn from them.
Aleksandr Volodarsky
[progress update] Nov - Jan: 20% growth, 4 new hires, and opening to new countries.
In January we did $337k GMV with a 25% take rate and 54 new clients. Reaching $900k and even $1m looks like no-brainer. Do you think we can hit $1.2m in Q1?
5 qualities to optimize for when hiring a CTO
Non-technical founders often struggle to find a co-founder or a CTO-level employee. Pay attention to these five critical qualities when hiring.
Experiment to get backlinks that took 9 months and failed
To get high-ranking backlinks we've created an industry report. It took us 9 months. To our huge disappointment it brought us only 10 links and 2000 visitors.
How to get more leads from SEO landing pages (advice from conversion copywriter)
I asked a professional copywriter how to get a better conversion on SEO landing page. The founder of a copywriting agency gave great advice in a 15-min video.
2021 goal: grow from $2.7m to $10m
In Q1 we will work on preparing our systems for exponential growth.
2020: year in review
2020 looked like "nothing special" in terms of growth. But look at the amazing things my team has achieved
Strategy advise from Chris Bakke (3x exits to Indeed, Zillow, and Knotel)
Chris Bakke advises me on strategy on business models, pricing strategy, client retention, and growing margins.
How to check if a freelancer is good before hiring them (my personal process)
These 5 steps helped me to hire 100's freelancers for internal jobs and the marketplace before I had a team to do that.
Update on progress July - October (lots of wins and a big fat churn)
In the last 4 months, we increased our GMV, % of new contracts, saw a surprisingly high churn, and tested a few client acquisition channels.
Moving in the same direction is the hardest challenge.
A few days ago I was reading to my kids a parable about crawfish, swan, and pike that got together in a team attempt of moving a cart. They had the same goal, but because of their nature moved in different directions. Long story short, it didn’t go well.
Chicken-n-egg problem
A 2-sided Marketplace is a livelong war of balance demand and supply. In this article I share how we deal with it.
After 5 years of work I'm closing Coding Ninjas
I started Coding Ninjas 5 years ago and after a few pivots we've found a better business model and created a new brand. This is the story of why we are saying good bye.
4 mistakes to avoid when working with agencies (from our $120k worth of experience)
A note for myself what mistakes should I avoid next time I will outsource a job to an agency.