Digital Growth with Mario Peshev

What are the most important skills you need to have as an entrepreneur? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Earlier this year, #CreativeTribes hosted an AMA Live Chat with Mario Peshev, founder and CEO of DevriX, a distributed agency of 25 people delivering high-end WordPress solutions and growth strategy for fast-paced startups and SMEs. Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Mario is, like all of our AMA presenters, a member of the #CreativeTribes Slack community. Mario got his start as a tech engineer turned manager and business owner, who’s gained a multitude of skills along the way.

What are the most important skills you need to have as an entrepreneur? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. 1. Curiosity. Great entrepreneurs are tasked to discover new problems, reveal potential niche opportunities, refactor their original business process and innovate. This is contingent on being passionate about different fields of study and business cases outside of one’s comfort zone.

In 2006, I made a career switch and joined an R&D company with a strong training department. Over the past decade, I’ve spent over 6,000 hours on stage – the majority being training courses mixed with 100+ conference talks and various meetup or workshop sessions. I’ve had the opportunity to teach classes and present at CERN, Saudi Aramco, MIT, VMware, SAP Labs and others. Since most answers focus on public speaking at events, I’ll share some thoughts on public speaking from a trainer’s perspective.

Most people are intimidated by the "co-founder" label and try to dodge a bullet when looking to get some help without giving too much. While finding a technical co-founder may help out a lot, it's not the only way. You can hire a senior engineer and design a payment structure that doesn't include equity. Best case scenario, you'll still give up some equity in order to keep your staff motivated. A fixed paycheck wouldn't motivate most people to respond to an important email after hours ...

Startups are in different stages and their marketing potential may vary dramatically. Being “pre-revenue” or generating a negligent monthly recurring revenue may pose problems. Reputable professional marketing agencies often come with established process that require months before seeing any results. Hiring a marketing team could be done in two different ways.

Blogging has been around since the late 90s and there are millions of bloggers earning a good living thanks to their writing efforts. Business owners, marketers, college students and everyone else is actively publishing online. With social media prevailing, a good percentage of the population is now actively producing content online. But what is the difference between a successful writer and a hobbyist? There are various ways to generate revenue through content writing.

Bringing more revenue to the table is a pressing problem for each and every business out there. Companies and solopreneurs experiment with content marketing, paid ads, press releases, and various forms of offline exposure. At the end of the day, revenue requires traffic and visitors look for validation.

Security is incredibly important for all the right reasons. However, a small blog or a 5-page business website is less prone to becoming a target as compared to a popular enterprise where competitors, top black hats, and other 3rd parties may have an incentive to receive some proprietary information which may be very, very expensive. WordPress Security is also one of the 15 main obstacles that enterprises report in WordPress. I’ve discussed the list in a separate post based on our sales meeting...

I’ve seen successful SaaS applications online built on every single web programming language that I’ve ever heard of. Some of the more extreme ones specializing in certain fields do include Haskell, Erlang, Go, Dark and others for certain applications behind the scenes. A subscription-based business can leverage a SaaS framework or proceed with a custom build, depending on the business needs and the long-term goals for scaling the solution forward.