Business Archives - Page 3 of 10

Documenting My Days on Instagram

November 24, 2016 By Boris Hristov Leave a Comment

Some months ago I started documenting my life on Instagram. As many of you know, I am now completely out of the SQL Server world and into developing and growing 356labs which now, I am happy to say, is already a very financially stable company.

To be honest, I tried to do the same in Snapchat, but for some reason… I was not motivated enough to push content on so many platforms (even though I did Snapchat stories throughout my whole Microsoft Ignite journey, for example). That all changed when Instagram copied Snapchat and introduced “Stories”. Probably it was the fact that now everything was in one place or it was something else that made me start documenting. I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t care. It’s just so much fun to be able to document what I go through every day and look back at it.

So, if you are on Instagram and want to follow my constant journey and actually learn the things I am doing way before they are posted here or on the 356labs blog (if blogged at all), go on Insta, find my account – brshristov – and enjoy!

See you there!

Video: Startup Grind Sofia

November 10, 2016 By Boris Hristov 2 Comments

A month ago I got an invitation from the local chapter of Startup Grind to speak about 356labs, my story and the presentation world. It was a long, but incredibly interesting and more importantly honest conversation.

Enjoy watching!

Simon Sinek and Personal Accountability

September 24, 2016 By Boris Hristov Leave a Comment

You know Simon Sinek from his “Start With Why” TED talk, right? If not, please stop everything. Stop reading this blog post and watch this.

I try to consume everything that Simon Sinek produces and probably that is the reason I saw the video above and stayed up until late in the evening one day to watch and then reflect on what he said.

Stop here for now and watch the whole video. Please. Yes, it will take you 1 hour, but I promise you – it’s worth your time.

Welcome back. Now you may be wondering why I am writing this blog post? The answer is very selfish – because I want to keep myself publicly accountable. This way I won’t have any excuses in front of myself and in front of you to not do what I learned from this video. Here are the 2 “accountability lists” I prepared for myself:

The personal one:

When going out with friends, family or my girlfriend, leave my phone at home or have it with me, but don’t use it except in an emergency.
Don’t put my phone next to me on the table when on a meeting or use it while waiting for someone. Notice the world.
Leave my phone at the living room during the night.

The ones for 356labs:

Make a rule – before a company meeting – phones out of the room.
Care. Truly care about the people who work with me. Build a family.
Support. Give chances. Make people at 356labs understand that I will always be there to help them in a hard moment.

…

That’s it. It’s public. Now I have no excuses.

Did you watch the video? What do you think?

Why not?

September 10, 2016 By Boris Hristov Leave a Comment

No, this is not one of the post on what I am learning as I am growing my company 356labs. However, it’s related to it.

Together with the designer who works with me in 356labs on “everything creative”, as I like to call it, we were recently talking about some of things we were doing and some of the things that we were thinking about doing, but seemed a bit impossible. At first…

And then I shared with her that… if I think about it, everything that allowed 356labs to still be here and get so much traction in it’s first year (8th of September, people!) is because I was asking myself one very simple question:

Why not?

Why not leveling up our trainings and deliver the best possible experience for our customers?

Why not reaching the local TV stations and ask to be their guest and talk about us being accepted and being the only presentation company to speak at Microsoft Ignite?

Why not putting the time and recreating our Instagram account from scratch after we were banned for no reason?

I just don’t know why not…

…

Turns out, when you ask yourself this question, you end up trying and doing the first step in regards to the thing you are questioning.

Turns out, when you make the first step to the thing you desire to accomplish, you actually do accomplish it.

So. What are you waiting for? Just ask yourself why not.

Starting My Company. Mistake 11.

September 3, 2016 By Boris Hristov Leave a Comment

Believing that having English-only online presence is more than enough.

This one hurts me so much to share, but I need to.

Before I started 356labs, I was an IT consultant(and a lot of other things which does not matter in the context of this post) who was fortunate enough to speak in more than 20+ countries. And to put things in perspective, I did this before I got 25.

One of the reasons why I was able to speak at the most important events in my world was because of my personal brand. I really care about my online presence and I seriously believe I know how to manage it on a pretty decent level.

That being said, an important point here is that, all of my online identities were in English. And I live in a non English speaking country.

So, you probably guessed it right — when I launched 356labs, everything was in English. Pay close attention to the next sentence, though. We are selling our services to both our local, Bulgarian market and the global one. However, in my mind, there was not even a thought that I am doing a mistake in regards to the local market.

I was constantly telling myself:

If they want to work with us, they will find us through our website(which was in English).

Bad, bad, bad. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It turned out, they won’t find us through our website because when they search for our services, the decision makers in Bulgaria were not typing in English. Guess what? Because of that, we were not showing up in their Google search results! How cool is that, right?

At the moment I found out about that (by a customer… as you can imagine), I immediately changed my view (even though I didn’t want to and even though I thought that this is their problem and not ours back then!). I started a process of translating our web site and if you go to 356labs.com today, you will see that at the top right corner there is a Bulgarian flag too. We are still not 100% ready with the translation (especially the blog articles — 200+), but we will soon be.

My lesson for you here — don’t be romantic. Just because something worked for you before, doesn’t mean is the best option for your business case now. Reverse engineer the market and act based on that. Yes, you may need to put a lot more work, but… if you want to have a business, there’s a price coming with it.

P.S. That same “language problem” happened with our Facebook Ad campaigns too. Made our creatives and campaigns in Bulgarian — boom. Results.