Career Development Archives - Page 3 of 11

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.

Starting My Company. Mistake 10.

August 26, 2016 By Boris Hristov Leave a Comment

I can’t summarize this one in 1 sentence, so please read. It’s an important and an interesting one. That’s why it’s number 10.

When I started 356labs, it was clear to me that we were going to offer both company trainings and opened trainings in which individual people who want to learn more about the world of presenting would enroll. That’s what we did and that’s what we continue to do. Let me tell you a story about our first opened course, though, because I believe it’s a good lesson of what a founder of a company must be ready for.

See, we do not have our own training room yet. We rent such. And so I rented one of the most creative places in Sofia, Bulgaria for our first opened course. At the end of the day our we were teaching storytelling & presentation design. The place needed to be… special. I didn’t want a hotel room.So far so good. I rented the place(meaning, I paid for it — that’s important and you will see why) and a day before the event I went there to set up everything.

I walked in that place and it was… gosh, it looked ugly. Everything was covered in dust — chairs, tables, everything. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. The trash cans were not cleaned. Yes, including the one in the toilet.

That’s not what I paid for, I said to myself! Problem was there was no time to go and complain to the host. The course was starting tomorrow morning! I needed to do something myself because one of the things about our trainings is that I want us to deliver an experience. An incredible experience to our students. That means that not only the content and our materials must be top level, but every single other thing should be too — the venue, the food, the organization, the communication prior the event, everything.

What happens next is my lesson for all of you— I went and cleaned all the dust. Every single chair. Every single table. One by one. I cleaned the floor. I went and changed the trash bags everywhere. Yes, the one in the toilet too. And yes, you are right, I didn’t like it and I wasn’t happy I was doing it, but at the same time, I knew this would pay off…

On the next day the training went incredibly well. Many of the people who came and paid for the event are now coming to every single one of our events and recommend us to others. So to all of you founders, co-founders and all of you who truly care about your customers — get ready to do things you have never ever thought you would if you really and I mean really, want to deliver incredible experiences.

P.S. After this training, we gave this room another chance and hosted another course there. We were faced with the same and that was the last time we rented it. We now moved to a new place which is a true state of art. The place that I was looking for from the start of 356labs…

Starting My Company. Mistake 9.

August 20, 2016 By Boris Hristov 4 Comments

Starting a business can not be as hard as people say.

… guess what — it really is.

And no, I don’t want to sound like, you know, I am one of those guys that work so much. Noup. Not at all. I just want you to understand that when you are starting a business and you start it alone or with a co-founder(s), there is no one else you can count on. What I mean is that when there is a slight issue or a big problem with:

Your website
Your sales
Your marketing campaigns
Your payments
Anything else

… it will be you that will have to fix it. This is completely not the case when you work in an organization and you can always forward that problematic e-mail or some task to the people above you. It’s just not.

So my lesson here is one that you have already heard before — get ready to work countless hours because believe it or not, sometimes even straightforward things like purchasing stickers to give away at an event, for example, can take you 2 days of pretty intense communication between you and the printing company(guess why I am using this example?).

Again, as Steve Jobs once said:

Many people say you have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing… and it’s totally true… and the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t any rational person will give up.

Well said, Mr. Jobs. Well said!

Speaking at Microsoft Ignite 2016, Atlanta

August 17, 2016 By Boris Hristov 2 Comments

Microsoft Ignite 2016 is the biggest, most important yearly conference in the world! A conference that is attended by more than 20 000 people (yes, you read that right) and has the best (and in hundreds) speakers from the whole world.

This year, after not being accepted last year, I am happy and feel privileged to share that I(and respectively 356labs) were accepted to speak at Microsoft Ignite 2016.

My sessions are the following:

Live Presentation Transformation: From Boring to Effective – in this one I will go completely demo only! I will take the typical badly designed slideshow and teach how everyone(non designers too) can create stunning, yet effective slides for their presentations
Sway: The Interesting New World of IT Presentations – and in this one I will show how Microsoft Sway can be used to deliver a top rated IT talk. Many people still don’t know about Sway, so what better moment to learn about it.

Wish me good luck and to all of my friends in Bulgaria – we will organize an event immediately after I come back from Ignite in order to share the overall experience and the leanings. I think it would be useful to everyone in the speaking / presenting community.

Update 1: Obviously, my first session got some serious attention because just a few days ago Microsoft asked me if it would be possible for me to deliver it twice in order for them to be able to handle all of the attendees that want to see it. Of course, I agreed without even thinking about it.

Update 2: At the end of the day, Microsoft were not able to organize the repeat of the session, but actually put my name on another one for Hybrid Cloud Storage. I am addressing this issues from the first time I noticed it (second day of the event) and up until now (October 5th) it’s still there.

Update 3: The main take away from the conference now. Here’s the thing. Microsoft Ignite is probably one of the biggest conferences in the world. With 25 000 attending it is seriously hard for you to imagine how much people this actually is, how many rooms there were and what’s more interesting – how you organize breakfast and lunch for so many people. The latter was done just incredibly well and to be honest, almost everything at the conference was on a very high level. The expo area had almost 2000 companies you can network with and the sessions were more than 1400.

As for my sessions:

The first one started a bit problematic as the display on which I was presenting died just when I connected to it. 5 people from MSFT were trying to fix it for almost 10 minutes with no success and I thought it’s Game Over and they will cancel the session. However, they made it work magically and I was able to start. The talk went perfectly well and there was some serious interest after it! Here are the resources I used together with the slides:

Photos: (Creative Commons 0 – no attribution required!)
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The second one that was on Sway went completely smooth! No issues what so ever and yeah, as it was 95% demo, there are not that many slides. However, the key takeaways are there, so sharing them here just for info:

What else can I say? I am already looking forward to Microsoft Ignite 2017 in Orlando!

Starting My Company. Mistake 8.

August 5, 2016 By Boris Hristov Leave a Comment

Not being able to send an offer quick enough.

In my previous post , I shared just one of the stories around the fact that even if a potential customer gets out of a meeting with you and enthusiastically asks for an offer, that doesn’t mean you got the business.

In this one, however, I want to switch gears a bit and talk about another “extreme”, let’s call it.

At the early days of 356labs, we didn’t have an easy way to send an offer when we were asked by a customer. Why is that, you may ask? Answer is simple — there’s just numerous other things that are bigger priority than that. Thus, whenever we were asked for an offer, we were creating it from scratch. This was just… more reasonable.

To be honest, that “algorithm” worked fine. However, I believe (no data to support it!) that because sometimes it took us more than a week to come up with an offer, there were a few customers that we missed. Or at least our chances of winning some business became even smaller. Why I am thinking that is because when you want to buy something and you hit an obstacle for a week, your “willingness”, let’s call it, to buy that same thing is not the same. There is just a moment when the customer is in the mindset of buying and when you miss it, it is really hard to make him go back there emotionally.

So my lesson from this one is probably something like this — when you send your first 3–5 offers, take a look at their structure and content. Create an adaptable template(PowerPoint can be of great help here because you can export in PDF from it!) or figure out the way(based on your business) that will allow you to come up with offers for the potential customers fast. Don’t let the customer wait for a week in order to get your offer. Just… don’t.