Description:
Today Vova Feldman, owner of the popular WordPress Platform, Freemius, joins me to talk about his journey and business. We start out having him dig into his past and he talks about his family's migration from Ukraine to Israel when he was 4 years old. We learn how those experiences shaped him, how he discovered his love for building things, programming, and business.
From there we talk about how his company leverages and creates content for his user base and fans. We discuss how he started his company, built relationships, and found his first customers. Learn how he prefers selling, his focus on the long game, and his approach to marketing. Great guy, great conversion! Enjoy!
Vova Feldman
Vova Feldman is a serial maker and full-stack developer who transitioned from the technical co-founder seat to becoming the ship’s captain. He’s “addicted” to challenges and solving complex problems that may seem unsolvable using technology and engineering. Vova is passionate about the “passion economy” and these days he’s focused on helping fellow developers in the open-source space to make a living while pursuing their passion products through Freemius.com.
THE MEAT OF IT!
- Introduction: How I met Vova
- Vova's migration story
- Creativity when he was a kid
- His Dad as his major influence
- How he discovered programming
- Problem Solving games
- Gaming and Programming
- First Big Project
- Organizing CD's and selling them online
- Young Entrepreneur's Program
- Exposure to a start-up business
- My early programming experience
- His internship in Silicon Valley during college years
- What he realized during his Corporate America experience
- Start-up Accelerator Program
- Understanding Business rather than just the Technical side of things
- Doing things out of the comfort zone
- Matt's experience in Insurance Business
- Bringing Value rather than focusing on taking money
- Building a product vs Commercialization
- The starting of Freemius
- Modern eCommerce solution
- Revenue share business model
- Development Basement
- Helping other developers to grow and learn ‘Business'
- Content practices of Freemius
- Started with blog contents
- Basing it on data and experiments
- Making people think more
- New medium – Video contents
- Hustling content distribution
- reaching out more to people
- pro-actively approach people with good network
- Step out of your comfort zones and keep things going
- Experimentation
- Adjustment period
- Analyze results
- Challenge in human interaction
- Focusing on building relationships and learning people
- not about selling but having a good conversation
- learning what people do in their business
- provide value to each other
- If you wanna sell something, don't sell it
- Way of selling commodity vs solutions
- The magical initial time in business
- Vova's biggest challenge
- “Hire fast, Fire faster”
- Team growth – Hire someone better than you
Check out these related Episodes:
- Episode 30: Meet Stephen Wilson Downey: His Journey & Developing an AI-based WordPress Plugin
- Episode 28: Doland White on Team Building: Elasticity, Growth & Scaling
- Episode 25: Meet Widmaer (Wid) Telisma: An Inspiring Story that Leads to Building a Successful Agency
