Ivaylo Karmazov Tells Us How Grind Helps e-Commerce Entrepreneurs and Business Owners To Grow Their Companies Using Proven Technology Stack

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Ivaylo Karmazov: We are doing fantastic! Sure, we have had to adapt to a lot of changes because of the pandemic, but it is ok for us. In March, our first daughter was born, which makes the whole time much more meaningful. We were able to spend more time together to argue in another company, and we decided to leave and start our own business. We have worked for a very long time without following any processes until we found out that we are a family doing different activities with our baby. 

What is your business strategy? How do you innovate? 

Ivaylo Karmazov: We are working on a really saturated market. There is no differentiation between 90% of the e-commerce providers on the market, which put us in a position where they need for innovation is big. 

We have to position our brand as “THE CHOICE” rather than “a choice” to stay profitable.

How do we do that? Not easy at all. 

Let me show you a few main points as examples:

Niching down is a very important aspect of every business. If you try to sell everything, everywhere, to everyone… I’ve been there, and I’m telling you, it doesn’t work in the long-term. Niching makes things so much easier for you because when you have a specific niche, you’ll be pitching and working with only those select customers, which fit into your strategy instead of scrambling around and having to learn a new topic and target audience every single time you work with a different client.                                                            

Now we are focused only on creating e-commerce projects for WooCommerce and Shopify. Nothing more.

Processes everywhere for everyone. We are still learning and implementing new strategies here, but it is very obvious that every growing business needs that. In the beginning, we started with nothing. Every day was different, no way to plan anything for even the next day. Now we are planning ahead every new quarter which helps us to structure our work better. 

Hiring smart people rather than very experienced, senior, exceptional veterans or whatever you can call them. We prefer to work with people who can fit into our culture as a team rather than having very strong performing employees. We believe that anyone can learn anything if the right processes and leaders are around. Actually, a good leader can help a junior employee to grow at a very fast pace.

The main innovation in our business model happens in:

Solution rather than a service.                                                 

Let’s see some examples of solutions we have in place to make it easier for the reader to understand what is my point here. We divide our solutions arsenal to vertical and horizontal scales.

Vertically few examples:

● Many pre-made connectors with third party systems. E.g. ERP integrations, HubSpot integrations and many more. 

● Solutions for abandoned carts

● Solutions for cross and up sales

● Speed optimization

● Payment processors integrations

● Loyalty programs

● Native mobile app solutions

● and many other  

Horizontally:

What you see above is helping us in building e-commerce products, very fast for grocery stores, apparel and fashion, food delivery and more industries.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Ivaylo Karmazov: The ongoing pandemic has created unpredictable challenges to all businesses, their owners and their employees.

I am happy that the whole situation pushed us to re-think existing processes and start working out of our comfort zone. From that point of view, I am sure it positively affects us so far. 

The biggest challenge for us comes when we want to keep close relationships in our team and also the boarding process of new members when we are away from our office. 

Did you have to change your business model, and what are the lessons learned?

Ivaylo Karmazov: Fortunately, we have not had to change our business model in a bad way, but instead, we focused more on innovations in the old business model. 

While the other companies were cutting down employees and their salaries, we are doing the opposite. 

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Ivaylo Karmazov: As I already mentioned, the market is very saturated, but I can assure you that if anybody is providing quality service/product at a reasonable price, he can succeed in the time of crisis. 

The game is really challenging right now, which makes it very exciting and a little dangerous and I believe the strongest and smartest ones will survive. 

What are your plans for 2021? 

Ivaylo Karmazov: Our plans for the next year is to extend the list of ready-to-use solutions we have in place. Now we are in the R&D process of connecting a mobile application for iOS and Android to WooCommerce through their API which will open a new door for every single store based on WC to have a better relationship with their customers. 

Your final thoughts?

Ivaylo Karmazov: As the main topic is the innovations around Covid, I want to finish with saying that every crisis is also an opportunity. You should only be more focused on what is going on around. 

Your website?

https://grind.studio/