As part of the Startup Founder Series segment, today, we had a free flowing convo with Nedko Nedkov, to understand his journey as an entrepreneur, and share his experiences and learnings from it with the commune.
WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU WERE A KID?
Nedko started off as most of us, at a young age, when he wanted to be a professional football player, and he was inspired by Hristo Stoichkov, especially during the 1994 Football World Cup when his country Bulgaria achieved their best performance to date, being placed at 4th.
WHAT WAS THE NEXT STEP TOWARDS PICKING YOUR PROFESSIONAL PATH IN LIFE?
When he was around 14 years old, Nedko’s mom got him his first computer. He first started playing games on it, and as the Internet began with slow speeds back then before Y2K, he got into internet chats like mIRC. His purpose in doing so, at the age of 16, was to learn English, and whilst he was shooed off many platforms because of the quality of his English at that time, he persevered, and finally got to learn English more from the internet than from school.
He met a lot of Marketers, and learnt about how to monetize traffic & make money online. This experience was the very foundation of his entrepreneurship, being inspired by how internet marketers monetized way back in the day. During this journey he came across Michael Lee Johnson who was kind of a mentor to him, learning a lot of skill sets on SEO, Email Marketing, PR and Google Ranking from him.
WHAT DID YOU PICK TO FOCUS YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL EFFORTS TOWARDS?
Around the age of 18-20 Nedko eventually decided to focus on SEO, wherein he started off with doing SEO for himself and networking on Marketing Forums, to attract clients that he could provide SEO services to. He continued to grow through Word of Mouth references, getting clients across US, UK & Australia, was making enough to pay the bills and more than his peers. Nedko also started building a remote freelance team, from countries like India, to aid the SEO efforts for his clients, which included off page techniques like directory submission for link building, whilst he focussed on the on-page optimization aspect. Management, Communication, Networking, Strategy building, were the key skills he built and used in the process.
WHAT WAS THE NEXT PHASE OF YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY?
Post doing SEO for clients, directly and indirectly via Marketing agencies, for about 10+ years in the first stage of his professional career, in 2012, he started working on a small PPC ad network on the lines of Adsense, with one of his freelancer friends, based in India. Nedko used his SEO skills to attract potential clients that were looking for “adsense alternatives”, “where to advertise” , “best ad network” etc.
This continued till 2015-16, after which he moved to the capital of Bulgaria, joined the Pre Accelerator Founder Institute, and that was how his first entrepreneurial baby Brandvertisor was born. When a potential client wants to have their display ads on relevant websites where their TG visit, Brandvertisor offers digital advertising solutions. The potential clients come to Brandvertisor and select relevant categories, and Nedko connects with the relevant websites and find the best budgets for meeting the clients custom digital planning needs.
Nedko was all passionate about Brandvertisor being able to attract fundings within the first year of ops. The benchmark he had set for the same was to have around 5-10000 listed sites and follow that up with attending different conferences.
In 2020 during the pandemic, Nedko got into podcasts and during Pioneer.app & YC Sprint virtual accelerators, his second startup was born, Podvertise.fm which allows clients to find relevant podcasts to advertise on. At the moment he juggles between a full time job as a B2B Marketing Pro, to make ends meet whilst his passion remains in his startups Brandvertisor and Podvertise.
If there was one thign he would like to share with the Startup community from his learnings, it would be to "Focus on Delivery/CSat over Product Development"
Here's an overview of Nedkos Journey so far.
in 2016 Nedko did pre-accelerator founder institute https://fi.co/ , where he started https://brandvertisor.com > Pitch deck: https://invest.brandvertisor.com/
With it he went to conferences:
Nedko was learning a lot about Blockchain at some point 2018-2019
Nedko almost launched Brand Token but didn't have the marketing budget needed, so developed white paper for Decentralized Shared Economy Advertising.
If you are looking at an opportunity to share your Entrepreneurial Journey with the Startup Commune, you can email us.
