My name is Mihail, Co-Founder of NitroPack from Bulgaria. A real pleasure to be here. As a child, my parents wanted me to become either a doctor or a teacher, so I blended both and became an entrepreneur. 🙂
I believe this is the best job in the world, and as a kid who grew up in a small town, I was exposed to the boundaries of what’s possible and what impact you might have on the stuff you create.
I don’t have any siblings, and I had to take care of all of life’s choices on my own, which, at some point, I figured out can be a lot better when you work in a team.
This is why everything I do nowadays I do with my university buddy Georgi, who we’ve been prolifically working together for the past 14+ years.
The Journey Began
Actually, our very first company, iSenseLabs was inspired by WordPress – we associated ourselves with the ideals of open source, a legion of people all around the world contributing their most precious resource – their time, to create a platform where folks can build and express themselves.
While what we embarked on as a journey mainly was eCommerce, back in the day we chose another open-source platform – OpenCart.
I can say we used WordPress for the first site we ever created, and going back, I feel so privileged that after 14 years we’re going back to making an impact on the most popular platform in the world- WordPress.
Back in university, we had a computer science club, and one of the hot topics was open source. I believe the very first time I stumbled upon WordPress was then.
Little did I know that we would be opening our digital agency a few years later, and the very first website we would be creating would be on WordPress. And I won’t and can’t ever forget our first client because it was my mom. Thank you, Mom!
The Need for NitroPack
NitroPack Logo
So originally we created NitroPack for OpenCart back in 2013, and I believe it was the first of its kind for the platform.
Our main thing was creating products and selling them on the marketplace but on the side, we would also do websites or custom development.
We noticed that speed is one of the key elements influencing the buying decision of a website visitor, if your site loads slowly or you get layout shifts, which means the content is not where it should be, this creates a bad user experience and ultimately results in a drop-off.
And in a world where you invest in ads to drive traffic, this ends up as a sunk cost. This was also back in the days when we didn’t have Google Page Speed, and the main players were GTmetrix and Yslow.
So we decided that this was a noteworthy idea to invest in, and after a few months of hard work, we created a plugin for OpenCart, which we named NitroPack, inspired by Fast & Furious’ Nitrogen Boost, and we added “pack” because it had multiple features under the hood.
Well, to continue on the story we embarked on above, after creating NitroPack in 2013, it became our best-selling and most notable product; however, OpenCart’s market share didn’t grow as fast as WordPress, so we started talking about going where we can have the biggest impact.
Our idea was that everyone deserves a fast website regardless of the platform, and this was the core mantra behind NitroPack becoming a company rather than a product from our portfolio of 140.
We figured out that all optimizations will be carried on the cloud, that CDN is an integral part of the package, and we will be including it in the product offering.
I believe another thing that worked out well was understanding where the market is shifting, which is from a synthetic test on how well your site scores to Core Web Vitals – this is about how users experience your website.
That was a bet we placed in 2021, and I believe it played out well.
I am also super proud of the team as we will be launching two new products around NitroPack and while challenges are part of the ride, I can honestly say that when you work with an incredible amount of people every day, these challenges are nothing but the next hurdle jump you need to do as an entrepreneur.
We are the team behind NitroPack, and we proudly have 200,000 WordPress websites running NitroPack. We have a total of 1,704,904,455 optimized pages – we optimize over 5,000,000 pages every day and enjoy over 5,000,000,000 real-user visits on optimized pages.
Myself with my Brilliant Team
We are a remote team but we have amazing team-building events to which we all gather and celebrate our milestones. So here’s one from one of our last office parties:
Mihail Stoychev with Team
Advice for Business Owners
I believe this sums it up pretty much: “Who if not me, when if not now.” Another favorite quote of mine is WH Auden’s, “We’re here on Earth to help others; what the others are here for, I have no idea.”
So there you have it, the wisdom of the centuries. Just apply resilience and work hard, help others, be consistent, and 1% better every day.
There are a thousand ways to succeed, ours is that we started as a Plugin-Theme-Agency-Developers. It was a blend of four things, so naturally, with time, we’ve started eliminating the areas that don’t bring that much ROI.
In the end, we’ve stayed true to our roots, which was plugin development, and elevated it to product-platform development.
WordPress & Beyond
After we exited our company SMSBump, we rejoined NitroPack in Nov 2022. So, the past year was foundational for us.
We’ve pretty much reorganized every team inside the company, aligned on the new vision, hired amazing folks, and empowered the existing team, so results followed.
I can say that we are planning both horizontal and vertical expansions, and part of our strategy is to foresee where the market will be going with all innovation happening in AI, where our product adds value to our user base, and how to enable businesses to excel towards their competitors.
I believe open-source LLMs reinforce the thesis of how important open source is for the progress of amazing ideas done by an amazing blend of folks from all around the world.
I believe all the CMS, builders, and e-commerce platforms will eventually become prompted interfaces where we will be imagining and directing more and more stuff.
Prompt engineering and instructions come from imagination, so perhaps we will need to go back to imagining what we want, being inspired by what others have created, and making it our very own.
The threat column, when doing a SWOT analysis, is always there. Competition is the best thing in the world. It pushes you to create, innovate, think outside the box, discover, and go to uncharted territories.
Competition is what drives everyone forward and what brings the best value to the customer. Hence, keep your eyes on the prize, so doing competitive research and understanding where everyone is looking and how this intertwines with your vision is essential.
And talking about vision I always love to quote Jeff Bezos: “Be stubborn on your vision and flexible on the execution.”
So if there is great value added to a competitor product, you need to see how it aligns with your vision, whether to prioritize it, and how to take care of it.
Stay in Touch
My Love for the WordPress Community
I attended my first WCEU in 2023, and I was hooked. My team had told me about the power of the WordPress community, but seeing it with my own eyes made me a convert.
Since then, we’ve sponsored multiple other WordCamps and local meetups. And the fun fact, NitroPack has its own Wapuu.
NitroPack Wapuu
The greatest value for me is networking with fellow industry professionals as well as talking face-to-face with our customers and getting their feedback – this is the best way to make sure we keep delivering the best product.
I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know Vikas Singhal, Remkus de Vries, Rytis Lauris, Miriam Schwab, and Jonathan Wold – among many other wonderful folks.
I believe there’s something we can learn from everyone’s success story, so my advice is to keep them coming. 🙂
How I Keep Myself Updated
The WordPress community definitely has a number of valuable resources – I like to stay up to date on Twitter in addition to being a subscriber of “The WP Weekly” and “The Repository”.
I also like to listen to various podcasts such as WP Coffee Talk, plugin.fm, and Do The Woo.
I Have a Life Other Than the Work
Well, of course, it depends on how we define free time. 🙂
Besides spending time with my son after he comes back from school, I try to hit the gym every day and go to the movies. I love going to the theater and enjoy spending time with my friends.
I love to spend the holiday with my family. This is one of the few times I can zone out a bit and devote my attention to them.
I love to visit Istanbul, Turkey. I divide my time between there and Sofia as my wife is Turkish. It’s a 20-mile city, so things get hectic, but the level of service and hospitality is amazing.
I Reward Myself by
Whenever I have the time, I like to explore new destinations and enjoy good food – preferably in the company of my family. I also believe in giving back, so that’s something I try to do as much as I can.
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