Be customer-centric since day one of your entrepreneurship. Talk to your customers directly and every day to see how their perception of the product has changed, what they need now, what type of issues they face.
Arto Minasyan, a serial tech entrepreneur and visionary leader, is the founder of 10Web.io and co-founder of Krisp.ai. Both startups are the answers to his urgent needs, as a web developer and a businessman.
The idea of 10Web was born after struggling over ten years with creating beautiful and fast websites on WordPress. Coming up with the concept of an all-in-one platform for building, hosting, and managing WordPress websites from one dashboard and with the highest page speed score helped businesses to stand out in digital. Krisp was created as a solution to make noiseless and effective business calls from the most inconvenient places.
His startups serve freelancers, developers, web agencies, and small business owners. Prior to founding 10Web and Krisp, Arto launched a few software startups like a web development company that was focused on creating premium plugins with millions of downloads, and a marketplace for stickers.
Arto is a passionate entrepreneur who pays back to the community of techies, business people and followers while sharing his experience, knowledge, stories of failure, and step-by-step success guides on social channels.
Where did the idea for 10Web come from?
We have been creating hundreds of websites on WordPress and struggling with so many components like hosting, builder, templates, and plugins. They were often incompatible, and website optimization was giving us all headaches. And we decided that we needed a platform to create websites where all components are automatically optimized by default, and all those websites have a Google PageSpeed Score of 95+. Simply put, this is the platform for the fastest websites.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
Here’s an average day of me as a happy startupper:
8 am — Wake up with Krisp&10Web. Check email, brush teeth, take a shower, check Messenger, Slack, Telegram. Answer to bad/good reviews.
9 am — Writing some content. Wearing my CMO hat, feeling like a god of marketing, 1000s of users on the way.
10 am — Meeting with the research team. The video background removal algorithm sucks. It’s never gonna happen. We are total losers. No, noise cancellation tech was at the same level 2 years ago. But we made it happen.
11 am — Got an email from a customer: Krisp doesn’t work with WebEx. We’re having some big trouble.
12 pm — Meeting with the product team. Go back to my CTO hat. WebEx case was just a bug.
1 pm — Lunch Time. Our eastern partners signed the reseller contract. We are rich P.S. I continue eating my $3 lunch plate.
1:15 pm — Interview Rounds. Some manual QA wants to join Krisp as an ML Researcher. He’s the weirdest Ph.D. holder I’ve ever met
4 pm — I just spent the last of my energy. I wanna give up. Or I need rechargeable batteries or a slice of cold watermelon.
5 pm —- Listening to my favorite podcast Masters of Scale. Motivation is back & Reid Hoffman is the best. We will build a Unicorn here in Armenia.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Everything needs research before drafting the complete idea. This is how I do my homework: I talk to potential customers, investors, and influencers about the idea via social channels. Get the first feedback, create the MVP, and only then launch it on platforms like Product Hunt and the likes to get validation of our idea. Later on, we collect all feedback from the first users to excel and improve the product. In the end, we simply try to make our product the best in its niche.
What’s one trend that excites you?
AI helps with creating algorithms to automate every aspect of our life. It’s interesting to see what our future will look like.
What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?
I register all tasks in my calendar and keep it up to date because I simply care about other people and their time as well.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Be customer-centric since day one. Talk to your customers directly and every day to see how their perception of the product has changed, what they need now, what type of issues they face. It also shows the openness and transparency of the company. When your feedback is heard, you relate to the product on a personal level. All of this is much needed to keep your product relevant to the customer’s needs.
Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
No one believed that it’s possible to build a website and get a Google PageSpeed Score of 95+ by default. It’s possible now if you build and host your WordPress website on 10Web.
As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
Read smartbooks. And don’t forget to test the ideas from these books on your own business. People don’t just write for the sake of writing but also for sharing their experience.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?
To get first feedback and raise brand awareness, I’d suggest relying on existing businesses and platforms and launching your idea on Product Hunt or offer a sale deal with AppSumo. The authority and large community of such brands is a good test for your product’s validation.
What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?
I spent 2 years and half a million dollars of savings on a project called Sticker Market. It was a marketplace for brands who would like to create their branded stickers so users could use them via iOS and Android keyboards. When I realized the idea has no product fit, I simply closed the project. I gained a lot of connections though, and truly learned what the idea of entrepreneurship is. Plus, two other projects were born in that period of my life that are successful today — 10Web.io and Krisp.ai
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
I’d like someone to create a WordPress plugin that would turn all written posts into an audio track/book by using Amazon’s or Google Speech tech.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?
I bought a course about personal growth on Linkedin.
What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?
I’m going to call out Krisp because it is a life-changing software for me on so many levels. It’s a business I’m a part of and it helps me have noiseless/quality meetings, conferences with my business partners, investors, and family from any spot.
What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?
Donald Miller’s “Building a StoryBrand.”
What is your favorite quote?
“If you are born poor, it’s not your mistake, but if you die poor, it’s your mistake,” – Bill Gates.
Key Learnings:
- Be customer-centric since day one of your entrepreneurship. Talk to your customers directly and every day to see how their perception of the product has changed, what they need now, what type of issues they face.
- Everything needs research before drafting the complete idea.
- Any business, startup is a everyday work, with it’s ups and downs. All you need to do is focus on it and carry on.
Connect:
Carlyn runs the day-to-day publishing operation here at ideamensch and interacts with our awesome customers and entrepreneurs. She is likely editing this with a cat on her lap.