Global Entrepreneur Profile: Boris Krstovic, Spoonlabs (Republic of Serbia)

We hear it every day in the news – small business drives the growth and job creation in our economy. And that’s not true just in the United States – small companies with big plans and vision are making a difference all over the world.

So in honor of Global Entrepreneur Week, Independent’s Entrepreneur Profiles is celebrating a few entrepreneurs from outside the US who are changing the world every day.

This week, we feature Boris Krstovic, founder of Spoonlabs, headquartered in Belgrade, in the Republic of Serbia. Spoonlabs d.o.o. and its Vivvo content management system have made a big impact, racking up thousands of clients in the space of 5 short years.

1. What does your company do?

We are the makers of Vivvo – a news content management system, used by nearly 15,000 clients on over 100,000 installments (websites). Our mission is to provide the most user-friendly, innovative and efficient way for individuals and organizations to make use of their content.

My current focus is around leveraging social media and technology in small business and engaging in technology start-up’s that achieve growth through delivering continuous value to both enterprises and consumers.

2. When did you start your company?

Spoonlabs d.o.o. was started in 2005, and is privately owned and operated. The concept of Vivvo was brought to life in 2004. I was a freelance web developer at the time, and wanted a CMS that was simple use, yet modular and powerful, to help me deploy websites for my clients. The solution — Vivvo CMS — started life as a simple bundle of PHP scripts and has gone through several major evolutions to become the web content management solution it is today. The current version, recently released, is v4.5.

3. What are your funding sources?

Spoonlabs is entirely bootstrapped, which I’m very proud of. Our growth is purely organic, we grew as our product user base was getting larger and larger. Almost 75% of our revenue comes from licenses, reseller/partner contracts and license renewals. Other 25% is from very interesting and challenging projects we deploy using Vivvo.

4. What have the top 3 challenges have been in your start-up process?

The biggest challenge we faced was the path that we crossed from our first sold license to the stage where we started receiving acknowledgement and feedback from people around the world, commenting on our work and comparing us to other CMS’s on various community forums.

Apart from that, a very big challenge is running a dot-com from an Eastern European country that even doesn’t have PayPal (officially), along with legislations in ICT dating from ’78 or something. Enough said.

5. Define “entrepreneur.”

Entrepreneurship is not about having initiative, ideas and wanting to do something – it is about being able to remove 90% of the noise from your specter. You need to know when to go against the odds and be able to differentiate between the things that deserve 80% of attention and those that deserve 20%. It is often very difficult to be at the same time passionate about something, yet critical enough to see the big picture and business model clearly.

6. Read any good books lately?

Sure, I was on 10-day vacation not so long ago, so I had quite enough time to read. John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps”, and a great novel from Bosnian author Ivanka Djeric – “Bosanci trce pocasni krug”. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually read something written in my own language, which is probably not good.

7. What is your advice for an entrepreneur starting out?

Know how to let things go, and delegate responsibility to other people. You can’t control and oversee everything, and when you grow from 2-3 to 6-7 people being trapped in micro-management certainly leads to downfall. Avoiding mediocre co-workers, and giving people power to decide and the responsibility to work with the decisions they’ve made is the only way to grow and prosper.

The second biggest challenge for new entrepreneurs is being able to work with the budget, and project cash flow with minimal error margin possible. Inadequate cash flow projection is the #1 killer for all entrepreneurs and startups.

8. What’s your favorite entrepreneurship quote?

One coined in 1969, by Italian comic book author Lucciano Secchi, a.k.a. Max Bunker. “If you want to win, you must not lose.”

If you are an entrepreneur in the Northeast and are interested in being profiled, we invite you to contact us.