‘Hire people more intelligent than you’ and other words of wisdom given to us by the world-leading website building company co-founder.
‘It was hard to build a great website back in 2008. We just couldn’t find the best product or website that we loved, one that was easy to use but complex enough for businesses to run from them – so we built our own version called Wix.’
Skip forward to today and the Tel Aviv company hosts over 100 million+ sites, with 2 million new users added each month.
At Paz, we're Wix Experts and we use the Wix platform for website building for a lot of our clients. We go to Wix conventions and meet ups and love learning directly from the best.
We were lucky to sit down and talk with co-founder and CEO, Avishai Abrahami at the Miami Wix Expert convention this week and get some digital business advice from the expert himself (seriously, Google his backstory).
Here’s what we learnt:
1. Believe in what you do and make sure those around you do too
Avishai: ‘It’s not about where you are based, if you live in in Texas, or Miami, or Israel, chances are your reach in Silicon Valley is zero. It's hard to get from here to the Valley. But it's not about how small the place you're in is, it's if you're able to believe in what you do and find really good, qualified people, you’ll be great. I’ve been lucky in hiring an amazing team from the beginning and amazing partners. I think that is absolutely key.’
2. Change how you think about finding investors
‘In this current world, finding funding can be very easy. And it can be from anywhere – it could be in Brazil or Mexico. It could be from anywhere. It's not about reaching out to the biggest thing. Overcome your fears and it's about how much you believe in what you do for the investors to see that.'
3. Launching reveals problems, but you’ll never know till you do it
‘We worked on Wix for about a year and 4 months before we went live, which is actually quite long in the digital world. We just kept fine-tuning the product. The first few months after we launched were stressful because you see all the problems come out in real life. But it was obvious from the first two weeks that we knew it was going to be a successful product. It just kept growing and growing and growing.’
4. Hire people more intelligent than you
‘I never went to university, and in my family, my younger brothers are more intelligent than me. And so are my parents. But as the oldest kid I was always negotiating with my parents and setting up boundaries or testing the waters out – how late we can stay out, what age I can get a phone etc. So when my brothers were my age that was all set up for them. From that I learnt how to manage people who are more intelligent than me, I feel at home with people that are smarter. If you want a successful company you need to hire people who will push you further.’
5. You’ll know when the ‘yes this is going to work’ moment hits you
‘I knew exactly when it was that this company was on to something. It was the day that we started to sell premium subscriptions in August 2008. I remember it so clearly...'
'You know you're onto something when people are actually paying for your product. It's their well-earned money. So when there's a line in front of your business with people wanting to pay you that's when you know that something is working well and so that was the case with me.'
Contact us to find out more about the perks of having a Wix website design and build.