An Interview With Penny Bauder
Not making a difference at all (affects few people; with a small difference) Getting an apple from a tree and eating it makes no difference to anyone else. Moreover, even the marginal difference for you is negligible.
As part of my series about young people who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Iliya Valchanov.
Iliya is co-founder of 3veta.com, an end-to-end solution that integrates video, scheduling, and payments. He is also co-founder of 365 Data Science and a data science instructor on Udemy with more than 800,000 students.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit how you grew up?
Sure. First, thanks for having me!
My name is Iliya Valchanov and I am co-founder of 3veta.com. I am also a data science instructor on Udemy with 800,000+ students and a co-founder of 365 Data Science.
I grew up in Bulgaria and competed in Mathematics on a national and international level for 10 years. My upbringing was in a family of entrepreneurs, thus our dinner conversations would be largely business-related. My parents were very keen on including me and my sister in the nits and bits of their work.
So, a mathematician at day, eavesdropping into entrepreneurial conversations ‘at night’, I think I developed a very good balance of technical and business understanding from a very young age.
I continued my higher education at Bocconi University in Milan, where I focused on Economics and Finance. I think my solid foundation helped me focus on gaining as much as possible from my university degree.
While I was perfectly set for a career in consulting or investment banking, my calling was quite entrepreneurial. So here I am, helping professionals globally either through education or through software tools.
Is there a particular book or organization that made a significant impact on you growing up? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Pinpointing a single book is neglectful towards all other books that had an impact on me. However, if I need to name a single book that caused a great change in my way of thinking, that would be Tim Harford’s ‘The Undercover Economist’.
I read it in my first year of university a bit after having passed my super dry micro- and macroeconomics exams. ‘The Undercover Economist’ was the read which made Economics click for me: demand and supply, incentives, comparative advantage, everything just fit into place with real-world examples.
‘The Undercover Economist’ paved the way for me to devour a bunch of other books in the space of Economics, Economic History, Behavioral Economics, Experimental Economics, Statistics, etc. After graduating from university I had a bittersweet revelation that for 3 years I had not read a single book that is not related to these subjects. I have been working on expanding my topics of interest since then 😊
How do you define “Making A Difference”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
To me, the phrase ‘making a difference’ only makes sense if it is in the context of making a difference in someone else’s life. Moreover, the difference has two parameters: 1) how many people does it affect 2) how big is the average difference you make.
I have found that sometimes counterexamples work better than definitions. So, let me start with counterexamples:
- Not making a difference at all (affects few people; with a small difference)
Getting an apple from a tree and eating it makes no difference to anyone else. Moreover, even the marginal difference for you is negligible.
- Not making a significant difference (affects many people; with a small difference)
We all make a difference in other people’s lives by paying taxes (or for that matter: by not paying taxes). We affect a great number of people — the whole nation — but the size of the average difference is negligible
- Making a difference for a selected few (affects few people; with a big difference)
If you decide to mentor someone you can make an extreme difference in their life. While this change may be extremely profound, it is not so scalable. The real extent of your contribution to the world is then measured by the ‘making a difference’ factor of your mentees.
- Making a difference (affects many people; with a big difference)
A teacher always makes a difference in their students’ lives. That is why I am so fascinated by teaching. A traditional teacher could affect, say, 100 different people per year, times 50 years = 5,000 people in their whole life (an estimation with somewhat bloated assumptions). This by all means is considered ‘making a difference’, assuming the teacher’s influence is of high quality.
So what we should be looking for is the final case. To really make a difference you must target many people with a relatively big difference.
Through online education, I have reached 800,000+ myself and 1M+ through mentoring other authors. Judging by the fact that many of our students managed to enter data science, change careers, find jobs, get promoted, etc., I can say that we are really making a difference.
My latest project is based on a similar assumption, albeit more indirect.
Ok super. Let’s now jump to the main part of our interview. You are currently leading an organization that aims to make a social impact. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change in our world today?
Definitely. Using the same framework as above, we thought: if we can’t make a difference in many fields simultaneously, then we should help people who make a difference every day.
We created a software, 3veta.com, where people who need an online meeting to practice their profession have an effortless video call, booking experience, calendar synchronization, meeting reminders, and can even receive payments — all-in-one place.
These professionals include consultants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, coaches, fitness instructors, etc. — everyone who needs a face-to-face meeting to do their job. In the pandemic times, this was replaced by an online meeting.
Our software helps these professionals focus on their work, leaving technological struggles to us. The premise is: let’s make it as easy as possible for them to make a difference for their clients.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
Well, COVID-19 hit and we were all locked down.
- Teachers had to set up online classes and do their job through video calls
- Lawyers had to consult clients over the phone but struggled to get paid
- Yoga and fitness instructors live-streamed on Facebook but got lost in the feed, thus losing their identity
- Just about anyone struggled with scheduling, no-shows, event reminders
As we thought about these different problems, we realized they have a lot in common. They required a live meeting so the service can be executed and payment can be exchanged.
Bringing this online is no easy task even for tech-savvy people. So we set course to change that. We thought: let’s build a place where you can build your own meetings platform: video meetings, a booking page, even a website, all with your own name and logo (even in the meeting room).
We cover the technical side as well as the investment while making this tool available for everyone to use. A professional on 3veta.com needs 10-minutes of their time and as little as $10 per month to bring their practice fully online.
Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest it. They don’t get up and just do it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and do it? What was that final trigger?
I have many ideas all the time. When an idea is more complex I make some preliminary research and let it sink in. It is extremely important to keep it in the back of your mind. I am rarely actively thinking about it but am constantly passively thinking about it. Certainly, I consult with other people, bring some parts of the idea into everyday conversations and try to incorporate other people’s points of view into the idea.
With 3veta, we could not stop thinking about the idea. It was one of these ideas which were not only on the back of your mind but was surfacing and resurfacing all the time. Not only for me but for all co-founders.
The final trigger was a meeting where we decided: let’s stop talking about it. Everyone should think about it on their own. If in 2 weeks we still want to do it, then we should stop wasting more time and just do it.
Many young people don’t know the steps to take to start a new organization. But you did. What are some of the things or steps you took to get your project started?
Thanks for the question. In fact, we are religiously documenting every meeting we have. Therefore, I will simply open my OneNote to the first meeting ever and quote from there. The agenda consisted of 12 points:
- Research
- What else is out there
- How much money are others making on similar ideas (how viable is the idea)
- What are the super cool things about the tools others have built
- Identify competitor
- Direct (doing roughly the same)
- Indirect (not doing the same but could quickly pivot to direct competitors)
- Broad (e.g. Skype)
- Action plan — who takes ownership of which tasks that come up today
- Create a timeline for the next 6 months to 1 year
- Research and speak to web devs and companies (so we can later estimate the price to build the product)
- HR needs (IT, UX/UI, Sales, Marketing, Admin, Finance). Idea is to split the roles between us and see what we are lacking in terms of expertise
- Scaling structure
- How to structure the collaboration to accommodate 10, 20, 100 people
- How to structuring the product (to accommodate 10, 100, 100000 users)
- Educate the co-founding team. Are there gaps in their knowledge? What are the resources everyone needs to go through to be up to speed with vocabulary, state of tech, etc?
- Tools to use
- Documentation of meetings, research, and notes (OneNote)
- Task tracking (Trello)
- Where do we meet (Zoom in the beginning, then 3veta)
- Communication tools (Slack)
- Cloud (Google Drive, then we switched to Nextcloud)
- What is the availability of the team? (since we were not doing this full-time at the beginning)
- Decision making. How do we make decisions, especially when we’ve got a disagreement? The point is that we should be moving fast even if some of us are unhappy
- Legal entity
- Who is the CEO
- Who holds shares
- What is the initial capital (founder debt or founder equity)
This is what we call ‘the boilerplate startup’. No matter what you are doing, I cannot think of a point from this conversation that you can skip.
Later we got together for a so-called ‘boot camp’. As our CTO said: ‘we must get in a room and live and breathe the product for as many days as we need’. And we did. At the end of this boot camp, we had covered every aspect of the product and the strategy. We documented it and were ready to get going.
This set-up helped us to remain focused for close to 1 year. Afterward, our problems were different so we adopted an agile workflow.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
We were looking for a domain name for quite some time. We had shortlisted a bunch of domains we saw fit. We found out that all 4-letter domains are taken since 2016 (if I remember correctly). We tracked down several good ones, including jola.com. It was this 20-year-old website, so we thought we may be able to buy it. We reached out to the owners with a very friendly message and sent this super sweet photo of our co-founding team + our Labrador dog next to a whiteboard that read ‘Please give us jola.com’. We wanted to get the domain to build a great product, we thought. Turned out that the owners of the domain were a major telecommunication infrastructure company in Canada that had totally forgotten about this domain. It wasn’t for sale at all. Money couldn’t buy this domain.
In the end, we settled on 3veta.com. 3veta is a 5-letter domain name that represented the first letter of each of the founders’ surnames, three times V for 3veta.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or takeaway you learned from that?
We also have a podcast supporting the main business. You can find it at Life Math Podcast. We got professional microphones and gathered to record the first session. It was definitely a test recording. We were just getting started so we knew we had a lot to learn. So we settled in for 1 hour’s worth of conversation.
Around the end of it, my podcast co-host asked me why I had this light on the back of my microphone. Turned out I had been speaking at the back of the mic the whole time. Since the mic was great at noise canceling it had filtered out most of what I had said. Good thing it was the test recording so it came out as a funny story, instead of a sad one!
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
I really believe in mentors. These should be people who are experienced enough to need a very little context to understand the issues you are facing. I’ve got several people like this in my life. Every couple of months I meet them to brief them on our latest achievements and share our ongoing struggles. One conversation with a mentor could change the whole direction of our efforts for the next couple of months.
This is the high-level detached view everyone needs from time to time. The point is that you simply can’t detach yourself enough from your full-time job to see things with no emotions attached.
I am also working on being that person for others, which invites an even newer perspective on both theirs and my own challenges.
Without saying specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
There was this lady who had just retired from work. She was exploring new ways to make some extra income online. She was quite open to the idea of consulting professionals in her field. Exploring the different tools that others use was already challenging for her. We got in touch quite by accident and I started explaining to her how her online business should be set up. It was the perfect use case for our product. She became one of our first clients, while for her we were the only people who would sit down with her and walk her through everything. I think she wouldn’t be online if it wasn’t for us (and in a way, vice versa — each of your first clients is priceless).
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
- Politicians, please update tax laws for freelancers. In many countries, there is a big issue with reporting taxes if you are working as a freelancer or doing a side hustle. Especially for international transactions. It is extremely hard and often quite expensive to freelance (and pay your taxes), which turns off many people.
- Society, please pay the same price or higher for online services. While the majority of the people are okay with this, there is a large portion of people who believe that if a service is online, it should be cheaper. They don’t have specific reasoning but just feel that way. Why should a doctor, lawyer, or teacher charge you less for the same knowledge or expertise they provide in-person vs online?
- Community, please start helping people who want to bring their services online. Tell the professionals that you’d be much happier to at least have the opportunity to receive the service online. Also, let them know that technology is very advanced and everything is quite easy nowadays.
Fantastic. Here is the main question of the interview. What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each).
Let’s do this!
1.Learn about ethos, pathos, and logos
When building a new product many people think that it’s all about ads. We see ads every day all day, so it may be logical to think that. However, the purest sales, i.e. person to person is inevitable.
I have been trying to become better at sales for quite some time now. It is important to note that I am not a natural salesperson. However, I am a keen reader. So I’ve read a lot about sales. The one which really worked for me was the ethos, pathos, logos concept.
Simply put, ethos refers to your credibility, pathos to the emotion you convey or provoke, and logos to data or facts. To make anyone buy something from you, you need all three to hit home.
To me, the ethos part has always been problematic. I have the credibility to speak on many different subjects but I don’t articulate it early enough in a new relationship. Since I learned about ethos, pathos, logos as a sales concept, I always try to build my ethos extremely early on.
To sum up: If you need to sell something, this means you must learn to articulate how great you or your product are, in a way that is trustworthy and convincing. Even if it feels like boasting.
2. Don’t do ‘too much product’ before you start selling.
Everyone has heard about creating an MVP (a minimum viable product). No matter how well you think you know this, you are most definitely building too much product before you start selling it.
In our case, I was not convinced of the greatness of the beta version of the product, so I didn’t want to blow my shot with any prospective customer. Let’s assume that’s alright and you can wait to improve your beta.
Well, but then you end up with a product that is literally too advanced to sell to early adopters. Early adopters don’t like it because it looks like something too polished for them to give feedback on and be useful. Actual clients feel it is not polished enough for their use case (because there hasn’t been much feedback obviously).
In our case, we ended up hiding features just because it made us look ‘earlier in our development’ in the eyes of early adopters.
3.Build your personal brand
People resonate with people, not brands. Therefore, you must invest a fair share of your time in building your personal brand. You must be active online. It could be LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, your personal blog, you name it. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to build a base of followers who can contact you directly and vice versa. This will be your strongest asset as it will help you kickstart any new project you take on. It is problematic to promote your new startup to your existing startup’s audience through a company brand. But it is only natural to promote it to your personal fans or followers.
4. Don’t waste your time with VCs at the beginning of your project
If you are building a product and are doing a good job at promoting it, people will notice. For instance, posting your company on Crunchbase is sufficient for VCs to start contacting you. At the beginning of your journey, VCs are like time vampires. You get excited about meeting them but they only suck away your time. You have nothing to offer them. Yet. Their job, on the other hand, is not only investing but also gathering information. Therefore, they will ask you all types of questions about your business with absolutely no intention to invest at this point. Focus your time on building a product with good traction before speaking to VCs (note: angel investors are a different story).
5. Being an entrepreneur is stronger than your ‘will to chill’
They say: entrepreneurship is not a job title but a lifestyle, оr something of the sort.
The truth of the matter is that being an entrepreneur is quite devouring. You burn with the desire to work on your project. And it is rarely just one project. Especially once you’ve got something successful going, you can’t get enough. You just want to achieve more things, start and complete more projects. I can’t remember the last weekend when I haven’t worked at all. And don’t get me wrong — I don’t overwork on my full-time project. I take a rest from it by working on other projects. It could be my podcast, my blog or just making the apartment block where I live better for me and all the neighbors.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Look for problems to solve everywhere and take risks while you are young. The older you get, the more risk-averse you become. In your 20s and 30s, you have this amazing opportunity to try new things, learn quickly, and fail fast. These are your best years for quick accumulation of skills. Don’t give all of them away to the big corporations in exchange for limited financial upside and limited knowledge.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Tim Ferriss.
Tim is someone who was popping up on my feed for years. He called himself the ‘human guinea pig’ and had written the book: ‘The 4-hour Workweek’. This made me suspicious of him to the point of irritation. Took me some time to give his work a chance and now I cannot stop digesting his content.
Tim Ferriss is absolutely remarkable in the way he thinks about work and life. I highly recommend him to anyone ready to challenge their point of view and be confronted with tons of 1st party data (human guinea pig experimentation) or 3rd party data (scientific research).
Private breakfast with Tim? I don’t feel ready for such a meeting but let it be on the record that I would buy a ticket to the US to attend one!
How can our readers follow you online?
I try to be almost everywhere. However, I must be succinct so:
- to message me: LinkedIn
- to read what I write: Iliya’s Ideas and Frameworks
- to listen to me: Life Math Podcast
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
About the Interviewer: Penny is an environmental scientist-turned-entrepreneur. She’s worked as a climate scientist, an environmental planner, and a wilderness park ranger. Motivated by a passion to raise a generation of environmental leaders, in 2010 Penny founded Green Kid Crafts, a children’s media company that provides kids around the world with convenient and eco-friendly STEAM activities. Today, it’s become a leader in the subscription industry, with over 1 million packages shipped worldwide that have exposed a generation to think about and take a leadership role in sustainability. Penny, her husband Jeff, and her children Rowan and Declan live together in San Diego, California. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Management and an M.S. in Environmental Science. Penny has over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship, management, strategy and finance. She’s a seasoned leader, an inspiring speaker, an encouraging business mentor, and a creative writer. You can learn more about Green Kid Crafts at https://www.greenkidcrafts.com/ and follow Penny’s stories and updates at https://www.instagram.com/greenkidcrafts/ and https://twitter.com/bauderpenny.
Young Change Makers: Why and How Iliya Valchanov of 3veta Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.