DevriX turned 15 - how digital evolved and our next pivot

On Saturday, my first business DevriX turned 15 - after starting in our version of a “garage” (a shared 3BR). I covered our teenager in this carousel with some photos from the party with most of the local crew 📷️ 

You’ll see a handful of local and family-owned businesses crossing the 15 threshold, especially mom and pop shops in small towns or solo businesses (handymen or technicians). But in tech and digital, it’s often “go big or go home”, with 80%+ of startups failing to survive the first 5 years and funded startups aiming to exit in the first 5-8 years to repay investors and yield the legacy gains.

Am I glad I made this choice 15 years ago? ABSOLUTELY.

Would I repeat that starting today? No.

A 2010 market analysis through an advisory lens today

From building my first website to today, my perspective on assessing business opportunities and markets has evolved drastically.

How I pictured the opportunity in 2010, founding DevriX:

• Digital was exciting, and I wanted to dive all-in

• Existing job prospects were limited: product companies were still early, most roles were corporate and slow, startups were in their infancy, remote wasn’t a thing

• 9-to-5 fixed BPOs were the main model that worked at the time

• I was still living in a poor suburban area, far from tech hubs

• The Great Recession kicked the market hard in late 2008 and recovering back was unclear (in terms of “when” and “how well”)

• With a few years of freelancing experience, “being ready to become a CEO” looked plausible

• PHP/WordPress seemed to be growing - or dominating the market hard enough

• Agencies were mostly offline, creative, brand; tech wasn’t a strong suit for most

• Outsourcing costs were affordable for withstanding peaks in the “feast and famine” up cycles

In 2025, the market has undergone multiple transformations. What was once valid no longer held true - or the market movers at the time weren’t transitioning in the same direction anymore.

How starting the same agency in 2025 would crash today - and why

Let’s take a look as an observer - someone in college pitching you on their brand new web software/digital agency today:

1. There are hundreds of thousands of similar agencies already - and millions of web freelancers. If you don’t trust me, my 2015 research alone discovered over 200,000 freelancers on oDesk (now Upwork) alone, offering WordPress services (let alone anything else web). Expand that to any other job marketplace and creative/software service stack, and fast-forward 10 years of evolution.

2. Access to digital has been easier than ever. Starting a business for $100 or signing up for Gumroad or LemonSqueezy or any other 3rd party handling compliant billing today, with affordable laptops and 2nd hand marketplaces for gear, cheap Internet available everywhere, digital nomad hubs to move and expand runway, large networks and ecosystems, tons of free digital channels, and AI for automating everything. Since all of that is available to anyone age 12 and above worldwide, hundreds of thousands of “agencies” have spun up in the past 5 years alone.

3. The pandemic also fast-tracked that experience - with work-from-home being normalized, millions of workers launched second jobs and part-time gigs, and companies adapted to working with remote workers for a few years.

4. We quickly picked WordPress as our go-to tech stack in 2011-2012 back when it was powering 11-12% of the web. It runs 43%+ now, which is great, but it’s also stalled for a few years reaching a peak. This indicates other caveats (I’ll get to this below.)

5. Other competitive site builders like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Webflow, along with smaller niche CMS’es and even static file hosting platforms (including GitHub) - and now vibe coding and AI site builders - have saturated the space quickly. Yes, websites are still needed, but brochure websites are common outside of the upper tier of brands and corporations, eCommerce sites, communities and marketplaces. The bottom of the market can go with DIY builders or hire cheap labor for pennies on the dollar.

6. Other means of digital portfolios have grown popular in certain categories - such as Facebook pages for coffee shops, restaurants, and other local businesses (first covered that in 2017), Instagram profiles for influencers, YouTube channels for vloggers, and other variations of what Myspace was used for by bands back in my time.

7. The modern web is undergoing transformation. SEO was hit hard in 2023 and AI overviews aren’t helping at all. LLM searches are going up. Social media is getting crowded and automated. The Dead Internet Theory, originally more dystopian than needed, is taking a different chance here, all things considered.

8. Kids don’t use the Internet the same way, either. Smartphones are now a commodity, 4G and 5G unlimited Internet plans are common, and reels and shorts are a preferred medium. Compare that to predominant desktop browsing of long text pages with limited Internet access back then.

Workplace principles, Gen Z hires, aggressive digital pitches, automated cheap (low quality solutions), and many additional blockers that weren’t as overwhelming early on.

I’m a big believer in the Bell Curve - if you’re too early, the cost to disrupt and create new categories will be overwhelming. If you’re past the peak, you’re entering a highly commoditized space.

Are there any rising trends today that make a difference?

One recurring piece of advice I share in the era of AI lately, across relevant events I speak to or sponsor:

Either go 100% in LLMs and agentic systems, or take a 180 and focus on what AI can’t do.

The speed of evolution in that space is overwhelming. Even as an individual, you’ll likely need two full-time researchers to do R&D, follow updates, test tools and new GPT models, play with the latest tools and announcements from Google, Anthropic, Perplexity, and OpenAI, and test the broader ecosystem.

But right now, I can’t throw a rock from my balcony without hitting at least one n8n/Make consultant or agency owner, or a GPT wrapper builder, or an automation expert integrating simplified agentic systems for businesses. If this was hot and trendy 18 months ago, it’s already pacing with the speed of light and competition is fierce.

What I’m focusing on for the next 15 years (or at least 3-5 for now)

The key takeaway after reflecting on the first fifteen years of running DevriX - adaptability is more than paramount. We didn’t start with WordPress first, in fact, my first 7 projects early on were PHP web (CakePHP/CodeIgniter), Python web (Django for UNICEF), Android (was just launching), C++ and ASM for miner carts and set top boxes for hotels.

All sorts of engineering R&D stuff before honing on expanding the web on a FOSS application.

• Desktop was strong early on - we still had WinAmp or BSPlayer/VLC for songs and movies, and Spotify/Netflix have been a standard for over a decade now (or YouTube music, and many other streaming apps).

• SEO was a treasure of opportunities - the digital Yellow Pages. It isn’t anymore.

• Facebook was the go-to connection spot for everyone. Loud or not, building and growing pages was a massive perk before the 2014-2016 reset cycles, organic reach resets, and Cambridge Analytica.

• Other organic social popped up since.

• PPC scaled hard - like, really hard, expanding on the inbound opportunities prior (and a great addition to SEO.)

Several revisions later, we went through the Metaverse hype, the blockchain hype (remember ICOs?), NFTs, voice search, LLMs. Some stayed, some disappeared, some will see comeback (from AR glasses to a renowned VR effort, and NFTs as identity tokens or digitalizing paper documents).

What I’m most excited about, the age of LLMs and the mass investment in automation, are the opportunities it provides internally. A skilled senior/lead/VP would still need a dozen junior or mid-level people to manually manage campaigns, copy paste forms into 80 different enterprise screens (moving XMLs and forms over), run some tests, export dashboards over when APIs are mediocre and unstable. The amount of human labor for mundane tasks was wild, and it was slowing A players down.

The rise of the experts

Just hiring more director-level roles wasn’t justifiable before. But now is. Experienced talent willing to get in the weeds is now able to manage agents and scale tests faster than ever. Fewer people are needed in the process - not just in “replacing humans”, but accomplishing more, faster, with teams of 2-3 people vs. teams of 10, with some less skilled or with communication overhead, sick leaves, cultural differences, remote needs, and what not.

A common problem for non-business people has always been the lack of business acumen. This is something I’ve been personally focused on for the past 15 years - writing 2 books, over 500 articles on my blog, hundreds of other guest posts and pieces for Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, and many many more. And sharing internally to level up engineering or creative talent.

But with so much mediocre work to do, just copying reports over, or slicing Photoshop designs by page, or doing a lot more with limited business impact and visibility - this has been an uphill battle.

People have been referred as “resources”, as in “human resources” for the HR role. This is wrong. I believe the modern organization shouldn’t use “humans” instead of automation, tools, systems, or AI that can’t be automated, used for scraping, research, alerting.

People should be partners, the team, consultants, strategists, contributors, relying on smaller teams for what can’t be automated, and heavy tooling for everything else. Technology being commoditized focuses on humans, their skills, expertise, and lessons learned over time. Alumni groups, professional contacts and connections. Niche understanding of industries, categories, and ecosystems - as the secret sauce to running a coffee shop, a restaurant, a BPO, is often in cultural or organizational specifics that LLMs will never know, not reveal. A sense of gut feeling and reading people.

This takes a level of transformation - both cultural, and operational. And while it’s aligned with our existing portfolio of clients and partners, restructuring our service suite would look differently, including a more refined enterprise approach that scales down $2M projects into $250K builds thanks to the recent innovations, and monthly retainers for 70 hours that previously took 5 full-time people to deliver.

The retainer model will evolve - because dedicating full-time people won’t be as effective, but spreading across 3 projects would bring the best of both worlds - which we’ve always done, now structured differently. This is what I’m focusing on in the coming months, with two new director hires and COO support integrated into the new modeling.

Any transformative best practices and war stories are welcome - hit me up in the replies.

Mario

 📚️ Books I read this month - I like this new series and may keep it ongoing:

• ✅ LinkedIn’s Five Circles by my friend Alex Krastev (100%)

• ✅ “Main Street Millionaire” by Codie Sanchez (100%)

• Hooked - on habits and cues and product alignment (25% in)

• “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen - a detailed intelligence brief of what happens if things really turn to worst (30% in)

• Ray Dalio’s “How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle” (20% in)

• “The Sweaty Startup” by Nick Hueber (10% in)

🎈 The “15 years” party and team bonding - cherishing the milestones along the way is helpful. Pacing fast and skipping some wins is a missed opportunity to pat yourself on the back, an extra push for the next big thing. Been a great party and we have to do that more often than 2-3 times a year!

🇪🇺 Webit and meeting AI, consulting, and Fortune 500 - another epic event with thousands of guests attending Webit this month. I shared my summary as usual, with some snippets from Accenture and BCG, Google, health tech startups (plus inHEART that I backed myself), and key takeaways from the fintech and educational panels, too.

👥 Over 30 speakers, one repeatable playbook. Webit proved that AI’s rapid uptake is only half the story. Bridging the trust gap and refining prompt strategies are the secret sauce for 2025 innovation. If GPTs are the new “must-have” skill, thought leaders must dive deeper than surface-level use.

🔖 See the full impact of your email campaigns. Go beyond open rates with cross-channel analytics that link engagement across platforms.

🔖 Focus your analytics on what matters. Tie metrics directly to strategy with this analytics alignment guide for better results.

🔖 Plan forecasts with greater accuracy. Use time-series models like ARIMA in this guide to forecasting for marketers to improve ROI.

🔖 Automated content at enterprise scale. See how leaders like Netflix use AI in content creation to lower costs and raise engagement.

🔖 Plug revenue gaps before they grow. Learn how quantitative benchmarks help teams focus on results in digital transformation.

🔖 Build discipline into your work habits. This guide to momentum shows how routine drives meaningful outcomes.

🔖 Plan your legacy for a volatile world. Explore how flexibility and values shape long-term organizational success.

🔖 Get time back for strategic work. The calendar optimization guide helps executives protect focus and act faster.

📰 Cloudflare introduces pay per crawl. Sites can charge AI bots through its pay per crawl plan.

📰 Blue ocean growth strategies endure. Firms like Apple tap Blue Ocean Strategy to enter new markets.

📰 Meta hires $100M AI team. Its new superintelligence team includes experts from OpenAI and Anthropic.

📰 DigitalOcean updates access control. Teams set custom roles for precise permission management.

📰 Figma nears a $1.5B IPO. The design tool posts strong revenue growth and margin gains.

📰 Tesla’s Musk takes direct control. Elon Musk now leads its Europe and North America divisions under direct control.

📰 Google’s AI Mode ups search power. Gemini 2.5 delivers multimodal answers and deeper insights.

📰 Microsoft’s AI boosts diagnostic accuracy. MAI Orchestrator achieves diagnostic accuracy four times above clinicians.

📰 Levelpath secures $55M funding. The round backs its AI-first procurement platform launch.

📰 Search isn’t just Google anymore. Gen Z shifts discovery to platforms like TikTok, pushing brands to search away from Google.

📰 Clio expands with vLex acquisition. The $1B deal merges practice management with merge legal intelligence.

📰 Index inclusion signals momentum. Faraday Future gains visibility through its Russell 3000® addition with boosted investor confidence.

Let’s see the latest offers from Flippa. Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter for daily/weekly/monthly offers like these.

Manufacturing News Platform: Australia's top manufacturing news site with 67K monthly pageviews, 52% newsletter open rate, 24.6K LinkedIn followers, and 16K group members. Strong expo and advertiser partnerships drive recurring engagement - listed at $103,993.

Amazon FBA Supplement Business: Seven-year-old private label brand selling supplements on Amazon and eBay. Trademarked products, 15 SKUs, low overhead, and lots of room to scale via listing optimization and marketing - available for $131,061.

Business Sustainability Website: Established 14-year-old content site in the business sustainability niche with 1,300+ posts. Generates revenue through affiliate income & sponsored posts. Strong SEO (63% organic traffic) and minimal upkeep required - listed for $220,000.

Sensory Therapy Store: Specialized e-commerce brand for educational and therapeutic products. Trusted by families, therapists, and schools across Australia. 14 years old, $89 AOV, $67K annual profit - selling for $239,659.

Meta Lead Syncing SaaS: B2B automation tool that connects ad platforms with CRM systems for digital agencies. 8 years old, 37K monthly visitors, and a proven market fit. Eliminates manual data entry and shortens response time - asking price is $349,962.

Viral Cat Brand: Direct-to-consumer dropshipping business targeting cat lovers. Powered by viral content - no filming needed. 2M+ followers, 90K email subs, 12% return customer rate, and 45% margins on $592K revenue/year - asking price is $697,900.

Forbes-Featured Alternative Fashion Brand: Horror-meets-rock fashion brand endorsed by celebrities and metal band ambassadors. 107K Instagram followers, global wholesale accounts, and in-house ops in Memphis. Seasonal Halloween spikes - listed for $900,000.

Need My Help?

Keeping myself busy - here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling enterprises on top of WordPress? DevriX provides martech retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo and we manage high-traffic platforms (hundreds of millions of monthly views), B2B SaaS apps, partnership management solutions, supporting $10M - $250M businesses with scalability, custom funnels, CRO, big data augmentation, AI-driven processes, HubSpot workflows, programmatic SEO - and everything a modern business requires in digital in 2025.

🚀 Work 1:1 with me? At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($1,800/mo) for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($497/mo) for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

🌠 Feature your business across the community? The B2B Ecosystem includes this newsletter and 40 other digital properties (directories, newsletters, blogs, SaaS, and social accounts) targeting B2B executives. See how your business can benefit.

📈 International founder looking into US LLCs? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.

📊 Into digital M&A? I work closely with Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides the tools to list your business and close the deal.

💼 Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink.