The holy grail for international founders, global hiring, and assisted AI

You’re reading the Growth Shuttle Insider, gathering 17,000+ B2B executives, investors, and professionals making smart strategic decisions based on a blend of macro and real-world business data.  

Running global businesses is a hot topic at every business meetup or a hallway talk gathering executive leaders, managers and directors from global companies, investors and M&A people.

Because chances are, if you’re not running a restaurant or a coffee shop, you likely run a global business: with global suppliers and vendors, contractors and freelancers, clients, partners.

US LLCs solve tons of problems

This is why I’m glad I managed to get Arjun Mahadevan, doola’s own founder, on my business podcast discussing:

• US LLCs vs. other company types

• what are the best states to form a company in

• how easy it is for global founders to form an entity + register a bank account without flying to the US

• hands-free tax and bookkeeping management (including their tax packages to handle everything from start to end)

Watch the full episode or bookmark it for the weekend if you can’t right now, but it’s a must-watch:

As a European founder with 3 legal entities here, I founded 2 in the US thanks to doola after nearly a decade of looking into alternative solutions for merchants of record or other legal entities. The fear of dealing with the IRS directly because of accounting specifics has crept in for ages.

doola is solving this as well and after the last 3 years on US soil legally, I’ve transitioned most of my billing, subscriptions, Stripe invoices through the US firms because I don’t have to beg people to send me an invoice anymore or correct the billing details there or fear that $9 in Amazon KDP commissions will hit my personal account by mistake or I won’t see the invoice there, or a million other crazy scenarios.

I’ve plugged my doola link above because using this + a referral code “DOOLAMARIO10” will get you 10% off (highlighted for a reason). Robust Branding is running at the $1,999/year plan here so if you go for this one, it’s $200 down - and I can’t recommend this enough (so much I invested in doola 24 hours after I got the personal memo from Arjun a year ago).

And once legal + compliance is ready, other than your business model, the next topic at hand is hiring.

My hiring and outsourcing journey in 3 minutes

Going solo in 2008 resulted in 17 years now of poking into different business opportunities - and seeking as much help as possible whenever an opportunity presents itself.

While DevriX is fully on-site since 2017 or so, this wasn’t the case early on. In the 2010-2015 period, we had developers and marketers from Ukraine, India, Canada, the Philippines, Pakistan, Romania, Macedonia, Serbia, Portugal, the UK, and freelancers and contractors in the US, Australia, South Africa, the Netherlands, and several other countries.

For my consultancy Growth Shuttle, I’ve been using additional support as full-time hires or contractors doing social creatives, podcast editing (this episode above required 60 hours of work, no kidding), some community management or admin work for Slack activities, setting appointments, doing light research for prospects, and working on the satelite sites we run experiments on (dozens of them).

I’ve tried different outsourcing hubs and I’ve hired in the US, and we hire locally in Bulgaria. Each has pros and cons, along with contractors, freelancers, agencies, and commission-based partners.

And given the influx of outsourced talent and freelancers doing a crazy amount of outreach, picking the right choice isn’t easy. This includes pricing negotiations and faking location or even names, a topic I touched on in a recent LinkedIn post:

Even running a 40+ person agency, not every role justifies a full-time hire. Motion design, podcast editing, Reddit ads, or other specific activities are best offloaded to experts unless we plan to operationalize and build as a core service. It’s an important statement I can’t discard here.

And since the hiring ecosystem is changing rapidly, depending on the B2B global and macro environment, on supply/demand, on innovation, and different skills in play, different models fit different uses.

And AI is one of them

Believe it or not, I try to discuss AI as little as possible, being overwhelmed myself.

But the AI hype is there - and “replacing humans” and “taking jobs” and all the buzz that captures eyeballs is never-ending.

Some mundane, manual jobs will indeed be taken if the quality of work is 70% or lower. You just can’t match the top 10% or even 20% at times, and often, the amount of back and forth and editing or re-building something takes longer than doing it yourself.

And I’ve been iterating heavily on every aspect of LLM creation - text, strategy, creatives, videos, and all sorts of surrounding wrappers. Here’s my latest failed attempt to generate infographics with the latest models:

I’ve tried to “replace my job” a handful of times and it simply doesn’t work.

There are some shortcuts in the process that are primarily “automations”, and many of these have existed a decade ago as well. Think of scraping the web to pull a list of companies or contacts, or even “programmatic SEO” which we’ve done 8 years ago as well in WordPress - creating an array of new posts following a template, based on cities or countries, and data pulled from Wikipedia or other entities.

Quick image creation has been possible in Canva for a decade too, along with Visme and a handful of other tools. The current versions of “generation” look like the “can’t get there” of infographics above. And stock photos or image collections have also been around forever (including Unsplash).

Envato Elements subscriptions go for $29/mo for professional assets, infographics and slide templates, and even premium ThemeForest themes. None of that requires AI and it’s all been possible way back in time.

Engineers can speed up dev time with “scaffolding”, which has been the promise of Ruby on Rails and Laravel and other fancy frameworks building models around database schema. The rest is libraries and components that have to be “plugged in”.

Legal jobs “are now made obsolete”, except that contract and NDA templates have been available for decades, including provided copies and drafts from accelerators and VC funds to save startups time.

Once again, while AI isn’t going anywhere, and GPTs can help do research faster (if you trust the hallucinations), they don’t rank in the top 10% or even 20% of the results it takes to provide quality strategic actions. And even if they do, this market will get saturated in 3-6 months and said playbooks are going to go out of business - one of the dangers with AI SDRs nowadays, with dozens of new tools popping up, cluttering inboxes, and just ending up in spam filters.

So this is the past, now, and future of businesses in the next few years. What have I missed?

Mario

🎤 Haven’t spoken to Matt in nearly a decade - here’s my honest recap on the agency space, WordPress, and scaling B2Bs like a professional global agency:

📚 Revenue Architecture joins my reading stack. I got my copy of Jacco van der Kooij’s book yesterday and I’m diving into its frameworks on subscription models, pricing elasticity, and revenue structure later this month. I’m generally not sold on one-size-fits-all methods, but what I’ve seen so far—from the book and the Chris Walker podcast—offers a solid, pragmatic lens worth exploring.

✍️ Managing decisions without burning out. I try to minimize the number of choices I make each day—prioritizing impact, removing blockers for others, and sticking to a framework that favors clarity over perfection. I shared a few thoughts here.

📰 Shopify founder quietly deletes old stance on work-life balance. In 2019, Shopify’s CEO said 80-hour workweeks weren’t required for success and that he worked just 40 hours himself. That statement has now been deleted, in what some see as a shift in tone.

🔖 Prioritize leads that convert. Use rule-based lead scoring to identify B2B prospects worth your time. It helps align marketing and sales, reduce wasted effort, and focus on leads that are more likely to close.

🔖 AI-driven cybersecurity at scale. Companies are using AI-powered malware neutralization to speed up threat detection and automate responses across systems. As attacks evolve, these tools adapt in real time, allowing security teams to focus on broader risks instead of manual fixes.

🔖 Beyond VPNs: securing remote operations. When teams are spread across borders, basic tools aren’t enough. This case study shows how targeted protocols and training helped a company reduce phishing threats significantly—demonstrating that strong safeguards can keep pace with growth.

🔖 Why ISO 42001 matters now. As rules around AI tighten, the ISO 42001 framework offers a structured approach to staying compliant. Automating parts of the process can help teams stay focused on delivery without missing critical checks.

🔖 Personalization isn’t working unless you can prove it. To understand if your strategy delivers, you need more than gut feeling. These 9 essential KPIs for personalization break down what to measure and why it matters.

📰 OfferFit acquisition adds experimentation engine to Braze. With its $325 million purchase of OfferFit, Braze is integrating a system built to test, learn, and optimize campaign elements dynamically—turning static messaging into a more responsive feedback loop.

📰 HoneyBook might actually be worth it. Backed by $140M in annual revenue, HoneyBook stands out as a rare ZIRP-era company that could support its $2.4B valuation. The company’s strength lies in the pricing and workflow data it collects from thousands of small businesses.

📰 One image feature, one million users. A new Ghibli-inspired image generator from ChatGPT hit 1 million signups in 60 minutes. The viral success shows how the right visual format can draw attention fast and convert it. OpenAI’s launch sparked “biblical demand” and plenty of interest in repeatable tactics.

📰 xAI absorbs X in Musk’s latest consolidation move. Elon Musk has folded social platform X into his AI startup, xAI, through an all-stock agreement that values the companies at $80 billion and $33 billion, respectively. The deal aligns his ventures under one structure. Details here on the xAI-X merger.

📰 BlackRock tests Bitcoin in Europe. With its first European Bitcoin ETP, BlackRock is putting real weight behind crypto exposure. The offering could accelerate acceptance among institutional investors still watching from the sidelines.

📰 Europe’s battery sector at a crossroads. With Northvolt’s failure, the conversation shifts from scaling production to rethinking the fundamentals. Startups are experimenting with alternative materials in an effort to move beyond China’s dominant position in battery supply chains. The race is on for battery tech sovereignty.

📰 Certiverse lands funding to simplify certification. With an $11 million Series A from Cherryrock Capital, Certiverse is building tools to reduce the time and cost of creating certification exams. The goal: faster credential delivery and a model that better serves training providers and employers alike.

📰 Bridging labor gaps with WhatsApp. Ponte Labor uses WhatsApp to streamline the hiring process for Hispanic immigrants in hospitality, offering a simple and accessible solution to a nationwide worker shortage. The startup's impact and growth are detailed in this Forbes piece on how tech-light solutions are reshaping job access.

📰 Quantum computing gets a financial vote of confidence. By generating verifiable randomness using quantum methods, JPMorgan has pushed the tech closer to real-world use. While Big Tech talks up potential, the bank’s results point to cryptographic and modeling applications already underway.

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

Web Scraping Agency: A 4-year-old B2B agency offering custom data services with $94K annual profit, $574 avg. contract value, and 51% margins, priced at $195,000.

Pain Relief Heating Pads FBA Store: A 6-year-old eCom brand selling health products globally, earning $113K in annual profit with a $35 AOV, priced at $244,988.

Personal Development YouTube Channel: A 16-year-old faceless YouTube channel with 516K subscribers, 79M views, and $79K annual profit, priced at $275,000.

Social Media Lead Integration SaaS: An 8-year-old SaaS with $85K annual profit, $152 CLTV, and 7% churn, streamlining Meta lead delivery to CRMs, priced at $411,618.

Ecommerce Store in Design and Style: A 7-year-old high-fashion brand featured in Forbes with $22K monthly profit, 100K+ followers, and 67% margins, priced at $900,000.

DIY Tools Amazon FBA: A 2-year-old FBA brand in the DIY niche with $27.8K monthly profit, $51 AOV, and $1.6M TTM revenue, priced at $731,071.

Photography Courses Store: A 2-year-old branded eCom store selling mobile photo courses across 65 websites, generating $783K annual profit and supported by 1M+ followers, priced at $2,615,213.

Entrepreneur Platform: A high-margin platform generating $2.6M in annual revenue and $1.6M profit, with 14.7K monthly pageviews and 15K email subs, priced at $2,750,000.

Need My Help?

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

🌐 Scaling WordPress past 100M views? 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, 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 for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

📈 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 and use Equity to manage your ESOP tables in-house.