Over the next few weeks and months we will be presenting some of the most popular websites created with the Directory theme. The first such site is Engdex.de. To find out as much as possible about the site I had a discussion with Brian Burroughs, the creator of Engdex.de. He was kind enough to answer all of my questions and provide a glimpse into what it’s like creating and running a directory website. Can you provide a few more words about yourself? What is your background? I am Brian Burroughs, the director and CTO at Enterprise East, incorporated in Poland. I spent more than 20 years in the IT field, from Unix engineering roots growing to enterprise midrange, storage and monitoring, and solutions architecture. In 2012 I decided it was the right time to make the move to entrepreneur. At the time Poland appealed as a startup-friendly place, and I chose the North coast “Trójmiasto” region. We have a small office in Sopot with a great team where we run a remote concierge service, and are growing web communities such as Engdex. We also do a small amount in general web development and animation production. We have a lot of plans to leverage our multi-lingual team for new streams of business, but have to stay focused on core initiatives so as not to spread ourselves too thinly. How did you get the idea to create Engdex.de? We followed an interesting path to arrive at Engdex. We have a sister company offering multilingual virtual assistants (http://EuroConcierge.co) and in the beginning 2012/2013 we were looking to market it to the ex-pat community in Switzerland and Germany. We looked into advertising on some of the websites there. We found that the websites we did find were extremely poor quality, reminiscent of 1990’s HTML, and the prices were high. Even worse, the people behind these sites were individuals with no decent support response and no real company infrastructure. For example, none were capable of issuing an EU VAT receipt. One even had a foreign national taking payment for advertising space by funds transfer to her offshore personal account! It seemed like this market was a viable business model, and we could take a slice provided we could combine quality front end sites, a dependable EU VAT registered company behind it, and full-service creation and curation of quality listings. Who is the key demographic at... Read more »
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