I am Ivan Minić. Business development consultant, serial entrepreneur, podcaster, and author.

For the past twenty years, I have been balancing between technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. I have helped some of the world's biggest brands establish their digital presence in our market. Today, however, I am more focused on local businesses—both small and large—as well as mentoring and working individually with people who are struggling to build something of their own.

Additionally, my team and I try to create content that makes sense and actually helps people grow. We do this primarily through the Pojačalo podcast and the A1 Naša Mreža portal—because I believe that knowledge is only valuable when it is shared.

I know it seems strange, but I actually started working in 2000, and in 2003, while in high school, I switched to part-time schooling because I had a job that required working full-time. It wasn't necessarily something I wanted, but those were the circumstances and family needs.

At the beginning of 2002, driven by a desire to create a space for people to gather and connect, I launched Burek.com—which grew over time into the largest regional internet community with more than 5.000.000 members. Following the sale of a share to Hungarian investors—whereby I did not sell them my personal share, but rather a share in the company, in what was one of the first examples of a major investment in online businesses in our region—we launched Conquiztador in mutual synergy, which very quickly became extremely popular and was played by more than 1.000.000 users.

As a designer, developer, and project manager, I have been involved in more than 550 projects for clients across 35 countries—recently mostly as part of the brilliant team at Simplicity.rs. Before the advertising market made it possible for Burek to have stable monthly revenues, funding the resources to run it, as well as my personal life and development, came as a result of the exceptionally large amount of knowledge we accumulated while developing it. Because when you need to develop something and don't have the money to pay for it, the only option is to learn.

Later, when digital marketing began to emerge as a topic, as one of the pioneers, I collaborated with more than 50 of the most famous world brands and multinationals regarding their presence on the local market.

How is a community built?

In addition to gathering people in digital communities, I organized my first event back in 2001. It would turn out to be quite fateful for the things that followed.

I wasn't the lead organizer back then, but I was one of the most important members and took on serious obligations and great responsibility. I have organized more than 150 smaller or larger events, highly specialized or for the benefit of the wider community, under my own or other people's brands as a consultant.

The largest of them is probably Blogomanija, which took place on Kopaonik in 2013 and gathered more than 1.000 participants. And I am fatefully bound to brands that no longer exist today but once shaped our digital ecosystem, such as BizBuzz and Webiz.

I have woven myself into several editions of Digital Day organized by IAB Serbia. I have also helped numerous other colleagues both with the technical challenges of organization, and with conceptualizing programs and finding those incredible people who will speak on the big stage.

Since 2020, I have been involved in creative direction and programming mostly through our brand Digitalk, and as a consultant, I work on several events every month, either as a technical coordinator or a creative director.

If I had to explain what I do in a single sentence, I would say that, in a sea of identical things, I find what is different, giving voice and space to unusual stories, alongside a perfect technical execution, which is a must for an engineer with pronounced OCD.

The businesses I launched or partnered in over these past two decades were never just entries in a registry. Every single one of them was an attempt to solve a real problem, bring people together, and bridge online communities, marketing, and brick-and-mortar business operations in our market.

In addition to the companies I started, I have had, and still have, some very important roles in projects and organizations that are particularly meaningful to me.

Throughout my career, my projects and initiatives have been recognized multiple times at the PC Press Top 50 Awards (best websites and online projects), Web Fest, and UEPS Annual Awards, and I have twice been named among the best-rated speakers at the regional conference Konverzija.

For me, words—whether spoken into a microphone or written on paper—have always been the best way to settle learned lessons and give others a tailwind. Over the years, I have written more than 500 professional articles and columns for regional portals. It all started with my blog For the Win (ftw.rs), and continued through collaboration with portals such as Netokracija, BeforeAfter, the Serbian edition of Vice, Južne Vesti, SportKlub, Sportske.net, and BizLife. Today, I mostly share these entrepreneurial thoughts and business lessons through regular columns on the A1 Naša mreža portal.

Since 2010, I have conducted more than 400 interviews through which I shared stories of small and medium-sized family businesses from all over Serbia, with the fantastic multimedia support of my colleagues Stefan Đaković and Vojislav Vujanić. In 2018, I decided to step in front of the camera, and that is how the story of Pojačalo began.

In addition to hundreds of articles, over the years I have written several books in which I tried to write honestly and from a personal perspective, without sugarcoating, about entrepreneurship, people, neurodiversity, and finding one's own path:

Since 2005, I have lectured at more than 200 events, mostly in Serbia and the region, but also across various meridians. Most often, these were student events or professional gatherings of communities of which I am an active member, but I have also been a keynote speaker or moderator about thirty times at some of the most relevant gatherings in the region. What set me apart in particular is that I was a TEDx speaker three times, and was supposed to be a fourth, but had to skip it due to health reasons.

I have held numerous open training sessions, as well as closed ones tailored to the needs of clients in areas close to me, such as entrepreneurship, marketing, branding, technology, gamification, neurodiversity, innovations, and many other topics.

From 2017 to 2020, I taught Digital Project Management at the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK), and was truly happy to pass on the knowledge and experience I gathered to some young people.

If you would like to hire me for a speaking engagement or a workshop for your company, it is best to contact the Talks and Folks agency, which represents me in these engagements.

As a consultant, I worked for many large systems on their marketing campaigns, sales channel development, digitalization, introduction of business processes, resolving communication challenges, and other areas. However, I most prefer to work with small businesses and individuals who truly want to make a difference, because in those circumstances it is possible to track almost in real-time how your contribution makes a difference.

I have been engaged in numerous projects and workshops of major international organizations such as USAID, UNDP, the Thomson Foundation, GIZ, OSCE, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank, and the topics I most frequently dealt with were digitalization and strategic communications. A special place in my work is held by 15 years of collaboration with independent media throughout the region, most often in the areas of business development, monetization, new format development, as well as increasing visibility and influence through the internet and social media.

Alongside entrepreneurship, technology, and education, sport is a major constant in my life. For more than 20 years, I have been active in sports journalism as a hobby, combining my love for the written word and analytics with the dynamics of elite sports competitions.

During this period, I have had the opportunity—both as an observer and a sports journalist—to attend the Olympic Games, the European and World Basketball Championships, a MotoGP race weekend, Roland Garros, the Davis Cup, the Fed Cup, and the Serbian Open. During the 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup in China, I also produced a special series titled "Behind the Great Wall of China" with Slobodan Šarenac.

I have conducted a series of cult interviews for the Serbian edition of Vice, both independently and in tandem with my friend Miloš Jovanović. Some of these, such as the conversations with Miloš Teodosić, Marko Pantelić, and Goran Ivanišević, were translated into several languages and became the most-read articles in multiple countries across various global Vice editorial offices.

Additionally, alongside Milan Dozet, I co-hosted the first season of the Pick 'N' Talk video podcast, the official format of the Crvena zvezda basketball club.

My sporting interests and journalism assignments have also taken me to the European and World Athletics Championships, English Premier League and Champions League matches, and even games of the Japanese football league. Additionally, I have covered the European Shooting and Kayaking Championships, as well as reporting from numerous other sports arenas worldwide.

If you believe we can build something valuable together, whether through consulting, mentoring, speaking engagements, or if you simply want to share a story—write to me directly at my email address.

If you need a photo to illustrate my participation in an event, podcast guest appearance, interview, or something similar, I have prepared this section where everything is available in one place.