Entrepreneur and a passionate tech junkie, Marios Italos started his business almost five years ago while studying Civil Engineering in Athens, Greece. Today, Intergo —a digital startup specialising in SaaS related digital products — is a fully remote company that employs 12 full-time freelancers.
Marios tells us that although he already had a broad understanding of different internet skills, he was still a full-time student when he started his business. Therefore he quickly found himself swamped with work.
“I decided that if my business was ever going to work, I had to reach out and outsource. I started small — hiring to fix a small coding issue, write an article, or create a graphic or logo — this quickly evolved to an extension of myself,” he remembers.
Employing a fully remote team today, Intergo has developed a completely new way of working that leverages the flexibility of global talent.
Outsourcing has allowed for a rapid growth
At the start of his entrepreneurial journey, Marios had one goal and one goal only — to grow his business. A tall order in itself, it was particularly challenging to pull off with full-time studies consuming most of his productive time. That’s when he started delegating.
“I realised that if I focused on the things I was good at (marketing and product design) and outsourced the rest, I could really grow the business and support more people, even though I was working from the comfort of my home.”
The nature of outsourcing has allowed Marios to find like-minded individuals who are pursuing a similar type of flexible working arrangement. He has also been able to expand his business exponentially without making any personal sacrifices or stretching his working hours.
A distributed team with a unified purpose
A natural entrepreneur, Marios tells us he believed from a young age that the internet would change everything in the future of business, enabling companies to ditch the physical office and the 9-5 regime.
He says that he always dreamed of building something big and digital that would give him (and the people working with him) maximum flexibility. With Intergo flourishing and his distributed global team working in harmony, Marios is now living his work dream!
“Our first and most important product was www.fax.to, an online fax service to send and receive faxes digitally,” says Marios. “I did all the initial web design and a lot of research on how to send and receive a fax. With the part-time help of one freelance developer and several other freelancers hired on a task basis, this product grew to be the pillar of the company, serving over 4,000 people every month and supporting a fully remote team of 12 full-time freelancers all around the globe.”
Intergo went on to build a host of other digital products, including an SMS marketing and notification platform for enterprises and an email verification and validation product.
“With the help of my super freelancer army, we are trying to build great products and expand sales in the UK and globally,” Marios tells us. “And none of this would be possible without platforms like PeoplePerHour.com. PeoplePerHour enabled me to find talented people around the world with the same mentality as me, striving to find flexibility and freedom of working.”
Living between London and Cyprus and doing most of his work from co-working spaces, Marios assures us he has no plans for changing his approach to building a digital business in a globally connected world.