From the life of an ambassador: From leading an agency to everything creative and back with ambassador Maxim Krušina

8 minutes

Who are our ambassadors? How do they work, what do they enjoy and what are they currently working on? In the next part of our column we talked to the agency's director Massimo Filippi and versatile creative Maxim Krušina.

What is your main occupation?

I do a lot of things. Officially, I should probably say that I am currently the director of my agency Massimo Filippi, which I founded in 2007 with the unfortunately deceased Filip Crhak. But as part of my job I do everything from accountancy to design, DTP, programming, photography, video editing and I enjoy all of it.

Maxim Krušina - Director of Massimo Filippi agency and versatile creative riding a blue scooter

"Sometimes I start projects, I do initial idea making, sometimes I get in my car and drive to the printer or get on a plane and fly to Košice to check the cans to make sure the printing is good. It's really quite varied and I'm very happy for that."

What does your typical day look like?

As I get older, I get up early, which has the advantage of no beeping notifications and total peace of mind to work. I enjoy working, so sometimes I go for fourteen or sixteen hours straight, but other times I know that if I can't, I'm not going to break my knee and go for a walk. In general, I'm really grateful for the variety of what I spend my working time doing. Sometimes I'm starting projects, doing initial idea making, sometimes I get in my car and drive to the printer or get on a plane and fly to Košice to check cans to make sure the printing is going well. Or I yell at the printers to make the can the way I sent them the proof. Or I fly a drone and film. It's really quite a variety, and I'm very happy for that.

Maxim Krušina sitting at his vintage Apple computer pretending to edit the website of Massimo Filippi on it

"We have actually built almost 30 websites on solid. It's a reliable tool for me, thanks to which I can make sites quickly, flexibly, I can estimate pretty accurately how much time we'll spend on it, because I know that nothing will surprise me along the way, and thanks to all this I know that we can make good money on it."

How did you get to be a solidpixels ambassador and what do you see as the key advantage of solidpixels?

I've been making websites since the 90s. Since then I've been thinking, I can't do websites, it's a very complicated thing, I've hired someone to do it over and over again. But when it kept getting delayed over and over again, and the contractors were giving me the "my pet died" excuse, I figured I'd just sit down and do it myself. Gradually, I've managed smaller projects on my own, we've even developed a few generations of administration systems ourselves, we've really gone through everything, but it was terribly time consuming. We didn't want to depend on external coders and we also wanted to save time, so we switched to Wordpress. At the beginning it seemed like a great solution, because the website was built so fast on it. However, when dealing with the details afterwards, it takes almost more time than if you build the site the traditional way. You build the site and it looks like it's done. But then the client comes in and says they want YouTube. So you search for YouTube plugins, find out there are about 150 of them, pick one, install it, only for some other plugin to stop working because they're incompatible with each other. So you fix it, but something else breaks. Then the client accidentally clicks on the Wordpress update, so it completely crashes the whole thing. This process is very hard to price, because you can't rely on the tool and you don't know what's around the corner.

Then I got to solidpixels by accident when I was doing a quick website for a friend. I clicked it in one day and found it suspicious how smoothly it went. I figured that this is the first time that we can make a website for projects up to about two hundred thousand crowns without any problems. For that kind of money, it's not worth doing it the traditional way at all, which is why it's the perfect solution for exactly these smaller to medium-sized projects. And besides, I see a huge strength in the possibility to assure the client that if we have a fight or stop working together over time, it doesn't matter, because he has full access and can manage everything himself in peace and simplicity. At the same time, solidpixels is brilliantly designed and it's very hard to do ugly things with it. We've actually built almost 30 websites on solidpixels. It's a reliable tool for me, thanks to which I can make sites quickly, flexibly, I can estimate pretty accurately how much time we'll spend on it because I know that nothing will surprise me along the way, and thanks to all this I know that we can make good money on it.

The moment a client comes in wanting a website, solidpixels is always the first option. There are of course exceptions when something extremely specific is needed, but those are really the minority.

Maxim Krušina portrait

"I think I convinced the client mainly by sending him the finished website at 3pm on Tuesday when we had a meeting about it at 6pm on Monday."

The Ambassador Program is here for professionals who want to deliver world-class websites to their clients. Try it too.

What is the most common myth about the web/working with the web among your clients?

Clients sometimes imagine that creating something is terribly easy. I call this type of demands "the justs." I've made a price list of such "justs" - just the site, just the logo, just the content, etc. I once went to a lady who wanted something about communicators and she said she had fifty grand for it. When I went to see her, she showed me a WhatsApp saying they wanted something like that. So I just laughed and showed her the actual value of the app which was in tens of billions of dollars. I said, I'm sure we'll program it, it just might take a little more money. It's the same thing for specific items in web development.

Can you share with us your latest favorite project?

We recently did the identity and website for the Spectaculare festival, which is a project that is close to my heart because it's a wonderful cultural event that was also created by the legendary Josef Sedlon, who has influenced me a lot in my life. For this project, despite strict internal rules, I even managed to convince the client that the website would not run on the internal system of the Akropolis Palace, where the festival takes place. I think I convinced them mainly by sending them the finished website at 3pm on Tuesday, when we had a meeting about it at 6pm on Monday.


Do you also want to try building and selling world-class websites? Try it with our ambassador program.

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