A small company that operates its own work

I am Emil Šipoš, founder and director of EML MEDIA DOO. My route into this was the ordinary one for my generation here — a Commodore 64 far too early, then the web, then the realisation that ranking a site and building one are the same problem viewed from two ends.

For years the work was search: audits, architecture, on-page and off-page, link building, and the long patient business of earning visibility for other people’s sites. That is still the largest part of the company. Right now it means running search and link-building programmes across more than five hundred sites for a single client, each with a strategy of its own — at that scale you stop guessing very quickly.

The work pushed steadily further down the stack. First into hosting the sites properly, then into automating what we published on them, and eventually into writing software outright — WordPress and custom CMS work, then Node.js applications, then native Android and iOS clients. Today the company runs Astronoir, a subscription platform with web and mobile apps and a pipeline that generates personalised material every day, and ZAP Publish, the panel through which clients see their portfolios and order work.

It is a deliberately small operation. I would rather be accountable for a handful of things that genuinely work than be a department in something larger that mostly forwards email.