Several moves ahead | The visionary mindset with Ivan Alexandrov, CEO eBag.bg

CEOmoments · The visionary mindset, with Ivan Alexandrov

There's a particular energy in a room where everyone has built something real. No badges, no pitching, no performance - just founders and CEOs who has significant experience and are ready to share.

This is what we're here to nurture. When that much building wisdom sits together, something happens every one in the room leaves a little sharper than it arrived. The more connected Bulgaria's real value-builders are, the stronger the whole landscape becomes.

Our guest for the session was Ivan Alexandrov, founder and CEO of eBag.bg - the company that holds roughly 80% of Bulgaria's online supermarket market, and the only business in its segment in Europe that operates profitably. He came to share key lessons from his journey and how the company keeps innovating while it is already setting the standards.

Here are some of the statements he left in the room.

"Growing an unprofitable business is like walking away from a fire you haven't put out and lighting new ones as you go."
Ivan's philosophy is - focus relentlessly on the product, because nothing else creates durable growth; simplify to the smallest set of things that matter, then execute them near-perfectly; and never expand before the foundations can hold the weight. Expansion, in his view, is earned and not chased.

"Growth isn't the goal. The quality of the service is the goal and growth arrives as a consequence."
He was candid that he once chased growth the wrong way: quick hacks that moved a metric. The trap, he found, is that even a hack that works leaves you hunting for the next one. The shift came when he stopped optimising for growth and started fixing what wasn't good enough in the service itself. The growth followed.

"Fast growth without sustainability doesn't make you stronger."
Sometimes growth looks like a gift but isn't. A sudden surge - like the one during the pandemic for online businesses - can weaken a business instead of strengthening it. Ivan didn't read those temporary numbers on their own; he kept the bigger picture in mind, because he knew the spike wouldn't last. Efficiency, he said, can't be added after a boom. It has to be built in from the start and grown from there.

"You need some luck to meet the right partners - the people with whom ideas actually become reality."
You can't build anything big alone. The bigger the ambition, the more it depends on having the right people beside you - people who believe in the vision and are ready to grow with you. eBag's automation journey started with software, and only when they reached its limits, they build their first physical automation. What made that next step possible wasn't just the idea - it was finding the partners willing to take it on together.

"I have too many ideas - enough to kill the business. Ideas are easy. The hard part is the person who drives one change through to the end."
That was a striking note of humility from a founder at the top of his market: the discipline isn't generating ideas, it's resisting most of them. Scatter your focus, and you finish with nothing.

And when the room asked him why eBag is the only profitable player of its kind in Europe, his answer was a straight and sharp - because we can.

That confidence is absolutely earned — and the afternoon was spent in exactly the kind of visionary, innovative mindset the room is built for. Because Ivan's story isn't an exception in CEOmoments; it's the rule.

Every member and guest in the room is driving change in their own industry, each one building something others said couldn't be done. That's what makes the conversation worth having and why t