This is Tales From the Pros, where business leaders and influencers share their stories of inspiration, struggles, and successes. And I'm your host, Michael Giorgio.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tales From the Pros, and this is Michael Giorgio, your host and cofounder of Imagine Ovation. My wonderful guest with me here today is the founder and CEO of CreativeX, a technology company that aims to advance creative expression through the clarity of data. Creative x technology is used globally by Fortune 500 brands like Unilever, Mondelez, Heineken, ABI, and much more to measure creative efficiency, consistency, and impact across all creatives worldwide. A very, very unique business and an amazing entrepreneur.
Please welcome Anastasia Lang. Anastasia, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.
Thank you. That's quite it's quite a niche way. I feel I feel like I've really been hyped up. I hope I can move up to that.
Well, no. You have to give give yourself credit. Right? I mean, you've you have a a a, you know, an awesome company. You're you're making a difference, and, you know, that's what it's about. You know, it's about making an impact on others. You know? So you gotta tap yourself on the back and say
True. I'm glad. True. I think every at least every founder and entrepreneur I talk to tends to say that's the part that they're pretty bad at, is recognizing all the wins and the accomplishments and continually feeling like they're very much behind where they actually want to be.
That's very, very true. Yeah. Sometimes it's you know, it it is hard, to especially you being a data person, you can understand this is sometimes it's hard to measure the actual impact that you've made on others. That actually would be a a probably a cool platform to build. Right?
And measuring actual impact from, you know, from, you know, positive impact on other people. But, where I really wanna start, Anastasia, is just a little bit about your background and your story. Right? And this is a a business storytelling podcast, and, you know, the audience loves to learn just what you've been through, you know, some of the struggles, the successes, what you've learned, what you can teach them, and and really the inspiration that you can that you can offer them. And and that's why, you know, you're here today.
You've you've done a lot. And, again, I I really thank you for being here. So just if you rewind a little bit way before creative creative x, tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today. I know you have some background at Google. You've created others other companies as well. So I'll let you kinda take the floor.
Yeah. So, you know, the way I got to to where I am is really through a series of very lucky and coincidental events. So, I started my career at Google completely serendipitously. I studied, psychology, sociology, and French at university, so absolutely nothing that prepared me for the business world. But then I worked for my college newspaper at the time, which was a completely student run newspaper.
And my team had a very large marketing budget, and it just happened to be that, when companies came to campus, they took leadership from that college newspaper, which was very well known, and then asked them to come in and interview. So I got very lucky, got a job at Google, spent a number of years, really working on very cutting cutting edge and early technology at Google. So I found myself always gravitating to the kinds of projects where the first of something had to be done. So I really like things without a blueprint, without a precedent that I could figure out my own. And once it came to kind of, okay, let's let's sort of rinse and repeat, I'd find myself gravitating to the next early stage thing.
But inevitably, I did various jobs at Google for 5 years, left to start an e commerce business because I just felt I needed that risk and that adventure. That business was not a success. It was actually a complete disaster, so I learned a lot through that. And then but through the ashes of that ecommerce business, which was called Hatch, came what eventually became creative x, through basically, you know, sort of sheer hustle and inability to give up. And, you know, I've learned and I've made every in the book.
So I think kind of how I learn is I learned by doing, and I hope the small inspiration I can provide is being very, very honest about all the things I did wrong that I would do differently going back that, hopefully might help others avoid the same mistakes.
And, you know, it's it's funny you say that because a a lot of people that I I know, it's sometimes hard to talk about those failures and those challenges, those struggles that we've been through. And some people think, you know, they have this, you know, this mindset as, oh, it makes me look weak, and that's not true. I mean, it's called being a human being. It's Yeah. You know?
I I mean, it really is. I I think, it's very important to show that humanity, and I think people can, relate to you more relate to you more and resonate with you more and trust you more, and and your credibility just increases and and rises. And and I think it just makes you that stronger of a leader. You know? I think it's that simple. You know?
You know? And absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree. I think for me, one of the things that I found very difficult, which is why I'm on this, like, you know, mission to talk about the failures and the things we did wrong is because when I was in the process of failing, it felt very lonely. And I would talk to all of my founder friends at the time, and I would ask them how their companies were going.
They would say things like, well, you know, it's amazing and everything's going great. But I you know, it's a start up, like, by definition, especially early stage by definition, the early stages, it is difficult and terrible, and nothing is going the way you kind of predict the forecast. Yeah. So and so I just found it was so lonely, because no one was actually because, you know and and I understand to some extent, everyone sees everyone else as a potential investor or a client or a journalist, so there's this need to put on, you know, your game piece all the time. And I just got so exhausted by that.
And I really didn't wanna be one of those people who kind of faked it. And so I I unilaterally went on this mission of talking about, you know, hear all the things that are going wrong, and hear all the things that, you know, may be going wrong for you, and maybe we can kind of bond over it and learn from it together. So definitely a big believer in sharing those.
That's awesome. I love it. I love it. So, you know, now fast forwarding. Now we're you're at CreativeX, and and you've been, running and building this company for how many years now? How long has it been?
For a little over 5 years. Yeah.
Awesome. That's great. You know, making it past those 1st few years is really tough. You know, I think there's a, there there's a statistic. They're all so different, but I'm I'm not gonna quote it.
But I think it's something like between 90 to 95% failure rate between the first one to 3 years, something like that, it's pretty high. Yeah. So just making it past that is very rewarding in itself, and, you know, and like I said before, I think you should you should, you know, recognize yourself and and be proud to to get through that. You know, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. So that's what I always say.
I I've been through it. We've had our startup, been doing it for a long time, and it's very, very tough. So I can completely resonate and understand. But with creative x, right, so did you see a a missing piece or, like, a gray area in the market? So I I know just with your experience working in these companies and your past, you know, startups and all that, it led you to where you are today, you know, with with creative x.
But what did you see missing in the creative world for you to start this company? What happened? How did it really transpire?
Yeah. So, you know, what had happened was we were trying to make this ecommerce business work, and the business was basically kind of like a glorified Etsy, where we were trying to sell lots of customizable goods, lifestyle goods. And what we found was, you know, we were just we we couldn't compete. We couldn't compete on traditional marketing channels. We didn't have the money.
But we started noticing that, you know, obviously, imagery and video was really important to our conversion path. But at this time, we were this team of predominantly engineers. We were we skewed very high on on the analytical side, and it was driving us insane that we couldn't make more objective decisions about the content that we were using. We couldn't really understand this is what it was about some creative assets that we had that was really working, and others that looked very similar that that weren't working. And, you know, we made these fact based decisions about everything, except for this, the, the creative, which increasing was the biggest part of how users are making decisions about whether or not to engage with our products.
And so, you know, I remember at that time, we we had this insight and it made us very uncomfortable that we couldn't be more more objective about it. So we went and looked for tools, and no tools existed, and that was actually the problem. And no tools were out there. We wanted to better understand why our creative was working the way it ever was. And to eventually just got to the space where we're like, you know, we're just gonna try and build our own.
And it was never meant to be for commercial purposes. It was never meant to be sort of something we saw in the market, and we thought, oh, hey, this would be a business opportunity. It was quite literally to save our own tails. Right? The business wasn't working.
We saw kind of a glimmer of something here, but, like, hey, if we could only make this work, maybe there's hope. And so, you know, the the early version of the product was a spreadsheet. We put all of the creatives we were using to spreadsheet. We, put a bunch of questions, you know, in all the columns, and then we would answer in a binary way whether those creatives met that criteria, and then use that data to kinda combine it with performance data and look for patterns and trends. And that's what eventually got us to what what became creative x.
But you know, I wish there was this sort of spark of genius, but really it was a spark of, an inability to admit defeat, and a kind of sheer stubbornness to keep going that got us here.
You know, and Anastasia, sometimes that that's how it works, right? It's not a a one moment or a dream that you had. You're, oh, I I have this idea. You know, sometimes it it transpires from a a a failure that you had. I I use the fairy I use failure very whole you know, kind of, wholeheartedly.
I don't, you know, failure is very subjective. Right? But but in essence, you know, it happens through, like, a process. You know, mistakes that you that you may have made or your teammate or or, you know, trauma that you went through in your life or your company or, know? And sometimes that's how these how these, sparks of just, like, these epiphanies coming into your brain, and you're like, wow.
This is something that I think could fulfill a huge need in the market. You know? And that's it's a process. Sometimes it's not just like like that instant. Right? Yeah. It takes time. The crazy
thing is we
didn't see it either. So we'd we'd started doing this,
and our, we the business started doing better. You know, our marketing started to work. We got to profitable unit economics after a customer's very first purchase. So we're starting to see, okay, great. This is this is working. So we actually went to fundraise for that company. And it took a number of investors digging under the hood and sort of finding this and be like, well, what's this? And how is this curve growing this way? And what are you doing? And we'd explained it.
And they were the ones who actually pointed out that this was the much more interesting the much more interesting space. And we you know, and then we we've been trying to fundraise money for Hatch for what felt like an eternity. I mean, I I think I'd had over a 100 meetings. They were all nose. Right?
It was very depressing time. And, eventually, a couple of investors who who looked a bit deeper pointed this out and said to us, hey. You know, if you wanna spin this out and build this out, we're really interested in this, sort of what you've been building to try and grow Hatch, and gave us a term sheet for a company that didn't exist. And I went back to to the team at that time, and I said, hey. Here are our options.
You know, we can build this new company that we've been building just for ourselves, and we could try and make that. We can we can continue focusing on Hatch. We had a couple of sort of acquisition opportunities as well. So we could have gotten ourselves out of the startup game for a little bit. And the team was so excited about some of the the things we were building around, what became CreativeX, and everyone unanimously was like, yeah.
No. We wanna do that. But, you know, even then, it took it took other people pointing it out for us to see it.
That's awesome. You know, and and I I do have a a question later that I wanna talk a little bit about raising capital and and and venture funding and all that. But getting a little bit into just the weeds of your business, right, is talking about data and talking about scalability. Like, what does it really mean to scale your creative images and videos at scale? Your your creative collateral.
Right? How do you how do you scale that? What what what does it mean to use that data? Is it is it more just and this is just to, you know, give some clarity to the audience about what created x really does, right, the platform, what it really does. Is it more in the sense of, it gives data to understand what a certain image would be used for?
Because if you think about it, you know, especially me running my company and and I when I talk to my designers and my marketers, sometimes we don't know what image is going to work or what video is going to work. Right? So does CreativeX kind of solve that problem a bit?
Yeah. So we we solve a couple of problems. So the, you know, predominantly, what we see is every organization is reliant on imagery and video much more than it was in the past. But as you've had this huge increase in content production, what's happened is, you know, quality standards have started to slip, brand consistencies taking a hit, even things like, you know, how representative are you when you're featuring people on your content. Like, you know, you say we care about diversity, but do we actually, you know, do we show and not just tell that we care about diversity.
Right? And so the the first part is actually using technology to help streamline everything around quality, consistency, compliance, and representation across every bit of content that you produce. Think of it as like establishing a common language across everyone who creates content on your behalf. So it's like saying, hey, you know, at my brand, this is the minimum bar of creative quality, And I'm gonna use software to basically detect whether any piece of content, any designer, or any market produces on our behalf meets our bar for quality, meets our bar for consistency, meets our bar for representation. Then when you can do with that is as you actually start running this content, once you've established, like, what does quality mean to you?
What does consistency mean to you? You start getting performance data back. And it it becomes kind of a real time learning loop around, you know, how is you know, what are the decisions you've made around what quality means to you? And are those decisions driving business impact? And you can kind of toggle things up or down to say, well, you know, quality means content is branded or quality means it's it's very short videos because no people have short attention spans.
Right? So Yeah. As you start to make these decisions, there's actually a way to start measuring them so you can continue learning and improving.
Got it. That's great. And I guess the actionable insights, the data that you get from the performance. Right? That's when it really gets powerful. Right? Because then you can start to adapt your marketing, your campaigns accordingly. Right? Getting that data, using it to you know, using it for for further action, for next steps.
Yeah. So, you know, the it's funny because when we first started, we thought, hey, the performance part is gonna be really powerful. And, actually, what we find and, you know, again, this has to be looked at through the lens of the brands we've worked with, which tend to be very large corporations who produce 100 of 1000 of creative assets a year, right? So, across 1000 of agencies. So their content production processes are very complex.
And so, the first place where they see value is just be able to kind of get control of that. So they can see, hey, how much of my content is actually even meeting my own standards, and how much money am I spending on that? So one of the first insights we always find that even before you get into performance, is basically being able to figure out, you know, how much content are you producing that adheres to what you consider to be good? Which of your agencies are making content that does meet those standards versus which of your agencies aren't? And how much money is being spent on content that you don't even think is fundamentally good.
So there's there's sort of a media ROI and efficiency piece right off the bat before you even start to optimize for performance. And the way we think about it is in some ways, and you know again this was a surprising insight to us, that media piece initially and that kind of consistency and quality piece, like, that's the spinach that's actually really gonna improve the ROI on your media spend. The performance stuff, that's actually the dessert. You know? And so, and we the performance stuff is is often quite sexy to talk about, but, actually, what we found the most gains for the organization is helping them actually streamline all of their content and and get their whole companies to march the beat of the same drum.
And is the platform, is it a, I mean, for for you and your company, let's just say and we'll talk about investment investors in a in in a minute a few minutes. But do you track your, your monthly recurring revenue? Is it like, how do you monetize the the whole model? Is it is it a a payment, you know, monthly subscriber, or is it yearly, or how does how does that come up?
So, we work only in annual subscriptions. We don't do anything monthly. So, you know, obviously, we track monthly revenue too, but, really the the numbers that matter for us, and, and the numbers that we're optimizing. From a pure company point of view, of course, we look at revenue. Right?
Because that helps indicate the health of the business. But what we really believe in is having a metric that drives us forward, that also drives our customers forward, because then you're really aligned. Right? Your value is 1 and the same. And something that we talk a lot about internally is how do we build technology that helps our customers create more excellent content.
Right? And excellent content will mean something different for everyone. And so but the more we're aligned on that, the more we can build tools and make decisions that, yes, of course, benefit us as a company, but also really benefit our customers, which is why, you know, something like revenue is never kind of a great north star metric because it's it's very one-sided. Right? So
Yeah. That makes sense. And and this is a and I'm and this is me being honest here. Right? So it's like, I never had this question, but I had this question now, and I wanna ask it. For you and your and just in your experience, you building this company and and everything that you've done, what's considered good content? Like, what's cons what's considered good media? Good and a strong image? Is there is there the so many moving parts, moving pieces to it?
Yeah. You know, it's, so I I can give you an answer, but it it's you know, in some ways, the the copilot answer is it really depends. Right? It depends what market you're in. It depends what platform you're on. It depends what your brand is and what your brand stands for.
That's right. That's
right. But but there isn't there isn't sort of a silver bullet that's like, hey, if everyone does this. And I remember there was sort of an experiment. I think this was back in the nineties where, I think it was the first time people were just kind of kind of use digital creative data to make the perfect ad, and they they fed it to a machine. It was sort of the first, I guess, iteration of, like, the dynamic creative.
And they got all this data and and the sort of the system spat out an ad, and it was an ad with a rainbow and a baby and a monkey. Because these are all things that we engage with, but it was actually a terrible piece of content. Right?
Right.
And so and so which is why, even when we optimize for performance, it has to be done in the lens of like who is our brand, and who are our customers, and what do we care about, and what are we trying to articulate? But then as you go deeper, you can start to find consistent and
reliable best practices based on things
like platform, based on things like ultimately, our job as a company is not to paint the whole ultimately, our job as a company is not to paint the whole canvas. It's basically to help you set up a frame, and then let you paint within it. Right? Because, ultimately, good content, arguably, will never be done entirely by machines, and cannot be done without people's input. So, we take very much a a kind of a framework based approach rather than a, hey, like, put a dog there, put yellow here, you know, put a hand there because we we don't think that's how creativity works.
Yeah. And, you know, I I mean, I I think at least in my opinion, I I think you did kind of answer my question. You know what I mean? That is true because, and that's really what I wanted to get at. I think a lot of people think that there's always this blueprint for something.
Right? It's a blueprint of of starting and scaling a successful business. You know how you see all this crap on Instagram and Facebook, and it's like, oh, I have the blueprint. I know what it takes to to start and scale a successful business, and it really depends. It it depends.
It it really does. It depends who you're talking to. It depends on your product, your service. It depends on your funding situation. It depends on who you are, how you connect with your audience, and then the list goes on a 100 other bullet points.
So it really does depend, but, I do like I I I love what at least from the research I've done, on you and and creative x, what you stand for, you know, kind of you're creating this this infrastructure, this this framework for creatives, and, and then also adding the human element to it. Because that's what it's about too. Right? You can't just delete the, you know, the human person from it. And a lot of the not a lot.
There are some companies trying to do that, but there's always we're always gonna be needed, and that's always important. You know? Yes.
Without input from people. Right?
So the way we think about our
job is, without without input from people. Right? So the way we think about our job is, you know, our job is to help measure things, to help track things. Our goal is, once they figure out, hey, this is, again, this is what our brand stands for. Right?
How do we enforce that standard across the whole organization to try and drive that consistency? And how do we deliver insights back to all the brilliant people who are working on elevating that brand, so they can put those insights on steroids. Right? And like really think about great, like we saw this here. Now how do we take this to the next level? Which at least thus far machines have not really been able to
do. Yeah. And, you know, it seems like what you guys are also doing is you're improving the culture of these brands that are are using the platform too. Because when you are creating all this, you know, these media and images, all this creative collateral for your marketing campaigns and and all that, you know, you're you're showing your brand to your audience as well. So you need to also portray who you are as people, who are who you are as a company.
You're and, like, you talked about your brand. Not just your branding guidelines, but I'm talking about, like, you like you said, like, are you telling your story with within your videos? Are you doing those kinds of things? And that all impacts and reflects your culture. And and, you know, your purpose, who you are, why are you doing this.
You know? Yeah. And that can improve the, I think, just, collectively and holistically as a company, that can really help, you know, brands and and even probably, you know, small businesses who are using your platform. So that's awesome. I love it. I love it. So, now getting a little bit into into, like, raising capital and and that whole game. I know that's hard as well. You know, we've dealt with some investors too. It's a whole different thing.
It's a different beast to tackle. But what was it like for you and your team to try to raise capital with creative x? What was kind of the process, and and were you able you were able to, receive funding? Awesome.
Yes. We did. So, you know, we've gone through, I think we've gone through every type of fundraise, as in our first fundraise for hatch, the first two. I mean, it was like pulling teeth. Right? It was, 100. I I wanna say maybe 200 investors.
Wow.
All of them sort of said a version of no. The only thing that saved us was that, all my managers at Google decided to personally invest in the company, you know, sort of a show of faith in me, which was which was incredibly incredibly humbling. That's right. And because some of them were you know, had a bit of a presence in in the tech space, eventually, when some of them came in, other smaller VCs sort of followed suit. But it was a very, very painful process, you know, that that took ages.
It was incredibly demoralizing. And and the the thing is, that's one of the first things you do, you know, so you leave your big cushy job in my case, and then you you're like, okay, great. Like, I have all this energy, let's build this company, and you get out there. And the very first thing is like a real dose of reality. And and so we sort of tried to anticipate that, you know, and and we really wanted to show look.
Like, we can bootstrap this. So we we use all the money that I saved up while working at Google, and, we tried to build a prototype. But then, you know, again, completely mistimed things because the there are 2 kind of good times to raise in the early stages, and it's either before you even have a product, so you can really just sell vision and dream. Or it's when your product is starting to show signs that it's working. Right?
Now, of course, what we did is the worst of those worlds. So we launched a product so people could see all of its flaws because your MVP is never amazing. Right? Your MVP is
I know all about that stuff. You're exactly a 100000000 times right. There's no I think
you got, like yeah. You got this, like, kind of crappy MVP, and you're getting a little bit of data, but it's never enough. Because every EPC, you're like, oh, you know, we were like, look, we we made a $100 yesterday, and they're like, $100, like, 100,000. And you're like, but we just launched yesterday. Like, come back with a 100. So so we we basically started fundraising the very worst time and had this terrible experience, but eventually sort of made it through
Mhmm. Although it
took a tremendous amount of time. And then our first fundraise for what became CreativeX was actually very different because, and it was a completely different experience because, you know, again, we were raising for hats. We weren't trying to raise for creative x. And when a couple of investors pointed out, hey, there might be something here, and we said, okay. We're we're open to that.
We got a term sheet without having a PowerPoint deck, without having any metrics on the company. We have a term sheet, and we went from our first conversation about what became Creative x to money in the bank in under 6 weeks. I've never seen anything like it. So that was a completely different experience. Right?
And again, I think actually proves my point that it's always better to raise on a dream and on a vision. But I found that very difficult because I'm quite a practical pragmatic person. So, you know, the more data I have, the more confident I feel. And so that was, you know, it's it's kind of an an interesting learning experience for me, but what quite a shock for me. And and, you know, and then we've had, you know, we've raised our series a, and we'll be raising our series b.
And, we've had experiences in between those as well. So, yeah, run the gamut.
Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? Yeah. I I can definitely account for that. I've, you know, I've worked with 100 of startups the last decade, just our company building apps for them, different softwares for them.
And, we get start ups sometimes that they just have an idea. They're in the concept phase and they have this, you know, sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it's a bad idea. And, you know, I I can tell you that from from working with them, and sometimes they're they are looking for VCs and mostly angel investors, or even just family and friend money. And it's very difficult for them without having an actual tangible product where the investors could look at and use and see and and you know what I mean? And, and and see, like, money actually going into, you know, going in the bank from using these these apps.
But it's a lot, at least from my experience, the the you're gonna attract more VCs and angels, when you have an app that's built. Even if it does have bugs, it's always gonna be buggy. But you need an app that works and that is getting on, you know, the the increase in users, and it it's just showing a lot of positive traction. And that will kind of reassure them that, hey. There's demand here, that there's, there's value being provided here, and that this company has a potential of making a lot of money because they wanna make a return quickly.
Yeah. No. No. I, you know, I completely understand where they're coming from. Of course, they they have their own business, and they're accountable to their LPs.
And so I I completely understand where where they're coming from, even though I've never directly sat in their shoes. But one of the things I I became I tried to become quite quite good at and quite attuned to is, you know, investors ask a lot of questions, and a lot some of those questions are actually signals as to whether or not they believe in the business. And one of the questions that, you know, I would get asked a lot for every company is, well, you know, what's the market size? And actually, you know, and I kept meticulous notes during every fundraising process I've done, because again, I was trying to look for patterns to do better. You know, every meeting was an opportunity to do better than the next one.
And one of the patterns I spotted was basically you know, again, this is not statistically significant, just an observation, is that if an investor asked you how big the market size was, they didn't believe in the product. So no amount of prototype or MVP or whatever was ever going to convince them because fundamentally, those who believe, you know, they saw it, they saw the vision, they shared it, they felt it. They they knew the market size was big, versus the minute that question is asked, you know, that for me, that was a cue of like, you know, don't bother following up. Essentially, they'll they're they're probably they're probably not in a place where they believe.
Yeah. Sometimes you're probably gonna notice some probably some red flags, you know, some red flags that this investor is not for him is not for us. You know? It's just some I I agree with you. I think there's some and it's the same thing with employees.
Right? When you're in the interview process and you're hiring people, you know, I'm sure you're you're in that we're kind of on that process. We wanna scale, then we wanna delegate more work because we're all doing so many things, wearing a lot of hats. But, yeah. It's tough, you know.
You wanna make sure that they're they're they're checking all the boxes, that they're gonna fit your culture because they're you you know, you're both in it for the long run, and you wanna make sure that it's successful. So you need an investor. You need employees that fit, you know, your values and and your purpose, your mission, and all that is very, very important.
Yeah. And it's it's really tough. You know, we're we're going through this now to some extent where, you know, the way we hired when we were 5, 10 people is very different than the way we have to hire now when we're approaching and exceeding 50 people. And also, what do you do? You know, what do you do when when people get here?
You know, before when you're small, every decision happens in one room. And information just sort of spreads by osmosis, and that's great. You don't need structure, you don't need processes, you just, like, all talk to each other, and everyone knows everything. And then at some point, without you really noticing, all of a sudden those dynamics change completely. So all those things that I used to not hate, but certainly sometimes feel frustrated by at big companies, now you're like, oh, that's why they have those things.
You know, because running a company with some meaningful degree of scale is very different than running a company in the earlier stages. And it it's, you know, it's it's just a different challenge, but what I've realized is, my job fundamentally changes every year in order for me to continue being good at my job, or at least attempt to be good at my job. I literally have to change myself every year, which is which is really difficult.
It's very hard. It's very difficult to scale. It's you think, you know, as a startup, you think, oh, once I get past that phase, oh, I got it. If we're making money, it's I'll just hire more people.
Yes.
It's not that easy. I mean, more people, more problems. More money, more pro I mean, it's it's true because Yeah. You know, I and you seem like someone who, who who really loves people as well, very empathetic. But sometimes dealing with more people is different behaviors, more emotions involved, more yeah.
So it it gets it gets cluttered. It gets complicated sometimes. And you as a leader, you gotta, you know, you or we we have to try to solve them and and and listen, be good listeners, and and try to find solutions. And it's, it's just not easy. It's not easy.
Yes. And this is, you know, when we were about 10 people, someone kept asking, a certain number of people kept asking us, like, oh, what are your values? And, you know, let's come up with sort of values and all of that. And I was I was very ginset in the early stages because I was like, look, we're 10 people in a room. We talk to each other.
I mean, we spend more time with each other than we do with our partners. We know what our values are and we all sort of live them because that's how intense the hiring process was. And then as you get to 50 people, all of a sudden you realize, and we learned this again, like everything else through trial and error of hiring people who are smart and good and lovely, but who weren't the right people for the way that we wanted to work. And we recognized through that process, there are certain working styles and behaviors that are really encouraged and rewarded here. Like we are more analytical than the average company.
And we try to be. We try to make every decision with data. We try and argue with data, etcetera. And so you can have someone unbelievably clever and unbelievably lovely. But if if they like making decisions we found that it doesn't work. So we actually went through this process about a year and a half ago, where we got the whole company together, and use that to figure out what our values would be.
So we
can fire in a way that was more likely to lead to people actually being happy and and staying here for the long haul.
Yeah. I think companies are discovering now, especially from COVID, it was kind of a reset on, you know, to everyone. It was it was obviously very, very tough, for all of us. But I I think a lot of companies are starting to realize how important your why is and how important your values are. That's why I I I that's why I think COVID kind of made companies and even just people in general rethink things and repivot and restrategize, restructure, just a lot of who they are, a lot of what what their company, you know, what their companies mean to their to their audience, what value they're providing, you know, do they need to do something different, do they need to pivot, do they need to, you know it's just it it really makes you think differently, you know, especially going through challenges like that.
You know? So and and even just from I can I'm sure for you, like, with building creative x these these last 4 or 5 years, you've had your times where scaling was very tough, so it made you rethink, like, maybe I need to do things differently here. Right? Yes.
And and now I feel like it's something I think about on a very regular basis because what we're realizing is, you know, the things that work when you're 5 to 10 are different. The things that work when you're 25 are actually different. The things that work when you're 50, and you get to this point where whatever existing infrastructure you have, the way it feels to me is just like it's burst the company is, like, trying to burst out of it, and the existing structures can't contain it anymore, so you have to rebuild. But the thing that's really tricky, at least at our stage, is nowhere where just about 50 people now is once you get to that stage, there's already kind of a gravitational pull of the way certain things are done. And and so you have certain behaviors and ways of working that get somewhat set in, and you have to try to change them.
But it's not as easy as when you're one person because you just like make them up from scratch. Mhmm. Versus now, you really have to adapt and, like, take people on that journey with you, and that's not always easy.
No. No. It's not. Well, you know, I I wanna I wanna talk, a moment about creative x again in regards to, like, the more more a little bit a little bit more about data. So when it comes to, like, all the actional and actionable insights, all the the just all the data that you've collected from your brands and from just your company in general, what are you seeing in terms of creatives in general?
Like, are you seeing any trends? Are you seeing any are you noticing anything different just from all the delay the data? So I'm just basically, my question is after analyzing all the data from your brands, and you don't have to give me examples. I know that all that's very confidential, but are you noticing anything different? Are you are you noticing any new trends or anything like that?
Yeah. So so what what we notice is fundamental you know, a lot of people have been saying this. Right? Like, how important creative quality is to marketing performance. But no one's really been able to measure that until recently.
And there have been a number of studies that say, hey, creative is like the number one driver of campaign effectiveness and and ad effectiveness and all of that. One of the things that we've recently looked at is we were like, well, we wanna figure out if that's true. Right? But we wanna figure out if that's true in a really kind of long term sustainable way. And so we did this analysis piece looking at 800,000 piece of content.
So nearly a 1000000 ads over the course of about a year, I think. And started to see what happens to some of your media metrics as your creative quality score goes up. And basically what we see is that, the higher your creative quality score, the, more impressions you get per dollar on all the different media platforms that you're advertising. So what that's saying to us and the reason why we think this is so important is there seems to be some behavior that is set in that ads that meet a basic quality bar tend to actually get favored in auction dynamic regardless of what else is in them, which I think is the power of that insight. Right?
As long as they meet some of that basic quality criteria, they're branded, They're platform optimized. They feature the product early. They optimize for sound off consumption. They've they're framed correctly. They take up the real estate. If it's a direct response ad, they have that call to action. Having those basics actually gives you such a large boost your media efficiency, which then gives you more room to play around with against some of the desserts.
I love it. That's powerful. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this can really learn from that. That's great. That's great insight. Yeah. I I love it. Absolutely love it. You know, Anastasia, like, what are your thoughts just as an entrepreneur? What everything that you've learned through just your experiences, struggles, failures, successes, what are your thoughts and, you know, even advice, I can call it that, of how to succeed as an entrepreneur?
And I know we're all, you know, we're all always learning. We're we're always gonna be students. Right? But what have you learned that you could share with others in terms of just being a good entrepreneur and and succeeding at least in your your opinion, your mind?
So I think the the biggest things you know, when I think about what has enabled us to get this far, I think it's come down to 2 things. One is people, and having people around you who will tell you the truth even when you don't want to hear it, I think is unbelievably important. We actually made that a company value. We call it constructive dissent. We actively encourage people to to argue and debate, because we we want those things floating up to the surface.
Right? Things that we might not be seeing that other people are.
Right. Makes sense.
So I think, again, having people who will tell you the truth is very important. But then I think the flip side of that is actually being able to listen to things you don't wanna hear and finding a mechanism by which you can create a safe space for yourself to take that feedback on board when you're ready. And it doesn't mean every bit bit of feedback, but, you know, a lot of our successes came down to things that we didn't initially see, that it took someone pointing out in a way that didn't feel good at that time. Right? That was not pleasant to hear, that might have actually been demotivating to hear.
That once we actually heard it, we did something about it. And, you know, that has made all the difference in some way. So, you know, again, I I don't think there's any silver bullet, but so much of I credit the success of the company to is the the people who have come along for the ride.
And what about the some of the struggles and obstacles that you and your team have been through? What what are some of the the toughest challenges that you guys have had, and then how did you overcome them?
Yeah. You know what? I mean, we've we've been through a lot of stuff. We've been through, not being able to fundraise. We've been through, a cofounder leaving, deciding, you know, he he wanted, he didn't wanna be in the startup world and actually wanted to go to law school.
Mhmm. We've been through spending years trying to find product market fit. I mean, literally years and nothing working. And then there's sort of small decisions, you know, that we made that that felt really terrible at the time that actually not just Spectra not so bad at all. And so, you know, I think what got us through and it's funny we have some investors joke about this.
They, some of our investors say, you know, you guys are like a cockroach. Like, you will not die. I mean, you would be amazed at how many there was one time where we had $7,000 left in our bank account for a team of, like, 5 engineers.
So, you
know, I was even gonna stretch a week. And somehow and that that was the time when we got our term sheet. And and got one from term sheet to money in the bank with not even having a product, you know. So, I think we should have we're like a cat. Like, we should have died a lot more than we have.
And I think the only thing that I credit that, the fact that we are still sort of alive and now actually thriving as a company is the fact that we didn't give up. But I'll be honest, there are times I wanted to give up. Right? So when we were going through all that stuff with Hatch, and we just couldn't make it work, and I had, you know, a 100 meetings with investors, and all of them said no. And, we had this term sheet on the table from an investor, and then we had a couple of these sort of acquihire conversations in play.
I was like, let's do that. Like, you know, I'm tired. I've put you guys through a lot. Like, you know, we don't I I can't give you a lot of confidence about where your next paycheck is gonna come from. You know, let's just let's just pursue some of these acquisition conversations and see where that takes us. And it was actually the team, many of whom are still around today, who were like, no. We gotta keep going. You know? And so sometimes you lift them, and sometimes they lift you. But yeah.
That's right.
Tell them.
Oh, man. I I love that saying about even though I don't think any of us like cockroaches, but that's that's saying about that, that's powerful. I mean, it just shows how resilient you are and how much perseverance you have. That's that's very powerful stuff, Anastasia. I think, I think you guys are gonna do very, very well.
I believe in you, and you guys have an amazing platform, and you're you're making a difference. And I haven't I I mean, I can tell you just from, understanding SaaS businesses and SaaS products, and I I feel like you're very different, you know, and I haven't seen a product much much anything like what CreativeX is like. So, you know, that itself is is is awesome. You know? You're differentiated.
You're in your own niche. You're making a difference, and and just keep it keep it going and, you know, just keep moving forward. That's all we can do. Right? Just keep moving forward.
Yeah. And that's the
way we know how.
Yeah. And sometimes you take a step forward, then again, like the cliche goes, that means you take 2 back, but eventually you catch up.
That's that's that's true. No. You're right. That's exactly right. So last question I have here is since this is a a storytelling podcast, I I ask this to every single interviewee is, what's one word, just one word that defines your story? So it could be your life, your career, anything. I'll let you choose. But one word that defines your story.
I'm gonna cheat a little bit and use the word, which is actually the meaning of my name. So my name is Anastasia, and the meaning of that name is resurrection. And that, I think, is my story. It is a constant reinvention of who I am, what I need to do, and how do I need to do it. And I think that is what has helped us get through the the failures.
Wow. That's that's amazing. I love it. Yeah. I haven't had that one before.
Oh, good.
Great. Sometimes it gets similar. You know, I get I get, some of the same ones, but that that's okay. But, no, I love it. That that's great. That's that's also very powerful. So I really appreciate that. So, where can, where can everyone find you? Where's, you know, CrystalLinks website?
Yeah. So creativex.com, the word creative and the letter x at the end. And then LinkedIn, I'm, starting to be more active, but certainly respond to everything. And and, obviously, just reach out to me on email. I'm an inbox 0 person, so I will read it, and I usually respond. So, yeah. It's just my first name, anastasia@creativex.com.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Anastasia, it's been it's been an honor and a pleasure speaking with you, and thank you so much. This is this is great. Thank you for for sharing your story, and and, I really appreciate it. And I know a lot of people are gonna learn from you, so thank you so much.
Thanks for inviting me.
Absolutely. My pleasure. Well, thank you everyone for listening, and this is Michael Georgiou, your host from Tales From the Pros. And until next time. Thank you, guys. Please subscribe to our YouTube page and also follow our social media. There are links somewhere around here. But, we really appreciate it guys. Thanks for all the support and I'm gonna be giving you awesome content continuously And we look forward to seeing you soon.