How work culture fosters a great product – Xenia Muntean @ Planable

How often should you follow your gut feeling? 🤔

Xenia Muntean, CEO and Co-founder of Planable shares her thoughts on this in the latest episode of the Masters of SaaS podcast. She also reveals how you can align your gut feeling with decisions about people, culture and your product. 

Here's what else you'll get to hear:
- how to build and maintain a great company culture
- why every job candidate for Planable has to add five questions to their job application
- how to manage multiple feature requests from customers and stakeholder

Links >> 

Upraw media: https://uprawmedia.com/
Episode highlights: https://uprawmedia.com/blog/work-culture-planable

If you are keen to know more about Upraw Media or be a Masters of SaaS guest speaker, visit uprawmedia.com or DM us on LinkedIn. We are also on Youtube if you'd like to put a face to the names and voices of the best in SaaS. Thanks for tuning in!

Transcript

Todd Chambers : 0:08

Hey guys, welcome to the masters of SaaS podcast brought to you by Upraw Media, a growth marketing agency for SaaS specialising in paid media, content and conversion rate optimisation. I'll be your host, Todd Chambers. I have the absolute pleasure of chatting with really smart people from the SaaS industry. The goal is to extract as much value as possible. What are their strategies, the tactics that failures, funny stories, key learnings? All of this can then be used to help you grow and scale your own SaaS business. In this episode, I speak with Xenia Muntean, the CEO and co-founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 6000 teams worldwide. Xenia has been recognised on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, and she took Planable through TechStars London Accelerator Program in 2017. Xenia was running a social media marketing agency, and a large chunk of that work revolved around building editorial calendars. The process was super manual and clunky, and as she put it - for a millennial, this didn't feel right, and she knew that she could do better. This ultimately led to the inception of Planable. In the episode we cover multiple topics from Techstars and how they helped to accelerate the business, trademark trolls and how an extra from House of Cards tried to hijack their IP, hiring and culture advice, as well as knowing when to trust your gut. The episode is packed with actionable tips, funny stories, and failures that hopefully you can learn from. Hope you enjoy the episode and let's jump right into it! Xenia, welcome to the show!

Xenia Muntean : 1:41

Thank you so much for inviting me! The pleasure's all mine. Cool! Let's jump straight into it. Maybe you can give us an introduction to Planable Yeah, definitely. I'd love to give you this background on Planable. I've started the company together with my two co-founders about four years ago, and before Planable, I was running a Social Media Marketing Agency. I was building a lot of content for clients to manage their social media pages, their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram...we were building what's called in the industry editorial calendars, and that was happening in those very clunky very hard to use Excel files that were being sent back and forth between the client and us so we can get approvals before publishing the content on their pages and get feedback and get it reviewed by them. The process was very fragmented. I felt like it was a very old school way of working and you know, some millennial growing up with mobile phones and great you know, UI and you're used to seamless experiences; and having to use you know, Microsoft and Google Drive and all of those tools – it felt like was that just the best way for marketers. I felt like we could do so much better in terms of how we collaborate on content, how content is getting produced and reviewed. So that's exactly what we did together with my two co-founders, Nick and Vlad. They both worked in the industry before, and we, you know, built Planable to do just that - to help marketers collaborate on social media content in a more seamless and pleasant way. And it's been four years since we started the company. We've gone through a few accelerators, raised our seed round, and today we're working with more than 600 customers.

Todd Chambers : 3:37

That's great, thank you so much for the intro! I did have a question about founders and researching Planable for this podcast; I uncovered that you actually have two founders. I'm personally a solo founder, and of course, that presents its own challenges. So I was curious to understand how it's been working with two founders?

Xenia Muntean : 3:56

I think it's great. I can't imagine doing this alone. Just having someone together with you along the entire roller coaster of the startup life is – I can't imagine doing it without someone else. You can share all the hardness but also the joy of building a company. Just having someone to talk to, just having someone to brainstorm on problem-solving issues, complain about the things that are hard; I think that's extremely, extremely important. I'm happy I got the chance, and I was lucky enough to have someone to start this company with.

Todd Chambers : 4:41

Yeah, understood, and I think if I was going to start my business again, 100% I would go into it with a co-founder for all the reasons you just said. Okay, if you don't mind, I'd like to talk about accelerators, and a really viable way to grow a business to grow a SaaS company or a tech company is to go through an accelerator. There are many, many different accelerators around the world, and there were a few very prestigious, well-known accelerators and Planable, yourself and your co-founders were successful in getting its Techstars which is super cool! So I'd love to understand the story of how that happened. And your kind of experience overall, how was it?

Xenia Muntean : 5:21

Yeah, so I always wanted to, you know, get into either TechStars or YC or 500 startups. So those were my top three accelerators that, you know, the most prestigious accelerators in the world that I was looking at. And, you know, I had the ambition of getting into one of those. It was my fourth time when I applied to Techstars so every time a call was open at 500, Techstars or YC I was applying. You know, we almost didn't have a product, we had like a few mock-ups and a few beta users, an email list, something like that and I was always applying, because I knew that that's, you know, you don't get feedback from them: why, you know, you're, you're rejected. So that was not the purpose of why I was applying but rather just building a habit out of it. I knew that if I apply multiple times, I'm going to improve the way I write those applications, that I'm going to figure out in the end what's going to help me out. Next time I'm going to read somewhere articles about what makes a good application for an accelerator. So every time it's like a different iteration that makes it better and better. And I guess you know, the fourth time was the lucky one for us. Max Kelly, the former Managing Director of TechStars in London, had a tour, his Eastern European tour, and he was visiting Romania, where I'm originally from and I met him in in Bucharest at a networking event where he was presenting Techstars. And I remember I met him, I talked to him, he really liked the team. He was not so convinced about the product and the market, but he really liked us! And that just highlights the importance of teams and founders in very early startups and it also highlights the importance of networking. How crucial it is to meet the right people at the right time.

Todd Chambers : 7:30

100%. I think so often we can live in the digital world, and we forget that behind those emails and your social channels are actual people. So yeah, never underestimate the power of just networking and actually having face to face conversations so: how did you find it? What what was the main value you got from the accelerator? Because I assume they will give you some funding, and then did you go in with your co-founders and did they kind of really support you in the journey of growing?

Xenia Muntean : 7:55

Right. So it's three months – and we went through the accelerator, all of us. All the three co-founders of Planable we went through the Accelerator. The first month is focused on networking quite a lot. It's, there's a phrase that's called Mentor Madness because you meet a hundred mentors in two weeks. So it's really intense in terms of connections and meeting people and support and getting advice and mentoring from people. That's a big, big part of Techstars. And that type of'support it's present, you know, after Techstars that's what you know why they call it Techstars for life - because it doesn't end after the programme and they also have this tagline "give first", which again highlights just the fact of how important. Networking not in a very superficial way but meaningful networking where you get advice, you exchange knowledge, you share insights. That type of networking is what Techstars brought to the table. And then also quite a lot of support on the growth side: figuring out our channels, our go-to-market, but also support on the on the fundraising side. They put us in touch with a lot of investors, they helped us prepare our day to day, helped us, you know, nail the story, and, you know, prepare us for our series seed.

Todd Chambers : 9:21

Yeah. So at the end of your time there, how long ago was it when you actually came out of the accelerator?

Xenia Muntean : 9:26

So it was 2017. So three years ago, quite a lot, so very early in our journey.

Todd Chambers : 9:32

So when you came out of TechStars, you'd had some funding. Were you at that point, ; you're ready to grow and kind of throw fuel on the fire? Or did you still need to figure out kind of product-market fit, like where were you at that point when you left TechStars?

Xenia Muntean : 9:47

We definitely still didn't achieve product-market fit. We were still figuring out much of the things. We didn't know how to grow, we didn't know what were our right channels. We had a lot of knowledge from Techstars and we were experimenting with a lot of things that we learned there but nothing was proved. There was nothing, no predictable growth channels that were working out for us so we were still very early on in our growth journey. We were just monetising the product so we still had lots of things to figure out and understand what works for us. To be honest, two months after TechStars we had a very low moment in our startup life because you know, as I mentioned, it's a very much a roller coaster. We just graduated TechStars things were looking very hopeful and bright for us. We had lots of opportunities but at the same time, we didn't have too much growth. We were struggling to figure out marketing – as a former marketer, that was extremely painful to me that I couldn't find a way to market it and to make the product grow. And it was a bit of a desperate moment back then. And we were trying anything, really and one thing that we tried and it worked out well for us, though, it's not for everyone. It's not for every startup, for sure, we tried AppSumo. For who doesn't know about Appsumo - It's this platform for products where you give out lifetime deal, so you basically give out a limited version, a limited plan of your product for a lifetime fee. People pay $40-50 to get access forever, for a very limited version of your product, and they have a huge community. So that's the power of Appsumo that a lot of people buy it and it gives an injection of cash. But also, what we found out is that besides that injection of cash that we got out of that, besides, you know, just the motivation that we gained, we saw that a lot of people are excited about the product and it kind of brought us back on track. It is inspired us and it calmed us a bit. We got our motivation back and that was extremely crucial for us at that point. The other thing that Appsumo helped a lot with was that people started talking on Twitter. They were writing blog articles, reviewing the product, so a lot of word of mouth was created out of that. A lot of people started buying recurring subscriptions, which is the goal of every SaaS business, so it helped us grow, it gave us a kick in the beginning, and we never stopped growing since then. It's obviously something that you can do only very early on, because, you know, there are questions around brand damage, and all of that. So it's definitely something you do very early on when you need a kick so that you start growing. But then we you know, once that started and we had a pool of customers to analyse and to gather data and to learn from them we started figuring out how to keep growing and what works and what a customer is expecting from us. What kind of value can we deliver to them, what kind of marketing works with them. So yeah, that's that the story of how we started going at Planable.

Todd Chambers : 14:00

Yeah, that's amazing! I can imagine – and I always think this when I deal with our clients, and they have funding – I can imagine there's a lot of pressure when you take that money that you've kind of feel responsible not just for yourself but of course, but other people's money. So yeah, I can imagine that adds a layer of pressure, which must be quite tough.

Xenia Muntean : 14:20

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's not just you in this entire venture. It's a lot of people that you're responsible for.

Todd Chambers : 14:32

Yeah, for sure. Maybe a nice kind of launching off point to talk about growth and maybe a bit more specific on how you grew the company: what is the size of the company at the moment if you can share any metrics?

Xenia Muntean : 14:44

So we're still at a seed stage and we're 14 people on the team. And we have about 600 customers at the moment.

Todd Chambers : 14:53

Okay, great. And I always like to ask people about failures. One, I think because it makes me feel more like a human being and yeah, it helps people to relate because so often I think it's easy to look at people's successes and then maybe overlook probably the really, really painful road that they've come down. Do you have any particular stories that stick out in your mind in terms of failures or low points?

Xenia Muntean : 15:17

Too many!

Todd Chambers : 15:18

Sure

Xenia Muntean : 15:18

Which one should I pick? So I have two that I can share. One is also related about, you know, Techstars, post-Techstars actually. So, because the third month of Techstars is very focused on fundraising and lots of startups were leveraging the Techstars graduation, the Techstars demo day – you know, every accelerator finishes with a demo day. Many startups in our batch we're leveraging that moment and the hype that you get out of graduating out of TechStars to launch a seed round. We jumped on that train wagon to raise our own seed round, but we were not ready. We were far, far from ready. And I think one – that was a huge failure for me personally and also very demotivating as a founder to start raising. I realised that ''oh, you're not actually there, you're far away from that moment''. It's definitely a learning point and, you know, what I learned from that was that definitely should pick your timing very carefully for when you raise and also you have your own journey. Follow it, you know, build your own path. You don't have to ride the wave with everyone else. What works for other people doesn't work for you and you know, just stick with you know, craft your own path. The other story is a bit a bit funnier, I guess. We had to deal with a trademark troll if you can believe it. Yeah, trademark troll who registered our, brand name. For people who don't know what a trademark troll is: it's basically someone who registers a name or a trademark without any intent of using it just so that they can slap a lawsuit without actually using it. So that was yeah, that was the story that we had to go through. You know, we got so many threats and it was actually happening while we were at Techstars. They wrote to Techstars for some reason, telling them that we're using their trademark. Dope. You know obviously that's not how reality was, and the funny story, the funny note on all of this is that this person was actually an actor. So it was all real. He actually had the trademark registered because we were very early on, we didn't have you know, money to do the registration and to go through the process. So we didn't register the Planable name very early on. So that person, you know, obviously took it, registered it, and when we researched him, we found out that he's also an actor on the side.

Todd Chambers : 18:41

A trademark troll and an actor all at the same time.

Xenia Muntean : 18:43

Yeah, and he was an extra on House of Cards! If you can imagine it.

Todd Chambers : 18:48

Small world.

Xenia Muntean : 18:50

Yeah, it is such a surreal story that we had to go through. In the end, obviously, you know, in the US if you want to register a trademark you have to prove commercial use. You have to prove that you've been using the trademark or that there is an intent to use it. He couldn't prove that obviously because he didn't have any product or anything to bear the name. And you know, finally when his application was rejected, we applied without our own. So it's a happy ending story. But you know, a funny one as well.

Todd Chambers : 19:30

Yeah, make sure before you invest in anything where you build it, make sure you have the IP around around the product.

Xenia Muntean : 19:36

Yeah, and don't underestimate your adversaries though you might win the war in the end, but they can definitely waste a lot of your time and energy resources, try and damage your reputation. And do many things that you could avoid if you just invest early in the things that matter.

Todd Chambers : 19:55

Yeah, understood. So when you had all the trademark issues sorted out was there a certain point where you felt like – "Okay, I think we really have a strong product now. We have that product-market fit. This is a time where we really need to grow". Was there – or is that more kind of cumulative experiments you ran and it kind of progressively built up or was there a moment that you thought, right? No, this is the time where we can really grow.

Xenia Muntean : 20:22

Yeah, so there was no specific moment when that happened. I think it's a cumulative process very much. It just time passes by, you work on things, you iterate, experiment and then one day you're "Oh, I guess we got there!" I'm not sure when, but I guess we did. Though we're still very much early stage, so the question of product-market fit is one that we often go back to because we want to expand the product, we want to grow the vision of the company. So it's something that we go back we check, and we try and figure out if we got there actually with the new features that we build if we're there with them. But we knew we're ready to grow when we raised our seed round – that was a year ago. We saw a lot of exponential growth. A year after Appsumo, we saw that we were going month by month with above benchmarks growth rates month over month. So we knew, and that entire growth was sustained without a sales teams or even a paid budget, so it was all very much organic. So we knew that if things happen without us, we had a marketing team, but if things happen without us pouring too much money into it, what could happen if we do. So you know, we saw a lot of word of mouth we saw a lot of loyalty in our customers, a pretty good conversion rate, you know, steady upsells and expansions in customers and we realised that we we have to accelerate things. That was the moment when we decided to properly add that time properly. Raise a seed round.

Todd Chambers : 22:09

Yeah, understood. And how do you think about the kind of the product roadmap and what you need to to build next? Are you constantly asking customers what they like about the tool, are you using some kind of product analytics? How do you kind of decide what features are being used and then use that to yeah, to find the roadmap and to support growth?

Xenia Muntean : 22:32

So we have a plot public roadmap, where people can contribute to the ideas that we have. They can upvote features that are planned or they can suggest new features. They can see the status of features that are in development. So we get a lot of our feedback from that public roadmap and I think we implemented it very early on when we were in beta and that has been a tremendous help for us to figure out what features are important for customers and what features are not. But at the same time, you still have to have your own strong vision as a company, validated by what you've seen in the market. Obviously validated by advisors and investors and more important validated by your own gut feeling in the end, because that's how you build your company so far. And even if some features are extremely, extremely popular among your customers, you have to take a look at what segment of your customers – are those the customers that are your ideal customers in the future? Are those the customers that you want to build the second version, the first version fourth version of your product and so on. Is that the direction you want to grow into? Then you also have to figure out if that's something that you want to do as a company, maybe it's not. For example, for us, an extremely upvoted feature is analytics. So building in a data dashboard where people can see how their post perform on social media. But that would take our product into a direction that we don't want to go into: social media management tools such as Hootsuite, and Sprout Social and Falcon, and Buffer and so many other tools that do publishing and analytics. And we're not that kind of a company. We want to go into collaboration. More into the space of Notion and Airtable and Figma and Framer rather than social media management. We knew that that's not a good fit for us. We know that people want it, but we have to prioritise things, and you know, if you build everything, every feature that someone requires, you're gonna end up with a very clunky product. So you have to be careful about what you build into the product.

Todd Chambers : 24:49

Yeah, understood. And what about growth? Maybe this is a two-sided question because we have kind of the COVID growth and maybe before but maybe if we focus on the before and what we'll get to COVID. But what did you think about growth, did you find that there are some channels that worked particularly well for you? Do you kind of double down in a small amount of areas? Are you still testing multiple things? I guess the question is: what view do you think are the kind of the main growth levers moving forwards?

Xenia Muntean : 25:19

So we doubled down very much on content. We tried it, in the beginning, to see if it works, and we realised that though it's very hard to track the results of content and the ROI the attribution of content results is hard. But we realised that yes, it does very much work for us, so we invested quite a lot in content so far, and I think that's the reason why we got where we are right now, and we invested, we built quite a few counter projects like I can name a few of them. For example, we released two thought leadership Ebooks on topics relevant for our industry and for our brand, released an industry report where we looked at how what happens behind the scenes of content, how people are working on content, what type of workflows they have, what's the headcount of content teams and so on. We invest a lot in our blog, and we also write guest articles on other blogs. In January, we started a podcast called People's Marketing where we talk to top marketers about their journey and their career and what it means to be a marketer and then we also had the video academy with have a series of interviews with experts in the industry about how to build your own content marketing and what your workflows look like if you're a content marketing team. So we invested a lot in content. And together with that, we invested in SEO quite a lot. That's something that you know, content without SEO. You know, it has to go hand in hand. And I think that was some of the techniques that we implemented and the tactics that we implemented that was very helpful for our growth.

Todd Chambers : 27:12

Yeah, understood. And from us, one of the most common mistakes I see with our clients, SaaS clients and have seen over the years, is that, especially when you get SaaS companies that are funded, I think their notion is that they can kind of throw money at a growth, and they think that they can pay their way into growth. So we see that when we run paid media campaigns for SaaS companies, and they'll think, "we can spend a lot and we can just, you know, try and drive growth that way". But actually, I think content is really for me as a prerequisite. Of course, there's going to be, you know, a small number of or maybe even a large number of lower funnel, direct response type ads that you can run and you maybe will get some growth, but even when you want to scale paid me it's much better to do that with content instead of just, you know, hitting people higher up the funnel or cold audience with direct response ads. So yeah, I think for me, in my experience, the best companies create really great content. And that's kind of the cornerstone for all their marketing, and then they can use that in order other channels as well.

Xenia Muntean : 28:19

Yeah, I can't agree more with you.

Todd Chambers : 28:21

So I guess this leads on to the elephant in the room, which is, I guess, COVID-19 and the current situation that we're unfortunately all in. How has that affected the company? I guess there's two sides to that the growth and for your clients and also internally, so feel free to tackle either side.

Xenia Muntean : 28:41

Yeah, well, to be honest, I can't complain too much. We've been very fortunate and in a way positioned for this being a collaboration tool. You know, remote tools and collaboration tools are on the rise right now. And you can see that with Zoom and Slack and a bunch of other tools. And it applies to us as well. So I can't complain too much. Things have been pretty good on that side, too. We didn't slow down our growth, especially on the premium product. We've been growing like we were before COVID and that's definitely a very fortunate position to be during a crisis. So we didn't really see a decline on that side. Obviously, we're seeing that the pipeline, the sales pipeline might be getting a bit slower in the future, but so far things have been pretty good. On the internal side, on the team side, we have teams in two offices, one in Romania, and the other one in the Republic of Moldova so we had a bit of experience of remote work because, you know, we often have to talk to team members In a different office, and Slack is very much at the centre of our company and at the centre of our culture, and that was one of the things that probably helped us with this transition to work from home. There's definitely a process of doing that transition, and I think one of the few things that we did well was just communicating with clarity what's going to happen in the next few weeks in the next few months, potentially to people so very early on, we were extremely transparent of what measures we've put in place. Obviously, you know, everyone's working from home but here's what else we're going to do. Here's what we're going to do to maybe prevent churn, or here's where we're going to do to attract potentially customers that need our tool, the need help with remote collaboration on social, here are the things that we're going to implement. Also even more transparency on the money thing: how much runway do we have? What do what are we going to have to cut if things go bad? What kind of triggers do we have to cut different parts of the budget and so on. And just also in helping with the entire social aspect. We implemented Friday evenings with games. So every Friday for a few times we've had games where we were just on Zoom, playing remote games on the web, and it was super. It was super helpful because it just helped us connect. And it just gave us an opportunity, a platform to talk to each other. We also made the meetings a bit more lightweight. If before COVID we were just starting, you know, the meeting, right on time maybe doing the work from home period, we didn't do that too much we, you know, left some space for people to talk it out at the beginning of the meetings. I think it you know, those were some of the measures that we implemented that I think helped a lot. But I guess just showing up for people, that type of leadership and the transparency, I think that was most crucial for people to just put their mind at ease, show them okay, you know, with, you know, we thought about that, and it's also not bad at all. I think that's what helped a lot. What do you think about culture? How do you think about that and how much of an important role that plays in growing a team? Just an absolutely tremendous role. I think that's one of the things top of mind for me all the time as a CEO. Thinking about the culture, making sure that everything we do is – just respect to the culture that we're building and how our culture should expand, how should it evolve. That's super, super important for people to want to work at Planable, keep working at Planable and be productive, be happy. It's a very, very important aspect. And I think where you see it best is when things go wrong. When maybe you hire someone that doesn't fit with your culture, it's you know, great professional, someone super smart, but just not the best fit in terms of your culture. That's when you're going to see the most you're going to feel it the most that okay, culture is extremely, extremely important. And I think we've gone through a few of those episodes very early on with our company. And I think that's why we're so focused on the culture right now. And also, you know, I built a company before, so I have a bit of experience with people and managing teams, and a few of the mistakes that I've done in my previous company I've learned from them. And now, you know, I'm trying to make it that I'm trying to build, a place where I would like myself to work for someone else. To be the kind of leader, I would like to work for. Thinking that way is definitely, I hope, the right way. And there's a bunch of things that go into culture, not just the values that you stick with, just, you know, the leadership, the communication, but also some of the material things like, now probably talking about offices is a bit ironic but the material things; the technology that people use, the tools that they use, and you know, giving them the best tools so that they can be super productive, giving them the best, you know, resources so that they can feel valued is also, I think, very important.

Todd Chambers : 35:06

Yeah. And which leads nicely on to hiring. How do you approach hiring? Maybe what you've learned over the last few years? I think hiring for me has been incredibly challenging. And it's been probably for many entrepreneurs. There's a steep learning curve, that'll be wanted. I'd be interested to know what you've learned about hiring over the years, and maybe what advice you would give to people that are trying to run a SaaS company, trying to hire a great team.

Xenia Muntean : 35:33

I think it also relates with culture. I think if you don't want to spend eight hours with a specific person that you're interviewing, if you don't want to spend eight hours in the same room with that person, that's a red flag, a huge red flag. You might be you might think that, you know, they're checking all the boxes, and communication skills, they seem great, they have great experience. All of those checkmarks are checked, seems perfect, but you just have that gut feeling that you know, you don't click with them there's the chemistry is not there. When you have such a small, small, small team, those things feel you can feel them a lot. Maybe you can afford to do that when the company is bigger, but when you're, you know, 10 people at the same table. Those things are just crucial for the atmosphere in the team, just the vibe in the team, the motivation of other people in the team. And I'm not talking about you know, hiring clones of yourselves. You know, diversity is definitely extremely important but if you don't feel like you want to go, you know, for a beer after work with someone, maybe don't hire them.

Todd Chambers : 36:51

Yeah, that's actually a good starting point!

Xenia Muntean : 36:54

Yeah, I felt, you know, early very early on when I was hiring so many times I felt like I was searching for friends. To be honest. I was hiring friends. Obviously, you have good professionals, smart people experience all of that, then you need to feel that like you want to be friends with them. Yeah, that's my approach. I'm not sure the best one.

Todd Chambers : 37:20

What about like, at a really practical level? Hiring is so labour intensive. If you put you know, LinkedIn job ads, for example, you might get 200 CVs for a position and obviously, it depends on the position but how do you actually approach that? Because it's so labour intensive to review the CVs, to actually interview the people, to get into all the different stages, negotiations. How do you try to navigate that hiring process as efficiently as possible, and hopefully to get the kind of the best result at the end?

Xenia Muntean : 37:50

Yeah, so we have, as you mentioned, you know, LinkedIn is the way that we you know, promote our job ads and then the process is pretty straightforward. LinkedIn has two options. You can either just easy apply, and that's what we were doing at the beginning but then we were getting way too many applications to filter out. So we designed, you know, a form and we designed the bottleneck into the process. And the bottleneck is a form that they have to complete, which filters out quite a lot of the people that are not serious about the application. And the form– it's very straightforward as well just you know, name/surname, it's not too complicated, but it definitely filters out a bunch of people. And in the forum, we ask them to ask us a few questions.

Todd Chambers : 38:48

Okay!

Xenia Muntean : 38:48

We don't ask them any questions. I mean, name surname, LinkedIn profile, and that's all. Then we ask them to give us five questions. And we take that very seriously. If people don't give us five questions, we don't care if those five questions are good questions or not. But if they can't give us five questions, then that's, in my opinion, a sign of their interest in the company, a lack of interest in our company. That's the first filter. And then we have a phone screening interview, where Miruna, a colleague and in my team, leading operations, she's talking to people. She's the first you filter and then we have an assignment that we give to people to complete, and in the end, a 1-1 conversation with them where I get to know them better, and we talk a bit more, and maybe someone else on the team gets involved. But it's a very straightforward process, but I feel like the bottleneck that we built in at the application level, the form, helped a lot to filter out people and make my job easier and the end of selecting them for interviews.

Todd Chambers : 40:10

Well, I guess one of my, thank you so much for all your advice and for telling your story. I guess my, my final and closing question to you would be around kind of why you do what you do? And this is a question I asked myself all the time. And I think even more so, in this Corona world that we're living in now. So why do you focus on Planable, why do you try and build a company and what is the kind of intrinsic motivation that drives you?

Xenia Muntean : 40:38

Well, you know, the ambition obviously, is one big thing. You know, you want to build, all entrepreneurs want to build something big. So that's definitely a huge part of my motivation. I want to make a change, and I want to help marketers have a more pleasant way of working. So it's definitely that. I've been in their shoes, I had their frustrations, and I want to make it easier for them. At the same time, the second motivation for me is very much about the people. I get to choose with whom I'm working. And that's, I think one of the most amazing things about building your own business. You get to choose with whom you're working, and I get to choose amazing people. And you know, just the team is one of the biggest motivation for me. How amazing they are, how dedicated they are and just the feeling that you know, we're all pulling together and driving this together forward. And, you know, this startup vibe is definitely my second motivation on why doing this.

Todd Chambers : 41:48

Yeah, amazing. And where can people find you? planable.com I believe is the domain?

Xenia Muntean : 41:54

It's dot io actually.

Todd Chambers : 41:57

Oh, you're one of these cool startups with the io.

Xenia Muntean : 42:01

Yes, definitely, innovation.

Todd Chambers : 42:04

Yeah, how did that even start? I never know how that started with the dot io. It's actually, I have no clue.

Xenia Muntean : 42:10

Io - I think it's actually for the Indian Ocean. But you know, startup folks, you know, twisted it to innovation and I get that, you know, yeah. How you know, it started out. It's a cool domain. I like it. And then where can people find me? Yes, definitely Planable.io but also on LinkedIn – Xenia Muntean. Find me there, you know, connect and you know, happy to talk!

Todd Chambers : 42:37

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your advice in telling your story. It was a pleasure speaking with you!

Xenia Muntean : 42:41

Thank you so much, Todd, it was great chatting with you too.

Todd Chambers : 42:44

Yeah, speak soon. See ya!

Xenia Muntean : 42:46

Bye!