This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us maximize the impact behind all our creative decisions, and my guest is Anastasia Leng, Founder, and CEO of CreativeX.
Early in her career, Anastasia gained experience in brand strategy at Interbrand, spent 5+ years at Google, where she worked on every ad tech and analytics product, led entrepreneurship efforts in EMEA, and was responsible for early-stage partnerships for Google Voice, Chrome, and Wallet.
In 2012, she co-founded Hatch, one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Startups to Watch in New York and one of four most innovative retail companies.
Today, she's the Founder & CEO of CreativeX, an automated creative excellence platform used by the world’s most loved brands. The company is on a mission to advance creative expression through the clarity of data.
And that inspired me, and hence I invited Anastasia to my podcast. We explore what's holding companies back in their growth because they're guessing what works/what doesn't work in relation to their creative efforts. Anastasia shares how she solved this problem internally first, and how investors then made them aware of the size of this problem globally. She explains how this triggered a major pivot and the effort and determination it took to get to Product-Market-Fit. Finally, she shares some of the secrets she learned in turning her company into a remarkable growth story.
Here are some of her quotes:
We make a lot of promises and have a lot of efforts to try and do things like be responsible citizens as brands to promote different people of all different colors and orientations. And yet, when we look at the content we put out, we don't always tell that story. And I think part of it is because it has become very, very difficult to analyze content at that scale and in an objective way.
We can help to even get an initial pulse check as to how you're doing on things that don't even relate to marketing performance. What is the message you're really sending, I think is the broader question. And how do we help you figure out whether or not the messages that you are really sending actually are in line with the brand values and the things that you would like to be sending?
During this interview, you will learn four things:
- Why having an honest perspective about how your company is really running is key. Staying in that bubble and thinking you've got everything together will just make the mess bigger.
- Why we're often the biggest obstacles in our own way
- Make the big bets. Think 'what's the worst that can happen and push forward'. Your reflection will tell you, 'Why didn't I do this sooner?’
- Why success often starts by cutting things down to the core
For more information about the guest from this week:
The Remarkable SaaS Podcast