BlogTec CEO Manuel Brandt Interview About Changing the Marketing Industry

Today we have selected Manuel Brandt to take his Interview. He is the CEO Of BlogTec.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company.

I have always been a creative, passionate, and rebellious person. My brain is producing ideas all day, which I then have to implement. With 7 I started to create e-books, with 11 I created my first website, with 12 I had my own internet radio, with 15 I created an online store for hip-hop beats. Creating digital products has always been my thing.

When I was 19 I flew to Asia with a few thousand dollars I saved working at McDonald’s, with the intention to travel around the world for 1 year. After a few weeks in Cambodia, I had the idea for a non-profit crowdfunding platform. In Vietnam, I was living in a coffee shop for free to talk to some of their customers. I got myself a laptop and worked on the idea.

This project didn’t go beyond a few fundraisers, but thanks to that project I learned more about web design, content writing, and online marketing.

I got a remote job as a marketing manager and developer at an ed-tech startup from Munich. I learned a lot there and after a year I founded my company with the idea to work as a freelancer and realize some other ideas I had. Pretty fast I realized that the marketing service market is really profit-orientated but nobody is really focusing on innovation and customer experience. That’s when I decided to change this and built the marketing service solution of the future – BlogTec!

How does your company innovate?

We offer an easy solution to order SEO and content. We automate marketing services and are building our own technology to provide an easy-to-use backend (like a web app), where companies can easily book their marketing team in different subscriptions. With that, we want to be “the Hubspot for marketing services” in the long run.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

As I like to spend my time in different countries, we were a remote-only company from the very beginning without the classic office. As a result, the Corona crisis had almost no impact on the way we run our company. We just founded when Corona started, so I can’t really say much about whether we got fewer or even more requests because of Corona, since they have been constantly increasing since we started.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

I think as a startup you have to make difficult decisions all the time, as you’re missing the experience. What I learned is that the number one priority as a founder should be to build an awesome and passionate team. I deeply believe in “don’t hire for skills, hire for attitude”. If I interview someone, I’m looking if that person has a “fire in their eyes”. If so, I give them a chance.

With that mindset, we built a truly great team. Everyone in our heads team is motivated and passionate about our product and vision. We’re transparent and openly share all company insights with everyone, even revenue. That’s the number one lesson I learned: Trust in your team, give them responsibility, be transparent, and together you will solve every problem!

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

We were always a remote-only company, so I will just give some kudos to my favorite software for remote teams.

Slack is great for team communication. We don’t use email for team communication, but Slack only.

The notion is my favorite project management software, as you can adjust it exactly how you need it like no other software.

Zoom is a no-brainer.

Tandem is a tool I found recently and a cool addition to Slack. It helps to sometimes have lunch together or jump on a coffee with your team members.

Deel helps us to hire full-time employees and contractors all around the world totally compliant. Saved us a lot of hiring pains.

The front runs our sales and customer support inbox and makes it incredibly easy to collaborate on customer issues or bookings with our team members.

Pipedrive is my favorite CRM and gets an extra plus as they also have their headquarters in Estonia.

Loom helps us to work asynchronously. You can quickly record a video and share ideas, feedback, or other thoughts. Saves a lot of time!