Today we have selected Kate Bojkov to take her interview. She is the Co-founder of EmbedSocial.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
We are very thankful that the team stayed healthy and positive throughout the pandemic. However, the lack of social interactions had its impacts, such as challenges in communication, motivation, and the overall synchronization between the teams.
Luckily, we finally managed to get back to the office, where we have a great space to improve communication and team spirit toward building better products.
Tell us about your career and how you founded or joined this company?
I started working in the marketing space 15 years ago as a co-founder of one of the first digital marketing agencies in the region. In a few years, we became Facebook marketing partners and worked on digital campaigns for big marketing agencies.
With experience in building apps and small digital products for our clients, the team slowly switched to creating our platform that, in 2017, started to grow exponentially, which helped us focus on building it as a new company entirely.
How does your company innovate?
Innovation is part of our DNA. We are in a constant mode of finding new solutions for the problems our users face. That problem-solving mindset usually comes in our urge to never fall into a comfort zone and always try to add a secret sauce on top of the industry-standard solutions that already exist.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
We think there was no positive or negative effect on revenue and growth. We continue to grow at the same pace as before. While there was no overall change, we saw growth in some products on our platform, and some declined. We believe that the main logic behind this is that the target audiences for some of the products are eCommerce, where we had the growth. On the other spectrum are local SMEs that struggled and temporarily closed their business.
Did you have to make difficult choices and the lessons learned?
Our main difficulties were hiring the right people to fit a dynamic product environment. That said, our main lesson learned is to hire people who have the experience to work remotely, are comfortable with continuous changes, and are very open to learning new things.
On top of that, we learned that a hybrid model with a physical presence of the teams is a great advantage, especially for product-led companies.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
I tried to navigate the crisis with a back-to-basics approach and used the remote work experience to re-evaluate my entire daily routine. This includes changes in my diet, workouts, and practicing more mindfulness and self-care. From a tools and software perspective, my calendar and tasks are synced with our company Slack account, which helped to improve productivity.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We are in the trust business, so our main competitors are in the space of reviews management, word-of-mouth marketing, or user-generated content aggregation. To stay in the game in this competitive space, we are focused on executing our roadmaps that combine our user requests and founders’ vision. One of our main advantages is the quick response to our customers and the overall obsession with executing their requests.
Your final thoughts
I believe that young product teams need a physical environment that will facilitate natural conversations, arguments, and discussions about customer problems that will help them build more innovative solutions. That said, product-focused companies need to accommodate the choice to use an office, co-working, or similar space to facilitate constant idea exchange by being physically together.
- Spokesperson: Kate Bojkov
- Company: EmbedSocial
- Website link: https://www.embedsocial.com