Anastasia Leng

Learn more about Creative X at: https://www.creativex.com/

Find Anastasia Leng on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleng/

JC: Welcome, everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. I have with me here, Anastasia Leng, She’s the founder and CEO of CreativeX. Anastasia, thank you so much for coming on this show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do?

Anastasia: Sure. Hi, everyone. So my name is Anastasia, I’m the founder and CEO of Creative X, which basically means I do all the jobs that don’t have people yet doing them. I’m a former Googler, I spent about five years working in Google worked on every Ad Tech and analytics product Google had during that time. And this is actually my second startup. The first one was a complete disaster in a failure. But it led me to this. So I guess we’ll kind of consider it a latent success.

JC: I’ll tell you, I have to say, I say that it’s a trail of tears of the Golden kingdom, right?

Anastasia: Absolutely 

JC: Like, there’s no awesome story, like, yeah, I had this idea one day, and then I told it to one person, and then they gave me a bunch of money. And then it was a great success. And now I’m retired, like, that’s never been uttered in the history of entrepreneur.

Anastasia: It’s true. It’s true. And you know, what’s actually funny about this is, I found that this idea of having a first company that fails, and a second company that is like the phoenix rising from the ashes, is actually a pattern of success that investors look for. Because I think slack was born that way. There are a number of other companies that came through this first company failure, second company success, it’s actually sort of a weird badge of honor.

JC: Yeah. No, they want to know, I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of VCs and, and honestly, some of them, like the dirty little secret is that they want to know that you’ve tasted failure. I mean, you look at you look at sports. And almost, there’s a reason why there’s only one team in the history of the NFL that ever went undefeated in their season and won the Super Bowl because that basically never happens. For all the undefeated teams, they always eventually get beaten, and then they lose in the end. But that’s because they didn’t have that practice. You know, when things got hard, you know, even though the professionals they kind of almost lost touch with what it was like to lose. So they lost touch with what it was like to pivot and be able to overcome, you know, the big adversity. So, and that happens across all right, like you don’t want a perfect season. It’s like the..

Anastasia: No, no, of course.

JC: The kiss of death for a championship is to have a perfect season.

Anastasia: Yeah, I think you learn too much more from the losses too. But, you know, I remember, this is such a big surprise to me that when we were raising money for Creative X, which was then called the Castle Labs, we got a term sheet from an investor. And in it, you know, the terms he gave us were relatively generous, I thought for a company that didn’t yet exist. And the way he justified he said, Well, you know, you’re a serial entrepreneur. And I really did not feel comfortable with sort of having that label. And I said, You know, I don’t think having one failed company has earned me the serial entrepreneur label. And he said, you know, the biggest thing for us as investors is knowing that you won’t give up. And if you’ve proven that you’ve tasted failure, and you’re still willing to keep going, keep grinding, and your team is still with you. That’s one of the biggest things we need to de-risk as investors. And you’ve just done that for us, which I never really appreciated.

JC: Yeah, no, I mean, you’re right. Well, and before we get too far, let’s talk about Creative X real quick. You know, what is because now they’re like, well, well, what is it? So what is it? What does it do? And who does it help?

Anastasia: Yes. So Creative X is a company that focuses on elevating creative expression through data. So really, what that means is we’ve built technology predominantly for marketers at some of the largest brands in the world, to help them make better decisions about all the creative content they’re putting out there using data. To take it one step forward, it basically means we use things like computer vision, optical character recognition, etc. to really understand in-depth, everything contained in their creative content, and help them measure everything from brand consistency, to representation of talent, to adherence to creative best practices, and how those decisions that they’re making are actually impacting the bottom line.

JC: Okay, so walk me so for it’s a two-part question. The first one is, with what you guys provide, who is your perfect client, right, like, industry, size, you know, capabilities, whatever. And then after that, can you walk us through what, what it would look like to use your system? So first, who’s the perfect client? And then like, let’s get a visual almost on how someone wants to use it?

Anastasia: Yeah. Yeah, you know, the perfect client is, they will tend to be so let’s start with kind of company first, and then person second. So the company will tend to be a multinational conglomerate, right? Think of, you know, present in loads of markets, multiple brands under its portfolio, it’ll tend to be predominantly B2C, or certainly being an industry where visual is a big part of how it communicates its value proposition, right. So we really look for companies that have that scale, they tend to be in the Fortune 500, or at least the Fortune 2000.

JC: Like,  someone who relies on their brand heavily, something like that?

Anastasia: Exactly. That’s the last part, right? Is this brand has to be effectively like a valuable asset on their balance sheet that they really care about preserving and those are the likes of you know, Unilever, Heineken, Nike but that’s a company stuff. On the person front, what we tend to see is they tend to be individuals who are very, very data-driven, right, they want to bring data to the last frontier, which is the creative and doesn’t have as much data as all the other parts of the marketing funnel, they tend to sit in more centralized functions. So they will oversee a bunch of regions, they will oversee a bunch of brands, rather than just focus on one piece. And then from a you know, at least in the early days, I think this is starting to change as our product becomes you know, a little bit more industry standard. But in the early days, they were sort of like the folks, you know, who were happy going a little bit rogue, they were like the internal innovators. So they really wanted to be the first ones to test something, they really wanted to bring new technology to the table. They were almost like the entrepreneurs that, you know, hadn’t get started their own companies, but they wanted to do within this big company environment.

JC: And so what does it look like to use your system? So imagine, Imean, I’m the VP of, let’s say, branding of America, right? For a fortune 500 company. So I kind of meet all those requirements that you’re talking about right there. Right? So I log in and what’s my benefit? You know, what do I see in my dashboard kind of thing? You know, where am I? Where am I saving time? Or money? Where am I being more consistent in things? Walk me through that visual? So I understand what it’s like to even use yourself?

Anastasia: Yeah. So so you’re a VP, let’s say your VP of global because let’s go big, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna..

JC: Even better. I’ll take it, I’ll take the pay raise.

Anastasia: Exactly there you go. You’ve just been promoted. So your VP of global you log into dashboard. What do you see? Well, right off the bat, you see every single creative that all your brands and all your markets are putting out there right now that his media spend behind it, you see what percentage of those creatives are adhering to your creative quality standards, to your brand consistency standards, etc. You see how much money is being deployed on content that meets all your standard, the content that doesn’t.

Anastasia: You see who are the agencies who are spending the most money creating and deploying content that doesn’t adhere to your organizational standards. So you can actually see where the bleed is coming from. You see statistically significant correlations between kind of all your creative best practices, all of your brand, kind of distinctive brand elements, something we call DBAs, and digital performance metrics. And you can start to see, hey, as our creative quality score, as our brand consistent score goes up, what happens to some of this performance metrics. So that’s one thing you see, right. The other thing that you don’t see, but that happens in the background is what your agencies will see is a tool that allows them to actually test all new content, before it goes live to our system, to make sure it adheres to all of the brand-specific best practices, guidelines, creative learnings, etc. before it even goes out, which gives the VP confidence probably, that, you know, the organization is starting to March the beat of the same drum. And this is all automated and in real-time.

JC: Wow. So it’s not only does it have a check and balance before a filter before it goes out. So I imagine the software’s checking for font style, color gradients, right to make sure all those are on the quality of the picture size to make sure that it’s not too, you know, watered-down, you know, in low quality, those kinds of things is checking for matching correct?

Anastasia: You know, to be honest, the gamut runs really wide, it can be stuff like that, and those things that you’ve just mentioned, we see a lot on the brand consistency front, when you’re talking about something like creative quality, it’s really more adhering to platform-specific best practices. So you know, what is required for a piece of content to be successful on Instagram is different than YouTube is different than TikTok. And so what we do is we actually figure out what are those creative best practices that are platform-specific, and is every piece of content you’re running because there’s, there’s kind of a big, because there’s so much content being produced, we see a lot of recycling. But actually, the downside of that recycling is you’re putting something that was meant for an Instagram story as a YouTube video. And you know, the dimensions are even completely different, right? So we see a lot of this recycling, that actually takes a very negative toll on performance and on a user’s ability to really interact with that content. So we see things of that spectrum, we see things of the spectrum, you’ve described, the last thing that we’re seeing more and more of now is how do we make sure that when we represent people in our ads, we are telling progressive, authentic stories about the kinds of people representing and we’re not inadvertently perpetuating stereotypes. So that’s sort of a new use case we’re seeing come up more and more.

JC: Well, that’s really cool. And what kind of feedback Are you getting from new clients? Like within that first couple weeks of using it, right? Like, I mean, like, you talked about having, you know, inconsistencies and brand and the bleed and, and having you know, how much money we’ve been spending over here where we’re not either using the brand at all or not properly? You know, are they shocked when they go “holy crap, I had no idea” or is it like, “okay, yeah, you know, we figured it was probably somewhere around here, but now we can pinpoint it, which is really valuable”. Is it both? I mean, just what kind of reactions do you get usually?

Anastasia: Yeah, it’s funny because you know, we’ve done over two dozen of these global deployments and when they say global, you know means for one of these kind of global grommets, every brand, every market, etc. And it is amazing how consistent it is that that really actually there those first couple of weeks is every time. And the reaction is basically we had no idea we were spending so much money on content that doesn’t. Again, remember, we don’t make this stuff up, like we don’t tell them, these are best practices, and you should follow them. These are things the brand is saying to us that they’re giving us a list of things and say, these are our best practices or Facebook, their Facebook partners giving us a thing saying this is what it takes for us to be successful on Facebook, please make sure you and your agency team do this. And so from about, you know, 30 plus of these global deployments, what we’ve seen is the average creative quality score, right? Meaning the percentage of content that meets all your creative best practices is about 20% when we start, which means that there’s literally in some cases, billions being deployed towards content that doesn’t meet your organizational standards for creative excellence, which is a really big shock, right?

Anastasia: And I think, in reality, most people know, right, which is why they start having the conversation. They know there is some problem, but they don’t know how bad it is. And in fairness, this is not brands being careless, or people you know, sort of not being thoughtful enough, it’s just that we’ve never created as much content as we do today. And the problem is, we have to do it faster. We have to, we have to memorize all the different things that like YouTube and Facebook, Tik Tok one done in a different way. You know, it all has to be personalized. And there’s so many things you have to do as a marketer, it’s basically become impossible to do it without technology. Because even if you if you look back a couple years ago, when we had like one, you know, TV campaign, we ran for six months, marketers were doing some of these similar things, but they were doing them in a human-led way. But with the scale that’s longer possible.

JC: So let me ask a question. You know, what inspired you to even create this? I mean, most entrepreneurship is born out of frustration, right? You know, you were forced to deal with something that you hated. And you’re like, dang it, someone needs to fix this. And then you realize, well, I guess it’s gonna have to be me. Is that how this company started? Or do you just have some weird light bulb went off? Like, how did you even come up with the idea to create this?

Anastasia: Well, it goes back to our earlier point about you know, the importance of failure and learning from failure. So me Don’t I wish I could tell you I had this brilliant insight. And I saw we the industry was going we were lightyears ahead. But no, it was none of that. So my first company was an e commerce business. And you know, thinking of it as kind of like a glorified Etsy, we were selling kind of customizable lifestyle goods. And we started noticing that imagery and video was so important to kind of getting users to not even click on the the asset, but come to our site and buy. But we couldn’t figure out why some creatives performed really well and others that looked very similar to us, and to the naked eye that didn’t have the same, you know, didn’t catalyze same consumer reaction. And as a team of engineers, it drove us crazy that we’re making these like very data back decisions about everything else, except the creative, which was like finger in the wind, you know, let’s conjecture about what’s going to work. And so we started trying to think about how do we become more data driven in our approach to create a decision making, literally just to solve our own problems?

Anastasia: Because if you think about our company back then, were ecommerce company, very poorly funded, we have no we can’t pay to play, we can’t compete by like out bidding and all the other tactics. And so, you know, we thought about how do we get smarter, right? And our thesis was you get smarter by having better creative and really understanding what’s working from a creative point of view. And so our first iteration was, we took a spreadsheet, we put a bunch of images that we were using the spreadsheet, and we had columns for kind of binary questions, we wanted to answer about those images. Was there a person the image? Yes, no. is their product the image? Yes, no. And we went out and manually, you know, I did a lot of this in the early days, and manually sort of filled out this and then crunched the data and saw what the data set and and started making decisions based on that. And that was where the insight came from. And of course, the products evolved a lot since then. But the original insight was from trying to save a company that was that working.

JC: It’s funny, the way you describe the initial version of it, like is this picture with picture that, I cannot help myself but quote, you ever watched Silicon Valley?

Anastasia: Yeah. Is it a hotdog?

JC: Remember hot dog, not hot dog? You made that?

Anastasia: Yeah we made “hotdog, not hotdog.

JC: For anyone listening who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, you got these go on YouTube for this part that basically Silicon Valley it’s, it’s this parody on the startup in the Bay Area. And there’s a software that one of these guys creates, and all it does is tell you, if you take a pinch of your food, all it does is tell you is it a hot dog or not a hot dog, that’s it. And he ends up selling it for like $10 million, which is ridiculous or something right? But I just remember, like the way you’re describing the beginning stages of it, you know, hot dog, not hot dog.

Anastasia: Yeah it was definitely hotdog not hotdog. Yeah, exactly. Those are our roots. And yeah, I’m proud of them.

JC: Let me ask you question, a lot of the audience here are kind of founders sea level, you know, VPS or higher of businesses. And I find that one of the questions that really helps them is to ask my guests, you know, what type of marketing are you doing? To get your name? Obviously, you’re on podcast, right? So this is one thing, okay, but..

Anastasia: A new thing for us. But yes..

JC: I know. Right? Yeah. So what kind of digital marketing? are you guys doing that’s been successful, and what maybe hasn’t worked? Any kind of insights you could give the audience as far as kind of what you guys have done that maybe has helped you? Yeah. Land those bigger clients?

Anastasia: Yes. So you know, I’ll be I’ll be honest, in saying that, the marketing team is something that we’ve literally just started, I would say, a couple months ago, it’s a completely new function for us. And what we realize, and again, you know, this is very specific to us, because we work with, you know, very C-Level and senior folks at some of the biggest companies in the world, but what we realize is our best marketing was happy customers. And so what we did in the early days, is we invested everything we could to make sure that as we really listened to their feedback, we were very direct and very transparent about the things we were going to do versus the things we were not going to prioritize and explain the rationale behind that I spent, I still do, I spend a lot of my time in, in support and talking directly to our partners to understand the issue. And what that led to is, when we look at the business, the bulk of our growth has come from two sources, customer referral, and someone that we work with at one company, even maybe not directly, but you know, maybe they’re using our product as part of one company moving to another company, and then bringing us in. And so happy customers was really sort of our marketing.

Anastasia: Now, we’ve obviously, as we’ve started to grow more an investor expectations have started to change, we’ve started to think about building a proper marketing team. And I don’t know if I have too many insights to share. But one of the things that we talk about a lot is, is you know, being true to yourself, right and being true to your audience. And so for us, we know that the folks that we talked to are, you know, busy people, they get inundated with cold emails and ads, and all of that. And we just said, Look, we’re not going to really play that game. And so what we focused our marketing team on so far, is how do we use our tools to create interesting insights from analyzing lots of imagery and video, that are actually the kind of things you might want to talk about at like a dinner party or cocktail party. So you know, we denounce the Super Bowl ads, looking at whether or not we got better diversity, like over the last five years, by analyzing kind of, you know, the most expensive ads in the world. During that one day, we looked at whether or not representation of diversity changed post Black Lives Matter, in terms of the ads that were being put out in the US, you know, so we’re, we’re currently doing a piece on NF T’s and whether or not how brands are using kind of visual cues and NF T’s. So we try to think about kind of data driven storytelling, that’s been our approach so far. And again, it’s very true to us and what the company stands for, which is, you know, bringing a little bit of that data into the creative process.

JC: That’s really cool. Well, let’s, let’s talk a little bit now about the future stuff here. So first question is, you know, where do you see the industry that you’re in? You know, what, let’s call it, you know, brand software, generally, right, you know, for brand protection, you know, things like that? Where do you see that industry, including your competitors going in the next like, five years? I mean, how do you see it evolving? Just in general and being adopted?

Anastasia: Yeah. So, you know, obviously, that the reality is, no one knows, right? I think I see a couple of different paths from what we’re doing and other folks are doing. I think one thing that’s happening is, there’s been such a focus in the digital world on performance optimization, right, driving for clicks and conversions. And all of that, we’re actually starting to see is a little bit less focused on sort of short term ROI and short term, medium metrics, and more of a focus on how does the stuff you’re doing impact brand. One of the things that we’re already seeing this is maybe not too far ahead, is how do you start to measure brand lift – through like in a very quick and condense and like, programmatic way? Right. And so that that’s one thing is this, I think the conversation is really starting to shift, at least with the brands we work with, from, you know, what’s the click-through rate on this to is this going to make our consumers more likely to consider our product or to think favorably of our brand? Because I think there’s some consensus that we’ve moved too far down this like rabbit hole of constant optimization, and actually moved away from the thing that we’ve always known drove sales, which is a really strong brand identity.

JC: Yeah, making that connection between the the action and the reaction rather than just action, action, action action all the way down, right?

Anastasia: That’s right. That’s right.

JC: Now, let’s hear some teasers about x, right. So like I said, you know that if I want to out for a couple months, you have a little bit of time here between.

Anastasia: Okay

JC: But what’s coming down the pipeline for you guys? What are some new, cool tools or ideas you have or direction that you know you’re going in? Like, what can we give the audience that they can look forward to, or that might have just dropped by the time they hear this.

Anastasia: So one of the things that we’re working on now, which is which is very close to my heart is looking at how we can use the technology, we have to increase diversity and representation and content, and to decrease stereotypical portrayals of people. So one of the things we realized last year is because of the way we work with brands, all of a sudden, we have access to their entire content library. And two, we can start to sort of use our tech for good, right. So one of the products we’re building is a product that will help our brands not only get a quick sense of, hey, here’s what I feature people in my ads. Here’s how the people I feature break down by gender, by age range by skin tone, but also more importantly, am I telling different stories about different kinds of people? And are they progressive or regressive stories? So it may be great. Yeah, right like to, you know, I think it’s, we want to avoid like a box checking, sort of diversity product, but we’re trying to think about is, you know, every brand is really struggling with this. And I think a lot of people we talked to generally take this very seriously and want to do some good around this. And so one of the things that we’re looking at is, how do we help not only kind of help them understand what kind of people they’re casting, but also how they’re representing them. So might be great that, you know, 50% of your ads contain women. But if those 50%, 90% of women are being shown in domestic situation, sort of cleaning, cooking, etc, then perhaps it’s something you need to think about, right? So we’re trying

JC: Especially if there’ a single market there to, you know, for singles or anything like that you’re showing the wrong types of images to that demographic.

Anastasia: Yes, but more importantly, you know, there’s, it’s, it’s looking at about the kind of the targeting front of it and more about, there’s a lot of research that’s been done that shows that even the way that people are portrayed in Ads has a meaningful impact on the way that like younger people might see themselves, right. And there’s a lot of research done by a brilliant organization called the Gina Davis Institute, and they’ve been working on this for a long time, their focus is really has been to eradicate stereotypical portrayals in media. They started with film, right, and Gina Davis, obviously an actress, and they’re now also helping the brands do this to add, you know, some taking a brand like Unilever, P&G, which are some of the largest advertisers in the world, you know, on a given day, you might see more ads from Unilever, then you might watch like Netflix content, right? So it’s a there’s a lot of a lot of time you’re spending taking in these portrayals. And the research shows that they do have an impact on how you see yourself. So there’s, I think, a broader social element here as well.

JC: What about going the other direction? What about a company uploading its content library? Let’s take Mattel for example, because I believe they own Barbie. Right?

Anastasia: Yeah.

JC: So recently, which has been awesome is they’ve seen big gains in minority colored Barbies. Right? You know, I mean, there’s black Barbies, there’s Hispanic Barbies, like this was never done before was just whitewash Barbie forever. So if they, let’s say, uploaded the images of that, do you see a future where, because you mentioned very specifically how the content might not be tailored to the image properly. So if they were to upload their images of their, let’s say, their minority looking Barbies, right, or figures in general, and then the content that’s behind it, was still talking in a way that’s clearly geared towards white people. Do you see a way for it to to recognize that and say, listen, you’ve got this image that isn’t matching this tone? Or this the slang or this, you know, or whatever, right? You know, do you see it going in the direction where it can start matching, and creating suggestions for content with the images so that they actually have a flow so that you’re not talking, you know, to white people while showing a black Barbie or vice versa? Do you see that connection coming in?

Anastasia: Yeah. So you know, yeah I’m not sure because the research on this is actually quite mixed. So, um, you know, Facebook just did some, I believe it was Facebook, I don’t want to misquote here, but they just did some great research, looking at what happens when you show, you know, diverse talent to folks, you know, across a diverse spectrum, righ? So should you always show you know, white people to white people and black people to black people? And the answer is no. Right like showing diversity of portrayal and showing diversity of of people seems to work from their analysis across the board. And one of the things we’re very careful to do is to make sure that we’re not inadvertently using what we’re building to create further stereotypes, you know, so, like, even things like like, slang I think that can be a dangerous road to go down. Because then, you know, we don’t want to inadvertently say, hey, you use this word, and our technology doesn’t do this anyway.

Anastasia: So it’s not really, you know, not really a direction we would go in. But we’re very careful in helping them understand what is the story they’re telling, I think technology is not yet at a point where it can make recommendations fully around how we should talk to different kinds of people, or what we should show different kinds of people in a way that that doesn’t, that might not accidently perpetuate more stereotypes. I mean, the old adage is, like, put crap in, you get crap out. And the reality is, a lot of the pleadings that’s here can be biased. And so you know, that’s not a road where we’re planning to go down yet, because at this point, we just want to have first brands understand where they are, and then give them a way that they can set goals around progressive representation and commit to doing better, and then help them achieve those goals without really making recommendations of here’s how you should talk to different people. You know, that’s not really our bread and butter. But there are again, great research institutes that spend a lot more time looking at this qualitatively, like the Gina Davis Institute, who are much better partners for something like that.

JC: So it doesn’t sound like something you guys can do. But it sounds like it’s something that the industry could produce. And hopefully they go farther than hot dog, not hot dogs, right?

Anastasia: Hopefully they get way from hotdogs not hotdogs.

JC: Let me ask the question here. So what is the best either a the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given, you know, from a mentor or something business wise, or the best piece of advice that you can give the audience based on your own experience?

Anastasia: I think this probably changes day to day and depends on the moment you catch me in something I’m thinking about a lot right now is, and then this probably relates to the best piece of advice I can give at the moment, is really enjoy those early days of creating a company, because you know, our company went from, we were about 10 people, we were the same 10 people for like, three, four years, we went from 10 to 50. And I think about the last 12 months, and we’re continuing to grow. So you know, it’s not huge, but it feels really big to us, right? And I remember being 10 people and thinking, I can’t wait till we’re 50 people were 100. I can’t wait till we hit this revenue threshold, like life is gonna be so easy then. And I, you know, I kept, I was so focused on where I wanted to go to. But it’s funny now that we’re here, sometimes I miss the lack of complexity in the early days, and like, the joy of finding product market fit the joy of like, really quick this, I mean, all that so happens, of course, but, you know, I wish I could almost go back and really enjoy those those, like family like days of building something from scratch together.

JC: Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s exciting, right? It’s the hunt of it, it’s the trying to figure it out the problem solving, you know, just really, really fires your brain off on multiple cylinders, you know, and, and not that you don’t have things obviously, to think about and work through now. But no, I get what you’re saying. Because I mean, I’ve owned my agency for over 10 years. And I remember, early days, you know, not when I didn’t even know, like, who was our niche going to be, you know, I mean, we end up, I’m a geek from the Bay Area. And I like B2B. So I’d end up being B2B software companies. Okay, great. But before, I mean, we were all over the map, because we didn’t really know like, you know, what are we going to do? How are we going to do it for but it was exciting figuring it out, right?

Anastasia:Yes yes yes

JC: You know, there’s a lot of ups and downs in it, but and now that we’re there, like, Yeah, we got it, we have different things we work on. But yeah, I do miss a little bit, that exploratory phase of it, you know, what I mean? You know, it’s probably what kind of think maybe keeps, quote, serial entrepreneurs in the serial part of it, right? Because they can restart that over and over again, that’s why you sell after a certain point, or pass it on to a president and then you go create something else, you know, you get back in the, in the trenches. That’s really cool. Yeah, I can appreciate it.

Anastasia: You know, it’s really, both are really exciting. And I think there are challenges that that I’m really enjoying now. And, you know, the luxury to think about certain things that I could only dream that these would be some of the things I’d be thinking about back then. But, you know, as a founder, and as a CEO, the way I think about my job is my job is to constantly like outsource myself, right and replace things that I do and hand them off to someone more qualified, more talented, etc. And over the last like year, I’ve been I’ve been giving off a lot of the stuff that I’ve been doing. And sometimes you know, I like product work is something like Detail Product work is something that I love doing the early days, something I don’t, I’m still very involved in product more at a high level. So yeah, I wish I wish I could go back and tell myself like, enjoy those days because you know, that building stuff like that is something I think I’ll always remember. And I think I wish I would have put a little bit less pressure on myself in the early days.

JC: I think that’s really good advice. Listen Anastasia thank you so much for coming on the show. I love you guys are doing over there. How can the, tell the audience I guess how they can get to Creative X website wise, and then how maybe someone can reach out to you directly if they have a much bigger project for partnership that they want to pitch to you.

Anastasia: Yeah, absolutely. so CreativeX.com is aour website the word Creative the letter X at the end I am one of those annoying Inbox Zero people. So I do actually read every email, I do my best to respond. So just my name Anastasia@CreativeX.com. Also LinkedIn is a good way to reach me. So if you Google my name, it should be one of the first things that comes up.

JC: Awesome, Anastasia. Thanks again for being on the show. And I look forward to speak with you again, soon.

Anastasia: Thanks for having me.