140 – A Tool to Streamline Growth with Xenia Muntean

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 140

Intro 0:07
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:25
Hello, I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 140 of the good girls get rich podcast. And this podcast is sponsored by she’s linked up where we teach women simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing system that gets you on the phone consistently with your perfect people, people who will change your business, your life and your bank account for ever. So of course, every one of our episodes is supportive of that effort as well. So if you love what you’re hearing today, we would love for you to take a quick screenshot while you’re listening and share it on your social media. Just let people know you’re listening. And if you think they should listen, let them know as well. and tag me I’m @KarenYankovich you can use the hashtag #goodgirlsgetrich because when I see that, I make sure to share your post with my audience and that’s how we all get more visibility. So you can just go to karenyankovich.com/140 you can see the blog for this episode, you’ll see all the links that we share in this episode. And this is really an interesting one because we have a guest today who has really quite accomplished for a quite a young age. So I really can’t wait for you to meet her. So we’re not going to waste any more time we’re going to jump right in and get rolling. So I am excited that we have Xenia Muntean with us today on the good girls get rich podcast. Xenia is the CEO and co founder of Plantable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 5000 teams behind brands such as Hyundai Christian Louboutin Viber, the United Nations. Prior to launching plantable. At 20 years old, she built a digital marketing agency and lead social for clients such as Coca Cola, Xenia has been recognized on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and she spoke on the innovation stage at cons Lyons in 2018. She graduated Tim Draper’s startup Academy in Silicon Valley, to plantable through the TechStars London accelerator in 2017. And has published a book the manifesto on content marketing teams and has launched her own podcast, people have marketing. I am so happy to have you here today. Thank you so much for doing this with us.

Xenia Muntean 2:35
Thank you so much, Karen, for having me on the show. I’m very excited to talk to you.

Karen Yankovich 2:40
Well, I you know what, one of the things I love about your just your bio, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know a little bit more about you is how at such an early age, you had big goals, right? Like who at age 20, has a digital marketing agency and is working with Coca Cola, right? It’s it is what we teach here on good girls get rich, like, everybody’s always looking to go bottom up and well. And, you know, we teach, like started, like, look at look for the bigger opportunities, because that funds you to do some of the other things that you need to do. Right. And I love that you did that. Did you do that a native like, tell us a little bit about your journey, what brought you to at age 20 jumping into entrepreneurship at that level?

Xenia Muntean 3:19
And look, I would love to have more inspirational answers to this. But the truth is that, you know, I’m an entrepreneur by accident. So I do not have like a strategical plan I do not have, I wasn’t dreaming of, you know, becoming an entrepreneur when I was, you know, 12 years old. Now, one thing that was, you know, and the books for me or in the plan, I wasn’t finding where I wasn’t dreaming about that. Okay. So, you know, I think what happened was that I grew in that entrepreneurial environment without realizing so I think I learned quite a lot from my mom about creativity and about, you know, building something from scratch, though she wasn’t an entrepreneur, I saw, you know, her drive and her ambition. And I think, you know, that’s, you know, how I got my insights about being an entrepreneur, but I didn’t really have role models, and, you know, business people when I was growing up as role models, so that was, you know, not necessarily something I was dreaming about. But when I was very, you know, young, I was still at university, I got, you know, just by accident, the opportunity to have one of my first clients, and a Coca Cola, luckily, in my home country as a client for social media services. And that’s kind of how it all started. So it wasn’t, you know, something that I meticulously planned and strategically, you know, thought about, and it just happened and I seize the opportunity, and I think that’s, you know, one of the lessons that I, you know, I got from this entire experience was that sometimes it’s extremely important to just show up and to just say yes, and to just, you know, take the opportunity It presents and you know, to yourself, because so many times, you know, there’s opportunities in front of you that you don’t take advantage off. And I think that’s, you know, my lesson that, you know, happened with plantable. Afterwards, when I got the opportunity of starting the business again, it kind of almost happened by accident again. And, you know, I took it, I mean, there’s obviously I worked hard for it. It didn’t come easily. But yes, there is a lesson here about seizing the opportunity. And whenever it presents,

Karen Yankovich 5:32
well, and you know, what, and it and it is, what I love about it is that there had to be some level of confidence, or at least enough confidence to say, I’ll figure this out. Right? And I will, I’ll do that. And that I think, is really what speaks to a successful business venture is having the confidence to, to not wait until you have every single solitary thing figured out. I mean, 100%, I definitely don’t want people jumping into things that they’re not ready to do. But at the same time, you’re never if you wait to become everything to be good. And listen, women, as women do this more than men, I think we have to have everything has to be ready before we say okay, and sometimes that just gets in a way, right?

Xenia Muntean 6:13
Yeah, I can’t agree more with you. And I think it’s also about confidence, but it’s also about courage. Because times in confidence is again, something that we women struggle quite a lot with, especially when we’re extremely young, I still struggle with confidence, and you know, just building, building my confidence and building myself, that’s, that’s something that I have to do every day and growing my confidence is extremely challenging. Even now with, you know, everything that I’ve done, that’s still something that I need to work on. But courage, you know, courage to jump into something encouraged to, to just, you know, courage to realize that you will figure it out, eventually. And this kind of braveness and is probably one one thing to, you know, one lesson to keep in mind.

Karen Yankovich 7:02
It’s amazing. So tell us a little bit about your journey, then. So what, you know, so you’re doing this for other other people. And I’m assuming at some point, right, something was going on in your head, like, there’s got to be a better way. Right. So tell me tell us a little bit about that.

Xenia Muntean 7:17
Yeah, sure. So what happened was that I had this digital marketing agency, and I was building a lot of what we call in the industry, social media calendars, editorial calendars. So they keep that planning what you know, my clients are the brands are going to publish on social media in the next couple of weeks or in the next month. And I felt like the entire process of building those calendars, which was usually happening in like, very clunky spreadsheets, and there was a lot of back and forth over email on what that spreadsheet needs to contain. And a lot of feedback gathering and the approval process with the clients was very fragmented. And I felt like that entire process was just a lot of time was being wasted on inefficient processes and a lot of miscommunications with the client. And I realized that there must be a better way of doing things of collaboratively producing those editorial calendars and coordinating around content. And that’s kind of how plantable, the idea of plantable was born just out of pure necessity and kind of scratching my own itch. And yeah, together with my co founders, we both planning to do just that, to improve the way marketers work together on social media content and social media campaigns. And we’ve been doing that for the past four years, actually, I’ve been working with hundreds, thousands of teens, actually across the world, mostly in the US. And in the UK, helping them just simplify the way they work simplify the way they collaborate on content. And during this the past six months, we you know, this time has been incredibly important for efficient collaboration. And we had Yeah, we had to work with a lot of teams that suddenly, you know, had to go remote, and they suddenly had to figure out how to make it work. So yeah, we’ve been very busy.

Karen Yankovich 9:15
Yeah, oh, my gosh, I love that you’re saying that because I think that, you know, we are we really have to recognize that things have shifted and times have changed, right? And good for you that you’ve recognized that and are stepping up into that space to help people like me, because, you know, like, here’s the thing that i think i think that you know, as an entrepreneur and as someone who understands exactly what you’re doing, and I want to explain it a little better to you, I want to explain a little better, you know, I struggle a little bit with I want to you know, and not not anymore, but as I was building my business I was struggling with I need some support. But the hardest part about getting support as an entrepreneur with your marketing is having your team get your voice, right.

Xenia Muntean 9:54
Yes.

Karen Yankovich 9:55
And also I also did some of this work as you know, when I first started out I was doing social media. management for companies. Similarly, you were, and I would say to my clients all the time, if I don’t get your, if I have off the mark, you need to tell me, like, this isn’t you criticizing me, it’s hard to get your voice. And the only way I’ll know that is if I get feedback from you. And you know, otherwise, I’m just going to keep going. And if we’re off the mark, then this is never gonna work. So it’s so important, especially in the beginning, to have a way to communicate that, right just because, you know, just because I say things out loud, doesn’t mean I like to see it that way. Maybe, in my social posts, or, or even, you know, I was finding things like as the world as the world becomes more of digital, I also feel like it kind of becomes like a little smaller, right? Like, I have my, you know, Jill, Jill, who a lot of the people that was in this podcast are in my programs. No, she’s my online business manager. She’s so much more that to my business. She lives in London. So it’s the English language isn’t an issue, but sometimes the culture is, and she wouldn’t know that. And if I see something, I have to say, No, no, no, I would never, you know, there’s a disconnect with that here in the US. And we can’t say that like that, right. So it’s so important to have a system to kind of communicate around those kinds of things. Because if you’re not communicating around that, then there’s just a lot you’re setting yourself up, I think for for having more problems than you need to

Xenia Muntean 11:25
100% I think feedback is extremely crucial. Whenever you’re, you know, building your own image or building your own online presence, and you’re working with other people to do so. Just creates better ideas, in the end, more diverse ideas, just, you know, brighter ideas, whenever, you know, more people are involved in the process on one side, on the other side, it just gives, you know, the person who’s you know, in charge of things, either if it’s a client, or if it’s a, if you’re building a personal brand, like, you know, potentially you are doing in your own case, it just gives, you know, a lot of peace of mind that everyone is aligned around what it should look like, what it should sound like what type of content needs to be built. It just aligns everyone and you know, gives some kind of like democratic control over over, you know, the output of that particular brand. So I can’t agree more with you. I think, you know, feedback is extremely important. I think feedback in the marketing world hasn’t really evolved since email, and Google Docs. So that’s what we’re trying to, to do to just, you know, set the ground floor for a different way of feedback, a more collaborative and a more visual way,

Karen Yankovich 12:39
I really want you to dive in and tell everybody a little bit more about plantable. But before we do that, I want to just kind of recognize that if you’re listening to this, and you’re an entrepreneur, or you’re, you know, you’re building out your business, you’re stepping up to a new level, you know, building a team to support you to leverage your time is, is one of the most important things that you can do. And, you know, there’s all kinds of different ways to do that. But without investing in things like this tool, or, or like any, you know, without an without a plan to invest, to build your team, you’re gonna run out of gas personally, right. So if you’re at the level where you’re ready to move from six figures, to multiple, six figures, to seven figures, to you know, building a team is, is got to be a part of that plan. And this having tools like this is going to set you up for better success. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Xenia today, because I think that we need to hear this, we need to hear it like especially women, we need to hear that we don’t have to do it all ourselves. Right, that we can get help. And that, you know, sometimes we sometimes I listen, I do this, I get it. And using it, I’d love to hear your your take when I say this, you know, it’s quicker if I just do it myself, or if I do it, you know, it takes me longer to rewrite things than it does to just do it myself. So we get stuck in that and that gets in our way of growth. So tell me what you think when you hear that?

Xenia Muntean 14:05
Yeah, I’ve heard that so many times. And I, honestly, you know, I’ve been doing it also, you know, in the back. I did it in my Yeah, you do. Right. Yeah. So I think you know, the problem with this is that, first of all, it’s kind of a bit of a sign of not trusting the other person if you do you know, like just jumping over them and not letting them do the work, right. If you have someone that is helping, you know, you with with content with work with, you know, business, whatever. I feel like if you just jump over them and do it yourself and not give them feedback and not you know, contribute with productive constructive criticism around their work. I think it’s kind of like a sign of not trusting them. But also it’s, it’s not helping them grow. It’s not helping them learn. If you don’t give feedback if you just, you know, rewrite it yourself, redo it yourself. Then on the other hand, if you don’t grow your team If you don’t, you know, delegate, if you don’t, you know, bring more people on board, it’s all going to be centered around you. So what happens, you know, whenever you have to go on vacation what happens, you know, if at some point in time, you can’t do that stuff, you know, if you centralize work too much, or knowledge in your business too much around yourself, that’s just not scalable, I think in the end. So think there’s a lot of issues with keeping too many things around yourself and not either delegating or teaching other people giving feedback and helping them go so that they can do that particular work that you’ve been doing even better than you in the future.

Karen Yankovich 15:39
I love that. I love that. So we kind of jumped into saying, you know, talking about plantable, without really telling people what it is. So why don’t you describe a little bit? what plantable is,

Xenia Muntean 15:49
right? So remember how I told you that we were working with spreadsheets to plan editorial calendar, and then

Karen Yankovich 15:55
which by the way, I’m still doing.

Xenia Muntean 15:57
Yeah, that’s okay. That’s okay. Sometimes it works.

Karen Yankovich 16:01
Yeah, it’s, I really love the idea. I definitely think I’m gonna give plantable a shot. By the way, when we’re done with this conversation, cuz diving in just doing research before this, I was like, why are we not using this? Which, let me tell you, I talk to a lot of people. So that says something in and of itself about how cool this tool is. And as you describe it, I’ll tell you where the spaces are, that I’m looking at this going this is this is awesome. I love this. So

Xenia Muntean 16:22
I love it. I love it. I need to hear Yeah. Okay, so and the idea is that we replace the spreadsheets for planning the content. And then we replay the emails for the entire coordination and the conversations around content. So implantable, you can create posts for social media, and they book pixel perfect the final version on social social media. So basically, live previews of how your content is going to look like on social on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, which is really amazing, because it gives you a very visual way to work on content. And also, you know, kind of avoid, you can avoid any miscommunications, because if you have multiple people involved in the process, and you’re working in spreadsheets, you’re relying on everyone else’s imagination to guess how that content is going to look like Indian, then there’s dozens of formats of content or social, and so implantable, you can just see exactly where you’re going to get in the end, you can collaborate in a very productive way around posts, you can plan them, you have like a very nice calendar, where you can see you know, how your entire content efforts are going to look like for the next week, or for the next month, I have an Instagram weed. So you can see you know, how your content is gonna look like in a very, you know, Instagram, specifically out. There’s an approval system if you have approval processes in place for your team. So it’s basically, you know, an end to end workflow to organize yourself as a team around your social media output. And yeah, that’s kind of you know, plantable in a nutshell.

Karen Yankovich 17:55
So okay, so you, you plantable works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn,

Xenia Muntean 18:01
the majors. Yeah.

Karen Yankovich 18:03
So does it. So do you have the native integration with Instagram? Or does it have to get pushed out a schedule and pushed out?

Xenia Muntean 18:09
Yeah, that’s a good question. So it’s on natively at the moment. It’s like a push notification on your mobile phone. But yeah, that’s actually something that we’re currently working on. So that’s the next thing on our roadmap.

Karen Yankovich 18:19
And how about stories? Does it does it integrate it all with stories?

Xenia Muntean 18:23
Yes, Yes, we do. So in the same way you plan and collaborate on regular posts, you can do the same with with stories for Instagram.

Karen Yankovich 18:30
Awesome. How about… Do you know LinkedIn has stories now, at least in the US, and which I mean, which has happened, you know, very recently. So yeah, LinkedIn is is a tough integration. I’m impressed that you have it in the first place. Because I know that that is not easy.

Xenia Muntean 18:46
Yeah, it’s a very hard one, their API is not as developed this with the other platforms. And we don’t have stories for LinkedIn yet. But that’s, you know, again, something that we’re looking forward to potentially adding in the next quarters.

Karen Yankovich 19:00
Awesome. Awesome. Great. So one of the so here’s what I want to hear about. And this is the interesting thing, when I saw your, when I was looking at your plans, you talk about infinity posts, hmm. Right? So tell it tell everybody what that is.

Xenia Muntean 19:15
So infinity posts means that we do not limit the number of posts you can create inside plantable. So if you’re okay, if you’re on a paid plan, you basically have unlimited number of posts, you know, how other plans Okay, other social media platforms have like maybe 100 posts a month that you can create, inside, you know, your your account, so we do not limit the number or the amount of posts you create an inside bannable because we think, you know, you should create as much content as you know, you think your brand your brand needs.

Karen Yankovich 19:46
Got it. Yeah, got it. Cool. So, so is there a way to reuse content Once you’ve created it?

Xenia Muntean 19:52
Yes, actually, yes, we do have a reposting option, where you can, you know, go on the platform and if you really enjoyed a specific Post, you can actually, you know, reuse it again. So we don’t necessarily have like the Evergreen post, because we feel like just automatically rescheduling a post doesn’t give you the opportunity to actually tweak it as much as you would want to. So the content is not identical. And there’s, you know, actually policies in place, especially on Twitter for, you know, not abusing the Evergreen tactics. And so yeah, but we do have a way of kind of, like recycling content,

Karen Yankovich 20:29
beautiful, beautiful, because, you know, there is a lot, especially with images and things like that, you know, we want to be able to reuse some of this stuff, not Yes, you know, repurpose things in different ways, especially for things like, you know, if you’re a content creator, like this podcast, you know, we create a bunch of content around each episode. And, you know, we we send out content for a long time ever, forever, in many ways, you know, back to old episodes, which is really interesting, which is something I really hadn’t expected, really, when I was doing my podcast that we would be having listens to every single episode every single month. Right. So

Xenia Muntean 21:02
that’s interesting, we should do it. And that actually, you know, sparked an idea. We should do that more often for my own podcast as well. Yeah, not recycling content as much as possible.

Karen Yankovich 21:12
Yeah, it’s well, because you know, why? I mean, listen, and you know, well, what’s that? Let me ask about this. When I am using plantable, can I tag? Like, if I’m creating content for this podcast? Can I tag you in the content as it goes out? as its pre scheduled?

Xenia Muntean 21:28
Yeah, yeah, you can, you can obviously do that, especially on Twitter and LinkedIn, with Facebook, you know, it’s more, it’s like harder the brain. Right, right. Give you like, people names more like pages, rather than raise your profile. But on the other platforms? Yes, for sure.

Karen Yankovich 21:43
This is awesome. This is beautiful. So you know, thank you so much for doing this for people like me that have, you know, listen, we were entrepreneurs, and I like to have a tight team not have, I don’t want to have 100 people, you know, that work. For me, it’s hard. And you know, it’s, it’s enough to do what we’re doing. Right. So having tools that can really streamline our back end and our work is, is really an important part of our growth. And I know that that’s the same for my customers, you know, and obviously, we focus a lot on LinkedIn here. So I love that you are able to schedule and schedule content out to LinkedIn, I spend a lot of time live in LinkedIn. And I encourage everybody listening to do the same thing. But you know, our podcasts go live every Monday, I don’t need to remember every Monday to share a post that says Did you watch this week? Did you listen yet, right? Like that’s kind of stuff that can get scheduled. So it’s not like, you know, we don’t want an AI kind of overall marketing plan, we still need to be in it right to be marketing. But at the same time, there’s lots of stuff that we can automate, so that we

Xenia Muntean 22:45
There is definitely so much tedious tasks that can be taken out of your marketing work. So I can’t agree more with you. Like you can’t automate creativity and you definitely need some kind of like human touch. And your marketing plans don’t need to be you know, people need to feel and they’re going to feel, you know, if it’s too automatic, but at the same time, a lot of the stuffs like, you know, like you mentioned, you know, do you watch the episode type of posts, those can be automated and they should be automated. You know, your mind doesn’t need to be busy with remembering to post stuff. It should be busy with strategies and new ideas and creativity.

Karen Yankovich 23:26
So what is the what is next for plantable?

Xenia Muntean 23:30
Whoo, that’s a good one. What’s next? So then what’s next for us? is we actually just went through a big big rebrand and and launched a new website completely completely new website from scratch that we’ve been working on for the past year. And is Yeah, it’s kind of like a good time to reflect what’s next for us. And I think the next frontier for us is to expand into ads because we do have you know, we have a good head start with giving people the power to collaborate on organic social. So now the baby next frontier for us is to help them do the same with paid posts with paid social. So you know, that’s kind of like the big next thing and we’re very excited to

Karen Yankovich 24:20
that’s exciting.

Xenia Muntean 24:21
Yeah.

Karen Yankovich 24:22
And what about what’s next for Xenia? Do you have anything? Like I know it’s a crazy world right now. We’re not running flying around the world anymore speaking and things like that. But what’s Is there anything exciting coming up in your world?

Xenia Muntean 24:34
Oh, that’s that’s a good one. I think I take it just step by step nowadays. You know, honestly, this entire last, you know, this year has been so crazy. They just showed me that. You know, sometimes Yeah, it’s just finally if you plan in this period of time, I feel like just taking it one step at a time is the best I can do right now. And taking care of my you know, mental health and Yeah, trying to just trying to connect more with people that are close to me and what, whatever virtual ways as possible. And yeah, just I go hiking quite a lot during this period of time to investing a bit more and myself, and my personal development is probably the big next thing for me. Just doesn’t sound that big. But during this period of time, that’s like, huge.

Karen Yankovich 25:23
No, I I agree, I think and you know, here’s the deal. I can tie this all together. tools, like plantable allow us to do things like go hiking, right? Yeah, because it gives us It gives us a little bit, a little bit more free time, right. So. So I love that sr, you have shared a code with our audience, we’ll put it in the show notes, so that we can get a discount. And I believe the code is good girls get rich and you just go to it’s plantable.io. Right?

Xenia Muntean 25:49
Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of

Karen Yankovich 25:50
Planable.io, and if you register with the code, goodgirlsgetrich, you get a you get a nice sweet discount on your first couple of months. And and check it out. I’m definitely going to check it out. And I thank you for for what you do for for people like me and for coming on the show and sharing it with everyone that’s listening.

Xenia Muntean 26:07
Thank you so much, Karen, for having me on the show. I really enjoyed talking to you.

Karen Yankovich 26:11
So wasn’t Xenia Amazing. I’m so impressed at people that are so confident at such a young age. Even if she wasn’t confident she really just dove in and knew what she wanted and made it happen. So I surely wasn’t like that when I was in my 20s busy raising babies and not really having the kind of confidence that she had. So I hope that this inspired you maybe if if you have daughters or sons of that age, you can share it with them as well. Because it really is inspirational. And you know, I’m always here to support you and anyone that’s in your world as well. We have besides this podcast that we offer every single week as you know many of the episodes we do our training episodes, hopefully you’re subscribed so you know that we also do a free on demand masterclass where you can check that out at karenyankovich.com/masterclass. And it’s just a great way to just get a dive into a lot of the things we talk about here on the podcast. It is complimentary, it’s on me, just so check it out. If you have some time. It’s karenyankovich.com/masterclass. And I’d love to know what you think about that as well. So hopefully you’ve already taken a screenshot of this show on your phone or whatever you’re listening to and shared it on your social media. If not, you can still do this. All right, and then make sure to tag me and I’ll share it with my audience as well. I will see you back here again next week with another episode of the good girls get rich podcast.