Xenia Muntean, CEO of Planable, discusses effective strategies for streamlining content review and marketing collaboration. She explores common challenges in social media management, the importance of accurate content previews, and effective workflow solutions. Xenia shares insights on entrepreneurship and the integration of AI in marketing tools. Fresh perspectives for marketers, agencies, and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to optimize their content creation processes.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS 

Xenia Muntean: Content marketing is probably one of the biggest use cases out there for AI. And it’s very popular. Forty percent of our users use AI in creating content. And then 75 percent of what the AI copilot generates in Planable is actually accepted.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Social media has become indispensable for brands to connect with their audiences. However, managing multiple social media accounts, creating engaging content, and collaborating with team members or clients can be a daunting task. This is where new solutions are increasingly coming into play, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity for in-house marketers and agencies alike. Our guest today is at the forefront of this innovation. Xenia Muntan is the CEO and co-founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 15,000 creators working with organizations like Hyundai, Christian Louboutin, Viber, and the United Nations. Before launching Planable at just 20 years old, Xenia built a digital marketing agency and led social media campaigns for clients including Coca-Cola. Xenia is a Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ honoree, a Techstars alumna, and a judge for the Webby Awards. She’s also a frequent speaker, startup mentor, and angel investor. To discuss her journey as an entrepreneur, the challenges of social media management, and the solutions that Planable provides for in-house and agency social media teams, I’m delighted that Xenia is joining us today from Bucharest, Romania. Xenia, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Xenia Muntean: Well, thank you so much for having me on the show.

Adrian Tennant: Xenia, you started your first digital marketing agency at the tender age of 20. So what inspired you to become an entrepreneur so early in your career?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, I think I always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial itch without even knowing that I have it. I think I picked it up from my mom that always had all of these side hustles. She never had like a typical nine to five job. Even when she had that, she always did small businesses on the side. And I think I learned from her what work ethics is and how you should never stop and you should always be involved in something and always be building. And without even having typical business role models around me, or even seeing women in business, I think I always had that entrepreneurial drive inside me. And yeah, I couldn’t ignore it anymore. And when the opportunity presented itself for me to start building a digital marketing agency, I, yeah, I jumped on it. And that was when I was in a student organization and main sponsor of that organization, Coca-Cola, in my home country, Moldova. They were looking for someone to handle their social. And I enthusiastically raised my hand, you know, just someone in university at 20 years old, who was excited about the world of communications and PR. and digital marketing, which is what I was studying back then. And I jumped on the opportunity. Even if, you know, it was a big, big brand and I recognized the opportunity, but because social media marketing was very early on at that point in time, it wasn’t, you know, a big opportunity financially. But yeah, as someone in their 20s, you don’t need a lot. You just need the opportunity and the enthusiasm. And I jumped on it and I was really passionate to build it out and to expand the agency. And yeah, I figured out that this is the time to do it. So early in my life, because first of all, as I mentioned, you don’t need a lot, but then also you have a lot of time to learn, especially from your mistakes, which you do a lot. when you’re so young and plus, you know, who needs a lot of sleep in their twenties?

Adrian Tennant: I like that. Well, can you tell us about your experience running that agency and how it led to the creation of Planable?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, so as I mentioned, I learned a ton from my first entrepreneurial endeavor. And the biggest value that I got from it was the discovering the problem that we’re currently solving at Planable. I learned firsthand how messy the entire content collaboration process can be and what the behind the scenes looks like for big social and digital marketing campaigns. And I juggled a lot of endless email threads, a lot of approval flows on content pieces and content calendars, and I didn’t enjoy how fragmented and messy the process was. And I discovered this problem and I think my mind is geared towards solving puzzles, solving problems and trying to find the most efficient way to do something. So, you know, I was trying to find a tool for my own agency to solve this problem. Something like a PowerPoint, but that is maybe designed for the social media world. Something where I can collaborate very seamlessly with my clients on the content calendars that I was building for them. And I couldn’t find anything that was really solving the problem in a very good way. And realized that there must be a better way for teams to work together on content. And yeah, decided together with my co-founders to build a Planable to solve these headaches for others and to basically turn my frustration into a solution for others in the industry.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s talk about Planable. Can you give us an overview of what the platform does and how it helps marketers and agencies?

Xenia Muntean: Absolutely. So Planable is like a virtual workspace that brings together social media teams on the same place to collaborate together on their output, on social, on their content on social. So it helps you plan, collaborate, review and approve content. in this virtual environment. And it gives you a preview of how your content is going to look like. So you can experience all your social media posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever type of network you manage. You’re able to preview how that content is actually going to look like in the end so that there’s no last minute surprises. And it brings all the stakeholders or the clients if you’re working in an agency in the same page to basically visualize how everything is going to look like and work together to move it forward to finally publishing it. And then, you know, obviously analyzing the performance of that content and seeing the insights and all the must have metrics.

Adrian Tennant: How does Planable differ from other social media management tools available in the market?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, I think the fact that we were designed with teams from the get go is our main differentiator. We are laser focused on collaboration and I think that’s our secret sauce, but also the focus on design. And I think that’s not the big competitive moat, but I think it is for us having that laser focus on the experience of the user. It’s one of the first things that people that discover Planable say about the product is how sleek it is, how beautiful it looks, how visually pleasant it is. And I think we focus a lot on that. We don’t deploy a ton of features every single week. We deploy a few features, but carefully designed, carefully built so that they are thoughtful and provide a really good experience for the users. And yeah, we try to design a very seamless experience so that we can actually help our users, yeah, work together in a better way. So this focus on collaboration and design is, I think, what stands us apart from the competition.

Adrian Tennant: As we were preparing for this podcast, you mentioned two main use cases for Planable, the agency-client relationship and multi-location brands. So Xenia, can you elaborate on how Planable addresses the unique challenges in each of these situations?

Xenia Muntean: So the agencies are a no-brainer because I had an agency and my co-founders also worked in agencies. So for us, when we were building Planable, it was a very obvious problem and a very obvious solution. Planable just simplifies the entire feedback and approval loop between the agency and the client. It keeps all the conversations and the approvals on content right next to the content itself. It’s as though Hootsuite and Google Docs or Notion had a baby, right? It bridges the gap between planning content and the entire messy back and forth approvals that happen between you as an agency and the client. So it provides a premium experience in a way for the client to see how their content is going to look like. And it makes it dead simple for them to approve that content. So it’s all about that relationship between the client and the agency that goes on planning the content and the campaigns. When it comes to the multi-location brands, which is like the biggest second use case for Planable, it’s about helping the local teams collaborate with the central HQ teams, right? And ensuring that there’s this cohesive brand communication, that the brand sends the same message and the same tone of voice and the same type of content across all the locations. And it keeps it united and consistent.

Adrian Tennant: Yeah, that’s great. We’ve worked with retail chains that manage social media strategy at the corporate level, but want to encourage their associates to post about events at individual stores, you know, to localize the content. So one of the features you highlighted is the ability to collaborate with people on the ground. Now, in a practical sense, this is most often going to be using the phone. So how does Planable facilitate this kind of mobile collaboration?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, I think not just for the multi-location brands, but even for the agencies, it’s really important for the agencies to enable their clients to be able to collaborate on the goal. So the mobile app is crucial in that regard, but also for the multi-location brands, the multi-location businesses. Sometimes people that are on the frontiers in the actual locations, in the actual stores, in the actual venues, sometimes they might not have a laptop handy, so they might be collaborating from their phone. So then having a very simple and very easy to use mobile app was crucial for us from the get go. So they can keep everybody in the loop so that people can easily capture content, but also instantly give feedback on that content. just through their phone and make it very accessible for different types of users. And that’s the main thing when you build a collaboration product. There’s a lot of user personas involved in the process. So you have to make sure that the product is flexible enough to accommodate all of their needs.

Adrian Tennant: Xenia, can you walk us through the approval workflow process in Planable?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, so I think the first thing with the approval process and Planables is the fact that it’s really easy to understand how content is going to look like in the end. So that simplifies the approval process a lot because you get actual previews of the posts on every platform, like I mentioned previously, and that already simplifies the process a lot for any stakeholders, approvers, clients, because they just get to see what they’re going to get in the end, right? So it eliminates a lot of back and forth, a lot of confusion, a lot of questions. How is this carousel post going to look like? How is this reel going to look like? How is our Instagram grid going to look like in the end once we publish all of this content? So you get to see what your social media feeds, what your brand is going to look like online. And that simplifies a lot the process of understanding the content and giving feedback on it. And then in terms of the actual approval flow, it can be as simple as just one person approving it, but it can also be many layers of approval from somebody internally. If we’re talking about an agency, somebody internally at the agency, like a project manager or an account manager. approving the content, first of all, and then once it’s ready, its quality has been assured internally, it’s been passed for the next levels of approval. And can be as long as, as many levels as you need, from internal content creation, to proofreading, to design, to legal even. Compliance levels, right? That’s very important in some businesses. And then it basically moves the content forward from one stage to another until everybody’s happy and it’s ready to be scheduled and published online.

Adrian Tennant: Got it. Planable supports multiple social media platforms. How do you ensure that the content preview is accurate for each platform?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, committing to this accurate content preview feature in Planable, it’s definitely a big commitment because the platforms change all the time. And just recently I saw the news about Instagram potentially changing the layout of their grid from square posts to rectangular ones. And you have to be on top of all of these things and make sure that our platform, Planable, doesn’t become outdated in terms of how the content is displayed on the networks, on the channels. So it’s a big commitment, but I think it is worth it. Because it just makes everything easier for everyone who works on content. You just get to see exactly what you’re going to get. And you share the same language, basically, when you look at content, right? It’s much easier to collaborate on a website, for example, or an image if you actually see it, instead of collaborating on social media posts in an Excel, right? Or in a PowerPoint where you try to mock it up or it’s not visual enough and you have to click on a bunch of links to actually visualize the assets. When it’s an accurate preview, it just removes a lot of the friction and makes it more appealing for the approvers as well to give feedback. which is another challenge, right? Bringing people in to give feedback, making it very simple for them to give feedback and discuss and review and approve content. So I think overall, the effort is worth it because it just creates a more delightful way of working as a team on content.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Xenia Muntan, CEO and co-founder of the social media management and content collaboration platform, Planable. Xenia, I understand that Planable has AI features integrated into the product. 

Xenia Muntean: Of course!

Adrian Tennant:  Of course. Can you tell us more about how AI is being used in Planable and how it benefits users?

Xenia Muntean: It was a pretty straightforward decision to integrate AI in Planable since content marketing is probably one of the biggest use cases out there for AI. So once ChatGPT’s API was available, we integrated it straight away. And the way it works inside Planable is that it’s kind of like a co-pilot inside the product that helps you either generate content ideas when inspiration runs dry, or It helps you polish your content, shorten it, tweak it, make it punchier, adjust the tone of voice, or repurpose pieces of content, right? Write the caption for a video, right? You have the video or you have an image, and then with AI Insights Planable, you can write the captions for those pieces of content. And it’s very popular. 40% of our users use AI in creating content. And then 75% of what the AI co-pilot generates in Planable is actually accepted. So it’s used in production. It’s used live on social media posts with tweaks, with changes, with modifications, obviously, but it seems to be very useful to a lot of our customers. And yeah, we’re happy we get to make their lives easier and their work faster.

Adrian Tennant: Fascinating to hear some real world data on the adoption of AI. That’s super interesting. Has that surprised you how quickly folks have adopted it?

Xenia Muntean: Actually, yes, it did surprise us, but it’s also very rewarding when you get to build something that is so, so used. Because not all of the features that you build in a product are used by the majority of your users. A lot of times you build niche features for specific users. And when you get to build something that is so highly adopted by your customer base, it’s very, very rewarding. But yes, 40% is quite a big number. So we didn’t, yeah, we didn’t expect that people would embrace it that much. But I think, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense for the social media and the content world.

Adrian Tennant: Xenia, as someone who’s been through the Techstars accelerator program, what was that experience like and how did it help shape Planable?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, for those who don’t know about Techstars, Techstars is one of the leading startup accelerators, probably top three. And it took us a while to get into the program. We applied maybe four or five times before we were accepted. And we started applying to accelerators such as Techstars and Y Combinator 500 startups, basically from the get go, from when we started Planable. But again, it’s a lot of effort, but it’s something that was really, it paid off because it really was a very intense bootcamp and an experience. We gained a lot of valuable mentorship, a lot of knowledge from the accelerator. It opened a lot of doors for us. And we met, you know, very important people and expanded our network. And some of the people that we met became our investors later on. So definitely worth it. It helped us fine tune our thinking, the way we saw the market, the way we saw the product and the business overall. An accelerator so prestigious as Techstars helps you with your reputation quite a lot as a very young startup that is built by very young founders. When you get into an accelerator that has such a low acceptance rate, I think they said it’s like the Harvard of accelerators in terms of their acceptance rate, something around 1 or 2%. When you get into a program like that, it really helps you boost your image as a founder and as a startup. And it helps you further on when you pitch your company to potential investors and when you reach out to people for mentorships and just overall, it helps you boost your network.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you’re now an angel investor yourself. So what do you look for in startups when considering an investment?

Xenia Muntean: Yeah, I think this might sound like a cliche answer, but I look at the founders first and foremost. They really pay a lot of attention at who the founders are and how they are. And if I click with them and what matters to me the most is how passionate they are about their industry and the product and the problem, the problem that they are solving. I’d like to see them maybe even a little bit obsessed in a good way with their business and the problem that they’re solving. And I want to see that they’re solving real problems, maybe problems that they’ve also had experience with in the past, just like I had with, you know, with my business. That’s always very helpful because you’re the ideal user and you get to empathize a lot with the problem. And not just jumping on trendy ideas, like I see a lot of AI tools nowadays. Everybody builds on top of AI and it can be a bit tiring. Some ideas are exceptional, but a lot of them are not. And I think solving a real problem with obsession is what I’m looking for as an angel investor.

Adrian Tennant: What new features or improvements can users expect from Planable in the near future?

Xenia Muntean: Definitely we’ll keep integrating thoughtfully and meaningfully AI into our product. And we constantly try to find ways to bring more automation and more speed in Planable. We will be beefing up our analytics. We launched an analytics product a few quarters ago and we keep improving it because it’s a very new product. So we keep adding new metrics, new ways for our users to be data-driven with their content. And potentially we will be expanding our integrations. Because content is very often at the center of other things and it’s so interconnected with other tools. We already have Canva as an integration, which is very, very helpful for people to bring their assets and their designs into Planable. We also have an integration with Slack that is currently in beta to help keep everyone in the loop with what’s happening with their content. So we were on the lookout to build more integrations like that to help our users stay really connected and yeah, save time with all of their workflows.

Adrian Tennant: As a successful entrepreneur in the tech industry, what advice would you give to aspiring founders, especially women, who are looking to start their own companies?

Xenia Muntean: It’s always, yeah, it’s always hard to give advice that is also unique, but I think one that I would have wanted to hear is to find my own path in terms of being an entrepreneur. There’s a lot of talk about what entrepreneurship means and what true entrepreneurs look like. And I didn’t resonate with it most of the times. And I tried to become more like that template of entrepreneurs. And I think it’s really important not to go on that path, but to find your unique truth of who you are as an entrepreneur and make that work for yourself. And also to not forget to enjoy the journey. Very often through the struggles of it and through the lows of it, I often forgot to really truly enjoy all of the phases and all of the flavors of entrepreneurship. And I think that’s something that I wish I did more and an advice that I’d love to share. You know, every stage of it, even the tough ones, there’s something worth enjoying in it and seeing it as an experience that you’ll probably look back with nostalgia at. I look back a lot at our early phases, which were very tough. I probably didn’t enjoy them much, but now I look back and I find, you know, a lot of beauty in it. The energy and the challenge of those days, it’s something to be appreciated. And I think if you can summon that future nostalgia to the present, to where you are at right now, I think that’s going to help you make the most out of every phase of your entrepreneurial journey.

Adrian Tennant: Great advice. Xenia, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about Planable or connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Xenia Muntean: Absolutely. You can just check out our website, Planable.io – with one ‘N’ – Planable.io to see what the product and the company is all about. We have a free trial if you want to even give Planable a spin, if you think that the product could help you. Or you can follow us on social, on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, everywhere. And definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d be happy to chat with any of your listeners.

Adrian Tennant: Great. Xenia, thank you so much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Xenia Muntean: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I really enjoyed chatting with you.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Xenia Muntan, CEO and co-founder of Planable. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

01:15: Meet Xenia Muntean

02:28: Xenia’s Entrepreneurial Journey

04:40: From Agency to Planable

06:17: Overview of Planable

07:20: Planable’s Unique Features

08:45: Use Cases: Agencies and Multi-Location Brands

10:41: Mobile Collaboration in Planable

11:55: Approval Workflow Process

13:48: Accurate Content Previews

15:32: Influencer Marketing Strategy by Gordon Glenister

16:40: AI Integration in Planable

19:17: Experience with Techstars

21:10: Advice for Aspiring Founders

22:23: Future Features for Planable

25:33: Connecting with Xenia and Planable

26:14: Closing Remarks