Leaving a promising career at Microsoft for the uncertainty of launching a service based startup with Anastasia Staniloiu

She told me that I'm, you're an overachiever. I wouldn't have seen you in, in a company for more than six years or seven years, because you have that spirit of starting things by yourself. And that was something because before that discussion, I wasn't thinking that I'm going to actually do something by myself.

Hey, everyone. Why would a highly respected engineer at Microsoft who enjoys her job and the people she works with? Go and launch a startup. Well, that's what we're going to find out in this conversation with Anastasia, co founder of Wit Analytica. Anastasia also shares some LinkedIn strategies for a service based business and her favorite tools that any startup can use for clean reporting.

Let's dive into the conversation and don't forget to subscribe if you enjoy this episode. Morning Anastasia, welcome to the show. How are you doing this morning? Oh, good, good, good. Enjoying, uh, the sun, a little bit of light. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm actually here in Amsterdam and it's quite chilly. People already have scarves on and mittens, but I can't wait to go back to Bucharest tomorrow where I'll be in t shirts and shorts.

Yeah, hopefully, because today, like one hour ago, it was pretty cloudy. So not sure about that. Okay. Okay. Well, listen, I'm going to share a little bit about your background. So the audience can get an understanding of who you are. For five years, you worked as a technical engineer, a consultant from Microsoft, and then in January 23rd or January 23, you launched WIT Analytica, which is a company that provides analytics and strategic consulting and architect data solutions.

So before we dive into that. What is something interesting about you that most people don't know, and they won't see on your LinkedIn profile? Oh, that's a, that's an interesting one. We're starting good. We're starting right. Oh, actually that, yeah, that's a good one. One interesting thing about me is that I write poetry and some years ago, I launched a meetup group, which was called the Bucharest Poetry Society.

And yeah, then I didn't have much time. I kind of faded. Yeah, you wait, wait the time, but okay, I gotta ask, what is one of your favorite poems then? Ah, it's actually by a Romanian writer. It's called, the, the, the poet is called Macedonski, Alexander Macedonski. Okay. Let me give it a try. Well, is it a point about suffering or is it something you know It's suffering?

Yeah. . . Okay. Okay. It's about, uh, roses which are dying with the coming of the autumn and yeah, . Okay. All right. All right. Okay, so let's dive in here. What was one of the first entrepreneurial things you did as a kid? Or as a young adult, I started in high school. Actually, I was that kind of kid involving myself in all kinds of projects.

And it was, it was a very interesting one that my economics teacher recommended. At that time, it was organized by junior achievement and what we were supposed to do, we were teaming up with kids from other high schools and we were supposed to come up with small businesses ideas. And then present them.

And it was So exciting, not only to just meet other kids, but also to get through all this creative process. And I was, I was quite young, like I was in the ninth grade. So it was something for me. And then we had to present everything. And the prize was spend two days with the director of a company. And we were one of the finalists, like we got the sports for price.

And then I had to. To come and spend that two days with, with the director and it's exciting. Yeah. Do you remember what the idea was that you presented? Oh, we wanted to make like a small print t shirt shop, like print your personalized messages and also pictures. So, yeah. This was in a nutshell, the idea.

Okay. All right. What was the best advice your mom or dad ever gave you? Oh, the best advice. Just, just be confident, I guess. Yeah. Especially my mom. She's like, she's my biggest fan. She's always telling me, you can do this. Don't, don't worry. You're, you're stressing up too much. You're. Thinking overthinking, just, just be yourself and you'll see you're going to get there.

I know that. Okay. Now tell us about Microsoft. You were a technical engineer there and what did you love about that role? But what did you also dislike about that role? Oh, many things from both sides, because the, the, the things that I loved about that role were, were, were so many, I had the opportunity to work with such bright people and this.

Pushed me into my learning path and also into my career. It totally accelerated me, my learning curve. So this is one of the major things that I loved about that role, the people that I worked with. And also the types of challenging challenges, because working with people, it's sometimes it's, it's really, really something because especially in consulting, because sometimes you suppose they want something, but then they don't.

Actually don't want something in the end. So it's kind of tricky to balance this kind of things. And, uh, this is also one of the things I dislike the fact that, you know, I, I had to really, really take care of how I'm expressing a message and especially to the customers and how I'm thinking to verbalize everything that I want to say to that customer, because.

Everything could have been interpreted. So yeah, this is, this was a challenge, but it teached me a lot. Yeah. Sometimes people can interpret different things, even though they've been working together or even living together for more than 10 years. My wife and I, sometimes we feel like we're not on the same page.

She'll tell me one thing and I, I heard it, you know, I took it another way and vice versa. Yeah, but you know, having such big responsibility because for some years I was also a support engineer for SQL server for databases and we had risky cases like end ports, troubles and so on. So it wasn't only about solving the issue.

It was also about the. Um, politics, let's say behind that, or how I'm actually delivering that resolution. So, but it, it teaches me a lot and I'm applying a lot of things also in my company today. So I'm really grateful for that. Yeah, communication among teams is probably the biggest, the biggest hurdle that companies need to overcome.

I think I remember in 1986, you probably weren't even born yet, Anastasia, but the Challenger spaceship from NASA, it took off and then within seconds, it just completely blew up. And so when they tried to analyze what went wrong at the core of it was just miscommunication among the different teams that were working together to build the spaceship, the spaceship.

So that's a huge thing that. Uh, I think most companies struggle, struggle with now, why does a person who enjoys working at Microsoft, working among so many different talented and intelligent people go off and create their own startup? Oh, um, sometimes when you're learning too fast, you want to get there to just see the next challenge, what could be more challenging than, than this and that, and that, and that, and you want more.

And this is also what my, uh, last manager encouraged me in Microsoft. You, he told me that I'm, you're an overachiever. I wouldn't have seen you in, in a company for more than six years or seven years, because you have that spirit of starting things by yourself. And that was something because before that discussion, I wasn't thinking that I'm going to actually do something by myself, even if my partner, my current business partner, she was discussing this with me, like, Hey, why don't you join?

I'm going to found this and so on. And I didn't have that confidence. But then after the discussion with my last manager from Microsoft. I said, Hmm, maybe she sees something in me that I don't see. So maybe this is a sign and I should just go out there. So it's, it's about challenges. It's about how, how you want to be challenged in, in which way.

At the end of the day, that's so funny. The conversation with your employer led to you leaving your employer to go start your, your startup. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That says something about the company. So yeah, it definitely does. So I love to hear how you guys got your first clients. Can you expand a little bit on that?

The first client was just a freelancing, to be honest with you, was just a freelancing contract. So nothing special about that. And then we tried a lot of things we tried, for example, approaching similar people that were doing also analytics that were also in this industry on LinkedIn and just build partnerships with them, like commenting on their posts, then discussing with them, going in their podcasts, and then they commenting to our posts.

So maybe we could just help each other when we see a project feed. And this is how the next customer came. Through a recommendation and then from the first customer, he recommended us to another customer. So we saw that this recommendation worked, worked really good. And now we want to take it to another level.

We want to, we are actually in the process of building a personalized email tool, which is just doing all this reaching out to people job. Let's see how it, how it will go with just in test case. So yes, you guys currently boot bootstrapping everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And did you guys attend any, any accelerators or do you have any mentors, you know, to get started to help you guys out?

Oh, not, not really. It's, it's really early for now. We relied on our own funds, like the way we're kind of traditional. Some of the people would say. And it's quite conservative, uh, let's say of until now we were just working on projects, implementing hands on solutions in order to fund our time to develop things.

So for us, it's, um, until now it worked fine, but now we are thinking of maybe options if we want to scale. So it's still a very early thing for us. Just. Thinking about Accelerators and investors and possible funding and so on. Until now, we managed to have our own funds and own projects that we're supporting this.

Can you walk us through a use case or one of the projects that you guys have done? And what did that look like? One of the projects I really liked was recommendation system we made. It's for a, for an email marketing customer. And this customer, it's basically a marketplace for publishers and advertisers.

So we were building behind a system which is recommending the best offers for both sides, also the publishers and also the advertisers. We, we worked quite a lot on that, but the customer paid it. So we were like, okay, so. You're somebody who speaks the language of data engineering and database administration, business intelligence, reporting, data science, data visualization, machine learning, storage, ETL, data pipelines, right?

So when, when customers or clients discover your services, what do they really get excited about? When, when talking to you, Anastasia. Oh, everybody's into AI right now. It's that phase when everybody wants AI, but it's very funny because some of the customers are really not ready for that phase. So we need to just hold them by the hand and tell them, look, it's really cool to have AI, but let's talk about your use case.

So then they really start to feel comfortable with me because I'm just that person who is. Who wants to make you feel good and nurtured, they're taking care of, and I think they are getting excited when I'm talking to them like that. And then they start to see, yeah, yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe we need to start with this.

And I'm. Making a plan just to get your data, right. And then if you have clean data, we'll see further. And they start to get, what are some, what are some other signs that, that tell you a company is not ready for, not ready yet for AI? Oh, that's a good one. I saw a lot of companies with data all over the places, like this data source, that data source, there's also an Excel.

There's always an Excel. Also the, the. The storage of the data is not, you know, versioning, showing us the history of use, one user doing what and so on. So these are the signs that the company is not ready to go to AI, because if you don't have clean data or clean processes, which are taking your data from all that data source and putting it together, then you can't use any outputs.

You just don't have anything to see. So usually our first step is to just make an inventory of what we, what they have, uh, put everything together in a database they, they choose and then start with the BI because if they see things, they may be realized, Oh, maybe I need also this field, maybe I want to see also that, and then from the analytics and BI use cases to just go and see what can we automate, where Can we use data science?

Where can we use machine learning and so on? So I would say machine learning, AI, all these things should be the last step. So you have everything in order. Okay. Now let's imagine there's a startup that's doing, let's say a million dollars in ARR, annual recurring revenue. And what is it, what are some good tools that they could utilize if the focus is on having clean reporting?

What are some of your favorite tools, Anastasia? I'm always saying for AI, Power BI is a very good tool for beginners because it's, you can just download it for free and then you can start connecting your data sources. It's the easiest way you can start with, with analytics. And then. Regarding storage and databases here, it very much depends on what type of developer you are.

Are you working with structured data? Are you working with dictionaries? Are you working with the data which needs to flow continuously? Here it's, it's a matter of how big, what's the size of your data and also how fast you want it to be flowing to, to your report and what we saw a lot of startups in terms of let's say data storage and data transformation, they mostly choose cloud, either a virtual machine hosted in cloud, either platform as a service, It very much depends again, of the size of the data and yeah, we, we saw it's really easy to start with Snowflake cloud or with Azure, but it's, it's a flexible way other than just buying hardware.

Startups usually don't do that. Okay. So, okay. Now, what are some of the obstacles that you've faced this year in trying to get WIT Analytica off the ground and get some more traction? We actually, because most of our customers are in U. S., last summer, we said a little bit, the fact that the interest rates grew, the investors were not so open to.

Just give funds to startups. We, for example, we collaborated with a startup. They were one of our customers and then they, they came and they told us it's just a matter of the fact that we didn't receive the last round of funding. So we can't invest in analytics anymore. And yeah, we had to, to postpone. It was quite challenging because it.

They, they were an important customer of ours, but then we started to come up with the idea of this email keeper personalized email tool that we're working on to maybe reach out to new people and do this fast and in big, so to say. Is it currently in beta? Are there any of your clients that are testing it right now?

We just signed with the customer for now. We tested for ourselves, so not an external customer, but we signed recently with a customer and we will start testing is it will be just a demo. And hopefully they will like it. Okay. All right. Now, earlier you said that LinkedIn has been, has been vital in terms of, uh, getting potential clients and also partnerships.

What were some of the tactics that you use aside from just engaging with their posts? And getting to know them that way, was there anything else, like, did you offer, I, I, again, you know, I just want to know, we'll share with the audience, any recommendations or strategic suggestions and trying to grow a service based business when you have potential clients that are not in your local market and could be across the pond.

We started for some months to write a lot of articles about. Things that we see, things that we encounter that our customers and so on. And in the beginning we were writing articles, we were posting them on LinkedIn. Nothing major happened, but we saw that with the time, if you're consistent and you just form this cadence of posting at least one time per week.

We were starting to get traction, and then we correlated this with going to live events and presenting things to audiences and then use that content for new LinkedIn posts. And now it's, it's starting to be way much better. And I recommend this, even if in the first months, you might say, Oh, it's too difficult.

I'm writing this. So I have so many, so little views. It's not going anywhere. Just, just. Be patient, it will go there, but make sure you're doing that every week. Okay. I would say, yeah, it's a must every week. All right. Is this still just you and your co founder or are there other new members of the business?

Writing articles, you mean, or? No, for the business in general, for the company. Yeah. So it's the two of us, the founders, and we also have four people. They are our employees. And we like to see it's not, ah, it's, it's an employee. No, it's just, they are our friends. So we really like to see, to look at them like that.

Are they from Microsoft too? It feels like, no.

Okay. All right. Well, I've got a few rapid fire questions. I would say, yes, it would. Yeah. I have a few rapid fire questions for you and just give me the first answer that pops into your head. Are you ready? Sure. All right. A favorite TV show you can watch again and again. Oh, that's an easy, Friends. Okay. Uh, the most interesting thing you did in the last 26 days.

Sorry, you said I should answer fast, but I really have no idea. Hey, you got in the podcast. I get in the podcast. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The next one. What is an unusual food or drink that you consume? It's actually a Romanian soup. I'm trying to be fast here. Trip self soup. Yes, you know, they accidentally delivered that to me at one time and it wasn't the normal goulash that I order because I like goulash.

And I was like, what is this? And my wife was like, Oh, that's a like, what do you say? It trips. Yeah, it's actually the board. Yeah, exactly. Trips. Yeah. Yeah. So I let her have it. I wasn't interested. Yeah. Okay. Last, last question for you instead of flowers for Valentine's day, you would rather receive. Actually, I really like, does it count if I like bamboos plants?

Okay. For a bonsai? Yeah. Is it counted those? Of course. Because I would rather receive these kind of things than flowers. All right. All right. That's a true one. Anastasia, thank you so much for coming on Innovators Collab. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I hope I shared interesting things for your audience and for you.

And so, yeah, I really, I really liked talking to you. Yeah, we'll put links to Anastasia's LinkedIn page as well as the link to witt analytica.com on the show notes. Everybody for listening. Thank you for joining in. I'll be back next week as we interview another inspiring and innovative European startup founder.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day. Hey there. I want to thank you for listening to the show. If you are new here, I interview European startup founders and ask them to share their best strategies when it comes to scaling their business. Anastasia is probably the first guest I had on the show that said her boss convinced her to leave the company and go and start one of her own.

It goes to show that who you work for early in your career can have a huge impact on the trajectory on your life's journey. If you enjoy this, hit that subscribe button and tell others about it. This is Eric signing off.