Interview with Dan Oros – Global markets, scaling, and the power of intentionality in shifting the mindset
Creatopy is an AI-driven creative automation platform for efficiently scaling ad production and campaigns, helping more than 5,000 global brands and agencies produce a high volume of personalized creatives that increase marketing ROI, while maintaining brand consistency and quality. It is also the most recent Romanian start-up to join the global network of Endeavor Entrepreneurs.
Dan Oros is the CEO of Creatopy, previously leading strategic marketing projects at Google & YouTube for 6 years. He is also the chairman of Flipsnack – leader in creating digital magazines and brochures – and occasional angel investor (Accel starter).
Get to meet Dan through this interview, and to step into the ambitious mindset of this Romanian-born start-up and its plans for the future.
First of all, tell us about Creatopy and how it works.
Creatopy is an AI creative automation platform that helps brands and agencies effectively scale their ad production and advertising campaigns. It basically empowers companies to produce a high volume of personalized and on-brand assets that generate higher return marketing budgets.
You’ve come very far with your product. What’s Creatopy’s mission and what do you see it evolve into?
Our mission is to help brands and agencies reach their creative potential. We think that most companies would benefit from using our product as they can reach their audiences with better ads.
We operate at the intersection of two worlds: design/ creative production and marketing/ campaign management. We call this creative automation and our ambition is to become the global leader in this industry
What made Creatopy target the global market from the beginning?
The tools that my colleagues were building were providing the most value to companies that were doing a lot of advertising, and Romania is still maturing in this respect. Of course, there’s an emerging advertising market, but not comparable with the U.S., UK or Western Europe, so the opportunity for this type of digital products was much higher in the United States.
What lessons did you learn growing directly on a global market?
The biggest blockers and opportunities, because they’re both, are related to mindset and culture. We only limit potential if we have a local mindset. The first lesson is to hire people who are motivated to build for a global market, and who have a mindset of continuous learning, which is something that we’re being very intentional about. It’s the single most important aspect of our culture. Out of the five values that we live by, continuous learning is the first and most important, because we’re always going to need to learn if we want to get better.
I would say that the most challenging thing is finding people who’ve had exposure to hyper-growth, because the moment you see it somewhere else you’ll start believing it’s possible, but until then it’s very difficult to picture it.
Is it difficult to preserve your culture when scaling your company? How do you do it?
The only way we can do this is by being intentional about the culture that we want to have and the values required. After you’ve defined the sort of culture you want to have, you need to operationalize these values and turn them into processes.
It doesn’t help too much to have them written on the well, you need to internalize them as a company in you,. For instance, every new hire, regardless of the position, will have a final interview with me exclusively for the purpose of ensuring cultural fit. In this final interview, we only briefly discuss their experience and their skills, and we focus on who they are as a person, on their values and how they align with our company’s values. If there isn’t a fit, we won’t move forward with recruiting that person, and we’re very transparent about what we value at the company from the beginning.
When does it stop being feasible for a company to hire based on this growth mentality in its journey?
It’s definitely much harder the more people there are in the company, but I believe it’s reasonable to assume that until you get to around 1000-2000 people you can still keep this culture, so we’ve still got a long way to go. I feel, though, that the main reason companies don’t keep this mindset is because they’re not intentional about it, and because it’s not clearly defined and operationalized, and very rarely because they’ve grown in size too much.
We want to build an entire category called creative automation and then to be the leader within this category globally, which is a very ambitious goal that requires a lot of learning, experimentation, and hard work, so we need to have a culture that would reward these values..
Building an entire category within the digital industry and then being its leader is your long term goal. What’s next in your journey towards that goal?
The most important upcoming milestone will take place in mid October, when we will have a big launch product event and also double-down on positioning Creatopy as an AI creative automation platform.
The next important milestone will probably be to raise a Series B in the first half of 2025.
A new round would give us more capital to accelerate growth. Once you have product-market fit, it’s a matter of how fast you can move, and how fast can you accelerate this process, which requires additional capital.
Are there any things that you would do differently if you had a do over in growing a business?
I would focus even more on the basics. There’s this tendency of trying to do a lot of things, because you see opportunities everywhere.
In the end, focusing on what works, doubling down on that, and constantly going back to the basics in everything that you do is the most important part of controlled growth. Keeping the whole company focused on a few key priorities, and not trying to do a lot of stuff, but a few things really, really well is much harder in practice. Even now, every time I think about it, I feel we’re doing too much.
How do you select those very few priorities to make sure that you’re focusing on the right things?
You need to be data driven to see what works. If we’re talking about the industries we’re targeting, we’re going to look at where our sales cycles are the shortest, or the use cases were we provide the highest values. And then, out of 1000 potential customers , we’ll focus on those 100 that actually have the highest pain related to the use cases we’re targeting, because this way we know we’re going to close them faster, and to solve their problems faster.
Focusing is not easy. We have a product that can be used bothby someone who has a pizza shop and just wants to make a social media ad and by a big company with hundreds of global brands. We are building for the second company, so we need to be intentional about that in our product roadmap, even though we can serve the pizza shop as well.
Going to the basics is the most difficult exercise for a company. You have to do it continuously and without specifically trying to solve this you might get side tracked because working on a lot of things simultaneously feels like hard work as well, although in the long run it won’t have the same results,e have to apply the principles of velocity to our work, which essentially means both speed and direction. In a start-up, you can very easily focus on one of these, but working on both at the same time isvery challenging.
You’re the third company to join Endeavor Romania. How do you see the role of Endeavor Romania in the local start-up ecosystem, and how do you see it linked to the broader goal of helping you scale?
I believe, from the bottom of my heart, that the local ecosystem needs to be more ambitious. In order to get there, we need exposure to other companies that have truly succeeded or are at least a few steps ahead.
The role of the Endeavor as a community is to actually raise the bar in general, in the ecosystem. For us, it means putting us in touch with companies that have raised Series C, D, E, or IPOs because this is what will help us in our journey
In turn, we’ll be here to inspire other local companies,who are maybe just starting out or raising their Seed round, that it’s possible to raise 10 million in your first round. Endeavor helps bring together the ecosystem and provides inspiration whether you’re just starting out or aiming for an IPO.
What do you think that we need in the Romanian startup ecosystem to unlock our next growth stage?
I think we need more success stories and the people in the ecosystem need much more exposure to companies that have been through hyper growth.
I believe that we are too fast at celebrating small milestones. People are excited about Seed rounds or series A. or about us raising a $10M round. This shouldn’t be an impressive achievement, as it’s just a vehicle for us to move to the next round, it’s not a goal in itself., So I think just changing our mindset a bit and being more ambitious will help us stay away from complacency.