Bogdan Cretu from Coinzilla shares with us how their company’s day to day operations kept going despite the COVID19 lockdown measures that slowed down most businesses

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID19 times?

Bogdan Cretu: Thankfully we are all doing great. We’re all going through some difficult times right now, but social responsibility is our best response.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined Coinzilla

Bogdan Cretu: My name is Bogdan, and I work as a Marketing Specialist for Sevio Solutions. The company was founded back in 2014 by Tiberiu Stingaciu and Alexandru Cozma as an advertising and development agency, where they worked on creating custom advertising solutions for several large clients.

After a few years, in 2017, the idea of Coinzilla was born. The company then shifted its focus from building advertising platforms for clients to developing its own platform. With the major advertising networks like Facebook and Google Ads banning crypto ads, there was a giant empty spot for advertising in this industry. Coinzilla’s goal was to fill that spot, and slowly but surely it did it successfully.

As for me, I joined the company in 2018, moving in the crypto & finance industry from the travel sector. It was a bit overwhelming in the beginning, especially with all the crypto terminology and the regulations for advertising, but it was all for the best. I started running Coinzilla Academy, a platform dedicated to teaching crypto enthusiasts what cryptocurrencies are and how they work. Then I started working on the development and marketing of our new and existing projects, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

How does Coinzilla innovate?

Bogdan Cretu: Innovation and technological development are two of our main focuses here at Coinzilla. All the technology in our platform was developed in-house, over the course of almost 4 years since the project was launched. We always try to provide our clients with the best advertising and monetization solutions, which is why we work closely with both advertisers and publishers when it comes to updating and releasing new features on our platform.

We believe that every client needs to receive great support, which is why our dedicated support team is always in direct contact with our clients. Looking back on everything, this turned out to be one of the most important factors that resulted in our success.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business and how are you coping?

Bogdan Cretu: Thankfully, we were not affected very hard by the pandemic. We did have to work from home for a few months during lockdown, but business went on as usual.The number of clients remained consistent throughout the whole situation, and their businesses continued to grow despite everything that was going on. In order to cope with the whole situation we started putting more work into our product’s development, creating more solutions to help our clients advertise their projects and monetize their websites.

Despite the fact that we still have some colleagues that are working from home, our activities are running normally, so we’re thankful that we were able to continue our activity and maintain our quality standards.

Did you have to make difficult choices and what are the lessons learned?

Bogdan Cretu: During this period, not really. But we did have to make a difficult choice back in early 2018, right after the BTC price crashed. Back then, our platform worked solely on BTC. This means that all the payments we received and made were in BTC, so every market movement was directly impacting our costs and profits.

The instability of the market put our business in a very high-risk zone, so the migration from BTC to a more stable currency was unquestionable. At first, all the payment system was moved to USD, but that was also a bit of a mistake, since most of our clients back then were from Europe. So after a few weeks, we had to change our payments once again from USD to EUR.

In the end, it all turned out great. But that taught us a very valuable lesson – always use stable currencies.

Despite the fact that BTC transactions are much safer, fiat currency is still superior in our book due to its stability.

But that was a one-time thing. Difficult choices generally come in the form of product development. Every time we decide on integrating new features into our platform, we first need to get feedback directly from our clients, which sometimes can be a wake up call. Because you may have this great idea for a feature that you think is totally going to change the game, but once you get the feedback you realize there’s no need for that feature, so you have to scratch the idea and start over.

Even so, getting feedback from your clients is a must. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be where we are today, so we tip our hats for all their support and honest feedback across the years.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety, how do you project yourself and Coinzilla in the future?

Bogdan Cretu: Working in the crypto industry can be stressful at times, especially when there are market dips. But we always try to keep a positive outlook on things. We generally organize plenty of informal activities and hangouts to break away from our work routine, which does a great job at solidifying our team.

The future looks pretty great. Personally, working on Coinzilla has been a great career choice, as it provided me with countless growth opportunities, not only in marketing but also in other areas.

In regards to the company, our main focus is advertising, so we are always looking to develop more projects in the advertising industry. We currently have a few projects in the works which look very promising, but I don’t want to give away too much.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Bogdan Cretu: We have several smaller competitors at the moment, some of which are older than us on the market. But other than that we are pretty well established in our market position. Getting here was tough though. We had to hustle a lot in the early stages, but working close with both advertisers and publishers helped us achieve our goals.

With their feedback and support we managed to develop custom tools and solutions for our client’s needs. These now serve as some powerful unique solid points, but we don’t want to sleep on them. We will continue to work on Coinzilla and further develop the project, in order to stay on top of the game.

In terms of competitors, we prefer seeing them as an opportunity. Even though we are fighting for the same clients, we believe that by working together with them we can further boost the advertising industry. This is why we are currently planning to create some partnerships with our competitors, through which we can advance the crypto advertising market and set new barriers in terms of quality and expectations.

Your website?

https://coinzilla.com/