"As the world moves on in a sort of 'new normal' environment, the businesses that thrive will be the ones who have best adapted to both the internal operating changes within their team but also the demands of the market you're in and your clientele."
Alex Gastle is the multi Award-Winning, Founder and visionary behind the ground-breaking tech startup CreatorPilot. Industry watchers say CreatorPilot is disrupting the world of Influencer marketing by building tools for marketers who traditionally avoid using influencer marketplace platforms. For half a decade, Alex immersed himself in both the agency and the tech side of the industry. Successfully managing influencer campaigns for a diverse variety of clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 brands – including household names like General Mills.
He even had the opportunity to put his skills to work as part of a team working on the very prestigious New York Fashion Week. While doing this work, Alex also built his influencer marketplace platform, expanding it globally to reach Canada, the United States, Singapore and the UK, receiving major coverage in high profile media outlets like Forbes. The startup racked up positive attention in other arenas, too, – winning multiple high profile awards including a 4-month incubator pitch contest and an Entrepreneur Innovation award in Canada. In the last year and a half, responding to industry trends and his personal experiences with the existing limitations of influencer marketing technology, Alex undertook a major pivot to the influencer marketplace platform he had envisioned, and in July 2020 the platform was reborn as CreatorPilot.
If you’ve ever tried to manage influencer campaigns without an influencer marketplace platform, you know the headaches and administrative burdens that can result. CreatorPilot is built to tackle those challenges, consolidating much of the administrative workflow for both the Influencer Marketing Manager / Administrator and the Influencer into one platform – providing the technological benefits and efficiencies of an influencer marketplace without being an influencer marketplace.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Alex Gastle: Thank you for having me. My name is Alex Gastle and I am the Founder of CreatorPilot. I was born and raised in a small town in Canada and for the last few years I have been living in London England.
CreatorPilot came about as a result of 4 years immersed in influencer marketing on both the agency and campaign management side as well as on the technical side. Do something everyday for 4 years and you begin to notice trends as well as inefficiencies. CreatorPilot is an influencer campaign management platform that provides an alternative to spreadsheets and other generic tools for brands, businesses and marketing agencies that manually build their influencer lists and run their campaigns. People always say ‘build something that solves your own problem.’ As someone who preferred to manage my clients’ influencer campaigns manually for various reasons CreatorPilot was a missing tool for me.
2020 and 2021 threw a lot of curve balls into business on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past couple years, how can businesses thrive in 2022? What lessons have you learned?
Alex Gastle: In my experience over the past couple of years, something that has really come to the forefront is the ability to adapt and maintain agility across as much of my business as possible. The ability to adapt and maintain agility will look different for every business but the last few years have undoubtedly shown us that operational disruption can pop up out of nowhere so it is important to be able to absorb it as much as possible.
As the world moves on in a sort of ‘new normal’ environment, the businesses that thrive will be the ones who have best adapted to both the internal operating changes within their team but also the demands of the market you’re in and your clientele.
The pandemic seems to keep on disrupting the economy, what should businesses focus on in 2022? What advice would you share?
Alex Gastle: My advice here would be to make sure that businesses are in tune as possible to the problems that your clients/users/etc are dealing with and how you can help solve them. Disruption often creates opportunity. To capitalize on this, businesses need to have a crystal clear understanding of the impacts the disruption has had on their clients/users/etc..
The best way to do this is to simply talk to your existing clients/users/etc as well as new prospects and ask the right questions. There has been so much disruption the past couple of years in most aspects of life so odds are the problems your clients/users/etc are dealing with have shifted ever so slightly. Businesses need to find out if within this opportunity is a chance to provide more or new solutions – ultimately growing the business
How has the pandemic changed your industry and how have you adapted?
Alex Gastle: The pandemic drove consumers online more than ever with some sources quoting a 61% increase in social media engagement through the first wave of the pandemic. This surge in social media usage coupled with an increase in online shopping, resulted in a renewed focus on influencer marketing for many brands, both big and small. With a renewed or expanding focus on influencer marketing comes new trends in the industry.
I’ve noticed more hesitation by marketers or business owners to invest their hard earned marketing dollars into extortionately high influencer marketplace platform fees, especially when these platforms rarely, if ever, have every single influencer on the platform. This has helped CreatorPilot as we generally cater to marketers who don’t use these platforms anyway but we’ve adapted our roadmap to include potential partnership opportunities with influencer database platforms in our market which are a natural precursor to using CreatorPilot.
What advice do you wish you received when the pandemic started and what do you intend on improving in 2022?
Alex Gastle: I wish someone had told me that even in unprecedented times or times of extreme disruption, opportunity exists so stay focused on what you can control. The pandemic turned most business on their head overnight. This took a lot of control away from people and forced us to react to the new world we were living in. What I missed early on, is that if you don’t take advantage of the situation, someone else will. It is our job to seek out opportunity in times of disruption and use it best to our advantage.
Often in these times and rightly so, we go into survival mode but I’ve learned that it is important to keep your eyes open along the way because opportunity will present itself (and possibly not in the way you think it might).
Online business surged higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for 2022?
Alex Gastle: Pending any more COVID variants or waves causing significant disruption, I think we will experience a sort of hybrid environment that combines all of the significant online business adjustments made during COVID, influenced by our pre-COVID routines and processes. Businesses will be in a position where they can pick and choose the combination that works best for them to deliver the optimal operating environment.
COVID forced many businesses to modernize and hastily adopt new technology that was available to them long before COVID. 2022 will be the year that we start to see the technology that will remain in these businesses take hold and not be used solely to navigate through the pandemic.
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a screen?
Alex Gastle: With my team being spread across the world, I spend the working day in front of my computer screen and most of the evening not far from my phone. This ensures that I am never far away from responding to questions and issues as they come up. In an ideal world, I would spend less time in front of a screen and I am working to try and create internal processes that will remove the need for me to be on standby for a lot of my time.
The majority of executives use stories to persuade and communicate in the workplace. Can you share with our readers examples of how you implement that in your business to communicate effectively with your team?
Alex Gastle: Everyone’s definition of stories is slightly different. In my case, I relate to my vision of and for the company quite frequently to the team. Being an entirely remote team, ensuring that we remain aligned on a common mission and vision for where we are going is crucial. Further to referring to my own vision, in many cases I also reference stories about our users and how our product can be the hero in our user’s working lives. This helps members of the team who don’t have direct experience or knowledge of influencer marketing develop an understanding of how our product is used and the problems that we solve.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Alex Gastle: In my business it is a numbers game. The more relevant people who learn about our brand each day the faster we will grow. Right now, the challenge is to identify, implement and scale the best strategies to achieve this that deliver the best ROI across the business. We are having some success with this right now, however, the challenge is to ensure that the short and long term strategies that we implement are sustainable and scalable in our niche.
In 2022, what are you most interested in learning about? Crypto, NFTs, online marketing, or any other skill sets? Please share your motivations.
Alex Gastle: While I am interested in learning more about Crypto and NFTs, I am not a natural salesman so I need to improve my sales skills this year. Over the past 5 years I have become quite talented at writing cold emails that perform much higher than industry standards. After the cold email, my skill set becomes more and more limited, mostly due to lack of experience and practice. This will be the focus of my learning this year.
A record 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September in 2021, accelerating a trend that has become known as the Great Resignation. 47% of people plan to leave their job during 2022. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. Do you think leaders see the data and think “that’s not me – I’m not that boss they don’t want to work for? What changes do you think need to happen?
Alex Gastle: I think that there is definitely a naivety when it comes to negative business statistics that have been calculated via a large poll. Everyone is ‘stuck in their own lane’ so to speak that it is hard to acknowledge what we consider to be external trends impacting our own businesses. As a competitive athlete growing up, I was familiar with the saying “a team is only as good as its worst player.” This saying applies in business as well.
People are what drive businesses forward from top to bottom. We need to be open to hearing the good, the bad and the ugly about being a member of our team and also encourage team members to share their thoughts with leadership. Without open and frank communication nothing can change because we’d never know anything was wrong.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Alex Gastle: I would choose to become an SEO ninja and have the ability to permanently rank all of my webpages #1 on Google for all of the keywords that are relevant to my business. This would make life so much easier and take the pressure off of outbound sales. With consistent #1 Google rankings across all of our pages and the subsequent traffic that would follow, we’d have more inbound leads than we could handle.
What does “success” in 2022 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Alex Gastle: This year success means tangible growth in all areas of my life and my business. It sounds very broad but I have set ambitious goals for myself and for the business. I try to avoid assessing success on the basis of if I don’t achieve X by Y than it is a failure. The pandemic allowed for time to reset and reassess the direction of the business and 2022 is all about bringing it to fruition or at least making steps in that direction. Personally, like everyone else, I have things I need to improve on but also values and morals that I need to maintain to be able to look back on 2022 and say that it was a success.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Alex Gastle for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Alex Gastle or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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