The digital marketplace is an increasingly crowded place. Customers are doing their shopping mostly online and entrepreneurs are being forced to comply if they want to make a profit.
However, the fundamentals of marketing have not changed: telling the right story to the right people, in the right place, at the right time. But each of these concepts has fundamentally changed with the digital age, with consumers requiring multiple touchpoints with a brand to make a purchase. One of these changes is the rise and importance of influence marketing as an essential part of marketing strategies.
If the influencer is that person who can change the purchasing behavior of a consumer by being in a continuous dialogue with the target audience, then the people at Fluency provide the perfect platform where the entrepreneur can find the most compatible promoters of his brand.
We talked to Andrian Nicolaev, co-founder of startup Fluency to understand more about trends in Influence Marketing and his idea.
Startup Moldova: Hello Adrian. Briefly tell us about your startup idea and the service you offer.
Andrian Nicolaev: Fluency is a web platform that integrates Artificial Intelligence, making collaboration between brands/marketers and influencers/content creators simpler, safer, and with measurable results.
The platform offers suggestions of content creators or influencers, relevant to each brand, and provides transparent analytical data on promotional campaigns and content creators.
Moreover, the fulfillment of the KPIs of the collaborations and the security of the transaction is ensured by integrated guarantee mechanisms.
Startup Moldova: What makes you special, compared to other companies or startups that offer the same solutions?
Andrian Nicolaev: The Secure-Deal mechanism that ensures the fulfillment of the predetermined conditions of collaboration between brands and influencers, as well as the security of remuneration transactions.
And analytical data displayed on the platform in real-time, 100% transparent, which allows the selection of relevant content creators for the promotion of brands.
The startup is a multi-platform that brings together content creators from different social networks (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook.) and offers AI integration for content creator suggestions relevant to each brand.
Startup Moldova: Where did the idea for this startup come from, and from what necessity?
Andrian Nicolaev: I noticed that brands, businesses, and entrepreneurs have problems finding an influencer relevant to their niche, values , and target group of customers. Also, 68% of them experienced fraud, i.e. failure to meet collaboration KPIs, false statistics, and black promotion.
Our motivation is to solve these problems with the help of a platform that facilitates WIN-WIN collaboration between the 2 parties.
Startup Moldova: What were the biggest difficulties you faced at the beginning?
Andrian Nicolaev: The biggest problem we had was the lack of competent developers in the team to provide a functional form to the platform. At this stage, we have the right people on the team working hard to get our product to deliver value as soon as possible.
Startup Moldova: Whom is your product aimed at? What is the target customer segment?
Andrian Nicolaev: Our target groups are entrepreneurs/marketers who want to effectively implement influence marketing in their promotion strategies on the one hand and content creators who want to find collaborators and monetize their activity on the other.
The platform is currently under development and we offer the Influence Marketing service (analysis, communication, collaboration tracking) in manual mode. We already serve several small businesses in the Republic of Moldova in this direction.
Startup Moldova: Who is part of your team?
Andrian Nicolaev: The Fluency team consists of 5 people:
Andrian Nicolaev – Co-founder, CEO
Andreea Cojocaru – Co-founder, CMO
Luminita Straista – Graphic Designer
Dumitru Cucu – Fullstack Developer
Ianus Ghiletchi – Backend Developer
Startup Moldova: What growth and development plans do you have?
Andrian Nicolaev: We plan to launch the beta version of the platform by December 2022, and at the end of the year to already have the first 300 users from both sides (brands and influencers).
Startup Moldova: Andrian, we wish you great success in everything you have proposed, to you and your team! And we encourage our readers to follow your startup on Facebook and Instagram.
