Natalia Sleptov is a marketer with 10 years of experience in various niches: FMCG, manufacturing, retail, international corporations. Now she combines two positions of Chief Marketing Manager and Chief Product Officer in the Moldovan startup Langly, which stands out from local startups in terms of the number of international awards received, and Natalia has played one of the main roles in this.
Natasha, thank you for taking the time to chat. I was interested in your career path in IT. Since you had no experience in this field before Langly, please share what brought you here.
My experience is like a jigsaw puzzle and I take relevant skills from every company I have worked for to my current business. I have experience in many niches, which helps a lot. So, for example, when I worked in packaging printing, I understood the right way, the right specifications for printing. So the marketing girls and I make good marketing materials very quickly by understanding the thickness of the paper and the type of printing.
Secondly, when I worked in retail, I understood how customers are researched, the target audience, how to communicate with them, in principle, and how they react. There is some common history, which helps me now to understand how we can do the same cust dev. A lot of things are accumulated from experience.
Thirdly, I worked for a large international company, Puma, where I learnt planning skills. This is a German company. And to give you an idea of how they work, they plan all their collections two years in advance. We, of course, have a lot to learn.
It turns out that you are showing by your example that one should not be afraid to enter IT without an IT background.
Absolutely. I believe that a non-IT marketer has absolutely every chance of becoming a marketer in this field if he or she wants to. You have to know some basic principles, love your job and want to do something for it. So one has to look for options on how to do it as caste and time efficient as possible.
So how did you get into IT?
Oh, now I'm going to make an advert. There is a school of conscious process management in Odessa called MindPRO. A lot of high-level businessmen in Moldova have studied there. In February 2021, I first came to a reflexive game and my training in MIND PRO started from there. By the way, they are now conducting training in Chisinau.
At the game, my game technicians were my current colleagues, the CFO and CTO. Some time after the game, we met, and I was offered the position of CPO. I didn't think it was my thing, but I was persuaded to give it a try. And here I am.
It was a very small position. I had to develop and promote a simple application. But I had to get my hands on something.
We had this little widget, a completely abandoned product. I started to promote it. But at this point in time, the person who was overseeing Langly left the team, and the product was left without working hands. Eventually they came to me and said, "You're going to be in charge of Langly from now on." I was shocked, I had a lot of fears and insecurities, but I had to take the job.

How did you manage to build relationships in the team?
I told them: "Guys, you and I are now on the same page. I give you full transparency and freedom to be creative within the framework of your work. You report on time, meet deadlines and discuss your proposals with me. The final decision is also mine as well as the responsibility." And we agreed.
We worked hard that summer. No one went on holiday because we had to catch up. We worked hard together, primarily because we didn't took it so serious, it was like a game play. At MindPRO, I learnt how to nip fires within the team in the bud and how to get business benefits out of any situation.
I explained to them that I didn't want them to just do their job, but to do it responsibly and with high quality. They understood this and began to collaborate with each other. In some moments I did not interfere at all, because there were some small things where I had nothing to do. After that, I put them in touch with the developers and things started to happen.
Of course, some people had Dunning-Kruger syndrome and resistance: "Well, they took a non-specialist, and she doesn't know how to do this, she doesn't know how to do that". I said: "Don't worry, I will learn everything. You all have your own role. My role is for you to work and report to me correctly so that I can do the strategy to market. Is anyone capable of doing that instead of me?" Everyone remained silent.
I have one principle in management: If it all works without me, it makes no sense for me to get involved in the processes and interfere with that work. Because I know less about UX than my designer, for example. That's why I need him.
You are now combining your CPO and CMO work, right? How did you manage to attract so much attention to the product?
Yes, after that we set up a marketing department, where I felt really good about myself. Imagine a start-up that doesn't even have a product ready yet. But we registered and got involved wherever we could, promoting the site and social networks. We took part in competitions, we were rejected, but we didn't take offence and said: "Never mind, we'll see you next year!".
And this tactic paid off this year, because we took three big international awards. There is no other EduTech product in Moldova that has won three such awards. If we take one more, we will repeat the success of Duolingo when it first appeared in 2008.
And now, when the market is so crowded with such products, and we are also in such a strong international economic crisis, we are not on a priori equal footing with them, and yet we took three awards. That's worth a lot. And it is all the same brazen marketing.
What challenges have you faced? What are the Challenges? 🙂 🙂
It is very difficult to work with representatives of the education system. Besides the fact that I have to prepare a product and marketing of international level, we are also trying to launch in Moldova at the level of educational projects and schools, which is difficult because it is a bureaucratic machine. But we will manage.
I really want to ask more about Langly. But I think that's for another time. Right now I want to concentrate on you. Did you do any additional training during your work? Or was your marketing experience enough for you?
I did a product management course from Berkley organized by Dreamups. But I can't say that he helped me in any particular way. It was completely classic and absolutely irrelevant for start-ups. The course gave me a general understanding of how networking works, how product specialists work. And I implemented some things that were necessary at the time.
Startups operate in a mode where you can't sit down and spend a week on some document. When you become self-sufficient, then the company slows down and there is an opportunity. In the meantime, we're all working in emergency mode. Because actually, in terms of money, we are in a rather difficult position. We thought that people would buy our product quickly. And a product for schools is a very long transaction history. It lasts six to nine months.
I act just purely out of product development. At the moment, I need Customer Development, and I am studying it.
Am I going to study further? Yes, I am. I'm interested. I want to keep coming up with useful tricks.
Okay, what helps you come up with useful chips?
My experience. My basic first education is as an English and Arabic linguist translator. I understand what the language learning process is like. And maybe my first education, helps me a lot here. And then also marketing experience and so on. It all adds up to such a perfect cube that helps me.
Plus I also have a child, I know how she studies (she is 16 now). I understand what exams are like, how she learnt English. And all this together gives me an understanding of what I would like for myself and my child in the first place.
Also, I'm not shy about asking for help.
Who do you usually consult with?
It depends on the topic. If I need to consult about crowdfunding, for example, I already know that there are people who do it. Or, for example, I know someone with a project with cool economics. Last year my brain was just tearing up because I didn't know which side to approach it from. I wanted to do it in chunks. I was told, no, that's not the way to do it. You have to generally know how to do it from all angles. Take your competitors' economics, best practices and introduce something new - your own. It seems like simple advice, but it's sound.
And depending on the question, I turn to the right people and don't hesitate. And if they ask me, I help them in the same way. It's an exchange of energies.
It seems to me that this community should work, because Moldova is at a very distant level in terms of product development. And if everyone behaves like the best guru, and all the rest of you are no match for me, we won't go anywhere.
All hands and feet in favor. I always say that to everyone. But I often encounter such arrogance when they say: "We are competitors.
If there is less of this, it will be good. And many of our Moldovan projects, like yours, are trying to make people know each other, communicate, make friends, because this is the key task. If they exchange experience, everyone will rise to the same level. You have to understand this and come to it.
I agree. Natasha, tell me, have you gone completely into IT or do you still help colleagues from other areas?
Classic marketing has remained in my life, it has not disappeared anywhere. I still have parallel projects in classical marketing. I have a young, intelligent team, and on my shoulders it is mainly consulting and strategic advice. I'm even thinking of opening a marketing agency, because I don't have enough hands and brains anymore. I need to get good people to do it because my name has already started working. And the love of my life is Langly, it's my baby, and babies don't get left behind.
Good luck with that! I think it's a great time to do it. Anything you can advise people who are afraid to go into aiti?
From my experience, I believe that IT companies are sorely lacking marketers and proper communicators.
There are rules of communication, and they are quite complex. This year we went through this at a university in England (I study marketing there). There, they teach integrated communication in an excellent way. This is when your message is clear to everyone around you, and it is the same across all channels. In Moldova, practically nobody knows how to build a proper communication. Therefore, if a person is not an IT specialist, but has a good tongue and an understanding of strategic communication, this is a huge plus.

If you position yourself correctly, you can find a new job. Because even in Moldova, we don't have such specialists or people willing to communicate in a cool way. And IT companies especially need such people now, because there are a lot of products, a lot of different ideas, websites. And how to write about them properly?
You don't have to be afraid. It is important to be in the right place at the right time.
Is it possible to learn this somewhere in our country? Or can you tell me where to start at least to study this topic?
We have excellent communication departments, both in private and public universities. It all starts with some basics, classic theories that need to be understood and studied. Maybe some people will disagree with me, but I just don't think you can learn anything cool from YouTube podcasts.
It is necessary to get education. This education should not be a three-month course, but three or four years of systematic training, either in Moldova or abroad. Plus some other courses and podcasts - this is auxiliary information. But you have to learn and not stop.
And you also have to work on yourself, discipline yourself and systematize all your knowledge.
Natasha, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Thank you so much for the detailed and frank conversation about your work and life. It was very interesting. There will be a continuation!
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