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The future of collaboration for digital marketers - Interview with Andrei Stoica, BRUNCH

Bianca Iulia Simion

The future of collaboration for digital marketers - Interview with Andrei Stoica, BRUNCH
The interview provides further insight into the long-term vision of the platform's founder.

Brunch is a collaboration platform that helps digital professionals manage feedback on live websites. The platform is used by digital marketing agencies, consultants and content creators to collaborate internally or with their clients.

During the interview, Andrei Stoica, CEO & Founder, shared his ideas on the future of collaboration for digital marketers. The interview provides further insight into the long-term vision of the platform's founder.


Hello, Andrei. What's happening on Marketing Tech? What are the main trends?

Marketing tech is a very dynamic industry and new solutions are coming to the market every month. Small and medium businesses are starting to appreciate tools like Hubspot (mainly for B2B) or Shopify (for eCommerce) that include the core features they need in the main platform and can be integrated with a wide range of apps to cover secondary use cases. Code-free technology and easy-to-use tools are definitely the trends of the next few years.

Privacy is becoming increasingly important, and companies have once again negotiated with their users over the line between giving away more personal information and better quality content (tailored to the needs or interests of individual users). As in many other industries, automation is a major trend. People value efficiency and are looking to replace repetitive tasks with automated processes.

We are excited to see how AI will change the marketing landscape. AI allows marketers to identify patterns and insights that are otherwise difficult to identify, and even create assets based on those patterns (e.g., Unbounce, Jarvis, and Drift use AI for their software).

The web seems to be maturing and there is a growing need for tools that make life easier and allow marketers to focus on the quality of their work and spend less time setting up tools or hiring development teams to make small content changes or anything that is not part of their core objectives.

What problem does BRUNCH solve?

Brunch seeks to improve online collaboration and feedback flow between digital agencies or experts and their clients. If an agency (or internal team of experts) is working on a website, has the first version, but needs feedback from the rest of the team, Brunch can help. They can add the website to Brunch and ask for feedback and discuss suggestions directly related to the website. Website feedback gets complicated when more than 2 people are involved - it's impossible to share opinions via email with printed screens and everyone in cc.

We do away with website screenshots and long email threads that are hard to track and follow up. We enable agencies and their clients to provide feedback on a website faster and focus on implementing changes rather than clarifying feedback.

We initially focused on improving this particular process for our users.

Are there no similar tools on the market?

There are a few other tools, but none of them are currently big enough to be recognized as the clear leader in our niche. Tools like Ruttl, Pastel, or MarkUp have similar features but have a different approach to integrating with other platforms, pricing structures, or onboarding and collaboration workflows.

We invest a lot of time in finding customers and the first 100 active paying customers to scale from there. We are betting that this focus on product-market fit before scaling will result in a lower churn rate and make all the difference in the long run.

How did you come to found BRUNCH and what is your motivation?

I have been building a digital marketing agency for the last 5 years and Brunch was a tool we needed to work with our clients. There were other tools out there, but none seemed to be exactly what we needed, so we started building our own.

I have been an entrepreneur for 10 years, bootstrapped a few projects and worked for clients from all over the world. It gives me a lot of energy to help people and build healthy, happy and efficient teams. Sometimes it works, other times I know I need to try again and do better.

Who is on your team and what is your area of expertise?

I co-founded Brunch with Razvan Statescu, our technical director. Mihai Ivascu and Ulpia Ventures joined to help us finance Brunch so we can build faster. Mihai is a seasoned entrepreneur who brings his expertise and extensive experience in addition to financial support. He trusts our product and that's why he decided to lead the SeedBlink investment campaign. Daniel Negoita (Senior Software Engineer) joined our team earlier this year and Oana Groza (PR & Marketing Specialist), Vlad Stoica (design), Gabriela Popa (design), Alexandra Balan (sales) and the rest of the team from Brunch or stoica.co helped to shape the current product.

I am good at developing things. My professional experience started in digital marketing, but I have bounced around a lot between web design, user experience, product design, facilitation, team management, content marketing, analytics, and a few other things in between. I have a really broad range of skills, but did not specialize in one. I recently discovered that this is a good mix for a product manager, so I started focusing my time on building Brunch.

What makes BRUNCH so special? Why you in particular?

Brunch is built by a team focused primarily on customer success. We really want to help people with what we build. We are there for them and we do our best to understand their needs. We also understand the main users we are targeting, because we have experienced similar frustrations working with our clients as part of a digital marketing agency or as freelancers.

We are also used to developing good solutions quickly and with low budgets, so being bold is probably one of our most important qualities as a team. With Mihai Ivascu, Ulpia Ventures, and some other people and teams that support us along the way, we work hard to get better every day, learn from our mistakes and think long-term.

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Brunch started a €285.000 seed round on SeedBlink, to scale its collaboration app for website creation internationally. The round is supported by entrepreneur and investor Mihai Ivașcu, CEO of Modex and Investment Partner at Ulpia Ventures, with €85.000. Aside from funding to grow Brunch’s user base and support marketing activities, Mihai Ivașcu will use his 15 years entrepreneurial experience to help scale the company through mentorship and consultancy.

Learn more about Andrei Stoica | BRUNCH | BRUNCH's investment opportunity on SeedBlink

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