Our 2021 SaaS influencer report launched in January. Amongst the 25 names is Katherine Kostereva, a legendary SaaS presence—she’s the founder and CEO of Creatio.
Katherine was kind enough to spend time answering our questions about her career and approach to working life in SaaS.
Below are essential insights into Katherine’s daily motivations, achievements, ambitions, and advice for SaaS startups. 👇
Q: What keeps you motivated day in, day out?
A: We at Creatio have a vision of creating a world where any business idea can be automated in minutes. With our low-code platform for process management and CRM we help IT, business and digital leaders create low-code companies.
Understanding that with Creatio platform we build a future where anyone can rapidly automate and improve processes and create applications without coding skills—is what keeps me motivated.
My aspiration is to help businesses around the world to be able to transform their companies, automate their work, and accelerate—without expensive IT investments, lengthy implementation, or a steep learning curve.
With our team, I believe that Creatio has the potential to enable anyone to bring their ideas to life quickly and easily.
Q: What would you say is your biggest achievement in SaaS so far?
A: In 2019, key analysts like Forrester and Gartner have documented Creatio’s evolution from being just on the radar to being an industry leader on a very saturated market.
For two consecutive years already, Creatio has been recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation and in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management alongside such established leaders like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Adobe.
This year was very different for every company. Many businesses were hit hard by the COVID-19 and financial crisis.
During such times, support of the community is crucial. We at Creatio thought what value we could immediately bring to the community of our customers and partners.
As well as to companies that knew they needed a turnaround but hadn’t paved their way there yet.
Our response was a program of digital events to connect leaders and experts from various industries to collaboratively help cope with current challenges and build a rock-solid foundation for the future.
To date we’ve had over 250 digital events, as well as a 24-hour virtual conference with five tracks for various audiences, plus separate tracks in 7 languages.
These initiatives helped us connect over 45,000 of outstanding IT, digital and business leaders to share ideas, discuss challenges, learn from peers, and support their transformation process to increase agility and strengthen resilience.
Q: What’s the best career lesson you’ve learned?
A: One of the biggest mistakes I made was spreading myself too thin on multiple things at once, losing the focus on a single big idea, initiative or direction.
As an entrepreneur, I see lots of opportunities for business growth and it’s always tempting to go for them all at once.
However, in most of the cases that is not the best way to go, and a tight focus on one core initiative is vital to turn all the efforts into a success.
Q: How would you describe your day job to friends and family?
The CEO’s job is to make strategic decisions to fully achieve the vision of the company and at the same time build a strong team of leaders able to execute this strategy.
We face hundreds of challenges and issues from small to huge daily. My job as a leader is to be confident, optimistic and inspiring to help the team achieve great results.
Q: What’s your advice for those starting out in SaaS?
A: I strongly believe that moving fast matters. It’s inevitable in today’s reality. Make sure you are building an agile company that can react to change in an instant and adjust processes on the go to be able to provide value to customers.
As they are #1 priority for every organization. Be obsessed with customer success and ensure that you deliver what they are looking for faster than your competitors do.
Looking for more SaaS insights?
Want to see what Katherine and the 24 other influencers had to say? Get your free download. 👇
You can also sign up to the FoSaaS membership plan. It’s packed with value-driven content, including templates, OnDemand videos, and deep dive feature articles.
