Ever felt isolated and unproductive while working from home? Today we meet Tina Kesova, the Head of Marketing at Codeable and a Campus X member, who shares her personal story. Here’s why she joined our coworking community and how it powered her productivity.
Can you tell us a bit about Codeable and your role in the company?
Codeable is a marketplace for hiring freelance WordPress developers. It’s similar to the Toptal platform but is WordPress oriented. We connect WordPress site owners with 530+ highly vetted WordPress experts to work on projects of pretty much any scope and size.
Anything WordPress goes. We’re happy to have serviced more than 19,000 customers with over 75,000 projects and take big pride in being recommended as an official development partner by key players in the WordPress ecosystem. Worth mentioning that Codeable is a fully bootstrapped company.
Although my official title is Head of Marketing, I actually wear many different hats as we’re a pretty small and fully distributed team. I work on anything from SEO content marketing through product marketing and branding, all the way to existing clients' retention and growth.
What motivates and challenges you daily? Give us an example.
Where do I start? I think my biggest motivators are working with smart people, learning something new every day, and last but not least, just getting stuff done and seeing the results of my work. I’m a doer and that last thing is pretty important for me. If you want to get me under the weather, give me a big project with a 2-year launch horizon. I’ll probably quickly break it down into smaller, manageable chunks, so we can just ship faster and learn as fast as we can.
Working remotely, in a completely distributed environment, with colleagues from dozens of different nationalities can be quite a challenge. It pushes me to communicate better, manage, and plan work better, and most of all - be more patient, open-minded, and empathetic to others.
Why did you decide to join Campus X?
It really goes down to two simple things - productivity and staying sane and socially connected. Working for a completely distributed company comes with many perks - flexibility to work from wherever I want, whenever I want, however I want.
Nevertheless, it also comes with a lot of challenges. If not managed well, you may end up working all the time, oftentimes from home and completely isolated from the rest of the world. I only get to meet with my colleagues in person once a year, and this year with COVID-19 this was impossible. All that is neither good for your productivity, nor for your mental health. Tried and tested personally, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Because of all that, joining Campus X was a no-brainer. Here I have everything I need to stay productive and I am surrounded by amazing, smart, and like-minded people that I can connect with.
How does being part of a coworking space impact you and your team?
At Codeable, my colleagues often refer to me as the Marketing Department. The reality is that because I’m a single person team (is that even a thing?), I often end up working and thinking alone. Every extrovert will understand me when I say that this is “no bueno”. Quite often I need to do a sanity check with someone who speaks my language or just run an idea by someone without having to explain in detail, for example, what are attribution models. And that’s when I go to the Campus X community.
Having access to so many smart and friendly folks, always willing to help is wonderful. Thanks to our community I can easily unstuck myself and move the needle forward for the team, respectively.
What’s your favorite part of your workday at Campus X? Why?
By all means, lunchtime. The best time when I get to meet and casually talk to members over a quick bite at the on-site restaurant. The best part is that it all happens organically and doesn’t take any planning.
What’s up and coming for you and Codeable?
We’re working on some pretty interesting partnerships, expanding the team (hopefully soon I won’t be the Marketing Department), and revamping our whole SEO and content marketing strategy, among other things. Fun fact - we’ve chosen to eat our own dog food and I get to work with experts from the Codeable platform on the implementation of a lot of our marketing initiatives. Overall, fun growth-oriented activities with the extra challenge of executing almost exclusively with freelancers from the platform.
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