Our reasons for launching Flight Story in late 2021 were centred around two principles. The first was a recognition of what we were great at after our time at Social Chain, such as providing teams with the right tools to become highly sophisticated when it came to marketing. The second catalyst was change - there are many industries which are currently going through an immense amount of change, and so our aim when launching the business was to support and guide these sectors navigate this change and take advantage of the opportunities that exist in today’s current climate.
Tell me about the business - what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
Flight Story is a modern marketing and communications group, where we have four divisions: strategic consulting, content, media and we have some proprietary data and tech capabilities within our walls.
We work with companies and industries who are looking to go through change, with our primary focus being disruptive brands, emerging technologies such as Web3 or biotech, complex sectors as well as the finance industry. We reach our customers through focusing on projecting our philosophies into the world where we are a very marketing, content-heavy business.
How has the business evolved since its launch?
We officially launched Flight Story in December last year, where the company has since evolved significantly. Naturally when we first started, the backdrop of the world was very different and the big opportunity was supporting the finance sector, particularly companies that were going through an IPO, which we did successfully.
As we moved into this year, with the economic backdrop shifting, we broadened our services to not only focus on finance but other industries which were seeking this disrupting change. This has been a gradual expansion - we very much started with strategy, we made our first acquisition and partnership with R. Agency in January, who increased our capabilities, and since then we continue to develop and grow across the group where we are now a team of 50 people.
Tell us about the working culture at Flight Story
Personally, people define a business, and so our culture is people-centric in every sense of the word at Flight Story. With this, I believe our success will be defined ultimately by the first 100 people that represent the business.
Our working culture is mostly about being caring, fair and holding high standards. As a collective, our primary value is to be unapologetically ambitious.
How are you funded?
Flight Story is founder-funded.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
I believe there are many challenges and, as a cofounder, there isn’t a single big challenge that exists that we have faced. Ultimately it’s a series of difficult challenges that any early stage or startup faces - from making sure we have the right systems, processes and operations which enable us to scale, ensuring we have the right people, making investments in the right area, to increasing our capabilities and keeping the momentum up when building our own marketing engine to attract clients and business as such.
How does Flight Story answer an unmet need?
I think as our worlds get increasingly complex, the ability to tell great stories for companies online consistently and on a regular basis is becoming harder to do nowadays. Marketeers have more choices than they ever had, and I believe having partners that can help them be very intentional with their efforts is so important, but also have that deep, nuanced expertise on the art of what is possible by questioning what these new innovations mean for companies and being very thoughtful about how they take on new endeavours.
What’s in store for the future?
We have very exciting plans coming up, as we will officially launch publicly. We have now come out of beta for our first tech product, Flight Deck, which we can’t wait to bring to the light as this has effectively been helping companies create visibility and linking, showing the direct correlations between social searches or other news mentions, and how that impacts stock prices, crypto tokens and more. This is very much here to support investor efforts.
Closing out the year, we’ve had a lot of momentum where we are looking to invest in other entrepreneurs and businesses, so that pursuit continues with more news coming very soon.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
My number one piece of advice is building anything, specifically a company is very difficult. I think as much as you need to stay focused, you have to take on the whole process, find things you enjoy doing and be around people you like to spend time with and work alongside. Being a founder can be a lonely place however if you have great people around you and a strong support network, you find fulfilment and enjoy the process, you will weather the tough times and thrive in the good times too.
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
I am quite a disciplined person - my daily routine involves me trying to get some fresh air every morning and do a little bit of exercise before starting work. I also try to not look at my phone before coming into work to get myself in the right frame of mind for the day ahead, however this doesn’t always happen. I also spend a lot of time after work doing a lot of activities, whether that’s sports, going out into nature… I have also just started intermittent fasting, which I am new to however my energy levels have never felt better! Overall, I am very focused on my health and always try to be the best version of myself.
Oliver Yonchev is CEO and cofounder of Flight Story.
