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Daria Astanaeva

Daria Astanaeva

Founder of The Sell Well Agency, a Vancouver-based personal brand sales agency that turns Instagram into a revenue stream for service providers and founders; BC Business 30 Under 30 honoree.

Sep 18, 2026

6:41
So was it easy for you to like pivot and like let go of that version of you?
6:46
I would say one thing that I do really appreciate about myself is that I am very quick executor and I can very quickly identify when the path I'm on is no longer one that works for me.
7:04
However, so my agency existed before March, but it was a content creation agency where we were just focusing on creating content.
7:13
My thought process came around December, January, where when I was reflecting on all of the data and how much money we made over 2025, what did it look like? What was our cost breakdown? It took me a minute to realize that for me to make, let's say, $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month, I would need to have a lot of fucking clients.
7:40
And it's not really something that I can manage because our content packages, they were pretty small.
7:47
Our content packages, they were ranging somewhere between like $1,000 to $3,000, which is a lot of work to get $100,000 a month.
7:58
And then I calculated how many team members I would actually need to have full-time, some of them part-time.

17 MINS LATER

25:28
yes and no
5:33
And I would like go back and forth between wanting to start on social
5:37
media, but then like would feel like this feeling of imposter syndrome, cringe, embarrassment, shame, because like it is such a weird experience.
5:47
And then I would come back to it over and over and over again.
5:49
And it always felt like this was something that I really, really want to do.
5:54
But when I actually stuck to it was 2022 when I was working a nine to five job.
6:02
I really liked this job.
6:03
I was working in influencer marketing and in PR as well, and it was really great.

9 MINS LATER

14:39
So like in 2026, what is the first thing you would tell someone to do?

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