Moving to a different country with an unfamiliar culture is scary and definitely not easy. But in case you are planning to move to Romania, there are quite a few startups that can help in your quest to settle in. We came up with Family X to illustrate.
Meet Family X. They recently decided to move to Romania as Mr. X got a job offer in the IT branch. He is a developer and web designer, and he owes a lot of his successful job search to a Romanian startup. He built his resume with the help of Splinter.me, a company that specifically focuses on Mr. X’s profession. He is one of the 2.600 beta users, who created a candidate profile, based on personality tests to ensure the perfect employer-employee match.
Getting around
Before their move, of course, Family X had to find a place to live – and what better place to for it than through rently.ro, an online platform designed for tenants that matches them directly with property owners. Family X paid a monthly fee of 29 euros to get in touch with their future landlord in Bucharest.
Mrs. X is a writer and documents their journey on a blog. Her first entry was about moving their stuff and actually getting to their apartment. When they landed at the airport in Bucharest, it wasn’t exactly easy to get to their future home. But since Mrs. X has Romanian friends online, one of them told her to make use of Clever Taxi. Once they found a Clever Taxi Order Kiosk in the arrival terminal, the expats could order a car in English and received all the information they needed: taxi company, car ID, the expected time of arrival and the company’s phone number. (By the way, Clever Taxi has more than 260 countries listed, so you can order a taxi either using their app or Facebook.)
Enjoy your meal
It took a few months until the family settled in and started feeling at home. Mr. X started working at his new job, while Mrs. X is writing from home and taking care of Child X. She is not much of a cook so she likes to either eat out or order online. But this has turned out to be somewhat of a challenge, since most of the menus are in Romanian and their knowledge of the language is vitually non-existent. Because they don’t want intestines or the like on their plates, Family X is making use of HipMenu, an app that has high quality photos of the menus of many Romanian restaurants.
One night, they had dinner at this fine restaurant, but unfortunately, Mr. X’s soup was cold. But not to worry – he had heard his colleagues talk about TxtFeedback, a tool that facilitates communication between a customer and a business – you can easily give feedback about a service and let the management know by either texting a number or scanning a QR code. That’s exactly what Family X did. The manager received the message immediately and responded, while family X was still at the restaurant. Mr. X got a new, hot soup on the house.
If the family doesn’t go for the food they are familiar with and like to get a feel for the new culture and be adventurous, they explore traditional Romanian dishes with TastyTripApp.
Ever-growing Child X
Child X is eight years old and very curious about his dad’s profession. To act on her son’s interest, Mrs. X found out about programming courses for children aged 8 to 14. Digital Kids is a programme run by Edusfera Association, in partnership with Romanian Open Source Education and HUB Bucharest. Their mission is to empower children and turn them into creators, not only users of technology. Luckily, Child X is among the 70 children enrolled – there is a pretty long waiting list. For 10 euros a session, Child X can learn programming languages such as HTML5, CSS, Ruby and JavaScript, as well as get to know about cyber safety and social media do’s and don’ts.
Before their move to Romania, Mrs. X gave away all of Child X’s clothes that didn’t fit anymore. Had she only known about UseTogether, a peer-to-peer sharing platform. It allows users to swap, lend, or donate things they don’t need anymore. Mrs. X could have swapped old clothes with new ones but now that she knows about the startup, she is completely hooked. She also learned that the team is planning to focus on a more specific niche: parents.
SEO in CEE
Like her husband, Mrs. X is fond of numbers so naturally, she is curious about how many readers follow her website. Mr. X recently discovered Monitor Backlinks that helps him to achieve great rankings in Google without having to deal with the complexity of SEO. Mr. and Mrs. X are among 17.000 users. Moreover, Mrs. X is a subscriber of ContentLook by Squirrly to get regular reports about her blog. She receives scores on traffic, SEO, usage of links and keywords, etc. and gets tips on how to improve on weaknesses. Mr. X, on the other hand, is a loyal user of Social ReHub, which helps him to get to know his new coworkers at his new workplace. It’s all about making connections.
Over the past few months, Family X has had to get used to an entirely new culture. It hasn’t beeneasy, but thanks to quite a few neat tools by Romanian startups, they’re a step closer to being locals.
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