Exclusive90 Day Fiance’s Andrei Reveals How He Juggles Being a Husband, Dad of 2 While Launching New Business With Andy
Hard worker! 90 Day Fiancé star Andrei Castravet is launching a new business venture with franchise costar Andy Kunz, In Touch can exclusively reveal. In an video interview, the TLC star reveals how he is juggling his new job on top of being a husband to wife Elizabeth “Libby” Potthast Castravet as well as a dad of two.
“I think this is just simple because we are putting [my wife’s] work in my wife’s hand and I have my work in my hand. So, she’s responsible right now for the for the kids,” Andrei, 36, says. “My daughter already, she is going to school, she actually has her own thing going. She’s already a big girl. Winston is smaller and he needs to be taken care of, but 50 percent of the day, he’s sleeping.”
Andrei and Libby, 31, share daughter Ellie, 4, and son Winston, 4 months. The proud dad continued, “So you have a lot of time on your hands. That’s why [Libby] can concentrate on her thing. I concentrate on my business, I travel.”
In the months since welcoming baby No. 2, the Moldova native has been focusing on building a business with his 90 Day Fiancé costar Andy. Andrei and Libby made their reality TV debut on season 5 of 90 Day Fiancé while Andy, 36, made his franchise debut on a May 2020 episode of 90 Day Fiancé: Self Quarantined with 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days alum Cortney Reardanz. The business partners, who both reside in Florida, first connected on social media but didn’t become friends until they reconnected in person one year later at a mutual friend’s birthday party in Los Angeles. They immediately hit it off and bonded over their Eastern European cultures and common interests.
“We have a common love, and this is money. [The] will to make more and more, we’re both passionate about it,” Andrei says about how he and Andy hit it off after meeting in person for the first time. Andy adds, “We are from different countries, I’m from Germany, he’s from Moldova, very different countries. But still there’s that European mindset about business and the American Dream we have.”
They leaned on each other for advice on how to adjust to the business culture in America, which they say is different from Europe. One of the biggest obstacles they both have faced is dealing with competitors, scammers as well as the misinterpretation of their “accents” or their “communication” styles.
“Everybody thinks we have a bad tone when we speak. When we talk, [people are thinking] that we’re aggressive,” Andrei says. Andy explains, “It’s goes even further than accents. It’s also communication that we are very planned and direct. I had a job in corporate America and we are supposed to critique people and give them feedback, and afterwards I was told, ‘No, no, no, you cannot say what they do wrong. You have to tell them that there’s opportunity to make it even better.’ And it’s just not me. I can’t, I give it to you straight. And that’s again, what works between Andrei and I. We can tell each other when somebody effs up and when you hear that, you know exactly what to do.”
When asked what made him want to go into business with Andy, Andrei says it was all about Andy’s past success. “Andy is an entrepreneur and he had a lot of ventures that he succeeded in. I checked on that, I did a background check on him, obviously,” Andrei said with a laugh. “The guy is a serial entrepreneur and he has a lot of experience. I learned from him a lot of things.”
As for what made Andy want to team up with Andrei, the businessman took note of Andrei’s work ethic. “Everybody knows Andrei from the TV show, and that’s also how I knew him in the past, before I met him in person. But I also know the Andrei that is at home,” Andy explains. “This guy’s an immigrant from an Eastern European country. He lives in a nice house. He has a beautiful wife. He has two adorable children. He has two cars, that is already success for everybody. And he strives for more.”
Andy adds that he and Andrei also complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses, which make them a good team. They also bonded over their shared vision and drive of achieving their version of the American Dream while coming from their similar cultural backgrounds.
“This is specifically for people that come here for the opportunity to live American Dream. It’s just for people that get here and they realize how much things you can do actually in America and how capitalism works in the favor of people that wanna strive for more,” Andrei says. “So we are using these tools in our favor. What we have in common here is just the capability to go and go and go. When somebody stops, we do that extra hour of work and sometimes people are not ready for that. We’re on top of the game by doing that.”
Andy elaborates, “I think in Europe, everybody is used to having an eight to five job and it’s much harder over there to start your own business. Also, it’s made much harder to start a business. You need a certain amount of capital. It takes weeks and weeks to start a company. Over here, you come here, everybody hears about the American dream, everybody looks at Hollywood and all those rich people. So once you get here, you don’t stop working because you want to achieve that dream. I think that is a bond that we have that always, again, always strive for more.”
He explains that even when he and Andrei worked for other people, they would still dream up ideas for starting a businesses “on the side” after coming home from their day jobs. “Because America is just such a big market, and you can make it here without inventing your own product,” Andy adds. “You can make it without having money, you get investors. You can make a business, it doesn’t matter where you come from or what you have on resources.”
As for their business, Andy explains more about their new venture. “It is in the e-commerce space, we just don’t talk about it quite yet for a competitive advantage that we want to seek,” the entrepreneur says. “We started at the end of last year, like mid-December. We already hired five people. We are already profitable within a month. We are traveling a lot, which Andrei’s wife might not like that much, that I steal him a lot from his family. But it’s a lot of fun. It’s typical startup, it’s chaos. You don’t know what the next day brings. There’s always uncertainty. But we think it will be great.”
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