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The no-BS podcast to scaling startups and growing revenue and businesses.
It was like a Twitter account, Internet of shit. We actually lived together. And I got very lucky. I was employee number 80. How did you feel? I got to know what it's like to work for a startup. I really felt at times overwhelmed. You were so excited and 100 % certain that this would be great and a piece of content or a strategy. And then it actually didn't work. Biggest distinction between what's happening right now and how we think about marketing right now versus maybe...
20 years ago. It's something that's misunderstood, oftentimes overlooked. my God, there's so much AI about this. If you're really bad, maybe chat GPT can actually be helpful. It's not coming for you.
Welcome to the Growth Hour, the No BS podcast about scaling startups and growing businesses. In today's episode, we have Anna Savina, who is currently head of marketing at Archetype AI and used to do content at Miro before it became a unicorn. Welcome Anna. Really glad to have you in our podcast among one of our first guests. You and I know each other for a very long time.
We worked together at Setka when you were running our content marketing. And we actually lived together when you moved to the US. So I'm actually really happy that you made your trip to Serbia and are doing the podcast today with us. And Alex, I've introduced a little bit Anna to you, but I for the purpose of this podcast, you don't know...
everything because we want to kind of discover more about your journey and your experience. And maybe to get us started, maybe you can talk a little bit about your sort of background in your journey from content marketing in Russia to then joining one of the main unicorns right now, Miro. Before it actually was even Miro, it was real-time board. And then we can start with that and see where it takes us.
Totally. Thank you, Blanka. I'm really glad to be here. I'm really excited to talk about all things marketing. But to kind of understand my journey, think it makes sense to start with my journey as journalist really, because I worked for one of the biggest independent publications in Russia, digital publications. It was really focused mostly on design, tech and business.
And while I was covering tech and design, I got really interested in kind of new technologies, the world of startups, Silicon Valley. And I was really curious to see what it's like to work for a startup myself. And I got very lucky because the publishing companies that I worked for, it was building its own tech tools. Setka is a company that we worked for because
This digital publication, they had a really innovative CMS that could allow different companies to have more interactive experiences online when they're building this new digital publications. And that's how my journey in tech started. We were building this design tool for other editorial teams. I think it was a really smooth transition because I was really familiar with the tool.
I was very familiar with all the challenges that editorial teams face. I was working with designers and illustrators prior to that. So that's how I started working in tech and naturally I was, at first I was really focused on content marketing and storytelling because that's what I was doing before in my capacity as a journalist. then SETCO was such a great experience for me because I got to know how to
what it's like to work for a startup, what it's like to kind of start as a scaling process. And Miro, got, someone referred me to Miro and they reached out to me and they were really interested in hiring their first content marketer at the time.
I haven't even heard of this company, RealTime Board. How big were they at the time? I was employee number 80, so under 100 people. I've never heard of this startup, but when I was visiting the team for the on-site, I was so impressed because they already had so much traction. And I think it was around several million users at the time, if I'm correct. But yeah, I was really impressed.
It was a natural transition as well because it was also a design tool. It was slightly different from Setka, but it was still kind of a B2B, mostly B2B product that was really focused on building digital tools and digital kind of design tools for a really wide audience. So that's why I was really interested in this role and decided to join. Awesome.
We'll definitely go into more details about Miro and what you've done there and what your role was there. But from what I remember, this coincided with your move to the US. So you've joined Real-Time Boards, like Miro at that time, and you moved to the US. That was 2017? Yes. And I'm very curious because obviously I was in the same boat a few years before that, moving from Europe to the US.
What would you say was the most challenging for you as a marketer in the US startup environment, especially because you joined a very high growth startup. And for marketers, it's a bit different, I think, than people who are working in tech. So can you talk a little bit about kind of what was the most challenging part about it? Totally. Yeah, I think the most challenging and the most interesting part of it. I mean, there were a lot of different aspects of it that I loved, but I think
Going from Setka that was a smaller startup, to Miro, where as a team at the time, think the marketing team was already maybe around 10 people. I think it was really interesting to see how much focus and how much emphasis we were placing on collaboration and communication, and how it's something that was evaluated and measured and was a measurement of success.
I think it was also coming naturally from the fact that we were building a collaboration tool. So there was a really strong investment in kind of building the teams that communicates well and that can make collaborative decisions that are impactful and don't feel like compromise. So I think it really took me some time to understand how I can be successful and what's the criteria for success. And they think...
What it taught me is really being really proactive in my communication. think it was also maybe different from some editorial teams I worked with. think it was really important to, know, and because we were building a very innovative product, of course we could fail easily and we could, there were a lot of ways to fail. I think it was really important to.
to be really open about if something is going not as planned, there is a delay, proactively communicating about it and being really open about your blockers or what can be improved and how the team can help you. It was pretty unusual, I think it's not very typical for Russian companies as well. And I think we also had this culture of really celebrating both wins and failures because we had
I don't remember the name of the event, like kind of a recurring event that we had, but it was basically like a fun night where we would share our failures and everyone would celebrate. of course it would stay within the company, but it was kind of like a stress relief ritual that allowed everyone to feel okay with making mistakes. that- that stay, sorry, did that stay when Miro grew obviously to-
hundreds and hundreds of employees, did that stay as part of the culture, those types of nights? I think they were more local, so there were so many hubs. think it was more also an in-person experience. But there were some big kind of rituals and things that always stayed, for example, doing retrospectives after each big campaign or big event.
So after we complete some launch or we're done with a big event, we would all have a retrospective that is led by a facilitator or someone from the team is facilitating it. it would allow everyone to kind of, without putting blame on one person, to really understand what worked well, what didn't work well, what we can improve and kind of actionable insights after each.
cycles that we had. So I think that was tremendously helpful. And I think it was also a very unique thing compared to a lot of other companies where, you know, when you're kind of optimizing for pace and you don't have the space to reflect. I was gonna add there's, I think, after the fact, there's this like concept called failing forward. That's like something I've been hearing a lot lately where companies are allowing the space for people to actually test iterate.
validate, mess up and keep building that momentum without it actually having to impact their portfolio or other work that they're doing. So I think the idea of like failing forward is something that's new. A lot of startups and high growth businesses and that I've worked with personally have incorporated as like a cultural thing, which is really interesting because I wonder kind of like where all that came from and kind of like who the early adopters were because that's obviously a huge cultural positive impact. Totally.
Obviously, maybe before we really go deep down into your role again, I would love to hear just your personally, moving to the US, starting work at Miro, obviously having this diverse background. What part of it would you consider was beneficial for you in this role? What helped you? Because I feel like a lot of times people who move to the US, feel, especially marketers, feel...
maybe inferior, they're not native speakers, they are immigrants in a new country. It is very challenging, know, first hand. How did you feel? And did this really help you? Or were there any challenges you had to overcome, like, personally? I think, yeah, I totally agree. It's really challenging, and especially in terms of, yeah, kind of adjusting to a new culture and adjusting to something just kind of...
I think, you know, even if you work for startups that is international, but you live in a different country, it's a very different experience compared to really being in person with an American team or even an international team. So I agree it was challenging and I think it was really kind of a full immersion because we were building this team really quickly and I really felt at times overwhelmed because it was really, you know, even
I'm confident like, okay, I can speak English or something. But when it's day to day, it's very different from an environment where you kind of have this point of contact with an international team and then you work by yourself or something like that. But I think what was really positive is that my experience working as a journalist was really beneficial because I think I really had a general sense of what the audience, know, what usually
typically people find compelling or how we can tell a story that people would read. And there are some general kind of common sense rules that you want to follow as a marketer and as a journalist. Like people are really attracted to other people's stories. Like there is always has to be this human dimension or some conventions around designing.
articles or pages online and working with illustrators, working with designers. I had a lot of experience working with both illustrators and graphic designers from my journalism days. So it was really natural for me to collaborate with the brand team at Miro and Miro was growing as a brand team really quickly. always had a lot of kind of a lot of we always invested a lot into
brand building and brand design, as well as product design. So I think that was really something that helped me a lot. And I think being really invested and interested in design and design tools, I think it was also really a big part of it because I was using Miro every day and I was really enjoying it. And I think generally I was always really passionate about
kind of understanding where graphic design is going or what are the most recent technology trends. And that's what was my job when I was a journalist to kind of understand what are the current trends and how they can be leveraged. So I think that's something that helped me a lot in this new role and when I was moving to the US.
Awesome. What's interesting about you is that you don't come from like a very traditional business and marketing background, which I think is really, really helpful when it comes to content. And I think storytelling is super, super important. It's something that's misunderstood, oftentimes overlooked. Whether you're a high growth business, whether you're startup, it doesn't matter. The idea of storytelling almost feels very overwhelming for a lot of people who are especially like tech driven. So something that I want to spend a little bit time now is to move towards your experience specifically when it comes to Miro. Content marketing.
storytelling, talk to me a little bit about your opinion on its misunderstanding. Can you explain a little bit about what impact you see when it comes to content marketing, why it's important, and essentially the impact your team had when it came to the early days of Miro? Totally. think just starting with generally what content marketing can bring, I think it's very often what I really liked about moving to the US and what was my
One of my biggest motivations is kind of building products that are super innovative and products that are defining their category. And Miro for sure was defining this kind of whiteboarding category. They were really early into this kind of collaboration tool boom. But I think what's also really challenging when you work in the US market is
how competitive it is and of course every idea that has some, that is gaining some traction, you have a lot of competitors. And they think that's where community and content can be really interesting, like can work as a competitive mode in a way because I think even with intuitive products like Miro, where you don't have a lot of, you don't need a lot of time to onboard, it's still...
you know, having the ecosystem of content and, you know, events, webinars, community spaces that can help you ramp up your team really quickly and onboard your team or find value. This kind of time to value, kind of time to value is shorter when you have this ecosystem of content. So I think that was really...
how we were thinking about it at Miro in the early days. And they think since the product was very horizontal and could serve so many different purposes and so many different personas, we were trying to use content to really find people who are really passionate about Miro and really help them get the most out of Miro very quickly. For example,
Very early on we were, and it was before remote work, so it was 2017, 2018, it wasn't as popular and not everyone had the, you know, the necessity to use an online whiteboard. So we were thinking, the team was thinking, what was their most, like kind of who can be our early adopter and who can really advocate for us inside different organizations. And what the team found out is that
Agile coaches and UX designers, UX consultants, they really needed a tool like that because they often worked remotely or they were traveling between different locations and going to different clients and kind of having this big, I don't know, a sprint event with a team and then it would be so hard to document it or to...
turned into insights because it's all on a whiteboard and people need to use it for something else. And you know, you don't have a documentation. And we've seen a lot of really weird workarounds where people would like point a camera onto a whiteboard or like do something really weird. And then so content, in terms of content, one of the projects that I worked on very
early when I joined Miro was creating a lot of SEO content and lot of thought leadership content, both for UX designers and the gel coaches, because these two verticals were really, really important for us. And we really wanted to help these two personas succeed really fast because they were also really
kind of bringing the tools to new organizations and they were influential in those organizations when they were thinking about choosing the right tool for the team. So that was really, yeah, kind of one of the early wins that helped us understand how content can be helpful in our strategy. And I'm sure that in the early days you were probably testing
trying different things. Was there something where you were so excited and 100 % certain that this would be great and a piece of content or a strategy and then it actually didn't work? I think that's a really great question. I think there were a lot of really different, so many things that the team tested and in different ways. I think at first,
yeah i think my god this is really hard to pick one
I think one of the things that was challenging is trying to cover all the use cases because we knew that Miro can be really beneficial for so many different types of teams or types of organizations and I think over-investing in
like a lot of vertical use cases while kind of being in this testing mode where we don't know what will land. I think that was really, really hard and not always like, it was really, I think it was also horizontal products and I worked for another startup that was kind of in a similar situation, but I think for a lot of horizontal products, it's very hard to.
to kind of sustain this balance between showing that the tool is really universal and really helpful for so many people, but also kind of going after a specific market. And it's always, there is no silver bullet or anything like that. You're like kind of always trying to navigate this, like this balance and understanding that you have to have some
piece of your messaging that appeals to a really wide audience, but there also has to be a lot of building blocks that help the audience that gets the most value out of the product. So this is two parts of the puzzle that you are always trying to figure out. Just as you're speaking, I'm thinking, has there?
like been buying that content marketing is like a big bet for Miro from there because you joined as the first content marketer. So somebody obviously made the decision that this is important, you know, when you have 80 people on the team to have a content marketer. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, how did they know the decision? Why maybe? What was the thought process? And
Maybe you can talk a little bit more about measuring. So obviously they've somehow made the decision that content is super important for the growth.
Was that something that later on they were like, yes, we need to double down on this? Maybe just a little bit of the thought process of how they thought about content marketing early on. Totally. think, yeah, it's probably a better question for the person that hired me as the head of brand at the time. I think it was just from the early days, it was really important for Miro to have a very strong brand and to really stand out as...
And I think it's really important for any design tool, and that's what we're seeing in the market. think design tools that have a strong brand and a strong kind of narrative, always they get more love, they get more recognition. I think with Miro, at first, of course, it was an experiment. I think at some point, maybe a year or two later,
we really started kind of figuring out what's working and it was a combination of three things. So first of all, there was a kind of SEO organic growth part that was really important because it was supporting our overall PLG motion and self-serve acquisition. So acquiring users that would
try a free plan, find some value in Miro and hopefully maybe sign up for a team plan or even an enterprise plan. So this kind of top of the funnel content and all the metrics that are associated with top of the funnel, organic traffic and kind of social traffic. It was really important for us to work with. Second part was thought leadership. So again, for our brand, were...
And I think when you are creating a category as well, it's so important too, because you are thinking about how we can show that the tools that we're offering should be a part of the tech stack for a team. What's the kind of innovation here and why we think teams that use this tool...
are going to succeed. So there was a lot of work around thought leadership and around working with really well-known agile coaches, really well-known design leaders, really well-known product leaders, and kind of creating, kind of understanding what's happening in those markets and aligning with them and working, kind of interviewing these thought leaders, building events around them.
building some of the templates around them. then lastly, there was the enterprise part that, you know, with time we were putting more effort into and investing more into enterprise and kind of building a case for Miro as a tool for a larger organization as well, not just consultants and smaller teams. So building content around enterprise.
And kind of, it was mostly customer stories that were documenting how big organization can be successful with Miro. And it was also mostly in this case, metrics were more about, you know, how they're helping. And they were also an enterprise events branch. So.
Then we would measure like stage one or stage two opportunities that we create for sales or the metrics would be slightly different because it was more about decision making and how the pieces of content that we are creating are impacting decisions on the kind of as a part of a sales cycle. Cool.
I have two questions. The first one is for someone like Miro that was a very early adopter when it came to content. I today I feel like it's finally coming out how important contact is, community and all of that. I'm wondering for, let's say a founder or CEO that's hesitant, that isn't really bought into the story of content, how would you kind of show the impact in terms of, hey, like this is a channel that is very customer facing. Somehow weaving it into
whether or not in your opinion you think it impacts product development? Yeah, I feel like there are two questions here. So I'll start with the first one. I think the first question, why it's important. I think it's important for the majority of tech companies. would say maybe community marketing and community led growth is not, can be not applicable to every startup, but content, think.
is very important for almost any startup. And I think why it's so important, I think it's just kind of having control of the ways the company is perceived and having in growing your own organic channels. Because I think when we think about the past and how marketing was done in the past, I think it was mostly PR and...
channels that you don't have a lot of control over. And I think PR is really important and I still work a lot with PR and kind of communications is a really big part of every company's growth. I think having your own channels and it can be social, email, I don't know, maybe it's a big event as well. think it gives you so much autonomy and
so much agency in telling your company's story and kind of working with the way people perceive it and the way people would consume the product. So I think it's pretty high level, but I think that's very kind of as the biggest distinction between what's happening right now and how we think about marketing right now versus maybe, I don't know, 20 years ago because
If we even think about marketing in the past, we think, like Apple campaigns. Madmen era. Yeah, yeah. Apple campaigns for TV. And it was really impressive. But you have to have a TV station or TV channel to air those campaigns. it's very... So I think that's the biggest distinction. And was...
I think the second question was about product development. like do you see it as a, cause it's a customer facing, do you have like a feedback loop that brings back to the product team that helps iterate so that those use cases are relevant continuously to those personas? 100 % I think it's always what's also really exciting about it and kind of the approach to marketing that a lot of companies now are choosing. It's kind of creating this feedback loop where
You are always testing new messaging and you have so many tools to kind of understand if the message that you have is landing with the audience that you are targeting. And I think it's really allows you to iterate fast and create something that people would want and people would like to try and purchase and I don't know, advocate.
for this product inside their team, I think it's all really critical when you're building products that have competition in this kind of competitive market. The faster you can integrate this feedback, the more successful you are. Awesome. Actually, because we started a little bit talking now already about community, and I wanted to shift gears a little bit. Obviously, I know a little bit of your professional journey and...
You've stayed at Miro for, I think, about almost five years. Yeah, four and a half. And I know that even then in the last parts of it when it already was a unicorn, it was already really big, you were doing some events and online things and you were pretty involved in helping build out the community aspect. And then later on in your next roles that became an even bigger point. So maybe you can talk a little bit about
sort of how content and community, how are they connected? And what kind of startups should focus on building a community and how do they go about this? I mean, it's very, a big task. So there's a loaded question. There's a lot of different questions in this question, but start wherever you want. Okay. This is Blanka's favorite topic when it comes to community. She's the community queen, so this will be an interesting.
Yeah, totally. I also really love community marketing. think it's very... If you can build a community around the product, it's a really exciting opportunity because it's can really help you grow and win in a competitive market. I think you're right that not every startup really requires this kind of community piece. I think...
with Miro and with another startup I worked for, Felt. It was a really natural choice because both of the tools were really essentially design tools and I think for any tools that enables human creativity or kind of is connected to some skill, I think that's where communities, you can build like a really flourishing community. Sometimes...
know, the personas that they were working with, maybe it's someone really busy or in a very kind of regulated space. But I think in case of Miro and in case of Felt, the mapping startup I worked with, we were really lucky because people loved the product and people really associated this product with their creativity or their career growth. And they really saw how they can leverage it to...
to really be better product managers or better designers and better gel coaches. And at first, we really didn't have, when I joined in 2017, we didn't have any community programs or anything like that. people were already posting their Miro boards and showing what they've built. So it was really, if you have this also kind of grassroots motion where people...
are talking about the product and excited about the product. I think it's one of the best signals to that you can have a good community. And they think the way it's connected with content, I think there are several ways you can connect the dots. And I think it's actually one of my favorite things as well, because I think if you can have like a holistic content community strategy, it's really...
amplifying every effort and every kind of campaign that you work on. I think, first of all, and maybe Miro is a good example here. So the way we were starting with events with Miro is that first we just had a blog and we were interviewing the thought leaders and influential people in the world of product management and in the world of design and agile.
And then we decided, okay, we have all these people and some of them are already also very excited about me or maybe trying it out after the interview or have heard about it before we contacted them. So there were some excitement and we wanted to host like a big event that would just kind of tell the story about what it's like, what good collaboration looks like.
And it was also again before COVID and at the time, our, the CMO of Miro Barbara Gago, she's really just a great marketer and she's really, she thought about having a conference and we, I was really focused on the content part of it and kind of finding the right speakers. And we had a lineup of the speakers that we had in our network. So this event was really successful.
But it was a little bit more about thought leadership and the next year we kept getting all this like enthusiastic people who were just wanting to show their Miro board or to show the ways they work with the product. then it started, this annual event started becoming like a combination of community-led sessions where people were teaching each other the skills or maybe talking about their favorite Miro templates and
more of like influencer types and people who are really well known in their field. then I think, that's kind of, sometimes working with speakers that can, you know, it can kind of create like some structure for events and create, help you define maybe some of the narratives that are important for you as a company.
it's kind of a two-way street between content and community. And they think some of the community programs are also in itself content. And to give an example, I think what a lot of collaboration tools are investing in is templates. So for example, and we had a really
solid team working on our template library. my role was just mostly focusing on finding high profile experts to bring their templates to Miravirse and helping them create a template. And maybe it was a little bit of like white glove situation where we would just...
just help someone create a template and then, you know, we could, when you have a template, it's, and it can be something from like maybe a book turned into a Miro board where there is like a helpful framework that you can use with your team. And then of course it can then be turned into a webinar or an event or it can be a part of like a Q &A when you are hosting like a Q &A with your community forum.
So I think it's kind of thinking about, I think it's also about repackaging and I think with a lot of community and of finding a good way to distribute. I think when you think about when you're kind of putting on your content hat, okay, you have the template, how you can make sure that it can reach the, like,
the widest audience possible and how we can think about the way it can resonate on social media or the way it can resonate as a part of an event and can be integrated into some of the larger narratives or like launches, product launches that you have this quarter or something like that. yeah, I think that's...
a big overlap there. love this. So actually one of the points that you first that you made, I love the fact of like, instead of trying to force things down, and like, we have to have a community. Let's make sure I can get all these people start talking and then something like I've rarely seen that work, but harnessing what's already you know, what you're noticing there and what's natural to your target audience, and kind of amplifying it and helping it and then nurturing it.
Instead of forcing, nurturing, like a difference, even energy to it, I love this and I wish actually more startups early on actually listened to their community because sometimes their community doesn't want to be maybe that open and that sharing, you know? And they prefer different style of communication and instead of being like, I have this idea, I'm going to force it down their throat.
I love that. And then the other parts, which I think for every marketer that has a tight budget of kind of trying to see how you can slice and dice and like repurpose anything you have for any other campaign. Those are really, really good points. And then my question is to Blanka's point about nurturing your community. I think you've, you obviously have an incredible experience when it comes to content and community, but I'm wondering if there's any startups listening or any really agile small teams with very low budgets who are trying to nurture and create a community.
What would be some small wins that they could start today, something that's really practical that you've seen successful in the past that was very efficient in terms of building a community that they can then nurture, create advocates out of, that they can get feedback for, anything that you can kind of provide any feedback on? Totally. think it's really important to start with
those advocates, think, even if you have three advocates, it's really important to talk to people who are already really passionate about your product and really understand what they find really exciting. Maybe also what they find, maybe if you don't know what would be the right way to interact with the community, it's kind of thinking about
you know, what they like. And, you know, since we're talking mostly about professional tools, like, as a part of any other professional group, what kind of group do they, what do they enjoy about it? I think it was felt and I was really new to kind of cartography and mapping. And I was really working just very hard to understand what
was some of the rituals at this community of like cartographers and urban planners and GIS analysts. What did they enjoy? And I think it was really interesting because even if you look around and kind of trying to understand this affinity groups that people are a part of, it really gives you a lot of ideas immediately. For example, with cartography, there were a lot of mapping challenges. So there would be a theme and people would
tweet different maps that kind of follows this theme. And we would start hosting this little mapping challenges and doing raffles and stuff like that. really, I think it's really important to Blanka's point. You don't want to reinvent the wheel or be really forceful about something. I think with a lot of events we hosted at Miro, they were also very natural.
and they were kind of following the path like following what a gel coaches or designers really liked and enjoyed. And I think that was, you know, was the resource, if you have scarce resources, I think kind of talking to your advocates, finding how they overlap between, you know, what they find interesting, what, where they find motivation, even talking about your product and your product goals, your company goals.
Finding like a center of the venn diagram is really important. then, yeah, taking the steps that would be kind of thinking about how you can give this ambassadors or early adopters tools to really amplify their message. And it can be really different ways you can do it. essentially, yeah, you are just trying to help.
help and enable growth in this kind of area where you already have some traction. That's one of the things, obviously, I as a community enthusiast, understand the importance of it. But again, as a founder, think that oftentimes you're like, I want to focus on the product, I want to focus on the sales, on more specific things I can touch and like...
see how it impacts my revenue. how did you, like I know that even measuring the power of content is hard because it's like a long-term strategy, but for both of those and the community specifically, because it takes a lot of energy, a lot of resources, a lot of work, how do you measure actually the impact it has on the business, on startups growth? I think it's...
It's very hard and I think for bigger companies it's very hard. But I think it's a long-term strategy and I think one of the ways you can talk about it is kind of thinking about the way it made an impact for some of the most successful startups right now. Because when we think about Figma, Notion or Miro,
or when we think about, I don't know, other tools in this kind of space, they all really, they invested in community and it's what makes Notion so special and what makes it so different from other note-taking apps. And there are so many note-taking apps in the world. But Notion clearly stands out and their community investment is...
They have meetups all around the world and they have groups on every platform, et cetera. I but in their kind of short term, the way you can also think about it is having people who are so passionate about your product, maybe it's not immediately like a kind of revenue play.
But there are a lot of ways it can really be beneficial for product development because I think all the ambassador programs that I know of, there is always some kind of feedback loop that allows the product team to gain insight into how people are using the product, some kind of maybe meetups with the...
CEO or meetups with the product team where there is like kind of a regular feedback session. And it's always like, even if it's not formalized, having a core group of enthusiasts allow you to always have someone for like a user research interview. And I think another way to think about it, if you really want to be super strategic and prove that it's really, it can...
contribute to revenue. think it's slightly, sometimes it can be more like a customer success strategy, but if you want to really focus on revenue, you can really pick ambassadors that meet a certain criteria. And the criteria is them being a part of like a larger organizations that wears the potential for kind of expansion and adding more seats to.
Yeah. To the plan or something like that. being, I think it's also, it's okay. Community, like, it's a very big word, but I think, you know, again, for it to work, you can really have to provide value for people who you're inviting to the community. But also it's okay for you to be really transparent with the team and be, and decide, okay, this is our criteria for people who want to
help and amplify their voices. Like maybe there are some people that are enthusiastic and it's really valuable, but maybe they're not like fully meeting the ideal customer profile. And then you want to focus on enabling people that really would help your company's growth and maybe have this use cases that really help you scale and move forward.
I was just going add to your point. One thing when you merge community and revenue together is the fact that those communities, those community members not only become brand advocates, but then turns into word of mouth. So it's a very efficient channel where essentially you're not spending money to actually get those additional seats and users. You're actually relying on your community to go out there and tell about how great your product is. So there is, it is somewhat measurable. Yeah.
I also want to shift gears again and talk a little bit. So now you're in your new role as a head of marketing of Archetype AI. Congratulations. It's pretty recent. Yes. Thank you. I'm super excited. Maybe you could tell us first a little bit, just quickly, what's the startup does? I know it's heavily in the AI space, but tell us a bit more. Totally. So I'm really excited to join Archetype AI. I think the back story here is that I've always
Even in my role as a journalist, I was writing a lot about hardware and interaction design. And I interviewed a lot of people in this world. And my first job in tech, even before Setka, was for a hardware startup, building devices and working with China. And it was very different from the world of design tools that I was working with.
Yeah, and I've been following this team for a really long time. It's a really exciting opportunity because the team has been working at Google. It was a team focused on innovation and Google innovation for the real world, hardware devices, like all the novel interactions that are now a part of some of the Google Pixels and smart home devices.
It's really focused on sensors and radars. So when you think about all the interactions where you can control pixel with gestures, I'm not sure if you see, but are like Google Home devices. So this was the focus of this team. Physical AI? Yeah, and now the team is really, with Archetype AI, they are pioneering the term physical AI, which is essentially
When we think about large language models and what AI can do, it's mostly done with all the information that we have online, with text and images and videos and, you know, all the way LLMs work. They are scraping this information from the internet and they help us, you know, generate text or generate image or generate video. And I think it's really impressive, but...
There is also so much data that is really not touched by LLMs. And the data that we work with at archetype AI is mostly sensor data. So a lot of machinery at factories or smart cars or smart home devices and even iPhones, they have those sensors.
You know, the promise of Internet of Things was that, you know, we could do something with this data. then it was like a Twitter account, Internet of shit. Whereas all this devices malfunctioning and not working because there was no horizontal solution that would allow you to kind of control these devices because every manufacturer was creating something on their own and there was no platforms that would...
you know, help you gain any kind of insights from this. So what the Archetype AI is building is their large behavior model, also an AI model that would work with all the sensor data and help you understand, you know, what's happening in the real world, what's happening at the factory, what's happening when you're driving your car, or what's happening when, you know,
having better interactions with your smart home devices where you don't have to like program every device or just talk to Alexa. And I think, so that's Very cool. Yeah, it's a very new world to me, but I think it's something that is so exciting because it will allow you to have
it will allow a lot of organizations to have this kind of control and have all the benefits of working with an AI model in the real world and kind of asking questions in a natural language, the way we interact with, with the lamps asking questions, for example, where's my package or is there something wrong happening on the factory floor? this is really exciting and...
Yeah, this is the new area that I'm exploring. I know that when we talked personally, you were saying, my God, there's so much AI about this. And I'm curious, as a head of marketing, is there any way different? You guys sort of do you use AI in your marketing activities? And kind of what's your view on that?
Or it's not, like it's not necessary. Because I would assume if it's a startup, it's an AI space, they would want to do everything using AI. So in terms of your sort of role, how is it different, if it's different? I think it's, I think AI is definitely really important and we use it every day in so many ways and not just in marketing, but in on the engineering side, I'm sure. And on the design side, I think.
I think it's just all about kind of finding the right balance between what we can achieve as a team and how AI can enable it. think recently I had a conversation with a former editor-in-chief of Wired, and he was also kind of reporting a lot, obviously reporting on also recent news and tech and how it's impacting journalism as well. And I think...
So the way we think about AI in marketing can be a little bit... It's misleading to think, okay, AI will solve all the problems and write all the blog posts. I think the task of writing is actually what is not something that we should maybe use AI for, because it's...
It's really formulaic and now there are all these kind of conventions where you can tell that something is written by Chad GPT or by Claude. I think there are a lot of other tasks that AI can solve for a marketing team. For example, summarizing something, working. And I think especially when it's like a fast-paced environment and you want to kind of understand gist of something before diving into
like a big research paper, you know? Like one of the most exciting things was we were publishing our own research paper and we were kind of playing with Notebook L.A.M. was a new tool by Google and we were looking into like, could it summarize the research paper and create a podcast about it? And it was, it wasn't perfectly accurate, but it was really engaging and kind of
It was a good summary. course, you always really want to make sure that, especially with deep tech or anything that is related to science, I think it's really critical to have human intervention where you're making sure everything is correct. don't try to outsource these tasks to AI, I think what's really powerful is that
First of all, yes, there are a lot of ways you can speed up certain processes and workflows that are not about writing and kind of creating quality narratives. But also, I think, you know, if you're trying to maybe ideate or think about something new and, you know, I think it kind of eliminates this kind of blank page.
All the fears around having just a blank page and not knowing where to start. I think it's also very powerful to have to kind of think of it as like a thought companion or like a springboard to start something. So I think, yeah, wouldn't outsource writing. Especially now everyone is talking like how...
I think it's a point of SEO now. Everyone is concerned about creating low-quality content because at some point the engagement will drop. But I think if you're a bad writer, you can use ChatGPT. Sometimes there is an improvement. You don't need it. If you're really bad, maybe ChatGPT can actually be helpful. That's a great advertising of ChatGPT if you're really bad.
Yeah, think there are certain, again, I'm also a big fan of Notion for certain workflows. And there are some AI features. It's not just like Chat, GPT, and Cloud. There are so many AI features dispersed across different tools now, and they're really helpful. For example, Notion summarizing certain, like if you're looking into an agenda for the meeting, or all this kind of.
small fixes and like small things that you can do for like, yeah, for everyday, smaller everyday tasks, where it's really clear what success looks like. I think someone said, and it's really wise that AI is really, AI tools are really, really helpful when you know what success looks like. And if you're trying to create something that is very new and you don't know what success looks like or
you are trying to kind of work around like conventional ways to do something, then you should use AI. But of course, if you know, okay, this is what we're trying to achieve, that's a perfect way to speed things up with AI. So summary for marketers, don't be scared of AI. It's not coming for you. It's just helping with brainstorming redundancy, which is just helping you become a better marketer and do your job better. Yeah, and I think
I think it's also, and I think now it's very trivial thing to say at this point, but it's not that AI will eliminate marketers, but as a marketer, you have more of a competitive edge if you use AI. yeah. Yeah, agreed. So we're towards the end. We did budget some time to do a little bit of a closing icebreaker. Okay. If you're up for it. Of course. Do you want me to wrap this fire up?
We call it a rapid fire, which is basically we have six questions. It's basically choosing between the two. You give no justification. You just got to give an answer. Okay. I mean, you can if it's like we can ask you why. I can elaborate. Growth or scalability? Growth. Any comments on that? I think it's kind of different sides of the same coin. Yeah, think scalability is just a little bit more vague.
to me. Like a buzzword. Number two, paid versus earned. You kind of answered that a little bit earlier. Earned. Work-life balance or hustle culture? Provided you've been in the US this long. I have a feeling that it's going to be somewhere in the middle. Both. Seasons, different seasons. Seasons, yeah. Speed or perfection? Speed. Okay, excellent. Early adopter feedback or market research? Early adopter feedback.
Do you have any comments on why you didn't choose market research? think kind of the reality of people using your product and having real complaints always beats any kind of research. I should learn that because that's all I ever do for my clients. And the last one, growth hacking or demand generation? Demand generation. Why not growth hacking? I think growth hacking is more like short-term gains over long-term vision.
Can I play devil's advocate and ask your previous question, your previous answer was speed. So why would you use growth hacking as a testing to eventually get to demand gen or use solid demand gen as the answer? I speed is more about like good as, know, I think perfection is just like perfectionism is very, it's kind of overrated. think moving in iterations and the...
improving consistently is more important. So that's why I chose speed. So it's still a bit, it's two different ways to think about it. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing both your journey and sort of some interesting tidbits for startups and marketers. And I think especially starting marketers as well. Thank you.
again for flying actually from US to Belgrade. Yeah, have a wonderful day. It was a pleasure to talk to I learned a lot, so I appreciate it. Thank you. Awesome.