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The no-BS podcast to scaling startups and growing revenue and businesses.
Yes, we're finally doing this. The no BS version. You needed a drink before this. my god. And I'm gonna be a little controversial here. This is gonna be bad, but I'm gonna say it anyways. Regional market is really bad. How did they sort of went from this to actually being a profitable, scalable, investable? And if you don't have a brand and you don't have demand, you won't get a lead. 70 % are not profitable. I'm like, how is that even possible? We paid them 20,000.
dollars for one month. What did we get? Zero. Most marketers are not good. You want Musk again? Do sound like a fake startup podcast? But there are Swiss knife like on steroids. This one's going to be hard, I think. Welcome to The Growth Hour, the No BS podcast about growing startups and scaling businesses. I'm Zoja. I'm Blanka. I'm Aleks. And today's our first episode.
Yes, we're finally doing this. So welcome to the growth hour. And since most people are going to watch us after the New Year, even though we're filming this a day before, I'm going to start opening a bottle of sparkling wine while we talk. And after all, this is a growth hour. It's not a happy hour, but it's a growth hour. Powered by alcohol. included.
So I'm really, really happy that we're finally doing this. We've been talking about it. Blanka, is that going to pop? Okay. Yay. Yay. Awesome. But yeah, I'm in the ecosystem. I can say I'm a granny when it comes to how long I am in the Serbian startup ecosystem and regional startup ecosystem. you. Thank you. This granny thanks you. And you two are quite new.
newbies when it comes to the Serbian. Just fresh off the boat. Fresh off the boat. And I have to say that one of the things I'm very grateful for in the last two years is the fact that I've met you two and that I had a chance to talk to you and learn a of new stuff.
I think that this had to be a podcast at some point because... Actually, just the other day I was talking to somebody about how you and I have met because it's kind of a crazy story. I know if we've ever told you this because basically when I just came to Serbia about two and half years ago, I reached out to a bunch of people via LinkedIn, know, typical American style. came from San Francisco. I was like, I have to meet all the people who mean something in the ecosystem. And...
Zoja was almost the only one who responded. Classic. And besides that she was also the coolest person that I've met because we've met in a cafe in Belgrade and we chatted for hours. And we were chatting in English, afterwards she kind of tried to force me to speak Serbian. after that I was like, I have a feeling we're gonna do something but I wasn't sure what it was gonna be. And...
I think you and I met at Haos, yes, the co-working and somehow within that time you guys met, but I feel like every time we've talked, it was like, God, this has to be a podcast because we were both like- A yap session. Yes. We were like ranting, venting and actually for all the time I learned so much from Zoja about the startup ecosystem. So we were like, okay, other people should probably know this too, right? Yeah. For me, it's-
Like as I said, when you are for so long in the ecosystem, there is this tendency that you get used to the way things are and how everything works, and then you focus on the problems you noticed some time before, and that's where you are. And what I loved when I met the two of you, but also it happened in several instances, I remember also when I met Tanya Kuzman, is now, she came to the ecosystem six, seven years ago from the UK.
And then she also came and she said several things that I was like, no, we are better than that. It's just you are new. And then things started, you know, settling what she said. And I figured out, no, she's right. We have to fix those problems. Even at that time, we thought those aren't problems. And I feel the same thing is happening with me, with the two of you, because you have this fresh eye into the things.
And I think that that perspective really helped me work better with the startups that I'm working with, but also is helping me learn and do some new stuff because you're both in the startup ecosystem for quite a long time or just new to this one. that's the beauty because we can then compare what's good, what's bad, what we should improve. And I think this is the...
main reason why we decided to make it a podcast so that we can share. But also I think because even though there are lot of interesting things about Serbian ecosystems, some of the challenges here I feel are similar to other, let's say, European countries, even other countries that are not US and like typical startup hubs. And that's why, one of the reasons why we wanted to do this in English, besides the fact that
me and Aleks feel more comfortable this way, but it's also, think, to... I think this is relevant outside of Serbia, but also to give visibility to some of the speakers that we are preparing and to give visibility to the Serbian and regional startup ecosystem globally. Yeah, and the other thing is also that some of our guests in the podcast, because it will not be us. It will rarely be the three of us, right?
Hopefully. Please come to our podcast. It depends, like what the audience says, know, maybe they like it. But anyway, even our guests, some of our guests won't be from the region. So in that sense, I think it's important to... And one other thing, one of the things that we saw recently in the ecosystem that actually Blanka and Aleks, you helped me see is that...
I think it's a thing of not just Serbia, it's the thing of a region. We are not really open when it comes to international startups, international experts. And that was one of the things when Blanka said, know, Russians, for example, who came at one point, a lot of them from the tech and startup community, they think nothing is happening here. I was like, what do you mean nothing is happening here? There are so many events, there are so many organizations.
And then I realized everything is in Serbian. And luckily some of those things are changing, but I say they're changing very slowly. But I think if we want to be really an international Sarep ecosystem, we have to embrace, to create an environment where those internationals can actually come and bring value and add.
And I think it would be good to say, are we going to be just another general startup ecosystem podcast or not? It's the no BS version. So basically the idea is we take both the regional experience and international from all of us, realistically, because you also have international experience with clients that you've worked with. And the goal is obviously to not be, and we say this all the time, not to be elitist. So the goal is like, we want to...
create those best practices from international, apply them regionally, and really support startups. But we don't want to come off like we know everything and we know basically everything that should be done. So that's why we're bringing in specialized people from the region that are going to talk and give a little bit of context. But I think the whole point is there are a lot of podcasts about general business. There are a lot of programs, support programs for funding for...
how to do business, legal stuff. One thing that I would say that to me is still on a very bad level is the general sort of marketing and sales approach for most companies and for startups as well. And I think that that's what we've been talking because you and I obviously have marketing background. You have been talking with startups for a decade now. And I feel like everyone's talking like, the biggest problem is
like sales and marketing, sales and marketing, sales and marketing. And yet I feel like everyone has a very different idea what sales marketing is. They also don't really have ways where, besides having mentors from large corporations, there's nothing really done to say, how do you market an early stage startup or how do you market a startup that's before product market fit? How do you actually get to a point where you have enough resources to invest in actual?
like long-term marketing. And so I think that the idea was to really focus on talking to people who were at the early stage, got somehow to the growth to see how did they sort of went from this to actually being a profitable, scalable, investable startup, because most startups don't make it. And that's true everywhere globally, that 90 % of startups don't make. But I think that one of the
shocking thing to me, like I think you've mentioned recently to me, was that even though startups here get a lot of funding from grants, venture capital, 70 % are not profitable. I'm not talking about early stage, but like generally, all startups in Serbia, 70 % are not profitable. I'm like...
How is that even possible? Some startups exist for four, five, six years. Because I think there's a lot of a focus, and we've talked about this really early stage. But once you actually get that funding, once you actually try to grow and try to scale that, think the scalability is really, really hard to do. Because we're not just talking about growth, we're talking about profitability, we're talking about how to really leverage those sort of resources in developing a business. And I think that's something where the marketing aspect really helps. Because marketing, to me, is not just...
advertisement, it's not just social media, it's so much deeper to that, it's a business core function. And I think that's something that's really focused, like a really big focus is that early stage, okay, I have product market fit, but how do you actually validate product market fit? It's not with a few users, it's actually like a whole series all the way to like the life cycle and the retention, like there's a whole way to do that. And I don't think that, you know, startups are really looking at it at that focus, it's very early stages and they call it a success.
Just to be fair, agree, 70 % sounds overwhelming. But we are an early stage startup ecosystem, so majority of those startups are in the early stages. But I agree, there is this tendency, what I think everyone in the ecosystem agrees with,
is there is this tendency that startups are in this early stage for far too long. Yes, exactly. And when it comes to other data, here's your data person. But it should be like, bing. But one of the reasons I think that that's the case as well is you have, I think, less than one third of startups have a co-founder, at least one co-founder, who comes from a business background.
So that's one thing. The other is that less than 10 % of startups have a full-time person who is dedicated to either marketing or sales. And that's also a big tell. But I feel like I completely agree that that's sort of the reason. But also, I do feel like because there is access to grant money and to like...
free money, which you call, right? So you don't give out any percentage or whatever your company. There is no pressure actually to get to a point where you prove your product market fit because when you have like, A, to get venture capital money, you have to have like some data, but they also ask you for certain results. And I feel like most of the startups,
naturally die if they don't either become profitable or they are not able to secure another round of funding. And in this case, we have actually non-investable startups that they're not invested because they're not actually getting any traction. They're trying too long to perfect their product, to make it perfect without actually being able to answer whether anybody needs this product. And I think that that's the core thing that they would go to hire a marketer if there was a pressure.
we're going to run out of money if we don't start investing in the go-to market. And I think that sounds so easy. I think, again, everyone would nod when you say, well... Theory to do it, yeah. Okay, you are building the product, but you need to focus on whether anyone wants to pay for that product. And I think that's something that everybody says yes, yes, in the ecosystem, and everybody is focused on that. But I think it's also the hardest thing to do, not just in regional startup ecosystem and not just for regional startups, but for...
any startup ever in the world. The hardest thing is actually to get to the customer and to get that customer to pay. This is what I think is the most important for me, what I want to take from this podcast and what I'm taking from all of our conversations is practical, no BS advice and stories how to actually do it because I think we lack that.
There's a lot of content for startups when it comes to the region, but they are still in this general, generalistic advice workshop topics. And I think if we don't drill deeper, where you don't have much skill set here, people haven't sold tons of products, marketed tons of digital products. So there's not...
a lot of skills and if you are, I feel now, like now everybody's talking about it. People need to sell, people need to have growth. there is no playbook or no, not a lot of, yeah, technically it doesn't exist. Sorry to interrupt, one thing I want to say, I wanted to really address this early enough, that we're not selling a playbook, we're not selling a one size fits all, that's not the point. I agree with what you're saying, I think to just translate that, there's no...
practical steps and maybe like I call them non-negotiables and for me it's just things that you should be doing but how you apply them to your business will vary. So I think yes there is a lack of playbook but there's no like one specific strategy that works for every single person. it's also about the mindset and approach because in order to learn that you actually either have to have experience firsthand early stage in the startup or you have to have an advisor that's been through that because
Actually, there's so much bad advice out there when it comes to marketing that I sympathize with founders because when you feel that pressure, you want to listen to anyone who is confident enough to say, will work. And oftentimes, people end up listening to investors, which I always think is not the best idea, unless the investors have gone through a startup themselves.
I actually myself gotten the worst advice in my startup when I did in Silicon Valley. We were already like, we raised 745K when our pre-seed and we had some money and we had money for marketing, but I was going down the route of like, let's first do sales, direct sales, and we build out long-term marketing strategy. And then at some point our investors were freaking out that we're not growing fast enough and they were like,
you know what you need? You need PR. And I was like, you know, my gut was telling me that this is not right, but I was like, you know, what do I know? I worked with PR, but I had a million dollar budget before in a corporation, you know, and now I'm like, early stage, really, should I do? And I'm not even sure that we have a case study to really, that we're able to talk about publicly.
They're like, no, no, no, we have this perfect, really good specializes in startup PR agency out of LA. And I talked to them and we paid them 20,000 dollars for one month. What did we get? Zero. It was mortifying. Like to me, it was mortifying because it's like, I'm a marketer. I'm not a technical founder. I should have known better. How do I know selling to marketers? You the product was
marketing tech and I was like, my god, like I was so embarrassed. I was so embarrassed that I followed the advice of my, I thought I did everything right. I followed the advice of my investors. I was a first time founder. I invested in this and it completely didn't work. And so I feel like when we say no BS, like practical advice and stuff, to me, it has to come from somebody who was
in your shoes, in those shoes, either founder or marketer who worked super early stage and helped the startup actually understand, do we have a product market fit? Do they know how to market and test things before you have product market fit? And then once you have it, how to do more with less because you typically don't have any money. like, I was lucky I had 20,000 to waste. Most people don't. But it's interesting also what would be, what's another bad...
advice that actually came from the investor is also one of the local startups. They, by the advice of their mentor, they hired an agency to do their marketing in the very early stage. And I think that's another thing where, so maybe, I think either I talked about it with you or with you, can't remember, but maybe it's a good thing that now,
when we have cameras, to actually say why that's a bad idea, to outsource marketing effort, even if at one point it sounds like that could be a smart move where then you can focus on some other things as a founder. Why is it bad? One of the big things is obviously the cost. It's not really the best use of resources.
I think a lot of what you can actually achieve is sitting within the company. think being those subject matter experts, I'll refer to them as SMEs, and really building out, like she said, the use case, really understanding the product, really testing in order to actually get to product market fit. You don't need to have a campaign. You don't need to have a billboard. You don't have to have commercials. It's not about immediately going with PR. I think those things are tactics that are built on a strong foundation of strategy and enough data to support to say, hey, we have the forecasted
like users and revenue to be able to withhold this kind of agency cost. But in order to get to that point, you really need to make sure that you have enough users and that you have that foundation. So I think oftentimes, ideally, if you have hired somebody as a marketer, or even if it's part time within the company to do that, you have the foundations to do that. But other than that, agencies tend to come up with really big concepts that are like creative concepts that are not ready to basically.
But my main thing actually, mean, that all of this is true, but also you're not learning anything because it's the same reason why a founder should not outsource sales early on. 100%. Because if you're not there in the data, if you're not there talking to customers, reading, trying to test different things yourselves, you learn nothing and then you actually don't know what worked, what didn't and why didn't it work.
And agencies, they can give you certain things, but in my opinion, and honestly, I hate agencies, actually not just for startups, but generally, very few agencies that I've witnessed that have the capacity to work as your own team. And it's not because they're bad, but most of the times it just overworked and they don't.
Like to them, this is one of many. They don't have the capacity to go into that detail. Yes. And, but to me it's the thing, the thing that they are not, their interest is to stay there forever. You know, like you have predictable revenue. so for them it's, and also not to do things that they are not good at. Right? So they are going to suggest you things that they can do. Yeah.
But there's no agency that can do everything and that can do different maybe outside of the box stuff. to me, it's most really good agencies, there's like maybe a few of them are really expensive and for early start-ups don't make sense. And then actually one good marketer inside the startup is a much better idea.
I was just going to add, sorry, because I like working You started this. You're getting discussion. What I wanted to add, it was actually really interesting. I watched a video recently from Steve Jobs that actually says he hates consultants. And it's funny because I'm kind of like a consultant. And I will fully talk poorly about my own kind. And we can go into detail why I went into that. But I actually agree because it really changed my perspective where his whole thing was...
Hiring consultants, you're not hiring, again, those SMEs, you're not hiring subject matter experts, you're hiring people in a specific area that are helping you, again, with the creative concept or the PR or whatever, you need somebody who knows your business. And hiring consultant essentially means that you're not spending enough time in that business to treat it like your own. If you're not treating it like your own product in your own business, you don't have stake in it to grow it, to see it be scalable, not just growth, I'm not talking about, we grew you X percentage of users every month, did you help scale it, did you help?
look at the operations as you really drive that business forward. And I think that's what completely changed my mind from ever even feeling comfortable calling myself a consultant because that's an agency. Just think of an agency as, and I'm going to be a little controversial here, but you and I had a conversation once where we kind of, this is going to be bad, but I'm going say it anyways, how agencies can leech. Their whole idea is to leech.
onto you and slowly tell you, for next quarter we can do these services. The next quarter I suggest this. And I'm not going to lie, consultants do And we need more money. That's our business model. it's like you can build all the business cases that you want and show that that will grow. And I'm sure it will, but you'll never get that return the way that you have in your team. extraordinary growth or extraordinary result. And that's also me talking as a consultant. But I think it's a really good point because that's one of the reasons why I...
I stand behind the fact that I'll never start a consulting company. Like I never hired people, even though I had a few thoughts in the past, but it's exactly that. But I think, you know, like both Aleks and I are, well, I call this advisory. don't necessarily know like, or I like sometimes I sometimes did like part-time CMO roles where it's like a fractional thing.
But I do think that it's the same reason why at an early stage you're not hiring the same people in your company that you're hiring later on. Because you need people who are not just going to be comfortable with risks and uncertainty and stuff, but you want somebody who's always going to be thinking, what would I do if this was my company? Because those people are going to save you money and they're always going to try to think, how can I do more with less?
Whereas that's actually why then most startups have a hard time switching to growth when you start to actually have to think of like, need to start spending money now more to actually earn money. Because most of the times people are used to like this mode of like hustling and trying to get more. But I think that that's the same thing. Like an agency, most of the times those are people who are used to work with long like...
timelines with bigger budgets and they can't really do anything about their system. They're not wired for that. So what should a founder, let's say a typical Western Balkan founder, what did we say? Most of them, they don't have a single business co-founder. So either engineers and the domain experts, that would be mostly, often three engineers. now,
we've convinced them that they should do growth, marketing, revenue growth, whatever you call this, that they should do it in-house. How can they hire someone if they even don't know what they need? I think that my advice would be find somebody who is junior enough that they would join a startup at that early stage.
but potentially somebody who worked for an American startup before, so has that experience. Maybe they had a year or two somewhere else. I mean, ideally more, ideally more somebody who was more in the marketing generalist role. somebody who is not just like, social media is my comfort zone, so I'm gonna stay in social media.
but somebody who knows how to test different things. Did several different things. Somebody who is hungry, somebody who is not going to be like, we need a bigger team, because I know a lot of marketers who are like, we need a social media person and a digital person and this person. And ideally you want a Swiss knife at that stage.
somebody who is... For every field, not just for marketing, actually, for every segment. But this is something that typically people don't do. Like, oftentimes I see people go after either social media or they're like a copywriter and they're like, copywriter is the same as marketing. I'm like, that's totally not. Yeah. And you're getting into the point that one the things that really drive me and Blanka crazy is this idea that people forego all the other aspects of marketing, that marketing is not just social media and copywriting, although it is... something creative. ...very tactical and it is like, it is important.
But what I'm seeing a lot even on LinkedIn today is like the fractional CMO. And the whole idea is they are the Swiss knife, but they're a Swiss knife like on steroids in the sense where they are data driven. They really can go into the product. They can understand things, work with the different teams. Cause you don't just need a marketer. You need somebody who speaks to ops, to finance, to rev ops, to sales, to everybody who kind of puts everything together, whether you call it a marketer, whether you call it like the business person, but that's it's an interesting point. for interrupting you, but I think
especially, I think even globally, but especially in this region, when you say marketing, this is what people imagine. And I think it came from big, large corporations who started having marketing teams and job that was done in marketing agencies for the big companies, which is being creative and what...
people from marketing also mostly advertise themselves as like, oh, this campaign of ours was so creative that we got this award for the creativity. And I think generally, the most of the marketers, they rarely talk about results. They rarely talk, this thing that we did for this company drove their sales, drove something else.
You know, to be honest, good marketers are like unicorns. are... Most marketers are not good because most get into this... my God. That's why. Shut it off. Until then I drink. So let's not piss off everyone. I'm happy to do this. No, but the reason I say this is because I've interviewed over the years so many marketers. I mean, let's say it like this.
there's so many marketers in the world that it can't be that all of them are good. There's a lot more marketers than there are engineers, you know, and not all engineers are good. So... trying to... I stand by it. You said what you said, stand firmly with it. No, but the main thing is to me that marketers are always really stressed about having to talk about results because
the results of marketing are sometimes seen a year from now. Most of the time it's possible to measure, but actually that's the reason why in the US there's a big drive to not talking about marketing, but talking about growth. But in last few years, mostly demand generation of actually creating demand and capturing the existing demand rather than...
marketing where which is seen of like, let's do a bunch of ads and force something down somebody's throat and make sure they're our customer. That's not how it works. being data driven marketer is a big thing. And that's why I believe the marketers have to have both left and right brain really good because they are supposed to go look at the data. And yes, they have to be creative in their job, but creativity is not always like copywriting or
Creativity is looking at the data and trying to figure out how can I I think that's the most important part, especially if you're building a digital product. There is no marketing without the data and data analytics. And I think this is something that people need to learn. But I think that's something that engineers, when they want to, they can figure it out easily. I mean, that's something that's not too far from them. And I know many...
engineer founders who've been, who realized that and who were like, okay, let's see, this is also data analytics. I'll focus on that. understand what's, I can understand this role. And I think those are the startups when it comes to the region, I think those are the startups also that became successful, even though at some point they didn't have like a real marketing person, but they had this.
analytical way of thinking and doing things. I would also just add, when it comes to switching that on and off, a good marketer, to her point, can do both those sides. But when it comes to results, don't just... I've worked personally with a lot of freelance social media here and there. The problem is they focus a lot on what we call vanity metrics. They're like open rate, reach.
Impressions, marketing qualified leads. It's all about leads and I get myself because I work as a consultant as I mentioned, like with my clients, a lot of them want that lead generation. They want to say, okay, and I actually just recently realized that the name for that is called direct response marketing, which is you do a campaign, a marketing tactic and you want the direct like two days later, I'm getting a Slack message. It's like, what are the early indicators of the campaign? I'm like, guys, there's a learning phase, there's a maturity to that, it needs time, we need to get in front of the right people to get the learnings. And that's where vanity metrics actually do really.
because if you're just focusing on how many people open that email, how many people saw your ad, you're never getting the full demand generation. And just to translate what that means for audience, because we did say no BS, is basically it's building the demand. Whether it's for an existing demand or a new demand, essentially the idea is being able to kind of create that strategy around building the brand. And if you don't have a brand and you don't have demand, you won't get a lead, no matter what you do. You can't force people with sales tactics and force it down their throat, because if they don't know about you, that's called an
cold lead, which is very unlikely to actually close. So to her point, people focus too much on lead. But then there's people who say, I'm very results driven, but then the results are very basic. But what you were starting to talk about is they need to go into the business metrics. How can you actually start talking about how those things that you're working on are actually driving the key metrics, like the ARR, like all the things that are super important, LTV. But I think that one thing that's, when you were talking, that I realized, oftentimes what happens is that early stage startups, they
start doing cold emails or cold outreach on LinkedIn, and they see fantastic results because they send out a thousand emails and maybe they get 50 responses, but for them, 50 responses, it's amazing. So I think that when they start comparing that to marketing efforts, when they start thinking, I'm doing, I don't know, a campaign here or advertising on Google and stuff and nothing's happening, or I'm investing in SEO, which everyone hates, it's like,
organic, waiting until organic leads, like, why would I do this when I can just spend and give this agency who is going to do the cold outreach for me. But they don't realize that even though we have eight billion people, the market they have, you know, you it's not infinite. And so after a while, when you've done like thousands and thousands of leads that you've hit per day, you suddenly see, my agency is not working as well as it was before. And like, no, it's just, it's the same thing. You've, you've, you've tapped it out.
And when they realize that they're like, now we need to invest in long-term marketing stuff, while they were able to do this the whole time, and now their efforts on everything, on the cold outreach and everything else would be better if they invested early on in the marketing. Yeah, a great example of that story is just a lot of people say they want to do paid ads, and I'm getting a little bit detailed right now, but this is if you can take away one small piece of a playbook, would be this.
A lot of people come to us and say, we want to do paid ads, but you can't do paid ads without a strong brand and without strong organic. You cannot, if you don't have your website and everything organically optimized, you can't run paid ads effectively in terms of cost. So your cost of acquiring a new customer is going to be incredibly expensive. And then they look back and then they say, well, this is not effective. Well, of course it's not effective because you didn't, that playbook that we talk about, yes, there's no playbook, but there are certain steps that you have to focus. And that's why demand, gen, and organic is really important.
One thing when we talk about this data for me what's interesting what we sometimes see with the regional startups and I think it's one of the reasons why we don't have like faster growth is they focus on the regional market first because it's easy access especially if you are in the B2B space but even in the B2C you know some people you feel more comfortable in your own market and I and
regional market is a really bad proof of anything because some things we are not that rich. mean, people are, we are not that digitally literate. So most of the things won't work the same way. So even if you get, what I always try to tell founders is even if you get a no in the regional market and your data sounds bad,
it doesn't mean anything about the European market, but the fact that you already lost a lot of money and resources and time and everything else on a regional market, and you're now depressed because it didn't end up the way you imagined it, it just makes next trial harder to get, next chance harder to get. So I think that's something that people should also think about. And actually a conversation exactly about this with the startup that, thanks to you, are mentoring.
And the whole question was, do we do expansion to the US and Canada or do you focus like here? And I said, well, first of all, again, to your point, depends on who your target market is. Potentially you can be super successful here if you know exactly who you're going after. But why wouldn't you try expanding it? What is actually limiting you? A lot of people think that they need to like localize everything and make it very specific. And I say, do you have payment issues? Can you have people pay you from the US and Canada?
if you can have it on an app that actually exists on the app store, there's literally nothing that's holding you back from being able to test and try different things. Test and try, but that's the thing. If you don't have the ability to test and try, like if you don't know how to test things and you don't have that in your culture, it's difficult. It sounds overwhelming. Yes. But also I think sometimes people don't use data to make those decisions. Like, we should go into a U S and actually market in the U S just because everyone
is in the US. But did you actually check what are the competitors? Did you do any market analysis? I don't want to sound boring, but you know, it is important. I've had so many startups that have mentors in Europe that they look at like the European market and or they look at the Serbian market and they're like, there is no tool like this here. And I'm like, OK, I name your five tools like this in the US and they've existed.
for 10 years now, why would you, like how is it different? And I think that that's the one thing, I'm not saying that like a marketing person is needed for this particular task. I think the founder also needs to be wearing a marketing hat and the sales hats early on and the user hat, all imaginable hats in the beginning, you know? Yeah, but I think like another thing just to go back to this region,
and what you were saying, I think the magic, why we are even talking about the startup ecosystems is the fact that now from any part of the world, you can in some ways build a global business. And we've seen regional startups that managed to do it. We see some unicorns in our neighborhood. So things are moving in that direction. And I think it takes almost the same amount of effort for a startup.
to build the first market and customers, I don't know, in the region or to do it anywhere else. It's almost the same. And I've also seen wonders with some startups who were determined enough, like, okay, I don't know anybody in Germany, but it seems like it's a good market for what I'm building. And then they start looking for top 10 companies and then finding...
people from the Balkan in those companies, because that actually works. It's a good way to find them on LinkedIn and then, okay, I don't know you, but I know where you're from. So, and I'm from there and people actually want to help. And I think I've seen a lot of these magical things happen with the diaspora and the support of the diaspora and the connections through diaspora. So, I think that it's easier than we think to do it.
somewhere abroad. don't say it's easy and I think it's harder to do it in the region, although initially it might seem easier. Look, I think that it comes down to the person who is doing it and their drive, their passion, oftentimes their bullishness and being able to...
do whatever it takes to actually build a successful business. We were talking about this the other day of the difference of founders who just want to build a great product versus a great business. And I think that if you want to build a successful business, I think you can do it anywhere. I'm pretty sure, as controversial as he is, Elon Musk could build something wherever. And a lot of great founders are like that.
Yes, of course it's easier if you have a network and you have a bunch of people. A bunch of money. That And like I came to Serbia, I didn't know anyone and here we are, two and a half years talking with you and through you I met a lot of people in the ecosystem and I've built a business here. Okay, yes, it's offline business, but I've built a business that's not connected any way to anything. I had zero friends when I came here. So it is possible.
a harder way to do it, of course. But I think that nowadays you have so much data, people are so open most of the times to help and give advice. There are so many ways you can learn online, offline, of other people's experiences. And I think if you want to do it, you're able to do it anywhere. And I actually liked the point that it also comes from the founders mentality and what they want. And I think that
We talked so many times that there are some things when people talk a lot about startups and the business, but we rarely talk about the founders and how they feel and how difficult that role could be and things like that. But for me, especially now, I can't not mention it. But for example, if you're building a global business, I feel like as a founder, you get much more independence in the sense of that, look, we can't...
ignore the fact that in Serbia like two years ago, a bit more, three years ago, a lot of Russian companies, founders, investors, tech people came. And I think the reason they were able to leave so fast is the fact that they were embedded into the global ecosystems. so that's one perspective that I think me personally always have in mind when...
when living in this region, but also something even more recently, for example, we've seen, now we have like these huge protests, during protests in Belgrade. And I would say that one of the rare entrepreneurs and business people who've publicly supported the protests are actually the people from the tech ecosystem whose clients are abroad and who are not that connected with the
They are connected in the terms of that their employees are here, but their business is not dependent on what's happening in the state. So you had Nenad from COING who came out publicly, donated lots of dollars to the students. We had the Dean of the Phishing Booker also publicly, not to mention each and every one individually, but there's been this public support. And I think that's something that's very beneficial, especially if you're from this region, to keep your...
personal integrity in the sense because we are not the US yet. I think I totally agree. think that obviously I have a lot of friends in Russia and a lot of people who had to leave. Like a lot of people wanted to leave. A lot of people had to leave because they had international investors and they were like, we cannot support a company that is in Russia.
At some point it was even difficult to be a Russian founder and get investment. Now it's finally back to normal, more or less. But the idea is actually it was so easy for them to do it because most of them are already doing business globally, but they had investors that were international investors, American investors, or they were bootstrapped. And that's something that I always talk about is that...
Everyone is so after the venture capital, but sometimes actually if you want to keep your independence, you might want to go down the bootstrapping route. I'm not saying like I took investment from virtual capital, but I think that there are different ways to be independent and if you can do something to make sure that you're able to say what you want to say to keep true to your
values and you're able to build a successful business, should definitely do Actually, now that you mentioned... Political freedom of funding is not something we've ever really thought about before. Yeah, not something that we plan to talk about. But actually, I think that now that you said, all the founders that I know that came out publicly were actually bootstrapped. you had also like... There's always this thing that, you know, you have different investors. Some are okay with you being controversial. Yeah. Yeah.
are not okay with you saying anything at all because they're worried about the stock price or whatever if it's a publicly traded company, for example. In the US, that's why whenever somebody says something, you're like, how did they allow them to do this? And then you can see, again, I don't want to talk about Elon Musk all the time, but...
He's example of somebody- He's mentioning him for the second time. No, but it's something that's top of my mind right now, but I think that there is a lot of them that are able to, and then you have others who are dependent on the government of the US, for example, that are not able to be as vocal about some stuff and the censorship and things like that, especially like around social media and so of that. I think that here-
I mean, I look at the companies here and I was surprised that there were so many that publicly talked about the horrible protests, I mean, the horrible reason why the protests are And I think that it's not always possible, but if you can do it, I think that people should try to be more globally open and also try and look for ways to keep their independence no matter what.
When I come back to when we were building, starting the whole started thing, the spaces, the events and everything, it was like more than 10 years ago, I'm old. But I remember at that point, like our vision was, let's help people stay in Serbia. So how to stop the brain drain in the sense. And we saw it in the tech industry, not just startups, but tech, but also startups.
And I think now also one of the keys how to make Serbia a better place is by embedding it even more into the global ecosystems, the global economy, because even now you don't know what's going to happen across the geopolitical way. And I think that's a smart thing for founders and startup founders and people who are in the startups to start thinking immediately about the global market rather than like regional.
Last time Blanka is mentioning Ilona, I'm mentioning not go for the regional markets. But yeah, it's something that I always tend to advise startups and sometimes they follow or not. But I think we are 10 minutes to the end and I've prepared something. Since the two of you are like marketing people and marketing experts. And I know that there are some points you agree and you disagree on. And the most things we are going to talk with our guests in the podcast is
growth. And what we are also doing to our guests is going to be these rapid fire questions. So I'm going to shoot and you're going to answer. Maybe even at the same time. how you needed a drink before this. Do I need a drink? I don't know. Whatever you want. Some of them will be you choose the answer. Some of them will be just give me a quick answer. Okay. So data driven or intuition led decisions.
I think there's a data.
Okay, so in order to be controversial on this one, I would say that it depends whose intuition, because sometimes your intuition... Let me talk. Yes, I will not let you talk. Sometimes intuition is based on data. the concept. Data or intuition? One or two? I would say, in my case, would say intuition. Just to disagree. That's also our personality, so...
Paid ads or organic growth? Organic. Organic. Lifetime value or customer acquisition costs, which is the more important metric? I would say customer acquisition costs for me. I really call myself LTV person, so that's LTV. Okay. Okay, now explain. Why LTV? Well, like cost of acquisition, so CAC is important when you're considering LTV, but in all of my clients that I've worked with, we look at the ratio LTV to CAC. Okay.
So we need to make sure that LTV is balanced against CAC. She'll finally agree. So she's allowed to invent a second, third answer, not I combined You got the top and the first one I get to invent. Okay. Which we'll explain in a future episode what that means. Yeah, we can add it as a topic. B2B or B2C.
I think B2C is more fun. B2C? Most of my experience is B2B, not because I prefer it, but I would say that nowadays in B2B you're using a lot more activities that people used to do only in B2C. But I like B2B for the volume size. Am I allowed to add my point? Yes, you're allowed. To her point that I want to I like this, that you're asking me asking for my permission. we should have a ring, you know?
So what I wanted to say is B2B has evolved so quickly over the last few years, where to her point, it's like almost like the tactics and everything are meshing together. So while you have more experience with one than the other, B2B is definitely like developed. Building stealth or building public? We're so different when it comes to this. Really? Yeah, you're very much public. Yeah. I'm more stealth, but...
But I have to say it's been something. Well, she knows me. I know I can answer all these for you. I won't comment anymore. I do want to mention though why that's why I think that that's actually maybe the wrong approach for me is she's actually opened my eyes a lot to more of the public. And I think you're a little bit more on my side as well when it comes to this. Where I do think that.
Even when I'm talking to founders, I'm also pushing them to do the whole founder story building in public. And I actually, we're going to bring a guest in the future, near future who's based here and he's doing that and his build, his business is blowing up just because he's posting himself, story and everything. So I'm not against stealth. It's just, it's like getting through my own like limitations. I just say this because there's, there are definitely startups that make sense to be in a stealth mode. And most of the times it's something that's like in deep tech where there's like,
In the US, I worked with a few startups that had a very high risk of somebody stealing particular scientific patented technologies. In that case, of course. But in the case when you're not building rockets or whatever.
Elon Musk again? I'm not... No, you said this. Okay, that's our next guest. No, I think that it's important to use everything you can to build that story and to build already a community and a following and have people attracted to your startup before you even launched. I have to say that we sound like a fake startup podcast because the only entrepreneurs we're mentioning are Elon Musk and Steve Jobs.
Just putting it out there. Okay, now it's if you could choose just one tool that you can use for marketing, let's call it stuff. Which tool is Like a tech stack, like of a marketer. I mean, I don't know. I think for me, the first thing is first is always the CRM, be honest. Like HubSpot is my favorite thing in the whole world. I would add to that SEMrush, because SEMrush is like, am I allowed to say anything? No.
One book or podcast every growth specialist or founder should read slash listen to. You can do podcasts and you do the book. There's some books behind you. I mean, I can start to like, one, only one. Only one. A marketer or a founder, said, Choose.
I mean, maybe because it's my favorite currently is the All In podcast. Other than the product placement that we've put here, it's the lead startup, would say, and Blanka is going to get mad at me for this, but growth hacking was just because if you look at it as like doing good hacking things, like not illegal or things that are not good for SEO and organic, I think it's a really good way of actually building that scalable growth for a startup that doesn't have a lot of resources.
Bookies. Growth hacking. Bye. Was it Ryan Holiday. Holiday, okay. I know something. Okay, and this one's going to be hard, I think. Email subject line you'd never ignore. I mean, to be I know, from tax services, from Serbian tax service. Yes. But don't do that.
You know, I would say that there is no one like, like the more simple they are and the more, you know, for a while there was this very popular hack of writing RE. And it actually to this day, it still works for me because like my brain, that's how I read like, and whenever there's something in old CAP, like CAP's, CAP to letters or something that looks too clean or too long.
I'm always completely blind and sometimes I miss emails from important people because the subject line looks like an email outreach. So I would say that actually sometimes when it's no subject line or just one word or something very ambiguous, it works more than the other way for me. And I have a very opposite approach to this and I talked about this in a post on LinkedIn because it was a company that I never, not tech, they're like a retail that makes bags.
And basically they took your biggest pain points and made that the title. They were like, why you should spend $200 on this bag or the longevity of this bag? Like it basically addressed the pain points and those like what we call like sales level objections in the actual email. And then it literally talked about what the bag was made of, the quality of it and everything. And I was like, okay, well, this is better than just slapping a discount on the. But you know, the worst thing about it is that
whenever somebody gives advice on anything about subject lines, you can already completely dismiss it. That's the thing that the moment somebody hears about this RE, it really worked and then everyone started using it. That's what I'm saying, maybe no subject lines should exist anymore because people are spending so much time on this. then everyone else just reuses the same thing. So just reuse something and then quickly.
But you know, actually, this is the thing that why there's always like there's a trend and then there's anti trend of this. And for example, when I was doing my startup, which was like in the realm of also direct marketing in a way, we were doing business gifting as well. And it worked so well at that time because everyone was really tired of email, of digital outreach and stuff. And suddenly the anything that was physical in front of a person worked three times more.
and better to get their attention. So it's because nobody was using it. The moment everyone started using that, it's done. Typical life cycle. Okay. I think the yapping is done. So, now, let's cheer and we've survived the first episode.