Vedran Rasic

My previous business, Autoklose was in the email engagement space, it just got acquired in 2020. When Covid hit, I was made a director of marketing at that business. Around that time I noticed that some email automation spaces are becoming more and more saturated. As more people adopted, it slowly became spam over time. Nobody really talks anymore about their connections, because within your network there's likely somebody you want to hire, someone you can sell to, somebody you can help and really adds value to. And so I wanted to explore this further. I have a grand vision of becoming a digital rolodex for individuals, and then for teams, to help companies co-create social networks within their employees networks.

The first thing one notice would be AI is going to disrupt many things, but there hasn't been any real use case of this. I would say that things are going to be much better, just like any other technology. I kind of urge marketers to take some AI products seriously, then follow and monitor the AI evolvement. I think the industry is ripe for a change, and that's what usually happens over time. Transactions nowadays are also greatly affected by influencers. It's literally like "unless somebody's influencing my decision to buy, I'm likely not going to buy." Great quality and product service are still counted though.

We natively built on top of LinkedIn, for us LinkedIn was the greatest channel and still kind of is. One thing we did differently this time is doubling down on great contents and great collaborations. SEO was a big thing for us. From LinkedIn we moved to product hunt community where a lot of innovators and early adopters are spending their times there, and where they have very specific mentalities. But then those are your early innovators, and you can't go into the next stage without capturing these first bits and pieces of the market. We had a lot of focus on LinkedIn, the community, word of mouth, then we moved to ProductHunt and now we have multiple other channels that we are working with.

On my previous business, we were very religious about KPIs. Now, we don't go as granular, we know tactics that actually work, and the north star for us is the Net MRR retention. Obviously as we grew and scaled, churn became important as well so now its the net MRR retention.

I would say we managed to reduce the cost of acquisition. We were trying to scale ads, but just the ads wouldn't work for us at a scale, so we just completely cut them out because they almost have no effects. The biggest bottleneck right now is how do you actually 10X the system? How do we increase our operation that much without reducing quality too much? I'm trying to figure out a bunch of experiments which will help with the 10X.

AI is going to obviously disrupt many many things. Speaking of marketing and brands, I think we're going to have a lot of micro brands, micro communities, micro influencers. We are almost at the verge of like go big or go home type of thing and that market dynamic creates a lot of monopolies, and unless states and countries deal with those to make path for innovations and inventions, I think we're going to have a trend of amalgamation and merging of big enterprises turning into monopolies. Hence, a lot of people will opt for creating micro brands, small businesses, and such. I think its going to be a very exciting decade.