Emilia Korczynska

Userpilot

VP of Marketing

Doing all it takes to get more Product People over the code barrier with our code-free Product Adoption, Marketing & Experimentation Platform:  
Designing, developing and implementing a marketing strategy that ensures higher visibility 
Leading our stellar content team 
Implementing and driving a paid ads strategy to diversify customer acquisition. 
Driving funnel growth
Implementing an email marketing strategy 
Identifing and testing new acquisition channels
Overseeing, training, and coaching team members

Head Of Marketing

Managing content operations for a fast-growing B2B SaaS company - Product Experimentation and Marketing Tool for Product Teams: 
- Content planning, SOP development, SEO keyword research and topic ideation 
- Content editing and creation (blogs, website copy, social media content, ebooks, landing pages) 
- Community building (esp. Facebook - growing Product Growth & Retention Group, and LinkedIn) 
- Partnership management (guest posting, co-promotion)
- Writing weekly newsletters and developing email marketing workflows
- Organizing Product Drive - an annual online conference for Product People  (first edition: 2200+ participants)
- Data Analysis and Reporting (Google Analytics)

Marketing Manager

Wisemont Language Services

Boutique language agency helping SMEs sell more through great content on international markets

- Content marketing: translating, localisation and copywriting of SEO blog content, articles, website copy, newsletters etc. 
- International Social Media management 

Responsibilities:
- Developing and marketing new service packages and new in-formation products 
- Supervising development of content marketing strategies and SEO content for our clients that bring results – e.g.  ranking on 1st page in Google for competitive keywords, growing Twitter following to 3500 in 4 months

Owner

Postfity.com

- Helping more startups and small businesses hear about the most affordable social media scheduler designed specially for SMBs through: 
- creating a documented content marketing strategy, planning paid and organic marketing activities (content resharing, social media listening using Brand24, email marketing), setting and monitoring KPIs, measuring results using Google Analytics and Social Media Insights 
- hiring and managing marketing professionals: Social Media Managers, Copywriters, Facebook Ads Specialists, Google Ads Experts, Graphic Designers
- setting up and optimising email marketing drip campaigns
- doing Competition and Keyword Research, optimising blog content for search engines, creating new blog content optimised for low-difficulty keywords
- A/B testing Facebook ad campaigns
-  managing the marketing budget

Marketing Strategist

Find in China

Find in China is an online directory of local services, venues and events on a map in English designed for the expat population in China. Together with other local websites for expats we are creating the largest database of information and socialising opportunities for foreigners in China, as well as  a nationwide discount card. [Acquired October 2018] 
Responsibilities:
- Designing a web-app - map-based directory of venues, ser-vices and events in China
- Front-end project management – liaising with the front-end developer to produce the desired results in terms of design, functionality and user-experience, and with the back-end pro-ject manager 
- Business development and general management -  searching for joint ventures and collaborations to grow our database of point of sales and events quickly (we launched with over 1000 POSs across China), social media marketing

Co-Founder and CEO

Birmingham City University

Leading an in-country presessional course for students of Nanjing University of Science and Technology 
Teaching Academic Study Skills

ICP Visiting Lecturer

Swansea University

Teaching (Polish) Translation and Interpreting MA students:
- Module: Advanced Translation) 
- Module: Public Service Interpreting: Local Government Option
Supervision: Translator's Tools 
Material, test and examinations development

Part-time Translation and Interpreting Tutor

Runner's Delight

Runner's Delight was an innovative brand of functional porridge designed especially for runners. 
Responsibilities: 
- Designing and launching a sports nutrition product for runners
- Assisting in branding, social media and influencer marketing

Co-Founder and product manager

PayPal

EMEA Collections Specialist

Stream Universe TV

- managing relations with contributors: 
- contacting influential bloggers attracting large numbers of followers with commissions for film / TV series reviews and content writing;
- providing writers with updates on new releases, writing opportunities, etc.
- keeping  submission deadlines

Account Manager

The Cambridge Student

- writing a weekly series of satirical columns

Columnist

Passionate about SaaS product growth, and both the pre-sign up and post-sign up marketing. Talk to me about improving your acquisition, activation and retention strategy. 


2 years ago I thought LinkedIn ads were a complete waste of money. Any “attempts” we made didn’t bring any results…now our ABM program is just over 1 year old, runs 100% on LinkedIn, and has brought in multiple 7 figures in pipeline & very soon 7 figures in revenue…

What changed? 

☠️ We used to spend $1500-2000 per month on “experiments”, and measured results by…demos! 🤦‍♀️ that we expected to drive directly, and almost instantly, from a few random ‘we’re so great, book a demo’ ads (with not enough budget to even get enough clicks to the website, which we didn’t even measure).

🍀 Now we know a) Linkedin is just a content distribution channel, yes, it’s pay to play (but you pay to have a pretty darn good targeting) - but ultimately, you’re building awareness through good content.
You need to resonate with the pain, show different benefits of your product, social proof, etc. enough times 

☠️ We didn’t have target account lists. We just used broad targeting by job titles. 

🍀 Now we know 50% of the success is building the right target account list, and spent a lot of time tweaking the SAM criteria, and use Clay, Builtwith, Apify, Wappalizer etc. to build our lists based on intent signals. We use almost exclusively matched audiences. 

☠️ Our goal was to “generate leads” - “MQLs” - we didn’t look at leading engagement metrics at all. We didn’t look at the correlation between which company saw our ads in which campaign - we only looked  

🍀 Now we look at “campaign influence” - the deals (and pipeline / $ spent) from accounts that saw/engaged with our ads enough time BEFORE the deal was opened in ZenABM (my husband's startup, so do sign up for free 😜 https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj) We have account stages and monitor progression through them on weekly basis (and velocity). We know that it takes 100s of impressions, not a single "last touch" click, to get someone to book a demo 😉

☠️ We looked at LinkedIn as an isolated channel. We didn’t do any email follow up, any re-targeting campaigns, we didn’t target the same lists on different channels. 

🍀 Now we run email (with Smartlead) & Linkedin DMs (with HeyReach.io) follow up campaigns (planning to send 32k+ emails per month), personalised with hundreds of different intent signals (including intent we’ve gotten from LinkedIn ads, but not only). We’re splitting the audience between cold and warm. We’re enriching retargeting. We’re experimenting with reddit ads, and planning to look into other channels too.

☠️ I don’t even wanna know what we did in terms of campaign settings (objectives, goals, audience expansion…all the booby traps LinkedIn has in store for inexperienced marketers)

VP of Marketing @Userpilot. Author @ Product Rantz.

Every marketer will tell you the same thing “We have enough data. We don’t have enough insights.” Especially at the end of the year, when we’re all going into “reporting mode” - we’re drowning in data and desperately trying to make sense of it, to plan our 2026 budgets. 

AI should change that. 

This is why I’m so proud that Michal Jackowski is launching Zena - LinkedIn Ads AI Analyst today on Product Hunt - please check out the launch here: https://zenabm.com/ph

Zena answers all your questions about your LinkedIn Ads performance, your ABM campaigns, your target companies’ engagements with your ads *AND* the impact of your campaigns on revenue and pipeline. 

TL;DR - my husband has been working very hard on making it happen for almost a year, and I’ve been the harshest critic ;D I rarely like anything he does that doesn’t involve pasta - and I wouldn’t be sharing this launch with you if I didn’t think this is a game changer for reporting on ABM Campaign performance through LinkedIn ads. I’ve been feeling all the pain of doing this manually myself and this product is made of my tears (proverbially, of course :D) 

How does it work? Zena combines data from 30+ LinkedIn ads API endpoints with data from your CRM, and processed data from ZenABM (that already combines all the above data sources into one single source of truth, and calculates account engagement scores, ABM stages etc.) 

Here are the types of questions you can ask Zena about your LinkedIn ad and ABM performance data: 

 🟢 Ask Zena about your top performing ads, and ad formats - which had the highest number of clicks & CTR. 
🟢  Ask Zena to get you a list of your most engaged companies in different timeframes by clicks, impressions etc. AND by inventory type (image, TLA, chat).
🟢 Ask Zena which of your ad campaigns are driving pipeline, and which are only wasting budget. 
🟢  Ask Zena about the impact of your ABM campaigns on your funnel and TAM - how companies you’re targetting moved stages month over month, how much you’ve spent on them etc.
🟢  Ask Zena which of your ABM campaigns (and LinkedIn Campaigns) had the highest impact on revenue e.g. this vs. last month. 
🟢  Ask Zena about your ICP’s engagements - which job titles engaged most with your campaigns - month by month.

Getting all these questions answered just by looking at LinkedIn Campaign’s Manager or my Hubspot dashboards would take me ages - now I can get them answered in seconds, with beautiful reports generated by Zena.  

P.S. You can try Zena for free - you get 10 chats with Zena in ZenABM’s free trial - perfect for your end of the year reporting.

Someone (from the tech industry) asked me where I worked and what Userpilot was this weekend. And for the first time (hold my coffee), without thinking much, I responded: it’s a “Lovable for Product Adoption”. I know it’s a bold statement…and a complement for Lovable for becoming a household name for the category of no-code software in such a short time. And I know - sadly, no matter how much I bend myself over backwards here - it will never be as popular - because product adoption, unlike acquisition (which I have a hunch Lovable is mostly used for) is still “Cinderealla’s ugly cousin”. 

But here’s the irony - as the entry barriers to shipping software are getting lower and lower with Lovables of the world (and the competition is getting more and more cutthroat) ease of use and Time to Value are the strongest factors in determining whether someone will continue using your product, or start shopping around again at the slightest hint of friction. Nobody’s reading help docs anymore. You either provide instant answers in-app, or the users leave.

The irony why perhaps product adoption software hasn’t been that popular is also because the legacy solutions in the industry were notoriously difficult to use (iykyk).

The popularity of Lovable lies in a) how easy it is to use b) how fast it allows non-technical users to ship market-acceptable assets they could never dream of producing without a designer and a developer. “Acceptable” is better than “perfect” - because the difference between acceptable and perfect, in my experience, is exactly the same as “done” vs. “Not done”. 

👉 Yes, you could hard-code your onboarding experiences. But you know you won’t.
👉 Yes, you can use the legacy product adoption platforms…but that’s the modality of the word ‘can’. If you can’t ship what you need in < a few hours without developers’ / designers’ help - you won’t.
👉 You could buy 5 different solutions for lifecycle email, in-app communications, and product analytics - but you know the data will be falling through the cracks and you don’t use it consistently between the different tools. Your use communication will be broken. 

So give Userpilot a try for 30 days - we’ll support you with our new “Product Growth Jumpstart 2026” program (Chat to our product Growth Expert: https://lnkd.in/duKmW2hY to participate) to help you make most out of your free trial, and demonstrate to you how much more product-led growth (not only in terms of new acquisition, but also expansion) your team can produce if it’s empowered to engage users and build in-app product onboarding & adoption experiences truly on their own, with data available on their fingertips.

Open article: 15 Minute Meeting - Kelli Truelove by calendly.com

Idk if it’s perception bias but I see everyone dunking on attribution here. But I believe it’s because we’ve perverted attribution. It’s almost turned into “performative action”. Every week we’re spending hours and hours poring over our channel performance, trying to figure out how we can squeeze more last-touch conversions out of a channel by tweaking things to hit quota within budget, while at the same time believing it’s largely meaningless - because 99% of the time it’s not the single touchpoint that made someone book a demo or buy. As Ashley Faus wrote recently - you don’t know if it was the first touch, last touch, or the 57th touch that made you marry your husband ( no pun intended 🤣 ). It all starts to boil down to CRM credit. It becomes theatre.

Hot take: Attribution shouldn’t be about determining if you should spend more $ on Google Ads or LinkedIn ads based on last touch conversions or initial traffic source.

But there’s one super-important question that we should answer - and if we were playing with our own money, not some sort of marketing-budget-monopoly-money-: we’d want to answer it ASAP: 

Which channels don’t make any sense to spend your $$$ on? 

E.g. They may be there, as a touchpoint - but that touchpoint just simply doesn't matter, and you're throwing $10k per month on it.

If you turned off Google Ads/ LinkedIn Ads/ Reddit/ Stopped posting on LinkedIn/ Stopped running webinars/ events today - would your pipeline stay the same? 

Might it be that a lot of your last-touch conversions from your branded cold search ads are just taking a lazy “shortcut” to your homepage, and would have converted anyway from organic? 

I’m not good enough at statistics (the class was at 8 am on Friday…) but it sounds like we should be doing multiple regression analysis on cohorts of SQLs, taking out different channels and seeing what happens, like with a food allergy test. 

But we wouldn’t dare. And we probably couldn't figure it out anyway, because dark social yadda yadda, and because...most people themselves don't even know what made them buy. 

Like - we’ve been running certain campaigns since before I even joined Userpilot (which was before covid…yes, I’m that ancient). We never dared to stop. 

What would happen if we did? 

But then we started running LinkedIn ads only ~14 months ago, and see an increase in conversions from the target lists vs “control group.” 

It’s easier to see because they are defined. But with inbound? 

Is it all trial and error? Is there no way out? 

I’m genuinely curious how you folks make peace with attribution and what tools you use to inform your decisions how much $$$ to put in each channel and when to stop 😅

Most people know whether they are "just dating" someone or "in a relationship". Except for my cousin. She doesn't know. Meanwhile - most Product Managers I talk to are like my cousin. They don't know if the features they shipped have been "activated" or "adopted" - and what % of their users have done the latter. And how to measure it. 

If your KPI is retention - this is something you need to measure (and improve). 

Cover photo credit to Vrinda Tyagi, whose Medium post (link in the article) inspired my Product Rant today!

Feature activation is not the same as engagement, and not the same as adoption. Most people know whether they are "just dating" someone or "in a relat

Open article: 🤔 📈 Are they in a relationship or not?  by Emilia Korczynska • 3 min read

🤔 📈 Are they in a relationship or not?

After George tagged me in his post about which of his 2025 “marketing projections” panned out and which didn’t - I had a strong feeling of deja vu. At the start of 2025 - we were all betting on “original, thought-leadership content” as an antidote to “AI slop” and organic traffic decline. I’ve announced our blog is dead - long live the PITT - Product Innovation Think Tank. 

Well, turns out the PITT lived just for a short 6 months. And that “thought leadership” is extremely hard to scale. I’ve tried so many times, in so many ways:

 A) 2021 - hiring “subject matter experts” in-house - something that even OpenAI (how ironic) is trying to do now (check out Kyle Poyar’s recent post about it - in the comments). It was a disaster; they all quit within 3 months - turns out thought leaders don’t want to mass-produce thought leadership to OKRs. I know of maybe one company that has done it successfully (Ahrefs) - so I wonder how that pans out for OpenAI. We say 'a star is born', after all, not made. 

B) 2023-24 - partnerships & sponsorships - like herding cats and playing one-armed bandit, was just burning cash while creating a disproportionate amount of nuisance for our demand gen team to manage;

C) 2025 - Content syndication in an “owned” online magazine + boosting LinkedIn posts based on the original content with Thought Leader ads. You can’t just find more Akashs Guptas, Kyle Poyars, or Maja Vojes to keep playing that game over time. Plus - getting the influencers to agree to participating in a program like that is art. So after a strong start, the quality just kept going downhill, and we fizzled out after a few months. 

No, onto what has worked, so far, ish:

ABM - moving from a purely inbound motion to building an account-based marketing motion has worked for us - driving a significant % of the pipeline every month. BUT - because of all of the above, we’re really only just capturing demand. We didn’t manage to create this exceptional program full of amazing content that would really “generate demand” (some people are going to tell me I believe in Santa in the comments - fair enough, I hear your point. As we all know, nothing exists in marketing anyway ;)) 

“SEO is dead” - well, that was my biggest “positive disappointment” - turns out both SEO and link building still exist, and have respawned as a whole new channel - AI referrals (and no, we haven’t changed much about how we do SEO). 

How has your 2025 been? Different than you expected? 😉

If (as I wrote last week) - most PMs don't know how the "regular" features are performing and whether they have been adopted by their users - imagine what it's like with AI features...

Hot take: digital products ship AI features faster than the users are adopting them: 

We’re great at signing contracts, we’re terrible at changing habits.
Adopting AI doesn't mean using AI. 

This is probably the most uncomfortable truth:

AI is not failing technologically - it’s failing behaviorally.

If you look at enterprise adoption, you see the same curve we see in product teams adopting new analytics tools:

💠 Excitement (“this will change everything”)
💠 Procurement
💠 Pilot
💠 Two power users 
💠 Everybody else goes back to Google Docs
💠 Leadership says adoption is low
🫠 Tool gets replaced next year

Why? 👇

If (as I wrote last week) - most PMs don't know how the "regular" features are performing and whether they have been adopted by their users - imagine 

Open article: AI is not failing technologically — it’s failing behaviorally. by Emilia Korczynska • 2 min read

AI is not failing technologically — it’s failing behaviorally.

Andrew Davies

Paddle

Experimentation (zero-to-one projects, including AI & automation)
Ecosystem (building relationships & supporting the early-stage startups)
Evangelism (using research and data to help empower others to succeed)

Chief Innovation Officer

Paddle takes care of the payments infrastructure for thousands of SaaS, AI and App businesses, so they can run, grow and scale internationally without headaches. It's your all-in-one billing, subscription & tax compliance platform - saving you time, money and precious dev resources. 

Deloitte Tech Fast50 for 5 years in a row. Over $95m raised. And only just getting started.

Chief Marketing Officer

Ninety CIC

Ninety is an innovation consultancy, delivering a proven and award-winning new change model for large insurers. We help clients including Zurich, RSA, AXA and Allianz and have won 'Consultancy of the Year' 2019, 2020 and 2021 at the Insurance Choice Awards.

Non Executive Director

YOYABA

Helping the leadership team as they build a leadership position in the DACH region for their Revenue Marketing services.

Advisor

Scalewise

Scalewise connect ambitious tech start-ups with a diverse pool of revenue experts. They inject businesses with the exact support they need at every stage of their growth. Core services include hourly coaching, project delivery and fractional leadership.

Scale Expert

Lands Road Ventures

Advising, investing and problem-solving with various high-potential startups.

Director

Sales Impact Academy

I teach the Account Based Marketing Course and the Analyst Relations course - both for B2B Marketing Professionals. Sales Impact Academy is a community and live learning platform for sales and marketing teams. They have created a unique combination of peer-to-peer learning and support coupled with live classes that will ensure you are creating and executing a world-class go-to-market strategy.

Account Based Marketing & Analyst Relations Coach

Optimizely

Led the brand, demand and digital teams at Optimizely (formally Episerver), following the acquisition of the startup I co-founded. We integrated 5 acquired businesses, rebranded the whole company, and saw considerable sales and pipeline growth through this period.

VP Corporate Marketing

Idio

Responsible for:
 - As CMO, devising and implementing marketing strategy (ABM, Analyst relations, Content, Demand Gen etc)
 - As co-founder, building the team & making Idio a healthy and fun place to work
 - Making tea/coffee & whatever else needs doing

We sold to www.episerver.com, backed by Insight Venture Partners

Co-founder & CMO

thrudigital

Leading creative strategy and sales activity

Co-founder & Business Development Director

Deloitte

Strategy and Operations Consulting - Technology & Media Business:
Projects including BBC/Siemens and internal RFID project

Auditing & Assurance - Technology, Media & Telecoms:
Clients including WPP Group, Vodafone Group, Epson Ltd, Trinity Media Group

Scholar / Associate Auditor / Associate Consultant

Serving the team at Paddle as Chief Innovation Officer. We provide the complete payments infrastructure for 5000 software companies. We have been ranked in the Deloitte Tech Fast50 for 5 years in a row, have raised over $295m, acquired ProfitWell, and are only just getting started.

Previously was VP Corporate Marketing at Optimizely (formerly Episerver), after it acquired Idio. My role included leading global strategy and activity for Demand Gen, Brand, Digital, ABM and Content. The business serves 8000 customers and is named as a leading Digital Experience Platform by analysts including Gartner & Forrester. During my time at Optimizely, we integrated 5 acquisitions, rebranded the entire company, and grew pipeline and sales significantly.

Previously, I co-founded Idio, serving as CMO and also leading people ops. We built the business from scratch to a market-leader in B2B personalization, with a superb team spread across offices in NYC, SF & London, and enterprise clients including Pegasystems, BNY Mellon, Fitch Group & Pure Storage. Through this process, we raised $13m+ from institutional investors including Notion Capital as well as a range of angel investors.

I sit on the board of Ninety, an agile digital transformation consultancy which serves the insurance industry, including Generali, Axa, Allianz & Zurich. What's even more awesome than its client-base is the fantastic team, and the fact it is a social enterprise. 90% of distributable profits are given to alleviate global poverty.

I also advise, support & invest in early-stage startups, helping them problem-solve around proposition development, people & teams, marketing strategy, funding, and whatever else helps them go from zero to one.

At university, I co-founded a few startups, including thrudigital, a social-media development agency based near Kings Cross in London, which served clients such as Universal Studios, No. 10 Downing Street, and Sky. 

Early on, I gained early experience with large multi-nationals such as Deloitte (working in Audit and Strategy Consulting for Tech/Media/Telecoms clients) and Reuters (Equities Analyst). 

I graduated with a First Class Honours degree from Warwick Business School. Also studied on exchange at Richmond University, VA, for 1 year.

I love the startup process, have a bias for action, enjoy working with people who solve problems rather than create them, and relish being the underdog. My career goal is three-fold: always to be the dumbest person in the room, always to be on the side of the disruptor, & always to encourage, serve & value those around me.

Paddle takes care of the payments infrastructure for thousands of SaaS businesses, so they can run, grow and scale internationally without headaches. It's your all-in-one billing, subscription & tax compliance platform - saving you time, money and precious dev resources. 

Deloitte Tech Fast50 for 5 years in a row. Over $95m raised. And only just getting started.

Loving the diversity of startups at Slush. From massively-scaling businesses like Lovable, to just-launching-now startups like Kima. 

Highlights so far: 

- Lucy on how Airwallex took 9 years to get to $500m ARR, and then just 1 more year to double to $1bn ARR (just, wow...)

- Luc and Nathan on training the next generation of basketball players through computer vision (yes, I braved the AI feedback, demonstrating my somewhat rusty shots)

- Sven on empowering millions of musicians globally (loved seeing your office, and my son will love the branded plectrum!)

- Goran on their slow and steady approach to bootstrapping the best colouring app on the Appstore (Apple Design Award, Editor's Choice etc)

- Alexey on building the future of football analytics for clubs, fans and players worldwide (so cool to see the global ambition - especially ahead of next year's World Cup in North America)

And of course catching up with conference friends like Claire, Asif and Christopher!

A few more meetings, then I'm running home!

Chief Innovation Officer @ Paddle. Formerly @ Optimizely; Co-founder @ Idio (acquired 2019). Startup advisor & NED. Here to help you scale your software business better, faster, safer.

Imagine growing from $1M to $200M ARR in just 12 months... Only to be dragged through the news for not paying VAT (yet). Last week, that happened to Lovable.

Stories about VAT usually don't get much attention, but this one did, probably because it had all these ingredients headlines are made of:

1) Entrepreneur vs government debate
2) US vs EU debate 
3) Fair vs not fair debate

The discussion mainly revolved around these 3 themes, but I think these are the wrong discussions to have.

If you're a founder, the real enemy is not the government, not a news outlet who goes after their country's fastest-growing company, not another founder who might be able to get away with less compliance headaches because they're in another country or because they're a hyperscaler…

The enemy is the complexity of selling globally.

Every software company is now born global. So from day 1, you're selling into 10, 20, 100+ countries. Each one of them has the right and necessity to decide who pays what tax for which products, and how consumers are protected.

As a founder, you just have to accept that and start solving it as early as possible. Otherwise, the complexity only compounds as you scale.

The good news is, this is a solved problem.

I’m not talking about hiring an entire team of tax consultants and setting up entities in each region. I’m talking about 2 much superior alternatives:

✅ AI-driven tax tools like Sphere and Anrok which automate a lot of the complicated tax computation and remittance in many regions (but notably, don’t away the liability of compliance). They also don't help with the growth side of the equation... local payment methods, currencies, conversion optimisation, retention mechanics etc. 

✅ A Merchant of Record like Paddle, where you shift that entire burden of compliance to someone who makes it their business model (and we have 6,000+ AI, PLG SaaS and consumer app companies that do this to grow faster whilst staying compliant everywhere)

Tax compliance doesn't have to be taxing. We’ve seen these challenges a thousand times, and solved them once and for all. 

I'm cheering for Lovable and all builders, and at Paddle, we'll continue with our mission of handling the-not-so-fun side of business (billing & tax compliance - as well as growth mechanics like localisation, conversion and retention) so the builders can stay focused on doing what they're best at, building.

Heading to Slush next week — one of the most electric gatherings of founders, builders, and investors anywhere.

If you’re a consumer/prosumer founder scaling globally, I’d love to connect. And if you are investing in them. 

I’ll be there meeting teams who are figuring out how to turn breakout traction into sustainable growth across markets. Looking forward to seeing Marcus, Kamil, Tendai, Flyer One Ventures, TRMNL4 and many more.

And I'm looking forward to the stage content, including Runway, Lovable, Lago, Guillaume from Anthropic and Jan from n8n!

Drop me a message if you’ll be in Helsinki — always up for a good conversation about product-led growth, global expansion, or the next wave of consumer innovation.

My last trip to India showed me why its AI/SaaS community keeps outperforming ecosystems with more capital, and more favourable home markets…

1,000 founders in the room last March at SaaSBoomi in Chennai…

The founders I met had deep technical talent and weren’t waiting for perfect timing or funding… 

They are building, shipping, and selling before many others have agreed on their ICP. They learn fast because constraints force clarity. And they treat global distribution as the default, not a late-stage expansion plan.

And the community density is unmatched. It’s a national operating system where founders share numbers, playbooks, and hard-won lessons without ego.

So next week, I’m over in Bangalore for AIBoomi ☀️ - a focused event for AI founders! I’ll be looking forward to learning from those I meet... and getting a break from the cold spell in the UK... ❄️ 

Thanks to Aditi, we will also be hosting an evening reception - on the Cross Border Playbook - along with AWS, Xflow and Efficient Capital Labs. We have a few spots left. 

Let me know if you want to meet!

Shoutout to Avinash Keerthi Denada Manik Anand and many more!

Great to meet some of the Czech (and Slovak) founder community last night in Brno. Thanks to Whalebone for hosting, and Customerscore.io for picking up the bar tab. And of course, Leonard Eldić for organising.  

So good to hear the opportunities and challenges first hand… and to enjoy the famed Czech humour 🤣😅

We dived into the GTM models that are being broken and reshaped as we speak: product market fit… market channel fit, channel model fit, and model market fit. And shared stories of focus and speed. 

Everyone founding here has serious grit, smarts, and a massive desire to scale outside of their borders. 

🛫

On that note… now onto Berlin for Business of Apps 💪🙏

A reception and fireside chat this evening, a workshop tomorrow… and several customer and prospect meetings in between.  

If you are around, do come say hi!

No alternative text description for this image

If you're a founder of a 'habit-forming' app, Q5 (late Dec to mid Jan) campaigns will probably outperform your BFCM campaigns.

In Q5, fewer advertisers compete for attention (lower ad costs), while users are looking for new devices, gift cards and setting New Year's resolutions (higher user intent + usage + retention).

(e.g, in Q5 2024, Health & Fitness apps saw 38% increase in installs and a 10% rise in sessions)

If you play in the habit-forming realm (productivity, learning, fitness apps, accountability buddies)...

Try these 3 things:

✅ Test creative and messaging while CPMs are soft and attention is cheap. It’s the lowest-risk time of year to break your own playbook.

✅ Tighten activation, not just acquisition. Q5 users arrive with intent - make sure your onboarding and first-use loops catch it.

✅ Rethink monetization. Web payments and off-store checkout are giving apps more control - better attribution, higher margins, and 85% more reachable users.

The momentum you create in Q5 spills over to the entire next year…

So if you want the best possible 2026, Paddle’s Lucas Lovell and RevenueCat’s Ed Shelley are hosting a workshop on Nov 18th, unpacking how best app teams approach Q5.

You know where to find the registration link 👇

Even before Slush is done, next week is ready... 

If you are building a cool product in Czech Republic, come join us in Brno for this meetup - Vojtech, Lukas, Zuzana and Leonard :) 

Otherwise see you in Berlin for Business of Apps later in the week!

One thing I have learned about AI-native founders... 

... they are massively overwhelmed.



Everything is possible. How do you prioritise?

The foundations change every week. How do you build to last?

The competition comes from everywhere: partners, customers, incumbents, upstarts. How do you position?

I have massive respect for those building right now. There will continue to be some big winners. You only have to be right once. And of course, some big losers. Those who get overtaken, left behind, or that build for a market that never really existed.

So what I really love is meeting AI-native founders that have found a way to cuddle with the chaos. To balance life and family around the state of constant flux. To hustle all day long, but down tools when its over. 

I learned the hard way, early on, that its about the journey - not just the destination.

It feels like things are moving faster than ever. Yet I'm pretty sure this will be the slowest they'll ever be. 

I've noticed that most AI-native founders I meet are excited. And overwhelmed. The best have found good ways of dealing with that. Sustainable ways... at least for a year or two. Many haven't, and are just chasing the next update - paranoid that others will beat them tomorrow.

So after another week, with yet more shifts in the market, competition, customer behaviour, underlying tech... I keep coming back to a simple mental model to stay steady through it:

1. Anchor. Keep the core steady: our purpose, the customer value, relationships, cadence. When you establish what won't change, you are better able to handle anything that does. 

2. Sense. See what’s really changing. Look beyond our category. Try and imagine where things are going, not where they are. Run small experiments instead of big bets. The goal isn’t certainty... it’s clarity.

3. Adapt. Build for movement, not stability. Tiger teams, short-term initiatives, fast feedback. The companies that win aren’t always the best predictors, but they are usually the fastest learners.

Change isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding. So, I want to learn how to move through it with rhythm, not resistance.

​>​>​> At Slush this week ​>​>​> Chief Innovation Officer @ Paddle. Formerly @ Optimizely; Co-founder @ Idio (acquired 2019). Startup advisor & NED. Here to help you scale your software business better, faster, safer.

Martin Mignot (Partner at Index Ventures, $15B+ under management): "It's easier to be born global than to become global"

This is a perfectly articulated version of the shift Paddle has been seeing and supporting for years.

In the last 5 years, startups went from thinking 'just hire some sales reps in US and move upmarket'... to most successful software companies being global from day 1.

A lot of factors made this possible. Covid paved the way for remote work. The rise of PLG. The state of permacrisis pushed businesses to look for 'pockets of growth' in markets that grew when their home markets stagnated. And AI has enabled consumer-grade innovation that is distributed globally from day 1.

Martin goes deeper and suggests there's 4 archetypes of (particularly) US expansion:

1) Telescope 🔭 

Marketing-led, global from a single location in Europe; U.S. is large but not dominant. For instance mobile or gaming companies.

2) Magnet 🧲 

Sales-led, U.S. is dominant; European start but quickly shift heavy presence to the U.S., senior leadership often relocating. Example: enterprise software / cybersecurity.

3) Pendulum ⚖️ 

Balanced presence, U.S. ~half the business, Europe remains important; build teams on both continents. Example: companies like Spotify.

4) Anchor ⚓ 

Europe remains dominant geography; U.S. presence grows but remains secondary. Senior execs stay in Europe. Example: fintech firms that build big in Europe before going serious in the U.S.

This week, this is what I'll be diving deeper into at Slush.

On Wed, Guillaume Princen (Head of EMEA at Anthropic) and Fabian Hedin (Co-founder of Lovable) will unpack how global demand shaped their earliest product and GTM decisions: 

- how to recognise real pull
- how to design for scale from day one
- how AI and PLG are changing the “when, where, and how” of going global

I hope to see you there. Until then, stay global!

A few observations about AI-native startups:

1) Speed is everything 🚀 
Building never stops, features are launched in days/weeks (not months/quarters), decision making is lightning fast (no committees, minimal/flat hierarchy)

2) Distribution-first 📢 
Most are building on the same foundational models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) = deep innovation isn't their moat, so they've nailed distribution: positioning, founder brand, ecosystem marketing, community building, superior UX…

3) Most are product-led 👩‍💻 
They're building for the end user, there's minimal friction, product growth loops fuel a lot of growth (virality, sharing, collaboration loops)

4) No buy vs build dilemma 🗑️ 
They'd rather use whatever's out there than reinvent stuff. There's just no time/focus for that. 

5) Industry outsiders 🆕 
Most AI-native founders are first-time founders without industry experience, attacking old problems with new tools and fresh minds.

6) Founders are exhausted 😫 
Everything moves at the speed of light, so the founders and their teams are always on. We may not like 996 (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but it's the reality for most of them.

7) PMF is a treadmill 🏃‍♀️ 
Trends and markets shift faster than ever, so AI-native companies keep reinventing themselves every few months. Product-market fit is no longer a finish line.

8) Born global 🌎 
They're going for the global market from day 1. The old playbook of gradual market expansion is no more, and they're figuring out tax & compliance implications of selling globally from day 1.

9) Pricing/monetization got the attention it deserves 💵 
Negative gross profitability is real because they're all paying 'rent' to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc, so pricing became an important growth lever and a lot of them introduced value-based pricing models.

------

AI-native startups are also the fastest growing segment at Paddle.

We've already remitted millions in taxes on their behalf, and have never seen such market pull for the Merchant of Record model (tl;dr we handle all payments, tax & compliance for them, no need to build a payments stack from scratch).

It seems like they're adamant about staying 100% focused on the main thing and ignore/delegate everything else.

H/T to Kyle Poyar and High Alpha for the slide from last year's State of SaaS Benchmarks Report.

taplio

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