Navigating Stealth Mode: Agile Marketing Insights with Vladlena Mitskaniouk

Overview:

In this episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders, host Kerry Guard sits down with Vladlena Mitskaniouk, a seasoned marketing leader with over 15 years of expertise in data-driven strategies and go-to-market initiatives. Vladlena shares her journey from studying hacker activism to leading marketing in a stealth-stage startup. She dives into the unique challenges of building a brand before launch, collaborating with product teams, and staying customer-obsessed. Listeners will gain insights into leveraging AI tools, balancing agility with strategic focus, and the critical role of marketing in shaping product development and organizational success.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:02

Kerry, hello, I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome back to Tea Time with tech marketing leaders. Welcome back to the show. We are at a weird time. It is Friday, 930 Eastern. This is unusual. We will be back at normal schedule next week, at our normal 11 am on Thursday. But this week, I was away at the amazing cybersecurity marketing con. If you have not gone and you're in cyber, definitely join the community. They're wonderful. And then next year in Austin, we're already counting down. It was, it was wonderful, but I had to shift my whole world around, because yesterday was a travel day, and I was not about to push this conversation, because it is tiny timely, not tiny timely. Before I get into it, let me introduce our guest. Today. I have the wonderful Vlad Lena Mitsuki. I'm sure I got that wrong, and she's going to correct me in a minute. It's going to be beautiful. She is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in data-driven marketing go-to-market strategy and empowering cross-functional teams for success, recognized for guiding marketing initiatives, enabling sales partnerships and delivering actionable insights to drive executive decision-making. She's got a proven track record in managing both B to C and B to B campaigns with a focus on driving growth and maximizing ROI. She's passionate about leveraging data to inform strategic marketing decisions and propel organizational success in dynamic, competitive markets. Vlad Lena, welcome to the show.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 1:29

Thank you so much for having me. Hi everyone. I'm Vlad Lena Mitnick, and I'm out here in beautiful Ottawa, Canada in month two of 14 months of winter,

Kerry Guard 1:42

cool. How cold is it there?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 1:44

It's not too bad today, where we're probably just below freezing, but we do get to negative 40, which we're all looking forward to

Kerry Guard 1:54

for. Oh my gosh. I thought it was cold here, with a with 3c Yeah, that is negative 40. I I stand corrected, and I'm very blessed where I am.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 2:09

Then February is the time to freeze, freeze yourself off a little bit.

Kerry Guard 2:14

Have you grown up there? Have you always lived there? Or did you find yourself there? Recently,

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 2:19

I've lived most of my life here. I immigrated here from Moldova when I was quite young.

Kerry Guard 2:25

So cool well, as somebody who's living in another separate nook of the world, it's nice to meet a friendly face of who's used to living remotely, very remotely, in a very cold spot. So I'm grateful you're here with me today and to talk about stealth mode and what it means to be a marketer before you could even market. But before we get there, I'd love to know your story of what do you do now, which we sort of hinted at, but more importantly, how did you get there?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 2:54

So I am heading up marketing at a stealth Stage Company, and we'll definitely dive into those details, but it means doing way more than just marketing. And one of the cool things is that marketing at any organization is very cross-functional, so it actually prepares you to work in a startup where you might have to put on a business hat one day and a product hat another day. I've spent most of my career in traditional marketing of some sort, usually on the digital and analytics side. As you mentioned, I actually started in B to C, but it was at a financial company that really treated itself as a software company. We built a lot of our own products. Actually helped launch a direct trade platform, a robo advisor during my time there. So I had some product experience while I was there on the marketing side, and then went right into cybersecurity from there. One of the cool things that I get to share is I actually studied hackers in my master's program, which is why I was so interested in getting into cybersecurity. I studied how hackers use technology for activism. So I've always really stayed on that technology side of the of the marketing game as a result,

Kerry Guard 4:04

You actually studied, what about hackers? Did you study like how they operate, what they're looking for? Tell us more.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 4:12

So this was in a communications degree where I had a lot of flexibility to following my own passions, and I've always been interested in technology, and this was at the time when Anonymous was really getting going, we were seeing a lot of change in activism. And then live streaming really became a big thing, and it was a lot about how activists could use modern technology from early on, when they were using really initial chats to have private conversations, to using live streaming mechanisms in protest for accountability.

Kerry Guard 4:46

That's so cool. I have a lot more questions, but I think that might be a separate podcast that we do not have time for. So I'm going to follow up with you. We might make that happen in the meantime, before we move on to the to the heart of our conversation. I'd love to know what's a challenge you're currently facing right now, what feels a bit hard and out of your control and or annoying, or all of the above.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 5:09

I think one of the hardest challenges is knowing when to actually take the marketing hat off. As marketers, we always default to that, even when we're working on, you know, a separate project, if we're working on a product, side business, side finance. We always kind of default to marketing, and sometimes it's not about that in the moment. So it's really learning how to bring my education and my experience from marketing into different areas, but also knowing when to remove that focus for a minute and move on to other things.

Kerry Guard 5:42

Well, that is perfect timing, because it sounds like you have figured out some of that concern. You're doing it. So the question becomes, valenna, did you go into this role knowing that that would be the case and you'd have to be in different roles, or was it sort of thrust upon you, and you've had to sort of figure it out,

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 6:01

I would say a little bit of both. But in the in the best way, I came into this role in large part because I do have a lot of subject matter expertise in these solutions we're building from my time, both as a marketer, but as well as marketing to cybersecurity and developers and really understanding that cohort. So I came in expecting to work very, very closely with product and engineering. But I think there's a characteristics a lot of marketers have where we see an opportunity to get involved, and we just can't help but volunteer ourselves. And that was a lot of the case here, where I really wanted to step in and be part of more than just let's talk about branding and messaging for the product that we're building. But let's actually work with our alpha and beta customers. Let's look at how we marketing and this side of the go to market initiative, and internally in our company, can contribute to product specifications, to mock ups to working very closely with engineering on the requirements of what we're building. So definitely, it was partially that there was an opportunity to step in there, and partially because I can't help but get involved. You know, when you're when you're customers, like marketing is which we really are. Marketers have to be obsessed with customers.

Kerry Guard 7:24

We are always going to get involved in product, one way or the other,in terms of being obsessed with the customer we're going to we're going to take a slight detour here, folks, don't worry. I'll bring her back center in a second. But I think this is so helpful, because at the conference this I actually attended a talk by Theresa Roy. It was a wonderful she brought she was talking about blockbuster. She opened the conversation with blockbuster. I mean, how could you not be invigorated right off the gate? But she was talking about voice of the customer and how she approaches it from an internal perspective. I feel like all marketers have a little bit of their own secret sauce in regards to what being obsessed with the customer means. So I'd love to hear from you. Valenna on what is that for you? What does obsess with the customer mean?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 8:07

I think a lot of being obsessed with the customer is actually spending time with the customer is on one side, and the other side is spending time where the customer is. And I think that is a gap that some marketers still kind of have to learn to embrace it's one thing to talk to your real customers, to have those customer interviews. It's one thing to ask for feedback, to run surveys, to look at the data of what your customers and prospects are saying. It's another thing to go to events and not just sit at a trade show booth, but actually go and sit in at the sessions. A great example I would often give is at a previous company I was at that was a very, very technical company, well beyond my skill set marketing to API and platform engineers. I was taking Kubernetes courses on the weekends. It's really about more than just asking who the customer is, and more about kind of that ethnographic research of spending time in the communities with your customer.

Kerry Guard 9:09

I love that. I think the actual spending of the time sort of gets lost. We sort of pretend we know what the customer wants without actually asking the customer. So I love what you're saying in terms of ways to spend time with the customer, and then way to go above and beyond. I don't hear this often. I've been doing this podcast for over five years. I can probably count on my right hand how many people have actually said that they have taken courses in regards to what their customers do. So hats off to you for being part of that very small elite group. It is no small feat to wrap your head around developers. I have my husband is a developer, and I remember several times getting out of whiteboard and be like, Okay, I hate you to explain how containers work for me, please. I. Give it to me, and so he would just sit down and give me a lesson and similar Kubernetes and containers and things like that. So it's so helpful to have a grasp and hats off to you for actually going above and beyond Call of Duty on the weekends, back to where we were headed with our conversation in relation to all the hats you have to wear in working with more of a stealth startup and not being able to actually market yet. I do want to know, in terms of getting ready to market, right? What are, what are you thinking about? You don't have a product that's ready, obvious, I'm assuming. But I also probably feel like there's probably some things you sort of need to put in the building blocks. So to speak, of what this would look like when you are ready to go to market.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 10:49

It's actually quite a fun opportunity. Not a lot of marketers get to come into a company that doesn't already have your brand and your vision and your message and your persona is defined. Usually you're handed those. It's like you're given a little book of here's the building blocks. We figured them out for you. Now you can go run marketing, whereas in this case, it's all about really identifying the building blocks that we need to have really early. So some of the very early work we did was doing that traditional definition of, what is our ICP, who are our personas, what is the maturity model, the technology they use? Where do we fit in? What is the right time for us? All the way down to messaging, we do when you're working with early customers, whether it's design partners or beta customers, you have an opportunity to test messaging in a really isolated, risk free way, which is very unique. You're not just putting something on a billboard and hoping that it resonates. So we are really able to kind of iterate early on our messaging, and then as our product evolves and shifts, we can challenge ourselves at every moment of does the messaging still align with the direction we're going the product? So it's this unique approach where we actually have to be very agile with how we're looking at it. We can plan messaging, we can plan branding, but we're continuously iterating as the product evolves. So it's almost like marketing gets the follow along with product into the go to market motion, versus the traditional where you arrive, there's a product ready, and you're layering marketing on top of it. It becomes much more of a cohesive campaign to build the product and the marketing together.

Kerry Guard 12:23

I imagine it's a blessing and a curse, right? A blessing because you do get to build with them, but a curse in the sense of how much you have to pivot? Do you find that you have to change your direction or your messaging or the work, like almost redoing your work over and over again every time there's an aha moment with product,

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 12:43

I like to not think about redoing it. I like to think about as an evolution. And it's funny, we, I think we, you and I had a discussion about how a lot of these startup mentalities are transitioning to enterprises, but I am actually seeing more and more enterprises looking to be more agile with their messaging, looking to be more agile with the products and their and their sweet so I think marketers, even outside of a pre product startup, are now experiencing this. Well, last quarter we had this product and we were marketing to this audience, but this quarter, we're shifting quite drastically, and I think that's becoming the norm, the scale at which we can learn, optimize, tweak our messaging, but also the scale which companies are building product means, I think every marketer has to be ready that today we're selling one thing to one person, tomorrow might be another, and you can always take learnings from where you started to bring them into where you need to go.

Kerry Guard 13:38

I think this is really key, because I feel like it's a delicate balancing act, as we know with marketing, especially to a complex audience of a bunch of skeptics who don't believe in what we do, and they only interact with it because they absolutely have to yay marketing to developers and IT people. It's so fun. We know that it takes a lot of time right to build up that trust and to have that relationship with them and that they're not going to buy with us out of the gate. So in terms of that pivoting, and I love what you're saying about more of an iteration approach, how do you internally keep your team iterating without feeling like you are constantly pivoting? Because when you pivot, you sort of lose some of that momentum that you had towards the other thing,

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 14:22

I think one thing is you can pivot a lot, and you can pivot your product, but there ideally is a core vision that you're you're building upon, and often that's about solving a sort of problem for a sort of person, your product and the offering and the feature set and what you launch and when might change. But if you're focused on, we're trying to solve this problem for this person, that keeps everybody focused and in line on working towards the same thing. And it's not uncommon. You see, you see startups pivot. You see enterprises pivot. You know, we see, we saw major rebrands with Jaguar recently. So it's not unique by any means, but it's a question of who's your audience and what are you trying to bring to them. And as long as that is always your core, you can keep everybody moving forward. You can maintain that momentum.

Kerry Guard 15:13

It sounds like brand is that sort of pillar that generally never changes. Jaguar took a huge swing, and hats off to them for giving it a whirl, regardless of how it landed. There was a lot of mixed reviews about it, but they took a swing and they took it big on brand, and I think that's where we're all sort of headed in regards to brand being important, and I love what you're saying, and why I'm doubling down on it is because you it sounds like it's a lot easier to pivot often when you have that always on brand messaging that is about the audience and the overarching challenge and problem you're looking to solve for them, and then the nuts and bolts can sort of move with that. But that would be the way to allow your team to pivot in a way that also keeps them grounded to something so key would be to build, to build that brand. Are you thinking about that? In regards to it sounds, it sounds like, from a stealth standpoint, brand is sort of where you're sitting right now, of what is this going to look like when we launch, and who is that audience, and what is that messaging? Or are you starting to get more down through the funnel already, or are you going to hold off on that piece until you're up and live? What's sort of the order of operations when it comes to lock coming out of stealth. I think you

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 16:41

do have to learn. I think you have to come from it. Brand is a component. But I really believe in the current motion that we're seeing in the market towards GTM strategy, brand is a component of your go to market strategy, and it can guide a lot of where you go with that strategy. But for your brand, you have to know who is the unique audience you want to serve. You often see startups coming out with this concept of large target audiences, B to B, B to B is a wild large space, right? So I think one of the things is finding your niche to some extent, at least for getting started. There's a lot of products out there that could be used by everyone but you, by starting with a niche, you can actually be very successful in a market and then expand. So I think that's part of it. It's like really understanding your go to market strategy, first and foremost, especially in startups. One of the things you often see is, you know, found founder led sales, right? You might not have an AE right away. So you really have to build operations to sustain that as well. I've had a lot of background in operations, so we're probably a little bit ahead of the game in terms of like, being able to implement our technology stack. Of course, we did start with the startup approach, even in early days, we needed a CRM. And as a traditional marketing operations background. I'm used to, you know, having a HubSpot, having a sales force, but most startups, from day one are not going to have that. Does that mean you don't have a CRM? No. So either you go and you pick a less expensive SaaS platform, if you have budget. But even for myself, for the very first days, I looked at the tools we already had, and I think that's something even enterprises are challenging marketers to do. It's like, what tools do you already have, and how can you be creative with them? So for us, early on, I looked at, we were using notion for product documentation, for general company documentation. I looked at, well, notion has database functionality. A CRM is a database. Why can't I build a mini CRM into notion? It's a tool we already have, right? So you can build a, yeah, you can kill build a leads table. You can associate those tables. You can build account tables. You can create now they even have an AI layer. So I think that's a lot of what marketing at early stages as well. It's what can I do with what I have? What can I do with things I don't have?

Kerry Guard 19:04

That is fascinating. Notion is so valuable. It's also sort of overwhelming to me. It doesn't feel as intuitive to me as a marketer, but I can understand from a dev standpoint why that might work for them. So it's interesting to me that, you know, I feel like we go to our go to Tools, because we feel like we can work faster if we know how the tool works. So how did you use notion before? Or was this brand new to you? I had

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 19:33

used notion lightly. I've had a few organizations, but usually it was more of like an internal communications hub. I do think that it's I had a thesis about 10 years ago, that all marketers would be technology first marketers. I don't think we've gotten there yet, but I do think we're still moving in that direction where more marketers are able to pick up the tool stack. And it's actually kind of a similar concept to what you're seeing right now with how SDRs are transitioning. There's that fancy new title we're seeing of go to market engineers, but all it is is saying SDRs, who do research using a marketing ops, sales ops, tech stack that they directly have access to, right? They're using clay, they're using perplexity. They're creating their own workflows. They're creating their own automations. But I think marketers really have to start thinking about as being marketers and engineers as well. We can't always wait and hope to have marketing operations resources. Lovely. If you do, I highly recommend companies at the right stages get ops resources. But a marketer shouldn't be scared to use a tool. In fact, they should be at the forefront and you have aI now there's, I don't want to say there's no excuse, but you can go and ask Claude or chat GPT. I want notion to do this. How can it? How can I do that? And it'll walk you through step by step.

Kerry Guard 20:54

So true. I was actually, I'm a pretty advanced Excel user, but I was like, trying to figure out a formula for something, and I was doing it on my own. I was like, I know I could figure this out on my own, but have to anymore chat how to how to create this wonky formula. And it gave me, like, the whole thing as one line, and I could stick that into one cell, but then I asked it to break it apart so that I could see the math and unfold. And it did that for me too. It was absolutely wild. I was like, this is I'm going to be so much faster. This is wild and awesome. So yes, hats off to you for not only figuring out notion beyond the base case of internal communication, but go to chat and figuring out how to expand on it. I love that. And I do think, you know, as resources get tighter and marketing budgets stay the same or decrease, we are going to have to get incredibly creative with the tool sets we have. So you know, peeking over your shoulder, what the devs got going on, is not a bad idea. Their tools are very versatile, and I love that in terms of,

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 22:04

oh, go ahead, I was going to say it's like, historically, the build versus buy debate has been kind of limited towards, do you have a developer to build that object for you if you want to buy a small tool? Do you have a platform engineer or DevOps person, and they would build tools for developers, right? It was the internal developer tooling. You would rarely have a developer with the capacity to build an internal tool for marketer. But now marketers can go build those internal tools themselves, and it could be everything from even many applications like you could think of a growth marketing and SEO applications, building something that you can launch as a marketer without necessarily having a full engineering team behind you.

Kerry Guard 22:50

Yeah, I think it's really interesting to think about what tools are out there that do one very specific thing, and then how you can stitch them together to make your to make one system that then goes end to end. And I actually there was a talk at cybersecurity marketing con about this exact thing. They basically gave away their entire tech stack and how they have them synced up so they can really, truly see the process end to end. And I think that's where we're all headed, of trying to, trying to crack that nugget of, how do we see what our marketing is doing and how it's impacting the customer journey, and what are all those touch points and giving giving credit, where credit is due, not just to one, but to the whole collective so yes to that. And I do think that we're in a what we're in a savvier place as marketers, and the tech now exists for us to be able to do that in terms of the hats you wear. We're, you know, we've been talking about, you know, our sort of that go to market strategy, and I want to pull that apart a little bit further. But before we keep heading down that rabbit hole, I'd love to understand more of what impact you've had within your organization, pre stealth mode, that's outside of marketing. How has your marketing skills transcended just the that GTM motion?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 24:11

So a lot of it has been on the product side. It's taking my knowledge of customers and messaging, and a lot of it is even marketing the test criteria. When you want to bring beta customers, you still have to pitch them. When if you want theoretical, if you were want to have investors, you would still have to pitch them. So those pitch materials actually do apply to more than just selling the product. Sometimes you're selling your company in a different way that you need to or kind of bring to light. The other is just kind of internal product discussions working day to day with engineers. A lot of marketers have more of that experience than they realize, and that they can bring to the table in a product role. If you worked with web engineers, if you worked with marketing operations, a lot about is. Taking that request, you have, that concept, that vision, and translating it and working with an engineer in terms of how to implement it and making sure that translation happens. And that's actually why I think marketers are some of the best people at using AIS, because we're so used to taking this theoretical out there concept that somebody has and drilling it down to a documented vision that we can write down on a piece of paper and then ask somebody to go do something with it. So I think a lot of that is like translating that subject matter expertise and those visions from kind of like our our conceptual phases, into what an engineer would go and build.

Kerry Guard 25:41

That always sounds like a pm on the product side. That is. That's fascinating. I mean, that's really what they do, right? They figure out what the audience needs and what what features need to happen, and then they work with engineers to bring those features to life in a way that meets the customer's expectations of usability. So, yeah, wearing the pm hat a little bit. Yes, yes, but how? How much easier is it going to be to actually sell the product? Having done that?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 26:10

Yeah, when you're involved at this stage, it makes a world of a difference, not only because you're passionate about what you've built, but because you really understand why people were asking you to build it, because one of the things we did early on, actually, as on the marketing side, we could argue GTM side, is we probably interviewed 50 plus people in our target audience, and really kind of built like a day in the life of their pain points of this of or trying to solve, what tools are they using? When are they using them? When is, when are they running into gaps? And those customer interviews pre product are just invaluable, and making sure you have the right balance of a breadth of perspectives, while not over rotating. I think one of the things you see a lot of startups do is they have a singular, massive beta customer and they build the ideal product, but then what you end up with is customer fit, not product market fit. So finding that balance of having perspectives you can bring in, getting that customer fit, but making sure that customer fit is representative of a wider market.

Kerry Guard 27:18

How do you ensure that is that getting a variety of potential customers into that flow, or is it built, getting the customer feedback, building and then getting the product into the hands of new potential customers? How are you sort of approaching How are you doing that? That sounds awesome, and I want people to be able to go do it. So I think there's

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 27:39

a few different levels of variety that you need. One is actually just personality. Take your target ICP, your target persona. There's very different personalities. Somebody selling me a marketing operations tool might be very different than somebody selling somebody else a marketing operations tool. So in your personas, you almost have to think there's a target persona, but there's different personalities within those personas. And making sure you actually challenge yourself. Who's the person who's been in that role for 25 years and knows how to do it, it might be less accepting of change. Who's that person who's been in that role recently, but is passionate and he's using all the latest, newest things. How do their perspectives differ on the solution that you're offering? Like, that's one thing. It's just that differentiating experience, personality perspective. The other is going to be actually market size, like rights of early startups tend to have a different perspective. Of like, quickly using a new tool, iterating than people at traditional enterprises. And the third is verticals. Even if you have a target vertical for your initial go to market strategy, you should still test your product in other verticals. If it's applicable. If your product is a complete vertical product, that's a different story. But if you just chosen a market that you think you'll have more leg room in that doesn't mean you only test in that market. Go and ask friends in other markets, if you're you know, if you're testing a creative design tool, don't just ask the designers, right? Ask the marketers who might use it, ask the people at financial companies, ask the people at creative agencies, because sometimes you'll get little tidbits of information that only come from that differenting opinion. But when you bring it back to your target audience, say, Hey, I heard this. Your target audience was like, Oh yeah, I felt that way too. But maybe they just didn't communicate at that time.

Kerry Guard 29:34

What are you trying to say for Atlanta, that we're all, you know, human and, of all, bit different and our experiences, we take it into consideration? I don't know what an idea I being totally sarcastic, but I also, like, totally believe in what you're saying. And i i Yes, like we set so stuck in tunneled vision on who we think this ideal customer is, and we. Don't really think about the breadth of who they are as individuals, from what you're saying, in terms of company size and their career experience, but even an industry right of whether they're in finance or whether they're an actual creative I think, is so important. You could even look at geo of where they are in the world. There's so many different ways to think about the intersectionality of these people, and we can definitely swing too far the other way and overwhelm ourselves than not have enough qualitative data to really be able to say for definitively, short, you know, definitively, one way or another. But I do think figuring out what those key aspects are that are going to impact the product, and finding the right people is crucial, and that's something we all think about. So yes, to that, interesting is

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 30:48

finding a balance of trusting the internal subject matter expertise. There's often this odd phenomenon, especially in larger enterprises, where a subject matter expert is brought in, but oddly enough, their opinion is valued less once they're brought in versus when they were external. So really thinking about if you're bringing somebody in for subject matter expertise, make sure that you have value, but also never mistake internal subject matter expertise for fully 100% representing your audience's perspective, even if you're part of the cohort, even if you're marketing to people like yourself, you're still not your target audience, just like I said earlier, you can get customer marketing fit. You can easily create brand messaging that resonates with you if you were buying it, but for not buying it, even if you're very similar to the people buying it. So it's like this odd balance of you need internal subject matter expertise, but you can't mistake it for actually being your buyer.

Kerry Guard 31:44

Yes, I yes to both of those. One of the things I love to remind what I when I start off as a marketing leader and I'm working with founders, is I love to remind them that they built the thing for themselves. You saw an opportunity to build this thing because you wanted it and what did you want it for, and really digging in with them on that as a starting point to then say, okay, how do I go find more people that were having this problem that you were having and that might look like you, and then branching out to where all the different use cases beyond just using that person as as the end all be all. So yes to that of your internal team, and especially your founder. Why do they start this thing? Why did they want it in terms of your go to market strategy? I want to know more around the exec, like, how you're thinking about bringing this thing to life. Or are you, know, let me ask this question first, how far out are you? Do you think of coming out of stealth mode? Do you have any sort of indication of how much time you have? Is it always changing? How do you sort of play within that space of known or unknown?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 32:51

I feel like that's one of those things you almost don't want to say out loud, because you don't want to do right?

Kerry Guard 32:57

Yes, yeah. So many times

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 32:59

in companies like, it's actually pretty common, especially in enterprises where marketing is like, go, go, go. We have to launch our January 1 campaign, the products coming out, and marketing is always so ready, and then January 1 comes out, and you're like, Okay, well, the alpha test for the product gave us some feedback. We're going to push it out through That's right. So it's like, I've learned as a marketer to just always assume that a data is flexible, and I think that's made the startup life a lot easier to learn that very, very early on in my career, but you always want to treat it like it's tomorrow, and I think that's the balance that marketers are in. I don't want to say it's an unfair circumstance, but it is a unique circumstance where we have to be ready to be completely flexible, but we also have to be ready to be told go tomorrow. It's often. We call it the hurry up and wait.

Kerry Guard 33:49

Yeah, so Okay, let's assume that baby, but hopefully not, because that's terrifying that you are told that you're going live, I'll get I'm not going to say tomorrow because it's December. Let's say January 2. Just give you a week and a week and a day here to, like, think about, think this through. But are you ready? And sort of, what is your initial, you know, strategy, as it stands today, knowing that tomorrow is another day, and it could be totally different. But as you're thinking about the product today, and as you're thinking about going to market with this, what sort of those we talked about, the building blocks of the brand and the more nurture piece. But what do you have today? And how are you thinking about bringing that to life?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 34:32

I think because we established brand early on, that is that is a piece that evolves, but you can always lean on what you have today. And one of the things with brand that's interesting is there's always a temptation to hold off, because it's like, it's not perfect. We're not there yet. Is it right? Is it not right? Do we do enough testing? But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how perfect it is. You're going to launch it today, in a year, you're going to resume, and six months after that, you're going to come up with a campaign that takes over your entire brand messaging. Anyways. So I think part of it is not holding on too dearly on the final product. It's not, are you ready? It's what is ready. And you go with what is ready, right? So whether that's you can always have in your back pocket a soft launch where you have a website and you some collateral, and you go, you could do the full marketing campaign launch like we'll see. You know, I personally have done a lot of big, big campaigns for product launches and for companies, for branding from from billboards to airport buyouts, but it's not about having the right set in that circumstances. What do I have? How do I make that work? And I think marketers are really good at taking that and putting together a working campaign. I'll never forget what a role I joined at one point, day one, and it was our annual biggest conference. Is in two weeks, you have to launch advertising today. And at first, I was that was my reaction. At first, I was like, today's day one. We need ads today. The events in two weeks. But halfway through the day, I was like, well, let's do what we what do we have? Let's use what we have. Let's not over rotate on how would I usually do this? Well, usually I would have three months notice, and I would have a design team, and I would do this, stop thinking about what you would usually have, and think about what can I do with what I have today? And I think that is how you launch a lot of companies, is, if we're ready to launch, you go, you don't. Last thing you want is marketing to hold off a launch.

Kerry Guard 36:27

I love to know, what if you could just finish the story out for us on that campaign you did where you only had two weeks to get people at this event, what was the execution on that? What did you have, and what did you run with? So the one

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 36:42

thing that was good is we had a very good customer base for that event. So we already had a good volume of people. I was on the digital side at the time. So one of the things is, I never like to wait. If there's a backlog in design, I'm going to create a bad design and get the designer to spend five minutes testing it, rather than waiting two days for them to start from scratch. That act is actually some often take is I'll do a bad version of something to get us started. Because if that even cuts 10% of the time or moves, creates a momentum people, there's a interesting reaction when people see somebody do something, they know they can do better. They're going to jump on it. But in that case, I was like, what do we have? Well, we had a web. We had a website for the event. So okay, so we have enough imagery, we have enough information within I think a day, I was like, okay, I can get LinkedIn ads live. I know our target market. We have enough collateral LinkedIn ads. I can throw into Canva and put something together. Search is text. I can go do search, and I can only imagine how much easier that would have been if I had AI, if I could have just thrown that website into chat, GPT and said, Hey, give me some guidance. Or, even better, my favorite right now, I'm pretty obsessed with Claude, because you can give it some materials. Here's a couple images, here's a text. Create an ad for me. It'll write React code and actually create the image of the ad for you, right? Create a landing page. Go write the code for you, right, and it does it live in front of you. So this ability to mock things up, iterate, create things fast, launching that campaign in a couple of days, like I did last time, would have been 1000 times easier. And I do think that your expectation of marketers is to be able to say, we have an idea today. Do it tomorrow. One of the biggest trends I'm seeing in B to B marketing is the speed from viral trend on, let's call it tick tock to before there'd be a transition go from tick tock to Instagram, to Reddit, and then about a month later, B to B marketers would have the same meme on LinkedIn, right that was the time right now you're seeing same day. You're seeing same day B to B marketers picking up these B to C, these generic means and trends, entering them out into B to B marketing same day, and I think we have to use technology to be able to keep up with

Kerry Guard 39:06

that. Claude, i It's the first time hearing anybody saying that they're using it, and it sounds very different than chat. GPT, in regards to the real time aspect. Are you using a bunch of AI tools? Are those your two go tos? What sort of your I know, guys, I'm going on another tangent again, but bear with me. I just really would love to know like, what AI tools you're testing out right now and what you're loving and what you are feeling like about

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 39:36

I do try to use as many of them as I can, at least when I come out, to understand their fit. I think we're seeing more and more people realize it's not that one is better than the other, it's that there's a tech stack of AI tools and you're using the right thing. So for myself, I like perplexity is a great AI search if you need current information. That's the one kind of biggest gap with Claude is their information is still, I think, April 12. 2024 I think it even corrected me the other day, saying, like, Oh, we're not in december 2024 yet I'm like, Yes, we are. So it's not about the most recent information, but I find its model is very powerful in terms of maintaining the context window in your conversation so you're less frequently correcting it, reminding it, asking for iterations, and it's forgetting a previous fix. Much better for coding in my experience so far. But I'm not using the level of coding. I know a lot of people are using GitHub code assistant, which is supposed to be very powerful that side of things. I like to use chat GBT as validation. It's not my favorite to start with in most cases, but I love to throw something I had one AI come up with, and I go to chat GPT, and I say, What do you think? What would you have done differently? What what outcome? So it's almost like that second opinion, kind of like a physician second opinion. So that's what I like to use. Chat GPT for image generation. There's obviously mid journeys, top tier, there's no there's no question about that, but there's more open source versions, and there's also quick ones. I have friends who aren't even in the industry, who realized on Facebook search, you can ask it to create pictures for your kids, and it'll I need a picture of a cat wearing an elephant ears, and it just a second later that it's there, right? I actually often use the Bing image search. It's accessible, it's easy. It's not the most powerful, but it does what I need it to do. The built in AIS in a lot of products I find are not quite there yet. Notion is slowly getting there. It's more helpful. Figma is launched. It's slowly getting there. I think we're going to see those pick up. And then we're seeing cool things on the coding side, in terms of V zero, which is creating quick components for front end UI really quickly. Just the other day I saw, I think it's called lovable, which is a dev app where you can text, create a restaurant app that only shows restaurants with these kind of things and let you rate it and like, here's and it goes and creates you that app really quickly. So there's quite the back. I think marketers really do need to pay attention. I've been refreshing the open AI video model that they just launched publicly every day to try to get an account. But if you're not playing with those as a marketer, it's gonna be hard to keep up. You're no longer going to be able to wait six months for a video production agency, and I think within a year, you're going to have to lean on some of these tools to maintain the speed of marketing.

Kerry Guard 42:34

Yes, I I'm overwhelmed in a good way, in a I need, I need to branch out kind of way I've been I've been very invested in chat GPT, mostly because I sometimes I think I got to get a handle on something before I can add to it, especially from I feel like I'm not learning chat right now. I'm learning prompting, because I feel like the only way to make chat GPT work really well is to really hone your ability to ask it the right questions in the right way and iterate on that over time to get to the best result. You can't just ask it the first time. Don't, don't do that. I spent

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 43:13

quite a bit of time on the marketing analytics side, and one of the things I've often worked with analysts, especially those coming new, into the field is training them on understanding what a person is actually asking for, and that's something AI doesn't do well. Today, they're not trying to understand what your intention is. Not yet, I think we're getting some improvements, but a data analyst really has to when you ask me for the bounce rate on this specific page, what was the intention? Right? If did you want to know if it was performing? Did you want to know if it was performing better than something else? Did you have an inkling that something on the page was wrong and you wanted to check it? What is your intention with that question? And that's one of the those things you almost have to ask yourself as you're working with AI is not what are you asking it to do, but what is your intention? And often giving it that context makes a world of a difference. There's a big difference between saying, write me a page about this, versus saying, I'm a marketer at a B to B Company. I sell to this audience. I'm having this issue selling to this audience. I think we're going to solve it this way. Here's copy for a page. Help me create a page that solves that problem. So I think a lot of that prompt engineering is about building intention into the ask.

Kerry Guard 44:31

Yes, the context is key. For sure, it definitely does a better job when it has all the information, as much information up front as it possibly can around. Why? Why this thing? There was a question earlier about another AI tool called Sora, s, O, R, A, yes.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 44:49

That is the video AI tool I had, I had referenced, I have not gotten access to it. It just launched publicly. So after this call, probably. Do another refresh and see if I can get it. But that image generation, video generation, that's not the only one. There'll be more that come out, but we're seeing it come out in production to Coca Cola. Latest Christmas ad this year. They spent a lot of money every year producing and they used AI, and there was very mixed feedback. There were those of us definitely camp by men who were blown away that it could even be done, that it could be done to that extent. And then there's a lot of people calling out, saying it's still not quite there in terms of having that human element, even when humans animated, there was this interesting concept I'm sure you've heard of, like being uncanny valley. When a human animates something, it still comes across as human when an AI animates it. We're still living that uncanny valley, that that unconscious feeling that something isn't right when you watch the video. But to be transparent, I think we're gonna surpass that very, very fast.

Kerry Guard 46:00

I mean, yeah, deep fake alone is, is a step in that direction, which is sort of kind of terrifying and also awesome at the same time,

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 46:11

great opportunity for cyber security companies.

Kerry Guard 46:15

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Let's close out here, Lena, with anything you have for the audience. In regards to, you know, I don't love advice, so if you have any experience sharing you can do around, you know, getting started and stepping into that stealth mode, what? What's one thing you wish you knew, stepping into this mode of knowing you were going to be more than a marketer.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 46:39

I think one of the things I wish I knew was the change of being a day to day operator at a running company versus at a earlier stage company really has. You have to really shift your mentality when you're used to looking at what has to be done today, what fires do I have to extinguish today? Like when those are your two questions as a marketer, and then you shift into it's not what has to be done today, but what should I be doing today? They're they're very different motivational methods, and that's why I think some people thrive in one and not the other. Some people really thrive in that external motivation, and at this stage you really have to have a lot of internal motivation and drive to get past that. There isn't something ever in a single day you absolutely have to do because a client's waiting for it tomorrow, or it's in production and it's broken, or, you know, an email went out and a link didn't work. You're never thinking like that. So you really have to challenge yourself to to be motivated on a day to day basis. And if you can do that, if you have that drive, it is so fun, because then you get to really think creatively of you know what? There's something I think we could do, and I have the time to go do it.

Kerry Guard 47:58

Time to go do it. What a what a novelty. I feel like as marketers, we tend to not be able to do anything unless our back is against the wall and things are on fire. So that is a huge mental shift. How do you stay motivated through that of feeling like, you know, but you don't, technically, you don't have all the time in the world, to the point you made earlier of needing to feel like you can launch tomorrow. But the same time there's probably because of the shift in mentality, there probably is a little bit of that breathing room where it almost feels like you do have all the time in the world. So how do you stay motivate, motivated and on top of execution, when it feels a little too easy to slip into this more theoretical, philosophical ideation place like when you don't have to execute just yet, or you feel like you don't have to execute just yet because you're not live, you don't have a thing. I think

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 48:48

there's, there's two things. One is you have to be very diligent about setting your own deadlines, even if they're not set in some sort of external factor. And then you have to actually find a feeling of reward in completing that task. You know, I've been writing blogs and content. I know we're not going to launch tomorrow, but I still have a goal, right of i want to write this many pieces of content for our launch, and I want to do it by this date and almost do like an even if you don't have a date set, if you have date sets, a little easier. But even if you don't have one set, an arbitrary What if we launch date like we're talking about, and create that work back plan, just like you would for a campaign, because worst case, you're ready early, and you get to iterate pivot. But even more important is you actually have to be passionate about the product you're building. That's something that you often see, is people go to early startups because of the fun of the startup, the concept of the startup. But it's not just the startup life. You have to be passionate about. You have to be passionate about the product you're building, because that is what's going to keep you motivated. That's going to is what's going to spark that extra idea of something that you can work on that day, that can contribute and add value.

Kerry Guard 49:58

I love that. That, yes, I find it really tough. I'm not gonna lie, as somebody who likes to get my hands dirty and make things, I find that I do that best when I do have my back up against the wall. So I feel like I would have, I would really struggle with not having a clear deadline so making my own I also feel like for me, having an accountability partner would be really key, which I do at mkg. You know, I'm my own marketing leader, but I have a PM. Avery Davis, I don't know. I can't imagine life without you, who holds me accountable to say you said you were gonna get this thing done, and it's not. And hey, it's kind of a waterfall cascade of when you don't hit a deadline that the people behind you can't hit their deadline. And I'm like, Oh, no. So there's that for me, it's like, okay, this thing isn't going to happen tomorrow, but my piece has to happen because of all this other sort of stuff. So I think even if you're a solo marketer, part of a team having some sort of accountability, who would you or if you needed that bullet, if you needed that, but you didn't have it as a mark, like, if you didn't have a marketing counterpart, right? A lot of times you're a solo marketer. These situations, how, who would that person be if you if you did need that as part of your organization? Right?

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 51:14

Today, I do think when you're this small, I think you have to be really, really in touch with the founders. And I think it's one of those, the second you communicate something that you are going to deliver to one of your founders that, in itself, is a extremely high level of accountability up to me. They don't have to check in. It's just like when you commute, I would say equal if you tell a CEO that you're going to get something done at a bigger startup or an enterprise, if you're telling your C level leader, I'm going to do something, it's it is very motivating to meet that deadline, deadlines that are arbitrary, that are ones I came up for myself that don't have an extra I'm going to do this by this date, just to do it. Does it? Does it affect them if I don't do that date? Possibly not, but by communicating that I've set that date to myself to a third party that sets that level it does

Kerry Guard 52:10

it does I feel like the minute you say it out loud and you tell somebody you're going to do something, then yeah, better deliver exactly, because it builds that trust. Because even if it doesn't matter, even if it doesn't matter to them today, when it does matter to them in the future, they know that they can trust you to get it done, because you've already built that trust, that level of commitment and trust I love that I'm so grateful for this conversation, I think so many marketers are heading into that sort of fractional subject matter, expert realm, and the idea of being able to join a company sooner than when they've raised money or when they've come out of, you know, once they have the product, is so it's, I don't think it's going to be an opportunity that they'll always have, but to keep their eye out for that, I think is going to be a moment, an opportunity. I think there's going to be a lot of products coming out of the woodwork as we head into, you know, with all these layoffs, that's sort of one of the wonderful happenstances when layoffs happen, is people go build, and they go create. And as marketers, we get to come along for that journey. And what better way to do it than to show up sooner than later to make it happen. So I am a little jealous that you get to build from the ground up. I'm a little jealous that you get to set your own deadlines and create your own sort of way forward. I'm like, really jealous that you get to hang out with the product team and influence that. And I'm so grateful and honored for this conversation. With Atlanta before we close out, where can people find

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 53:44

you? LinkedIn is definitely the best. I'm probably on 20 different slack communities. So if you're in marketing ops professionals or cybersecurity marketing society, I'm there as well.

Kerry Guard 53:57

We have to get you out next year. It was wonderful conference before we go, before we close out here, my favorite question given the holiday season and just the fact that I feel like we all sort of need this right now of joy, what's currently, from a personal standpoint, bringing you joy? Or what are you most looking forward to personally in the in the coming weeks and months to bring joy.

Vladlena Mitskaniouk 54:24

I'm hoping I have a couple days set aside. I started a new hobby maybe about a year ago or so, and it's a interesting hobby for me, because one, it's something that involves no screens. Two, it's something that I'm not obsessed over to the point of trying to turn into, like a daily thing. So I started bouldering, so like rock climbing without cables, and you can't check your Slack while you're climbing a wall. So there's something very special about the disconnect that you get when you're doing an activity like that, where it's both physical, it's mentally challenging, the puzzle of how do you climb? Them up the route, how do you and then being able to completely turn off the day to day thoughts about, you know, whether it's work or life, and really hone in on the activity you're doing. But again, it hasn't become an obsession for me. So I'm not looking at, how can I be the best builder. I'm not looking to compete. I'm not looking to go every day. It's a fun hobby I can do every week or two, and it's something I'm really enjoying to try to get a couple days in over the winter holidays.

Kerry Guard 55:29

I love the disconnect piece and what I not just about screens. I think that's important. Yes to that. I will be doing that with my children as much as humanly possible. We are not sitting in front of the TV over with Christmas holiday. That's my mission. But what, even more importantly, the brain break. Y'all, we're gonna need a brain break over the next few weeks as we close out 2024 here, take it. Find that thing where you can't think about anything else but what's in front of you, not that you necessarily have to go bolding without ropes. That sounds awesome and terrifying at the same time. But like for me, I play tennis, so for me, when I'm out on that court, I cannot think about anything else but that ball going back and forth, because the minute it does the I have missed the ball and I look like a goofball swinging through mid air. It's great. So I do think finding that thing is just so key to not just have over, you know, the this next few weeks, but what is that thing you can keep doing to get that brain break throughout the year is just so critical for our mental health, and I'm here for it. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. Thank you for being on the show, valana. It's lovely to meet you. Thank you to everybody listening? If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share. This episode was brought to you by mkg marketing, the digital marketing agency with SEO and digital ads helping you bring your brand for for those complex audiences, those CISOs and cyber security practitioners out there who love to not engage with us. But no, they have to. We are here to help you build that bridge and trust Yes, yes to that. Hats off to Elijah. Thank you, Elijah, for being my producer. I'm so grateful to you. If you'd like to be a guest, please DM me. I'd love to have you on I am, I am filled up through January, but I'm going to need to fill up for 2025, so let's go. Let's do it. I would love to have you. Thank you all so much. Have a wonderful, wonderful Friday and see you next time you.