AITW - Andrej Persolja

00:00:00 I went from a failed startup and having less than 200 bucks on my bank account to helping Aimfox scale from 200 K to 2 million in five months. It's been a wild journey.

This is Andrej Persolja, a positioning strategist and growth marketer from Slovenia, who has worked with over 100 tech companies from early stage startups to 50 million Euro revenue companies. And I'm Gabe Marusca and this is Authority in the Wild where we believe the safest path is the one you design yourself. If you're done following someone else's map, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Wild!

Andrej, what you just said is such a transformation arc, but it's not just that, it's real work that you put in for over 10 years to arrive in the place that you're now with Aimfox. But can you go a bit back in time and share how life was 10 years ago when you started Kobi?

I can, thanks for having me Gabe. Life 10 years ago was interesting, eventful, let's say. So I started out in 2015 ish. Our main idea was that we would just start a company. The reality was I knew that I had some skills that at that point were like 3D modeling combined with some programming, some development. We really wanted to create some kind of virtual walkthrough. So basically, if you were building a house or any building for that matter, you would be able to walk through the house before it was built, before it was actually even a blueprint.

We failed miserably with that. But in launching that company, we met new people, and we joined forces with some of those people, and we created Kobi. Kobi was my first actual startup. The problem with that was that when we launched, we launched first locally in Slovenia. We got amazing traction. We got like 2000 signups on day zero, the day of the launch, because we had amazing PR backing by the biggest TVs in the country. That was because we were solving a major problem for kids. Kobi was a mobile app that helps dyslexic children learn to read. Because we were doing something socially nice for the kids, the TV channels, the podcasts, the competitions, they were all backing us up and telling our story.

Locally in Slovenia, we launched and we immediately got users. The users were happy. The kids were learning. We were getting great reviews. Our average review on App Store and Google Play Store was between 4.8 and 4.9. We didn't even ask for those reviews. It was an amazing tide that we were riding.

Then came the US launch. Slovenia is too small. Slovenia has 2 million inhabitants. That's not enough to support a mobile app. The cost of our mobile app was 50 to 60 bucks a year. Even if we sold to every dyslexic mother of a dyslexic kid in Slovenia, it still wouldn't be enough to have a viable business. So we launched in the US with what we knew was a good product. And then crickets. Absolutely nothing happened. We tried to do ads. We tried marketing campaigns. We tried every growth hack in the book. Growth hacking was big at that time. Absolutely nothing worked. We couldn't get users to sign up. We couldn't convert them. Every book at that point was saying that you should talk to your customers, understand why they're not signing up. We couldn't even get customers on Zoom calls. We offered 30 to 50 bucks in Amazon coupons. They wouldn't even do that for 30 bucks. So there was no traction whatsoever with what we thought was a good product because we had a successful launch in Slovenia. That was the beginning of my story where I felt like a failure as a growth person. I was the head of growth at the startup. I felt like a failure because I couldn't get users in.

And 10 years later, do you already realize what was wrong?

Yeah, I 100 percent know what was wrong. We managed to solve it in the end. The last campaign that I did, this went on for like four years. After the four years, I stumbled upon April Dunford's book on positioning, obviously. Awesome. In that book, April said something like, if you have some loyal customers but new customers don't know what the value of your product is, you have a positioning problem. I had never even heard about positioning until that point. I went through a startup school. I went through college. I never even heard about a positioning problem.

That was exactly what we had. I started to realize that this is so important because we had this problem, which meant our marketing didn't work, our sales didn't work, our revenue was down. We spent close to 50K in ads without any ROI whatsoever. Why is no one talking about this?

We solved it in the end by repositioning. I did an A B C D E test with different positioning options after reading the book. I found that option C outperformed what we had at the moment by a significant margin. Our cost of user acquisition dropped by 52 percent. Our revenue went up by 200 plus percent. I fell in love with positioning. I said I want to quit this startup. I want to focus just on this. I want to focus on helping companies figure out their positioning because this is killing companies. This is killing startups. They don't even know about it.

When the point came where the startup got an investment, my decision was whether to commit for the next five years with the startup or to go on my own and start a business in positioning. I had no clients, nothing. I had to start fresh. But I decided to do it anyway because I was passionate about the problem.

Speaking of this problem, for those that are not aware, what exactly is positioning?

Positioning is basically the context that you're giving out about your product, about your service. It's a reply to who you are, what you do, and why the customers should care. If you're solving a problem, why should the customer care about the problem, and why should they care specifically about how you solve it. Your competitors and so on. So it's the thing that removes you from competition and says to the customers, I am the perfect solution for the problem that I'm solving, not my competitors. That's how you can charge more compared to a generic solution.

And I love that because you are a true believer in the fact that most companies actually don't have a product problem. Most try to improve their product, fix features, and so on. Most of them actually have a good product, but their big problem is positioning. How did you come to that conclusion?

The first stage was at my own startup. I saw that the symptoms April Dunford lists in her book were basically the symptoms we had. We had a few people that were really happy with us, that were engaging with us, that happily replied to every email we sent. But most of the people never saw the value of the product. So we knew there were people willing to go through the pain of our onboarding, of our funnels, of our website. Their pain that we were solving was so big that they were willing to give us the time to learn our tool. But most of them didn't because most of them didn't have that same pain. They gave up in the funnel. Based on everything I had read, that was a positioning problem.

Later I validated that on 100 plus plus companies working one-on-one. I have a positioning framework on Gumroad that was downloaded I think now more than 500 times. I get a confirmation every time I get a happy letter from a founder who says, we were stuck at 3 million, 5 million, 10 million. We couldn't find a way forward, and that was because our positioning was starting to break.

In the beginning, you set up with a vision, and the product has to do the heavy lifting. You have to get to the first million. If you're a SaaS company, and I mostly work with SaaS, the first million almost has to be done with a combination of a good product and a founder willing to hustle his or her way to the sales. After that, you start to build that positioning story, that narrative of why you are important in the world. You can analyze the first million and say, these are the ICPs, these are the companies we work with, these are their pain points, this is why they choose us. You can't do that with zero sales. The first million is almost always made with the product being good. After that, it's not about the product anymore. A lot of the products actually converge. The positioning becomes important because you have to compete with different alternatives, with different competitors. That's how you grow past wherever you are stuck.

Every time I get a happy founder saying something like, we were stuck at 3 million, 5 million, 10 million, and we figured it out because of something you said in a YouTube video or in your newsletter or podcast, I get confirmation that pricing, packaging, and positioning become more important as you scale than the product itself. Salesforce isn't a great product. It's just positioned in a way that it solves a real pain, and it's still being sold because it de-risks the person's career. The person choosing Salesforce over something else basically risks less if they go with Salesforce. That's where the value is. It doesn't mean it's a good product. It just means the product has value. That's what you have to be looking for. Building the product's value, not the product itself. A product with less features might actually be more valuable than a product with more features.

What makes a product valuable in that sense? When you describe it, at the beginning, positioning is less important, but as you grow it becomes more important. What should founders focus on at the beginning when it comes to the value of their product?

In the beginning, build not the minimum viable product as it's often thought, but build a good product, what you consider a minimal good product. Something you're still slightly embarrassed by putting into public, but at the same time you have some confirmation that it works, some confirmation that it provides value to the customers. Value can be anything. It depends on how we choose products.

Take cars for example. If I'm buying a new car, I have a set of parameters of how I will buy a car. For me what's important is going to be speed, power, how much it grips through corners. I have a set of parameters or needs I want satisfied. For my girlfriend, it's going to be something else. It's going to be the color, does it have manual or automatic transmission, and so on. She has a different set of parameters.

It's the same with your users. In the beginning you have to figure out what's important to your users. What's the pain point you're solving? Cars is going from point A to B. How am I solving it in a unique way? You have to map that out as you go.

As a founder, for zero to 1 million, figure that out as you sell. Try to sell as much as possible, but at the same time talk to the customers you're selling to. They're going to share why they bought from you, how they went through making that decision. As you get those answers, you'll find patterns. When you're at a million of revenue, you'll take a look at the notes and see, okay, that's a pattern. Basically 67 percent of our users say they choose us because we have the fastest inbox refresh rates, for example, at Aimfox. So we know that's important to the customer. What do we do? I can take that inbox refresh rate and put it on the website. I can put it into the email as the users onboard themselves. I can use it in my LinkedIn posts, in newsletters, in any marketing communication. Because that's important to the customers, I'm attracting not just new users, but the right users, because they're the same as the users that already converted. Growth becomes easier.

If you go from 1 million and on, and sometimes it's 1 million, sometimes 3, sometimes 5, depending on industry, as you grow, predicting what's going to be important next becomes equally important so you can continue growing. At some point you're going to run out of the users you were selling to, and you'll need to open a new segment. That's where positioning can help you predict what the next feature should be or shouldn't be. Should you make a bet or shouldn't you? Development is expensive, development time is expensive.

A lot of founders know they have to talk to their customers, see patterns, but most have no idea where to start or what questions to ask in customer interviews. What's your advice?

Do it in casual conversations first. You don't need formal interviews. To get customer data, you don't need formal interviews structured around exact questions. You just need to have a coffee. If you're passionate about the pain point or the problem you're solving, you'll anyway enjoy having a coffee with these users on a semi-regular basis. Everyone's busy, but you can take a moment to grab a coffee with someone who's been a paying user for the past three months.

Most of the knowledge, most of the insights I get, they're not from structured interviews. We barely do any of those. We do have a Slack community with Aimfox where users can talk about anything. Mostly it's customer support questions, but customer support questions open up. If a user complains about something, like the app was down for 30 minutes yesterday, we can go back and say, sorry, we're on that, we saw it. Why is that so important to you right now? They'll be happy to answer that. We'll find what's the urgent need they have. That urgent need can lead to new features, new upsell opportunities.

ChatGPT can easily give you good questions to ask in an interview. I don't recommend doing too many structured interviews. Coffee chats are good enough. Just be in touch with your customer.

When you trap it in a structured interview, you're in defense mode. You're waiting for the next questions or making sure your answer is good enough. When you have a casual conversation, it's different. Slack conversations are a quote unquote hack because people are actually complaining or sharing their feedback and thoughts.

It's more than that actually. This is where marketing should come in. You should have someone in your marketing team that is really good at what they do. A lot of people think marketing is about hacking and growth, that it's about finding different ways of growing. 80 percent of growth and 80 percent of marketing is actually research.

What we do is combine both. At Aimfox we run a biweekly live webinar every two weeks with partners, with clients often, and so on. A couple of days ago we had a webinar on how a client and agency got 5000 signups using our service in a month. That session was a live case study for us, a live case study for the client. It's a no brainer, a win-win. What we get from it is maybe 300 to 400 people and maybe 200 questions out of those webinars. If we analyze those questions, what were the users interested about, what did they ask, what were they passionate about, we can pull that into our knowledge, analyze it, and find ways to upsell or build the next features.

A lot of insights actually come from our marketing. Just having webinars. You're doing a podcast, it's a similar thing. Can you get users to comment on your YouTube videos? You can use those YouTube questions as a form of research. There are a lot of things you can do. A lot of it, at least in the beginning, is hands-on work. It can't be automated if you want to do it well. Not in the beginning. A lot of founders don't want to do that because they're looking for scalable systems. Scalable systems only come into play at 3 million, 5 million, and so on. Before that, you have to do things manually. You have to do it for marketing. If you don't have a head of marketing that does that, find them, because it's going to save you a lot of money going forward.

You grew Aimfox from 200K to 2 million, so I assume you guys are still in the manual work phase.

Yeah, we are setting up the systems as we speak.

Speaking of systems, what system did you start implementing first once you saw the patterns and clarified the positioning?

We still haven't solved our positioning 100 percent. We have three different customer segments. We're working on that on an ongoing basis. We will be on top of it in the next three to six months.

The systems we started with, honestly, we started building them based on what annoyed us the most. What part of my job is most annoying to me that I should hand off to someone younger, a younger marketer. To do that, I have to create an SOP, the documentation of how the process looks like.

For the webinars, we have a document that says we run a live webinar every two weeks. Ten days before the webinar, or like Monday on the week before, we send out the first invite. We invite people who were at the last webinar, or a specific segment in our email service provider. This is the template. Wednesday we send another invite with a specific topic. We send it to the users that did not respond. So basically I set up the whole flow because we've tried different things.

At Aimfox we started doing one webinar a week. The problem is it didn't work. It burnt out our users too fast. Once a week is too many webinars for the amount of users we have. We changed to a live webinar every two weeks and now it works. Now we are getting consistently 300 to 400 live attendees, which means we know what's a successful session and what's not. We know how to get users to attend. We know what to offer them so we can convert them into Aimfox users.

Because it works repeatedly, I can now document that and hand it off to someone in my marketing team. Until then it's on me to figure out the systems. I'm the head of growth, the CMO. We have that as one function. I'm responsible to figure out what works, how it works in the best possible way, before documenting and handing it off to someone else who can actually run it for the foreseeable future.

We build systems based on what works well, and we document what we're doing. At the same time, that's the content I put on LinkedIn, that's content for newsletters. You repurpose stuff into marketing content as well. That's the best performing content on LinkedIn, for example.

When it comes to documenting, or especially testing, do you have a time constraint for how long you test an assumption?

We do. We follow the basic growth hacking rules. We design tests. We decide on prioritization. ICE scoring, it doesn't have to be as formal for every test, but basically what's the impact, what's the ease, and so on. We have weekly sessions where we brainstorm on things that need to be done in the next couple of weeks. We prioritize. When we prioritize, we don't just execute. We design how the tests look like, what success means, what must happen if the test was successful, what the KPIs are.

If we're running a webinar, we need to be running a webinar at least five times. In those five webinars we need to get to 100 attendees. Otherwise this doesn't make sense. Why? Because we can expect, based on previous experience, that about 15 to 20 percent of attendees we can convert with a special offer into users at Aimfox. If we don't have at least 100, that means we get at least 20 paying users. The math doesn't work. That doesn't mean webinars don't work. It just means webinars don't work for us at this point. Maybe we're just not large enough yet. We don't have a large enough user base.

Then you come at the end of this. You've run four or five live webinars. You see that you've converted 15 to 20 people. You can now start thinking about how it can work better. We have a list of about 30,000 churned users. Can we get them reactivated through live webinars? Webinars are interesting for users. These churned users expressed a signal that they're interested in our software. They were with us for some time and left. We have a better software now than what we had six months ago. Can we do webinars and get the churned users back as active users by just promoting webinars to them? That's how you start building systems to grow your company. Churned users are already in the system, so it's much cheaper to get them back than to get new users through advertising and Google ads, Meta ads, influencer marketing.

I must ask if and how you guys are leveraging AI, because it's such a huge topic currently.

Yeah, you can't really get around it. At Aimfox we use AI in the sense that it's part of the software. Aimfox is about LinkedIn outreach. It's about helping you have more meaningful conversations at a larger scale. AI is a big part of that. AI can do research that helps you write meaningful messages that actually open meaningful conversations. Our clients receive about 50 to 55 percent acceptance rates and 30 to 46 percent reply rates. That's because we're not just trying to scale and send a generic message. We have tools like AI that help you research what you should say and write messages that have a bigger impact. So you have more conversations, but at scale.

AI is a part, not a huge part, but a part of the Aimfox product. How I use it personally as a marketer, I couldn't live without it anymore. I was 100 percent sure this was going to be a bubble that's going to burst, that we wouldn't see anything productive, any meaningful result. It all changed in the past three months when I installed Claude Code onto my laptop. I gave it access to the tools I was using already.

My ClickUp agent pulls up my calendar at 7 AM and gives me a prioritized list of tasks I have to do based on the KPIs I have for this week, decided together with the CEO of the company in a meeting. I get a prioritized task list. It's based on data we already have in the company or in the AI tools.

For the live webinars, the biggest pain for me was reaching out to guests who needed to provide descriptions, bios, photos. I have a system that sends out an email, gets back the photos and all of that. I input a photo with a quick description and a possible title, and AI does everything else. AI spits out an improved version of the title, description, how the email should look like, when everything should go out. It creates the entire flow for the webinars. I just have to copy paste it into other softwares, into Luma for the registration page, and so on. It even creates a brief for the designers to create a webinar graphic.

It's like having five junior marketers working for you. You just give it instructions and it does everything else for you. I couldn't live without it anymore.

Yeah, I used it in a similar way. I have a Git repository with all the data that is being pulled from Google Workspace, from my Notion databases, transcripts from conversations like this podcast. Using Claude Code like that, it's such a life changing thing. You're able to have a very smart assistant that has all the knowledge and without relying on handholding or things that usually humans are good at. Humans are very good at things. Don't get me wrong. But from a biology point of view, you are prone to errors. When it comes to AI tools, yes, they might hallucinate sometimes, but if they have the right data and context, the right instructions and workflows in place, they can do a lot of things for you.

When I wake up, I have my list of things I know I need to tackle that day or that week. I have one at the beginning of the week, one at the beginning of the day. I don't have to make that decision. It's already made based on the principles I put in there. Personally I'm an overthinker, and if I'm sitting in front of the things I have to tackle, I'd be like, oh my God, what should I prioritize? Now I don't have to prioritize because I know exactly the restrictions I put in place, and it's prioritizing for me. I'm saving at least one hour a day simply because I don't start from an overthinking perspective.

100 percent agree. I'm the same way. I'm an overthinker as well. AI, I've built systems around that. I see overthinking as a helpful thing now because I can prepare way better than an average person can. That helped me a lot in building my career.

I started building my career as, 10 years from now, where do I want to be? Five years from now, where do I want to be? For example, I saw that I could work really really hard and get to 100K in revenue, but I didn't want to do that because then I wouldn't have the time to enjoy the small stuff, like snowboarding now. I didn't want to work hard to get to 100K in personal revenue. So how can I do that without having to work hard? My name needs to mean something. How do I build my authority? How do I build my name up? I need to have an amazing case study, or an incredible network of people. Both of which I started to strategically work on.

I've now come to the point in my career when I can have both the free time and six figures plus in revenue. It's about designing the life the way you want it. That's the overthinking part of me. Where I lacked in the past was taking action towards that design, taking action towards that future. What's the first step in just doing it? AI helps you tremendously around that. I started doing it when AI wasn't around, so I had to have systems where I was only allowed to overthink for so long before I had to take an action, even if that action meant scrapping it and not doing it. That was fine. It was a decision. It made me go from thinking to execution. With AI now it's that much easier because AI does the prioritization for you. AI finds your podcast episode, reads through it, you've already done the overthinking part, AI has done it for you, and you just get the list that's prioritized that you know will lead to results. So much easier than it was 10 years ago.

It truly is, and it makes our lives so much easier. I want to tap a bit into what you described, the way you design your life. I know as well you cap the amount of clients you work on. You're planning to move to south of Italy. All those things help you become not just a better marketer, a better growth person, but a better you. Can you invite us into your brain and tell us how you work those things through? What are your big nos? What are your hell yeses? How do you think through the process?

It's a loaded question because there's a lot. I've set up systems around my work and around my life where I'm trying to figure out on a daily basis what went well, what didn't go well. What went well is not just about the results for the company. The results for the company might be positive, but also how I felt doing them.

At the end of each day I have a prompt, this is not AI, but I'm journaling to a prompt where I have to answer a few questions. What went well, what didn't, what was really annoying, what drained my energy. My goal is to understand how I function.

For example, I found that having too many Zoom calls one after the other is just a no go for me. What I'll do is I'll design my day to not involve as many Zoom calls. What happens when you get a good opportunity that involves having too many Zoom calls each day, one after the other? What happens then? Do you say no to the opportunity or do you say no to the Zoom call? This is where designing your life and your life vision comes in. If the priority right now is scaling and going from 100K to 300K, I'm happy to take too many Zoom calls for a limited period of time because that's a part of the process. I have a good opportunity. A client came in and said, we are paying you 10K a month and you're going to be managing three teams, which means a lot of alignment and communication. Am I prepared to say yes to that? Or do I reject it? It depends on the priority. If the priority is scaling from 100K to 300K, I'm going to do it. If the priority is, I want to take some rest, I want to recuperate, I want to spend time with my family, I'm going to say no, even though it's a good opportunity. It won't make me happy for the next three, six, nine months.

It's about being really honest with yourself about what you want from life, and designing the steps to get to that point. Most people are not honest enough with themselves to actually do it. Those that do, in the vast majority of cases, the way I see it, lead very happy lives.

Most people, not everyone, but most people are exactly where they deserve to be. If you find yourself struggling on getting revenue, or you are getting revenue but you're not happy, ask yourself what has to happen for X to be true. What has to happen for a company to be able to pay me 5K a month? A company can pay me 5, 10, 15K a month because I'm bringing 10x of that in revenue back to them. My ROI is 10x. It has to be, if I want to have that kind of a salary. That's how I see the designing your life part of the conversation. You see where you want to go, you take the next steps, you design the steps you have to take, and then you take them.

That exercise that you mentioned, to actually journal and be honest with yourself about what drains you and what energizes you, is such a good way of looking at things. Without understanding exactly where you are and what you're doing, just going by the motion, you end up at a point where you're like, I'm drained, but I have no idea why. I'm not fulfilled. Without clarity, it's so hard to make decisions and design the life you want to live. I love that.

For those that resonate and want to connect with you or work with you, where can they reach out?

Just on LinkedIn. If you want to find me, Andrej Persolja on LinkedIn. I'm always active, sometimes too much, even during the weekends. Just shoot me a message. I'll always be happy to connect.

Awesome, and I'll put the links down below as well. To conclude with one question, what would you say to Andrej in those years at Kobi, if you were to go back in time?

It's actually probably a couple of things. One is if the product you're trying, if as a marketer, because I was a marketer, a growth hacker at that point, if as a marketer the product isn't selling, it's not necessarily your fault. That was one of the things that pushed me into always trying to do the best that I can. I felt like a failure because I couldn't scale my first startup. The truth is that sometimes even good products just don't have a market. Maybe the timing can be wrong. A lot of it, especially in the zero to one phase, is down to the product. You might be a better marketer than you believe. Don't blame yourself as much. That would be the first thing.

The second one is get help. Have someone on your side. I've always had that. I've always had a really good support network that made all the difference in the world. My girlfriend was with me throughout the good and the bad. I've had friends in business and outside of business who kept me sane in the worst of times and grounded in the best of times. Get support. If you have someone in your network, or if you don't, reach out to someone who has been through that. Have a conversation, pay a consultant, whatever you have to do. Reach out to someone who knows what they're doing because this can help you put things into perspective. It can help give you that clarity. You can't put a price on that. When you know what you have to do, you know where your strengths are, you know how to take the next steps to get to the life you want. It's just about execution. It takes time, but you know you're on the right way. If you don't have that clarity, you might just be running in circles. Get help.

This was Andrej Persolja, Authority in the Wild. If this conversation made you think differently about positioning and products, you know what to do. Reach out to Andrej. Subscribe to the show and make sure you follow along to not miss the next one. Until next week, ciao.