ABOUT ME
I’ve spent 20 years trying to understand what actually makes a brand worth trusting.
I’m a science geek and a relentless reader, happiest when I’m untangling something complicated until it clicks. I’ve spent two decades chasing that feeling through marketing, the slow and unglamorous way: reading obsessively, testing what I learn in my own work, and getting deep into founders’ problems until I understand them from the inside. That patient work, the part most people skip, is where the good stuff actually comes from.
How I got here
I got into marketing in 2006. My early years were in-house, working with big international brands like LG, Dell, and Razer. I cut my teeth on brand-building and positioning by repositioning Ozone.bg, a scrappy gaming e-store, into the leader in the e-tailer market. Then I went deep into the startup world, leading content and messaging inside SaaS companies like Enhancv.
These were different companies at different stages, but almost always the same thing was waiting somewhere inside. A company that wasn’t quite sure what it stood for, or couldn’t say it cleanly, or couldn’t get it to show up consistently in the actual marketing work. So everyone started guessing. More posts, the newest channel, another redesign, all of it busy and none of it sure what it was really for. I started calling it marketing by guesswork.
And I couldn’t leave it alone. So I went out on my own, determined to get at the root of it.
What I learned, and what I’ve come to believe
What I eventually understood is that the guessing almost always starts upstream. A company usually drifts for one reason: no one has done the patient work of deciding what the brand truly stands for and how to say it. Everything downstream inherits that fog.
Years of chasing that root left me with a handful of convictions I now hold pretty stubbornly. They make me a little difficult, and I’ve made my peace with that!
I’m obsessively strategic. I won’t touch a tactic, a message, or a single piece of content until we’re clear on why it serves the bigger picture. I’ll cheerfully question a best practice that everyone follows and no one can explain.
I’m stubbornly hands-on. The thinking and the writing are mine, from the first customer interview to the final line. Judgment is the real work, and it doesn’t survive being passed down to whoever happens to be free.
I’m insistent on letting go. My favorite version of a project is the one where you don’t need me at the end of it. I time-box the work and hand the whole system over, because a brand you can’t run yourself is never quite yours.
I’m unbothered by the algorithm. I care whether real people understand you and trust you, far more than whether a feed approves of you this week. I’ll borrow an idea from coffee, jazz, or a science paper long before I copy whatever the competitor down the road is doing just to chase virality.
If I had to compress all of it into a single line: the brands worth trusting tend to be the clearest ones in the room. By clear, I mean something deeper than a tidy tagline. Clear all the way down: sure of what they actually stand for, honest about it, able to say it so it lands with real people, and consistent enough that you slowly start to believe them, one content piece at a time.
I get to help SaaS teams, service businesses, and solopreneurs do exactly that for a living, which still strikes me as a lucky thing.
Want to see how I actually do this with companies? Here’s the work →
I can’t keep it to myself
Here’s what I end up doing with everything I learn: I share it. The reading, the testing, the things I puzzle through all tend to become something I teach, write down, or pass to whoever can use it next.
Part of that is purely selfish: teaching is the fastest way to understand something properly yourself. Most of my own thinking got sharper in a room full of people poking holes in it and asking “OK, but why?”
But mostly, I just love the moment something clicks for someone. Watching a concept land, seeing a person realize they can actually do the thing that used to intimidate them, is one of my favorite feelings in this whole craft. It’s why I’ve spent years training students at the SoftUni Digital academy, teaching at New Bulgarian University, mentoring founders, marketers, and solopreneurs one-to-one, and building my own course on content and messaging. And it’s most of the reason I write at all: the blog and the newsletter are me thinking out loud, in public, hoping something clicks for you too.
Interested in what I have to say?
Check out my blog →
Ready to learn at your own pace?
View my course →
What matters in marketing, curated for you
So here’s the easiest way to keep this thinking close. I read around 180 articles a week so you don’t have to, and once a week I send over the handful that are genuinely worth your time: positioning, content, strategy, and the occasional tangent on where this craft is heading. A bunch of people read it. I’d love for you to come along.
Join 13,589 marketers who’d rather think than scramble.
A little context
A few numbers, for the curious
A quick few, offered as context and nothing more. Across 20 years, my writing has been read by around a million people; another 21,000 or so follow along on LinkedIn; and I’ve spoken at more than 20 marketing and tech conferences across Europe, with some pretty amazing feedback from audiences all over.
If any of it means anything, it’s that I’ve been showing up the same way, in public, for a very long time. The consistency is the point. It’s the exact thing I ask companies to do, and I’d feel like a fraud asking it without doing it myself.
And a few other numbers, for the genuinely curious:
- 12 years of drama classes and a passion for the theater I’ve made no real attempt to resolve;
- somewhere north of 6,000 kilometers logged training for half-marathons;
- a 6 a.m. alarm I actually respect;
- 18 months spent earning a wine-expert certification, purely because learning new things is a compulsion of mine. (No second career as a sommelier in the works, for now.)
Kimchi, my ginger cat, supervises all of it and has declined to be quantified.
Come say hi
If any of this sounds like your kind of person, whether it’s messaging design, content strategy, or the perfect recipe for a V60 pour-over, I’d love to hear from you. You don’t need a project, a budget, or even a tidy question to bring. Drop me a line, or book a quick intro call. Twenty minutes, no pitch, just two people comparing notes and seeing if we click.