Public Speaking
Talks that make marketing make sense
I bring the work in the trenches and the strategic big picture into the same talk. I distill twenty years of messaging and content strategy, in plain language, with frameworks your audience can put to work the next morning. And nothing is ever sold from stage.
Delivered talks at 30+ events across 8 countries
Top-rated workshop facilitator and speaker at industry-leading events like PLG Summit and WordCamp Europe
Spoken at events from 30 to 3,000, for a combined audience of 10,000+
The speaker your audience gets
For 20 years, I’ve done the work I talk about: positioning B2B brands, building content engines, and, lately, running AI-supported production systems that preserve a brand’s personality and point of view. Everything on my slides comes from real projects, including the failures.
On stage, I answer whole questions from the ground up: why marketing feels random, how good experts become visible, what a sane AI content operation looks like. I assume intelligence and never assume marketing vocabulary, so the same session lands for the founder who never studied marketing and the senior marketer two seats over. And since my full method is openly published, I give away the actual frameworks: attendees leave with working material, and you get a speaker with nothing to sell.
While we’re talking about the actual talk here, the Q&A bit or an interactive workshop session is the part of an event I often crave. It’s where the real connection happens and where I can bring even more value.
See it live
I’ve spoken at many local and international events, and you can check out some video recordings here:
More talks to watch:
The Brand of You
Personal branding for digital professionals
Building Content Personas
Define your audience with data, not assumptions
Building a Newsletter
The key content format to serve your audience and build a brand
What the rooms say
My talks have consistently received high praise from participants.
In 2021, I was part of the biggest event on Product-Led Growth, and my talk was among the top viewer favorites among more than 60 sessions:
In 2019, I had the pleasure of speaking at the biggest WordPress conference in the world, and my content planning workshop was rated as the top workshop by participants.
“Vassy has the expertise needed to present complex marketing topics in a clear practical way. And, just as importantly, she has the presence and infectious energy to keep the audience engaged and entertained. It shows she loves what she does – and I’m sure she carries that passion through to any talk or workshop she does, just as she did for the Creator Bootcamp.”
Benjamin Dell
Organizer of the Creator Bootcamp, Founder of Hey Summit
“Vassy’s information was paced out well, as well as something I could actually use, not simply “buzzwords” that one could find on a blog. She gave us insights, actionable goals, and was engaging.”
Participant in “The Content Planning Workshop”
WordCamp Europe, Berlin 2019
“To me, it was the most interesting talk of the conference. A lot of content. I’m trying now to implement your suggestions. Brava!”
Attendee of “Rule with data – measurement for your business”
WordCamp Milano
“I did some other work, listening to most presenters just as background noise. Then came you, and you got my full attention. You talked about the very real questions that I was pondering already.“
Edige Thein, Truth Technologies
Attending “Content Marketing Automation”, Future of Marketing Automation Conference
“The best speaker at the Soft Unit Conference! The talk was practical, interesting, useful, and inspirational.“
Attendee of “Building Data-Driven Buyer Personas”
Soft Unit Conf
“It was a really great workshop – informative, thought-provoking and very useful. It gave us lots of interesting stuff to go away and research, and you delivered it really well.”
Hannah, Guy &
Attending “The content planning workshop”, WordCamp Europe
Talks
Six talks, each one answering a question your audience is already asking, with an opinionated answer. Every talk runs as a 20-, 30-, or 45-minute cut.
A marketing-foundations talk: why tactics keep failing, and the order that fixes them.
When marketing feels random, most teams reach for a new tactic: another channel, a rebrand, a louder posting schedule. After 20 years inside B2B companies, I keep finding the same pattern underneath: the copy struggles because the messaging was never settled, and the messaging wobbles because nobody agreed what the company stands for. This talk maps the three levels (positioning, messaging, copy), shows how to spot which one is broken from the symptoms alone, and sends everyone home with a diagnostic to run on Monday morning. It opens with the seven years my own homepage headline was a placeholder.
Best for: founders, owners, and business leads who run marketing without formal training.
A personal-branding talk: the system that makes real expertise visible.
You’ve spent years getting genuinely good at your work. Your clients rave, your peers ask for advice, and when someone goes looking for an expert to hire, invite on a podcast, or put on a stage, your name never comes up. I call this the expertise-visibility gap. This talk shares the three-part system I used to become visible from Bulgaria, with no network and no famous employer behind me: stand for one clear thing, find the content angles only your experience can produce, and build a consistency routine that survives your busiest weeks, with AI as a sparring partner rather than a ghostwriter.
Best for: experts, consultants, founders, and technical audiences who find self-promotion uncomfortable.
An AI content-operations talk: how to scale production without losing your voice.
The first AI-assisted article I published checked every box: on topic, well structured, grammatically spotless. It was also the most forgettable thing I’d written in 20 years of content work. Today my entire newsletter ships through an AI-supported production system and sounds more like me than my drafts from two years ago. The distance between those two outcomes is this talk: a complete operating model (human ideation, AI drafting, human editing), the context blocks that teach a model your voice, and the written standards that catch the drift toward what I call the confident average. Shown live, from my own production stack.
Best for: anyone already using AI for content and quietly unhappy with how generic it sounds.
A differentiation-strategy talk: how businesses stand out when AI makes polish free.
In the 1860s, Napoleon III honored his most important dinner guests with aluminum cutlery; gold was for the ordinary tables. Then industrial production scaled. Polish is on the same path: AI has made competent, professional content the default setting, and when everything reads well, reading well stops setting anyone apart. Businesses have been escaping that trap for 150 years, and the plays are documented, from the Michelin brothers’ restaurant guide to Heinz’s 57. This talk turns that history into a menu of differentiation plays you can pick from deliberately, closing with the two that AI strengthens: a visible human leader, and a community that would keep talking if you left the room.
Best for: business owners, founders, and marketing leads in crowded markets.
A messaging-research talk: a research-grade method that runs on assets you already own.
Most B2B messaging gets written by the people who know the product best and buy it never. Meanwhile, the people who do buy describe the product every day: in reviews, in communities, on sales calls, in exactly the words that would convince the next buyer. This talk shows the system I use with clients: jobs-to-be-done interviews that surface why people really switch, message mining that harvests buyer language from sources you already own, and the emotional slot most B2B copy leaves empty. When I replaced four demographic personas with two customer jobs at Enhancv, trial signups rose 28%. The interview script and the mining checklist go home with the room.
Best for: founders and hands-on marketers who write or approve messaging without a research budget.
A brand-voice talk: defining a personality your whole team (and your AI tools) can write in.
The longest-running talk in my lineup, and its argument has only sharpened: now that AI has made polished writing the default, a distinct voice has to be structural, rooted in what your brand stands for and defined precisely enough that your whole team can reproduce it. This session walks through the voice spectrum exercises I use in client work and ends in an actionable voice blueprint you can apply across every touchpoint, from blog posts to your 404 page.
Best for: marketing teams and brand owners whose content reads competent and sounds like no one in particular.
Workshops
I’ve trained more than 600 marketers in hands-on sessions, from conference workshop slots to full training days. Every workshop below runs on the participants’ real brand and materials, because that’s where the learning sticks.
The Positioning Workshop
What You Stand For, on One Page
Most teams first notice a positioning problem somewhere downstream: the homepage rewrite that stalls, the sales deck everyone on the team describes differently. This workshop fixes it at the source.
We run the layered exercises I use in client work (ideal customer, competitive alternatives, unique attributes, the onliness statement) and collapse them into a one-page positioning foundation. Every step comes with a worked example from the process I recently ran on my own brand, live and in public. Participants leave with a working v1 of what they stand for and a map of where it needs to live next: homepage, sales materials, profiles.
The Content Strategy Workshop
A Plan Built on Your Positioning
Plenty of teams publish regularly and still can’t say what the content is for; topics come from whoever had an idea that week, and the calendar fills with random acts of content. This workshop replaces the guessing with a plan.
We build the content blueprint: goals, channels, and topic categories grounded in your positioning, the remarkable angles only your experience can own, and the planning cadence that keeps it all shipping through busy weeks. Participants leave with a filled-in blueprint and a prioritized topic list, built on their real brand.
The AI Content Engine Workshop
Building Blocks That Sound Like You
Most teams that add AI to their content process get speed and lose their voice: the drafts are competent, publishable, and sound like everyone else’s. This workshop builds the missing layer.
We create the knowledge blocks that teach the model your brand, audience, and voice; your first reusable skill for your primary content format; and the quality layer, a scoring rubric and review loop that encode your standards. Everything is modeled on the production system that ships my own newsletter every week. Participants leave with the start of a working stack and the playbook to extend it.
The practical bits
Common event organizer questions, answered:
Where
Based in Sofia, Bulgaria; speaking at international events since 2010, in person and remote, in English or Bulgarian.
Formats
Every talk has a 20-, 30-, and 45-minute cut, so it can fit any program.
Audience Fit
I tailor examples to your audience; I’d rather ask you three questions in advance than deliver a stock talk.
Materials
Your attendees get practical working materials for every session, and bios, photos, and a speaker one-sheet are ready when you need them.
Planning an event?
Tell me about your audience and the question they’re wrestling with. I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right speaker for it, and point you to someone better suited if I’m not.