You’ve spent over a decade across SaaS, agencies, consulting, and now leading marketing at Stripo. When you look at the marketing evolution, what feels fundamentally different today and what has remained surprisingly unchanged?

The constant is us. People don't really change much, or at least not enough to matter. Same wiring, same instincts, same reflexes when something new lands on the table. Getting yourself, your team, and the people around you to actually shift behavior is still the hardest job in marketing and beyond.

Everything else is unrecognizable. The world moves on us so fast – politics, tech, new ways of delivering and consuming the information.

For a while, this role felt knowable. You had a direction. A few rough patches, nothing you couldn't work through. Change came slowly enough to absorb.

That window has closed. The role has stretched. You're still a marketer, but also an analyst when the data team is buried, a mentor when juniors are drowning, a driver when momentum stalls, technical enough to follow what your tools are doing, and someone who has to invent the next thing while running the current one. All at once. That's the bar to stay visible.

Email remains one of the most reliable growth channels, yet execution often feels dated. Where is the biggest gap between email’s potential and how teams actually use it?

It depends on the team and the size of the business, but the most common gap I see is the mismatch between how email gets treated and what it actually takes to make it work profitably over the long run. Everyone quotes the 37x+ ROAS number, but not every email blast gives us this sacred number.

Email isn't "send a campaign and wait." It's ESPs, clients, device behavior, IP warmup, sending caps, deliverability rules, country-specific compliance, and an inbox provider quietly tightening filters every other quarter, and so much more. Even people who've been doing this for years are still learning something new every week.

That's the part most businesses underestimate. Email isn't a channel you flip on next to the others. It needs its own owner, its own roadmap, its own technical depth, the same way any serious channel does.

Stripo operates where design, code, and campaign execution come together. How do you define Stripo’s role in a marketer’s stack beyond just being an email builder?

You're right that "builder" only covers one slice. That's what Stripo is best known for, and we keep investing here. But the platform does a lot more: testing, accessibility checks, AI, comments, and real-time co-editing. Pieces that fit whether you're one person juggling every task, a freelancer managing dozens of clients, or a 200-person marketing team trying to scale email without the process collapsing under its own weight.

Stripo is where email creation actually becomes enjoyable – easy, independent, and without the usual limitations.

Stripo enables advanced formats like AMP and interactive emails, yet industry adoption is still slow. What’s really holding marketers back from embracing these capabilities at scale?

Interactive emails can be the hard part of email marketing, especially when done the classical way, where you need designers, coders, marketers, and you still have to account for every email client and device limit on top of that.

That's the work we've been simplifying for years. We were one of the first platforms to support the format, and we've kept building. From courses that teach you how to design your own interactive mechanic, to generators where you drop in your data and get a working module out, to chat-style widgets you can configure in a couple of sentences – the path keeps getting shorter.

The barrier used to be real. Teams had to prove it worked, justify resources spent, fight for priority on the roadmap, then actually go build the thing. Most stopped somewhere in the middle.

Now, with new AI widgets, almost none of that lift is left. The tooling carries the heavy lifting even more than ever, and what lands in someone's inbox can genuinely make them stop scrolling or cause a wow effect right away.

AI is now part of most marketing workflows. How is it actually transforming email creation and strategy, and where are teams either overestimating or underutilizing it?

Most teams overestimate how autonomous AI really is. It can work independently, but you don't just hand it the wheel and hope for the best. The teams getting real value from AI are the ones keeping it on a short leash: cross-checking output, staying skeptical on purpose, treating every result as a draft until verified.

The bigger miss is on the other side. Teams underutilize AI because they don't feed it context. Your workflow. The tests you've already run. Internal insights or best practices, what worked, what didn't, and why. Without that, you get generic answers. Give it the full picture, and the output starts to feel like it came from someone who actually knows your business.

The way I think about it: you onboard AI the same way you onboard a new hire. Give it the data, the history, the rules, the things that broke last time. Skip that step, and you keep getting average output — or worse. Do it right, and AI starts producing work that actually belongs to you, not generic text that the model guessed sounded close enough.

Given your experience mentoring startups, what are the most common blind spots you see in how early-stage teams approach marketing systems and scalability?

The biggest blind spot I see is the creative angle of their own product. Early-stage teams are short on people and budget, which means there's no real upside in copying playbooks from companies five stages ahead. Listen to your audience. Adapt. Test. Pivot when necessary, or AI ate your business model. Try things nobody else in your space is trying and differ from competitors, not just with pricing.

Marketing isn't a cookbook. It's discovery, experimentation, and your own point of view on the problem you're solving. You use what you actually have, not what some Series C company spent millions to build.

The thing I understood is that scarcity isn't the obstacle; it's the edge. It forces you to find a route to market that nobody at a bigger company would ever take, because they don't have to. You do. That's where most of the interesting marketing outcomes actually come from.

Are marketers today too dependent on tools and automation? And what mindset separates teams that truly win at email from those that just keep executing campaigns?

Yes, it happens far too often. There's a pull toward believing the next tool will fix what's actually broken. But the tool isn't doing the work, people are. The right people using the right tools drive results. The tool just makes them faster at what they were already good at.

If we're talking about mindset, the trait I keep coming back to is flexibility. Too many teams lean on stability — repeating the same routines because that's how they hit numbers last year — and end up losing ground to the ones willing to experiment.

Try something new and accept calculated risk. Test a new approach before there's a case study about it. Trendjack on social media while the moment is still hot. Pick up a tool while it's awkward to use, not after everyone else figured it out. AI is the obvious example right now. The teams already learning how to work with it will be in a different league by the time the rest catch up.