You've led marketing through startup chaos, growth-stage scale, and public-company maturity. What lessons have stayed with you and how do they influence the way you build Manychat?
One of the earliest lessons I learned in marketing came from running a paid search campaign alongside a seemingly unmeasurable billboard campaign. The billboards appeared to do nothing for organic or direct traffic, except that while they were up, our paid search suddenly performed dramatically better.
This taught me early on that marketing doesn’t work in isolated channels, even though our measurement systems have forced marketers to think otherwise.
Over the years, that lesson has evolved into a broader belief: everything we do in marketing culminates in fleeting moments of interface with our audience. That exposure to our brand, message and product is the only vehicle we have for influencing the market and driving outcomes. Grow your potential for exposure, and you grow your potential for impact.
Said simply: distribution is the mother of all unfair advantages.
That lesson has had a huge influence on how I’ve built marketing at Manychat. As we’ve grown the team, I’ve thought about it as layering on capabilities that increase our ability to distribute: content, creators, affiliates, social, community, events, paid. Not as a collection of separate channels competing for attribution, but as a system for making our message increasingly prevalent.
Manychat believes the most valuable moment on social isn't the post; it's what happens after someone engages. What are most brands still missing about that shift?
I think most brands still fundamentally think of Social as a broadcast medium.
For most of its history, marketing has been a one-way conversation. TV, radio, newspapers, and billboards were effective at broadcasting our message, and their impact had to be measured indirectly through other means.
But social has one thing all those forms of media never had: the audience can talk back.
And I think most brands still underestimate what that means. We treat a comment or a DM as ‘engagement’; something to measure… when it’s actually an opportunity to connect with an individual, at a scale we could never have imagined before.
When customers comment or land in a brand's DMs, where do businesses usually drop the ball? And what does getting those moments right actually look like?
The biggest mistake is treating these moments as engagement rather than intent.
Someone comments “where can I get this?” or asks for more info in a DM, and they’re telling you something about what they want. But brands typically leave these unanswered, let an intern respond hours later, or send everyone through the same generic journey.
Beyond getting the framing right, there’s another barrier at play: brands operate at mass scale, and historically there’s been no practical way to field thousands of these signals of intent individually.
Which is where automation comes in.
The opportunity is to combine the scale of mass marketing with the responsiveness of a one-to-one conversation. To recognize intent when it happens, respond immediately, and give each person a useful next step.
Beyond selling automation you're asking brands to rethink how they build customer relationships. How do you position Manychat so that message genuinely lands?
I think the important distinction is between automating for automation’s sake, and automating your ability to have conversations at scale.
We don’t want technology to replace the personality, authenticity and individuality that make people want to engage with a brand or creator in the first place. We want it to make sure that when someone does engage, they’re engaging with something that is true to the identity of the brand on the other side.
Creators understand this instinctively. They know their audiences incredibly well, and their audiences know them. You can’t suddenly replace that relationship with generic automation and expect nobody to notice.
So we position Manychat as infrastructure for scaling the relationship that already exists. The technology can recognize when someone raises their hand, understand what they’re interested in, and help continue that conversation immediately.
The goal isn't to automate the humanity out of customer relationships. It's to make that humanity possible at a scale where it otherwise couldn't exist.
Manychat sits across Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and more. How do you build one product and one brand when customer behavior looks so different on every platform?
Marketing is marketing. The job is to expose your audience to your brand, message and product in order to influence it towards familiarity, affinity, trust and action. What changes between channels is the culture, the formats, the audience segments - these differences call for specialized content, not specialized mechanisms.
As social platforms become more conversational and commerce-driven, what shifts do you think brands need to prepare for now, not two years from now?
Your customers are no longer joining the conversation you crafted for them. You’re joining theirs.
For a long time, brands had relative control over the customer journey. They chose the message, the medium, the moment, and built funnels designed to move people through a sequence they aimed to control.
Social has inverted that. Conversations about your brand, your category and your products are happening constantly, whether you initiated them or not. Your customers decide where they encounter you, what they want to talk about, and when they’re ready to engage.
So brands need to get much better at listening for those moments and joining them. Not dragging people back into the journey we designed for them, but being useful in the one they’re already on.
That requires a different kind of marketing infrastructure: one built to recognize intent and participate in millions of conversations as they happen.
