I'm the founder of Contensify. We help startups and scale-ups figure out their unique value proposition and take it to market sustainably, versus the growth hacks you typically see. I've been in this ecosystem for thirteen years, and this is our eleventh year running the agency.

I got here a bit sideways. I completed my engineering, but I was pretty good with words, so I thought, let me try marketing and partnerships. I got in, started working with tech startups, and two years in I realized I didn't want to streamline my skills down to one company. Tech is always exciting to me, so why narrow it? I started freelancing when freelancing wasn't even a thing back then. I was working with a couple of good tech folks, then the startup market boomed across the world, I needed more help, so I made one hire, and eventually it grew into a full-blown agency.

We're nineteen people now, plus six or seven on a contractual basis. From the start I wanted to stay true to having a bit of tech in there, so we work only with B2B SaaS. That became our positioning over the years. Within that we've dabbled in martech, salestech, HR tech. I stayed away from fintech and health tech early on, on moral grounds, because I wasn't going to touch finance unless I genuinely understood the ecosystem, and I wasn't going to touch health tech unless it was purely tech and not health-related, because I'm no expert there. We've gotten comfortable with fintech now. Health tech still feels a little away from us, because it just doesn't feel right to work there.

A common pattern across all my calls, on GrowthMentor and elsewhere, is that we're back to basics. People are not really coming to me to implement AI, which is what social media portrays. They can figure that out themselves, or hire one time for the implementation and be done. What they want afterwards is a coherent strategy.

So the conversations are about the importance of a good point of view, good branding, a proper positioning statement in a crowded market. All the basics of branding and marketing are practically back, because AI itself is asking for them. I'll get a content writer telling me companies are reaching out saying do it cheaper, we don't want human resources, so how do we position ourselves? I get the same from SaaS products: we're a video generator, but aren't there far too many video generators already? Unless you have a unique value proposition, you're not winning the game either way.

There was an article on Futurism about people who used a lot of AI early on without assistance, and now they're doubling the cost to fix it because they need ROI, so they're bringing strategists back in to fix the narrative. And the narrative is the unique value proposition. It's all back to basics. That's the one thing repeating in every single call right now.

AI makes you feel like everything is possible now, so the too-many-ideas problem gets amplified. It's that classic feeling of, oh, that's nice, I could do that, this is possible, let me just get into that as well.

What I do is put every idea into a matrix. Is this aligned with what I want to do, including where I want to be in five years? Is it going to add immediate value to what I'm doing right now? If it's a random idea backed by no why, just because I saw someone do it on Instagram or LinkedIn, I leave it. I have a huge idea list of things I've dropped. I wanted to spin up a separate entity for sharing our AI experiments, then realized, why? If we're using it for marketing, it adds value within the existing entity, so I killed it. I got the itch to build AI writers and programmatic SEO tools, and my head of SEO came back and told me flat out, don't do that, AI content is getting scrutinized, use human content and use AI only for assisting. So the itch didn't happen.

The way I split it is short term versus long term. Short term, immediate impact, just do it. For me that's LinkedIn, because I'm the voice for my company. My notes are scattered around one topic, so I just dump them into AI and ask it to structure this, otherwise I'd end up with seven side quests out of one set of notes. That made me so much more active. The long-term ideas you actually have to visualize and commit to, or you don't, because there's far too much to be done otherwise.

I grew the company myself for ten years, and it's only in the eleventh that I finally found a co-founder. The thing he's been pushing aggressively is getting me out of the in-the-business work so I can work on the business. That push was needed, because if I'm buried in day-to-day client work it becomes, we only want a strategy call when she's on the call, and that kind of dependency shouldn't exist. I was getting exhausted, constantly on calls, and I have the best team in place, people who've been with me five years on average. So why isn't their skill being identified and trusted?

The thing I'm most careful to protect is quality. We grew organically on it for all these years, and it has to stay the same as we scale. The trap in this ecosystem is the bait and switch. B2B SaaS clients come to us burned, saying they signed with another agency because of a brilliant strategist on the first call, and then that person disappeared after the contract was signed. A lot of the time people sign with us because they want my brain or my co-founder's brain on it, and if we completely detached after signing, it would feel like betrayal. That's something I never did for all these years and never want to do. So even if it limits the number of projects we take, the idea is to keep it quality-focused. My days now are a mix of working on the business, a lot of active conversations with prospects, and a quality-assurance layer on top of the strategy. The mundane tasks like internal linking are automated, but there is always a human check on top, every single time.