Vassilena Valchanova on mentoring with GrowthMentor

Mentor story

Midas · 433 sessions

“The best feeling is the lightbulb moment, when their confusion is suddenly gone and they know what to do next. You haven't just handed over information, you've delivered clarity.”

Vassilena Valchanova

Digital Strategist, Trainer & Content Creator · Valchanova.me

Bulgaria · valchanova.me ↗ · Jun 2026

Content Marketing Copywriting Branding

The Work

Tell us about what you do and how you got here.

I quit my full-time job in May of 2019 and decided to go full freelance. I'm a digital strategist and trainer, and most of my work lives in content marketing in some shape or form, helping founders figure out what content will actually resonate with their audience and their brand.

I was seeing some nice initial results early on that kept me excited, but I also saw pretty quickly that freelancing is a lonely journey. When you're only working with the same clients day in and day out, you don't really get to stretch your brain, learn new things, or meet new people. That pull toward new challenges is a big part of what shaped how I work now, and it's why I went looking for a community in the first place.

Why Mentor

What made you join GrowthMentor in the first place?

I genuinely have a visual memory of the coffee place I was sitting in back in August of 2019, when I opened up a Typeform and sent in my application. I had just started my freelance journey, and I was excited but also feeling how isolating it can be.

The more egotistical reason, if I'm honest, was that I wanted to meet new people and think about different challenges I wouldn't necessarily run into in my day-to-day work. But it was also a great way to contribute a bit more to the startup community and help people who were really excited to grow and move forward, whether that was themselves or their business, and who just needed a little push. Or even just a kind face to vent to, someone who could say, I've been there, I know how you feel. That's really the main reason behind it.

Who They Help

After hundreds of sessions, what do you find most rewarding about mentoring?

It's when I hear a person say, or sometimes I just see it in their eyes, that we discuss something and there's this lightbulb moment where they go, okay, I know what I need to do next. That element of confusion, not really knowing where to go, it's suddenly gone. And that's the most amazing feeling ever.

You see that you haven't only given them information, you've delivered clarity, which I think is the thing we lack the most. Everything in marketing and growth is based on experimentation, on trial and error. There isn't one single true answer, so you have to figure out what the next step is. If I can deliver that, I'm really, really happy.

A Standout Session

How do you prepare for a session, and what does your method look like?

My sessions are usually 30 minutes, and it's very challenging to go through the whole introductory phase and still deliver real value. So I do the preliminary work first: I go through whatever's already out there, their website, their blog, their social, their podcast, and I send a few warmup questions to get context and shrink that intro phase down to as few minutes as possible. I also ask what they've already tried, so I can jot down notes before we even start. That frees up a lot of mental capacity to really think through what I'm hearing and be reactive instead of playing catch-up.

From the get-go I'll give them an overview of what I think we should cover, and then I ask which of those they want to start with, because we often dig deep into the first point and never reach points two and three in that first call. So I want to make sure we cover what they're most interested in first. And I always end with a specific next step, whether that's resources to read or something concrete like gather your team and brainstorm, or go talk to a few clients. They should leave knowing exactly what to do next.

Inside the Platform

What do most mentees actually come to you for?

In some shape or form, it's almost always about clarity, figuring out whether what they're doing or planning will actually work for their target audience and their brand. Most of the time it's really about asking the right questions and getting them to think about who that target customer is, putting both of us in the customer's shoes and working out what they need to see, what brings value, what questions need answering.

The cool thing about GrowthMentor is that I very rarely get sessions about very basic tactics. Most mentees are already good on the technical level, they know how to make an Instagram reel or boost a post. What they need is the strategic point of view: how do we decide what to focus on next, what content should we create. The hard part is never how, it's prioritization, too many good ideas. That's where most of the discussions end up.

What They Got Back

You mentioned message mining and swiping copy from real customers. Tell me about that.

There was a session recently about a product launch, figuring out how to position it and what messaging to use, and we got into one of my favorite ways of researching: message mining. You look for information that's already available online, reviews of competitive products, or discussions in communities where your target audience is talking about their problems and the solutions they currently use.

The mentee knew on an almost subconscious level that their product idea was good, but they didn't know how to communicate it to a bigger audience. When you're starting off without much copywriting experience, that feels daunting, you think you need to be super creative and dream up something amazing. So I told them, you know what, I don't consider myself creative either. What I do is swipe copy from actual potential customers and use their exact words to reference back their pain points, or the positive things they felt after using a good solution. You just mirror it back. You don't need to invent anything, you need to be a good observer. And I saw this sigh of relief, this realization that they didn't need to be the next Hemingway, they just needed to be a good listener. That's often enough.

The Filter

Lately you've been collaborating with other mentors. How did that come about?

These past few months have honestly gone under that theme of collaborating with GrowthMentor mentors, which is a really cool phrase, by the way. I have my own content marketing and messaging course, and as part of it I try to organize at least one live session a month, either a workshop format expanding on something specific, or inviting an expert to talk about their work.

So recently I've done some really cool sessions with John Ostrowski and Eden Bidani, and I have one happening later today with Hannah Lipschitz about email marketing. It's been a great way to meet up with mentors again and pick their brains in front of an audience. The students in my course have told me these were the most interesting, value-packed sessions they've had so far. So I can definitely vouch that some amazing collaboration can happen here.

The Verdict