Damjan
Dimic
I build growth systems for companies where brand and performance aren't enemies.
Slovenian. Dad. Archer. Terrible gardener.
What I can help with
If you're dealing with any of these, we should talk:
You have a product people love but growth has plateaued.
You're spending on ads but can't connect spend to revenue.
Your marketing team is executing tactics without a strategy.
You need someone who can build the system, not just advise on it.
You're launching something new and need positioning, GTM, and the first 1,000 customers.
You want brand building that doesn't sacrifice short-term performance (or vice versa).
I've solved most of these. Some of them twice.
The Process
Every project I take on follows the same structure. Whether it's scaling an education brand to $10M or positioning an AI startup for enterprise, the process is the same. Only the inputs change.
This part takes the longest. Clients are always impatient first. Then grateful.
Diagnosis
"Before doing anything, understand everything."
- Market Research (Qualitative + Quantitative)
- JTBD Interviews: understanding why people actually buy
- Competitor Research: what's working, what's noise
- Brand Diagnosis: where do you actually stand?
- Product Research: what do users love/hate?
- Market Segmentation: meaningful segments with actionable variables
Most companies skip this. That's why most campaigns underperform.
This is where most people skip to execution. Don't let them.
Strategy
"Decide where to play and how to win."
- Brand Codes (visual/verbal identity)
- Brand Positioning & Targeting
- Positioning & Messaging (Product Marketing)
- Financial GTM Inputs
- Go-to-Market Strategy
- Objectives tied to business goals
Strategy isn't a deck. It's the set of choices that makes everything else easier.
This is where budget actually gets spent.
Execution
"Ship it. Measure it. Ship it better."
- Growth Marketing / Integrated Marketing Communications
- User Acquisition (paid, organic, partnerships)
- Retention & Engagement Tactics
- Product (pricing, packaging, distribution)
- Budgeting & Resource Allocation
- Tracking & Analytics Architecture
Execution without strategy is noise. Strategy without execution is a fantasy.
This isn't a phase. It's a mindset.
Optimization
"Nothing is ever done."
- Performance Analysis & Reporting
- A/B Testing & CRO
- Workshop & Team Alignment Sessions
- Iterate back to Phase 1 with new data
The best version of anything is always the next one.
I also built this framework into a free interactive tool. Try it →
You've seen the process. Now the honest question.
InteractiveShould You Work With Me?
Find out in 90 seconds. Warning: the results are honest. And occasionally funny.
Projects that tell stories
Each project is a chapter. Here are the ones that shaped how I think about growth, brand, and making things people remember.
Digital Art Summit
How do you get 46,000 people from 180 countries to register for an event they've never heard of?
Researched the digital art education market. Aspiring artists wanted access to professional workflows from working artists — not polished tutorials. Mapped competitor events: most were passive webinars with no community layer. The gap was interactive, multi-speaker events with real audience connection.
Positioned as the premier digital art summit, not another webinar. Multi-speaker format (30+ artists per event) created perceived value competitors couldn't match. Priced with urgency mechanics. Targeted the Procreate and digital illustration community specifically — not 'creatives' broadly. Each summit was designed to be self-marketing: attendees became advocates for the next one.
- —Landing pages: 60%+ checkout conversion
- —Email sequences: drove 70% of all registrations
- —WhatsApp automation: 85%+ open rates
- —Community layer: turned attendees into advocates
- —Speaker recruitment: 30+ international artists per event
- —Reach: 15M+ impressions across channels
- →46,000 registrations
- →$300K+ revenue
- →19,274 hours watched
- →180+ countries
- →8.8/10 average attendee rating
Avalan
Built a SaaS platform and signed 6 of 9 top agencies in the country before we had a marketing budget.
Slovenian agencies were managing influencer campaigns with spreadsheets. No discovery. No audience verification. No content tracking. The market was small but completely underserved — every agency had the same problem and no tool solved it.
Built for agencies first, not brands. Agencies manage multiple campaigns simultaneously and would pay for workflow efficiency. Targeted the 9 biggest marketing agencies in Slovenia with direct outreach. Yearly contracts over monthly — lower churn, predictable revenue.
- —Product: influencer discovery across 80M+ profiles, audience authenticity analysis, automated content tracking
- —Sales: signed 6 of 9 biggest marketing agencies in Slovenia to yearly contracts
- —Clients: L'Occitane, Philips, Publicis Groupe, Baby Center, Dedoles, Pristop
- —Brand: designed entire identity from scratch
- —Pitch decks: wrote and delivered all enterprise sales presentations
- →€15K ARR in month one
- →690+ campaigns tracked
- →18,928 verified posts
- →6 of 9 top Slovenian marketing agencies as clients
- →80M+ profiles in discovery database
Worthly
Same quality I charge €500+ for. 100% to charity. For a year. Here's why.
What if 15 years of photography experience could do something that doesn't make money? Not a charity photoshoot. Not a volunteer gig. A real, repeatable system where a professional gives their best work and 100% goes to people who need it.
Once a month. A few hours. Free portrait sessions. Not rushed snapshots — the same light, direction, and editing as sessions priced at €500+. All I asked was a small donation. 100% went to children's charities: Botrstvo and Projekt Vida.
- —12 months of sessions completed
- —Full brand identity designed from scratch
- —Landing page at worthly.damjandimic.com
- —Photography workflow optimized for volunteer efficiency
- →12 months of proof
- →100% to charity — every session, every time
- →Now building Worthly into a platform
- →Any professional can give their best work, 100% to charity
The path so far
Head of Growth
Scaling digital art education. 80,000+ students. $10M+ revenue. Built email marketing system, rebuilt landing pages (40%+ conversion), implemented full analytics layer.
Head of Growth
Influencer marketing at scale. 200+ brands (Samsung, P&G, L'Oreal, Heineken). 1,500+ campaigns. 171M+ reach. 16,000+ collaborations.
Product Marketing Manager
AI video startup. $60M+ funded. Enterprise clients: Reuters, Nike, BBC, Amazon. Made AI video feel useful, not gimmicky.
MDA (Marketing Development & Activation)
Consumer electronics across European markets. Built multi-market campaign frameworks. Learned what good distribution reach looks like at scale and where brand consistency breaks down when it does.
Education
Faculty of Social Sciences. Where the foundation was built.
What I got wrong
The wins are easy to show. These are the ones that taught me more.
Being a new dad and a professional at the same time
I planned for it like a project. Timeline, milestones, contingencies. Then the baby arrived and every plan evaporated. The lesson wasn't about work-life balance. It was about capacity. You can't run at 100% on two things simultaneously. Now I plan for 70% capacity and use the margin for the surprises that always come. The best work I've done was after I accepted this.
Not moving fast enough
I spent three months perfecting a launch strategy that should have shipped in three weeks. The market didn't wait. A competitor launched something 60% as good and captured the audience. Done beats perfect. I knew this intellectually. I learned it painfully. Now my rule is: if you're not slightly embarrassed by v1, you launched too late.
Trying to control everything myself
I built systems only I could run. Email sequences only I understood. Analytics dashboards only I could read. I thought I was being thorough. I was being a bottleneck. The turning point was hiring someone who did my job differently and in some ways better. Delegation isn't about finding someone who does it your way. It's about finding someone who achieves the outcome. The method is theirs.
The one where I spent $1,200 on an app that didn't work
I had an ambitious idea. $1,200 in credits later, I had a beautiful interface attached to nothing functional. Went to Cursor, took the backend and rebuilt the whole thing for $40. It's now the tool we use to scale landing pages and listicles. The expensive version taught me enough to make the cheap version work. And to never repeat. In the end still worth it though.
What I believe
"A CEO once told me my strategy deck was 'too negative.' It had three nos in it. I left it unchanged."
Most companies don't have a strategy. They have a budget with opinions attached.
Goals are not strategy. "Grow 30%" is an objective. "Become the category leader" is an aspiration. Neither tells you what to do on Monday. Real strategy is a diagnosis of what's actually hard, a policy that guides decisions under pressure, and actions that are coherent with each other. The enemy here is the planning cycle: the annual ritual that produces a deck full of objectives, a budget split across channels, and a set of initiatives nobody will kill even when they're clearly not working. I've sat in those rooms. The most useful thing I've ever done in one is ask "what would have to be true for this to work?" Most people in the room have never been asked that question. Most of them don't like it.
Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Lafley & Martin, Playing to Win.
"I've explained this to three separate clients who had just spent €50K+ on Google Ads. The conversation always starts the same way: 'but we're measuring clicks.'"
Your ads aren't selling anything. They're building the memory that will sell something later.
People don't buy when they see your ad. They buy when they enter a buying situation and your brand comes to mind first. That's the only job advertising actually has: to be present at the moment of recall, weeks or months after the impression. Most performance marketers measure the wrong thing because the thing they can measure (click, conversion, ROAS) isn't the thing that's doing the work. The brands that dominate categories didn't get there by having the best targeting. They got there by being impossible to forget. Mental availability isn't a brand strategy. It's the mechanism behind every purchase decision in your category, whether you're building for it or not.
Jenni Romaniuk & Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. How Brands Grow, Parts 1 & 2.
"I killed a loyalty program once. The client was nervous for a quarter. Revenue went up. We redirected the budget to reach."
Loyalty programs mostly reward people who were going to buy anyway.
Your most "loyal" customers are usually just heavy category buyers. They buy from you often because they buy from everyone in the category often. The CRM sequences, the points, the VIP tiers: they capture behaviour that was already going to happen. They rarely change it. This is the most uncomfortable finding in modern marketing research because it invalidates entire departments. I'm not saying retention work is worthless. I'm saying that if you're allocating 40% of your marketing budget to deepening loyalty in an existing base while cutting reach, you are optimising for the wrong lever. Brands grow by reaching more people, not by mining the same ones harder.
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute penetration vs. loyalty data.
"I once spent three months perfecting a launch strategy that should have shipped in three weeks. A competitor launched something 60% as good and took the audience."
If you're not slightly embarrassed by v1, you launched too late.
This isn't a productivity take. It's a market dynamics take. The window where your positioning is unchallenged, where your audience is uncontested, where your early adopters are genuinely yours to win: that window closes faster than any strategy deck accounts for. I have made the mistake of waiting for perfect. I learned it the expensive way. Done beats polished. Shipped beats planned. The obsession with getting it right before anyone sees it is usually fear dressed up as quality standards. The market will tell you more in two weeks of being live than in two months of internal review.
"I once wrote 'leveraging synergies' in a brief. Ironically. Nobody caught the irony. That was the day I started rejecting more copy than I approved."
If your marketing sounds like marketing, it's already been forgotten.
There is a distinct texture to marketing copy written by someone who is performing the role of marketer rather than actually communicating something. Agency-polished. AI-smoothed. Buzzword-optimised. It all sounds the same, because it is the same: the same register, the same sentence structure, the same reassuring platitudes. And when everything sounds the same, nothing registers. The best marketing I've seen doesn't announce itself. It says a real thing in a real way that could only have come from someone who actually meant it. I reject copy on this basis constantly. I'm not looking for grammatical correctness. I'm looking for the sentence that sounds like a human said it because they believed it. Most drafts don't have one.
Beyond the professional line
Most CVs end at skills. But the books I read, the music I make, and the things I grow (apple trees included) all shape how I think about building things.
Bookshelf
How Brands Grow
Byron Sharp
Click to read why
Why it matters
This made me stop believing in loyalty programs. Most of what the industry teaches about brand loyalty is empirically wrong. This book proves it with actual market data.
GoodreadsThe Long and the Short of It
Binet & Field
Click to read why
Why it matters
The IPA data that proves you need both brand building and activation. My north star for every budget conversation. If I could assign one book to every CEO, this is it.
Goodreads
MarketingHow Brands Grow Part 2
Jenni Romaniuk
Click to read why
Why it matters
Category Entry Points and mental availability. The science behind being remembered at the right moment. Changed how I think about what marketing is actually for.
GoodreadsThinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Click to read why
Why it matters
System 1 and System 2 underpins everything. From ad creative (make them feel) to checkout optimization (make it easy). The foundation of modern marketing whether you know it or not.
GoodreadsGood Strategy Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt
Click to read why
Why it matters
Most strategy is bad strategy dressed in jargon. Rumelt's diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action framework is the cleanest strategic thinking I've found.
GoodreadsPlaying to Win
Lafley & Martin
Click to read why
Why it matters
Where to play and how to win. Simple question, brutally hard to answer honestly. I use this alongside Rumelt for every strategic project.
GoodreadsFour Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
Click to read why
Why it matters
The anti-productivity book. Burkeman's argument: you have roughly 4,000 weeks alive. No system, app, or morning routine will change that. The most productive thing you can do is accept your limits and choose what matters. I read this during a period where I was optimizing everything. It made me stop and ask whether I was optimizing the right things. The answer was usually no.
GoodreadsBuilding Distinctive Brand Assets
Jenni Romaniuk
Click to read why
Why it matters
The practical companion to How Brands Grow. If Sharp tells you WHAT to do (build mental availability), Romaniuk tells you HOW (build distinctive assets people recognize without seeing your logo). Color, shape, sound, character, tagline. Most brands have a logo and nothing else. This book shows why that's not enough and exactly what to do about it.
GoodreadsMeasure What Matters
John Doerr
Click to read why
Why it matters
OKRs done right. Doerr learned the framework from Andy Grove at Intel and brought it to Google. The core idea is simple: objectives tell you where to go, key results tell you if you're getting there. I use a version of this for every project. The discipline of writing down 'what does success actually look like' before starting anything sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it.
GoodreadsThe Realmatic Project
I read Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings and couldn't stop hearing the music. So I made it. The Realmatic Project is two albums of Celtic folk meets cinematic rock. Each track follows a character through honor, loss, and transformation.
Photography
Published in Cosmopolitan, Grazia, Elle.
Currently Testing
Being a dad
"Everything I build gets measured against whether I'd be proud explaining it to my kid. The only metric that doesn't need a dashboard."
MTB
"Got an e-MTB. Immediately started researching tire compounds and suspension kinematics. I approach bikes the way I approach marketing: obsess over the setup, then go ride and realize the terrain doesn't care about your preparation."
Archery
"Started recently. Still at the 'hitting the target is a celebration' stage. But the focus required, the breathing control, the micro-adjustments. The most meditative thing I've found that also involves a weapon."
Gardening (badly)
"Inherited three neglected apple trees. Spent months studying pruning, soil, seasonal timing. The trees are doing marginally better. Invest now, be patient, the fruit comes later. Or the tree dies. Could go either way."
Now you know how I work, what I've built,
and that I make fantasy music in my spare time.
If that combination makes sense for what you need, let's talk.
Looking for growth strategy, brand building, or someone who can build the system AND write the copy? That's what I do.
Currently: Head of Growth at Procreate.courses.
Open to: working with founders and operators who are serious about building something that lasts.
Best fit: companies between seed and scale where brand and growth aren't at war.
Know someone who should see this?
Check out this guy → hi.damjandimic.com
Slovenia: 2 million people, one Michelin-starred lake, and somehow a Head of Growth who makes Celtic rock albums.