Damjan
Dimic
I build growth systems for companies where brand and performance aren't enemies. Currently scaling digital art education to $10M+. Previously: influencer marketing (200+ brands, 171M reach), AI video product marketing ($60M+ funded). 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 →
Should 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
Built and marketed multi-speaker summits from scratch. 15M+ impressions. 46,000 registrations. $300K+ revenue.
Created multi-speaker digital art summits from scratch. Recruited 30+ international speakers per event. Built the entire marketing engine: landing pages with 60%+ checkout conversion, email sequences that drove 70% of registrations, WhatsApp automation with 85%+ open rates, and a community layer that turned attendees into advocates. Each summit brought together thousands of attendees from 180+ countries. 8.8/10 average attendee rating.
Avalan
Built a SaaS platform from idea to 15K ARR in month one. 690+ campaigns tracked. 18,928 verified posts.
This wasn't a marketing job. This was building a product from idea to paying customers. Worked with a developer to take the concept from whiteboard to live SaaS platform. Led ideation on core features: influencer discovery across 80M+ profiles, audience authenticity analysis, automated content tracking, and content approval workflows. Signed 6 of the 9 biggest marketing agencies in Slovenia to yearly contracts. Clients included L'Occitane, Philips, Publicis Groupe, Baby Center, Dedoles, and Pristop. Wrote the pitch decks. Ran enterprise sales. Built the brand from scratch.
Visit AvalanWorthly
Free portraits. 100% to charity. A year of proof. Now building the platform.
The idea was simple. What if I used 15 years of photography experience to do something that doesn't make me money? Once a month, a few hours, free portrait sessions. Not rushed snapshots. The same light, direction, and editing I'd bring to a paid session. Same quality as sessions I charge 500+ for. All I ask is a small donation. 100% goes to children's charities: Boterstvo and Projekt Vida. Did this for a year. Designed the entire brand system. Now building Worthly into a platform so any professional can do the same.
Visit WorthlyThe 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.
Product Marketing Manager
Consumer electronics brand marketing at European scale. Multi-market campaigns. Learned that large organizations move slowly but when they execute well, the reach is enormous.
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 sent a test email to the entire list
Subject line: 'TEST - ignore this - Damjan testing.' Sent to 32,000 subscribers. On a Sunday morning. The open rate was 47%. Which, ironically, was our best-performing email that quarter. Three people replied with 'you're welcome for the open rate.' The lesson: triple-check your audience selector. The silver lining: authenticity apparently outperforms polished campaigns.
What I believe
"Strategy is a set of choices about what you won't do"
Good Strategy Bad Strategy taught me that most strategy is bad strategy dressed in jargon. Goals are not strategy. Aspirations are not strategy. 'We want to grow 30%' is an objective, not a strategy. A real strategy is a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions. Rumelt's framework. Lafley and Martin's 'Where to Play, How to Win.' Both come down to the same thing: strategy means choosing. And choosing means saying no to things that feel like good ideas.
Source: Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Lafley & Martin, Playing to Win.
"Most purchases start in memory, not Google"
Category Entry Points. Mental availability. The brands that win are the ones people recall when they enter a buying situation. Not the ones with the best Google Ads. Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute proved this with actual market data across dozens of categories. It fundamentally changed how I think about what marketing is for. Your job isn't generating clicks. It's generating memories that activate at the right moment.
Source: Jenni Romaniuk, How Brands Grow Part 2. Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow.
"Grow by reaching more people, not by deepening loyalty"
Byron Sharp's most uncomfortable finding: brands grow primarily through penetration, not loyalty. Your 'loyal customers' are mostly just heavy category buyers who happen to buy you sometimes. Loyalty programs rarely shift behavior. What shifts behavior is being easy to buy, easy to find, and easy to remember. Most marketers don't want to hear this because it means their carefully segmented CRM nurture sequences matter less than they think. But the data is the data.
Source: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
"The long and the short of it"
Emotional campaigns build long-term brand. Rational campaigns drive short-term sales. You need both. Les Binet and Peter Field analyzed the IPA Databank, the most comprehensive advertising effectiveness dataset in existence, and proved that the optimal split depends on your category and growth stage. Most companies are addicted to the quick hit. Performance campaigns that show ROI this quarter. It's the marketing equivalent of eating candy for dinner. Eventually, growth stalls and nobody understands why.
Source: Les Binet & Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It. IPA Databank analysis.
"Diagnosis before prescription"
Most companies start marketing by choosing channels. 'We need TikTok.' 'Let's try influencer marketing.' 'Our competitors are doing webinars.' That's prescribing medicine before running tests. My framework starts with diagnosis. Market research. JTBD interviews. Segmentation with actionable variables. Competitive analysis that goes beyond screenshots of their Instagram. Before a single ad runs, before a single email sends, before a single brief is written. It takes longer upfront. It saves everything downstream. Mark Ritson calls this 'strategy before tactics.' It's the simplest principle in marketing and the most consistently ignored.
Source: Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columns. Richard Rumelt's diagnostic approach.
"If your marketing sounds like marketing, you've already lost"
I reject more copy than I approve. Not because it's grammatically wrong. Because it sounds like someone performing 'marketing' rather than talking to a human. AI-generated, agency-polished, buzzword-optimized. It all sounds the same. And when everything sounds the same, nothing gets remembered. The best marketing doesn't announce itself. It communicates something real in a way that feels like a person wrote it because they meant it. This is a hill I'll stay on.
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.
GoodreadsHow 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.
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.
Oaths and Storms
Inspired by The Stormlight Archive
Epic Celtic rock and folk music bringing Roshar to life. Each track follows a character's journey through honor, loss, and redemption.
Ash and Metal
Inspired by the Mistborn series
Darker, more atmospheric compositions reflecting the ash-covered world of Scadrial. Metal instruments meet orchestral grandeur.
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: the right conversation about what comes next.
Best fit: companies between seed and scale where brand and growth aren't at war.
Slovenia: 2 million people, one Michelin-starred lake, and somehow a Head of Growth who makes Celtic rock albums.