MUP  - Nemanja Milic Show notes

What if your most successful product was born from the manual tasks you hated doing yourself?

Nemanja Milic, known as "Nemo," is a seasoned Ad-Tech founder and product owner currently specializing in AI-driven B2B lead generation. As an "AI tool building wizard," he helps companies scale their growth through "vibe coding" lead magnets and advanced automation. His work focuses on transforming traditional, cold outreach into predictable, warm pipelines by leveraging sophisticated technology.

Nemo’s career began a decade ago as a copywriter at Leo Burnett, but a pivotal shift occurred in 2017 when he moved into building live-stream platforms. The real turning point came from the frustration of drowning in manual tasks, such as hand-typing emails and hitting LinkedIn outreach limits. This struggle led him to pivot from manual execution to developing automation tools that allow founders to reclaim their time and focus on high-level growth.

Today, Nemo advocates for a "strategy-first" methodology that distinguishes intelligent AI systems from basic marketing technology. By integrating AI natively into the user experience, his framework ensures that outreach feels like a value-added interaction rather than an intrusive sales pitch. In this episode, he shares how modern founders can transition from "founder-led" manual sales to automated systems that maintain a human touch while delivering consistent results.

Key Takeaways:

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Closing thought: You know, you gotta test, you gotta try it out... because you can't do everything manually as a founder. You really need to focus on your strategy and the little details that actually make something work.

To learn more about our sponsor, connect with CEO Itamar Shafir at umbrellaus.com

What if your toughest sales calls turned into the stories that fill your pipeline?

Omar Majthoub didn’t begin his career in a boardroom. He started on the phones, making cold calls and learning what people actually care about and what makes them disengage. That hands-on experience still shapes how he leads marketing today: clear, simple messages rooted in real conversations.

On this episode of The Marketing Umbrella Podcast, Omar talks about the shift from dialing strangers to building campaigns that feel more like guidance than a pitch. He explains how paying attention to the questions people ask can reveal patterns that shape better content and keep marketing and sales on the same page. Whether you're a solo marketer or leading a team, he keeps coming back to one idea: good strategy starts with understanding people, not chasing trends.

This conversation gets into the practical side of how his team at Bith works: defining the right customer, making clean handoffs between sales and marketing, and tracking simple metrics that show whether something’s working or not. Omar also shares how he’s learned to cut out busywork, focus on the right channels, and stay close to customers, not just dashboards.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

Closing thought: "You have to market yourself before you market the product."

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What if AI could turn ad creative from art to science?

Ad creative is the black box of advertising. It drives 49% of sales, more than brand or distribution, yet it's the least understood part of any campaign. Hikari Senju, founder and CEO of Omneky, is changing that. With a Harvard computer science degree and a childhood spent between his painter father's art studio and his grandfather's tech career at IBM, Hikari saw something in 2015 that most people missed: generative AI could revolutionize advertising at scale.

In this episode of The Marketing Umbrella Podcast, Hikari shares how he built Omneky years before the market was ready. He talks about selling his first startup, the shift from agencies to in-house marketing teams, and why timing in tech means everything. Whether you're wondering how AI fits into your workflow or trying to stay ahead without getting left behind, this conversation will change how you think about creative production.

Whether you're running an in-house marketing team, trying to figure out if your agency model still works, or just wondering how to keep up with AI without getting left behind, this conversation will challenge how you think about creative production, data-driven optimization, and what it really takes to build something that lasts.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

Closing thought: "You come for the creative and you stick around for the workflow.”

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Most people think AI is here to replace creatives, automating the magic out of advertising and turning strategists into button-pushers. Pip Bingemann thinks differently.  As co-founder and CEO of Springboards, he's built an AI platform that does something completely different: it accelerates human creativity instead of replacing it.

In this episode of The Marketing Umbrella Podcast, Pip shares the wild origin story of Springboards. How he and his wife, Amy Tucker, got laid off during the tech downturn, moved to a tiny beach town in Australia, and accidentally built a SaaS platform now used by over 250 agencies worldwide, including two of the ten biggest companies on the planet. What started as a freelance experiment teaching themselves to code became a full-blown mission to fight the biggest enemy of great work: mediocrity.

Pip breaks down why the "click button, get ad" approach to AI is fundamentally broken, why he genuinely hates the term "marketing science," and what it's really like to balance a high-growth startup with two young kids and a dog. Whether you're a strategist wondering if your job is safe, an agency leader trying to figure out where AI fits, or just someone who still believes great ideas matter, this conversation will change how you think about the future of creativity.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

Closing thought: "Let's just inject it into a current process to help people explore more ideas. If you can help them explore more ideas, you're going to get better work."

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What if the future of advertising isn’t about who you are, but what you’re thinking about right now?

Brendan Norman has always been drawn to systems: how they work, where they break, and what others overlook. From being the first salesperson at Facebook Audience Network (where he helped scale the business to $3 billion) to leading Unity’s ad business through its IPO, Brendan’s career has been about asking better questions.

Now, he’s tackling a different kind of challenge: building Classify, a privacy-first ad tech platform that doesn’t rely on personal data. Instead, it uses AI to understand the meaning behind content—and matches ads accordingly.

In this episode of the Marketing Umbrella Podcast, Brendan explains how Classify emerged from his own frustration with traditional ad targeting. While trying to promote a niche ski guide service, he realized that existing tools couldn’t deliver ads with enough context. So he built something better.

He also draws a surprising parallel between startup life and his namesake, St. Brendan, both navigating uncharted territory with curiosity and a strong sense of direction.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

Closing thought: “Our vision is to organize content and make it searchable and monetizable in a privacy-safe way. We want to be the accurate library of the world’s content.”

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What if 80% of your marketing budget is actually being wasted right now?

Jeff Greenfield is an entrepreneur, advisor, and disruptor with three decades of marketing leadership under his belt. Today, he's the co-founder and CEO of Provalytics, a cookieless attribution solution that helps marketers prove the impact from upper funnel channels like CTV. Jeff didn't plan to get into measurement, but stumbled into it when he discovered a weight loss company was paying out five times for every new customer because all their partners claimed credit for the same sale.

Jeff gets that measurement isn't just about crunching numbers, it's about solving real business headaches and getting finance teams to trust marketing investments. He built and scaled C3 Metrics, one of the first multi-touch attribution companies, and exited just before COVID hit. What makes Jeff different is his experience living through both the wild west days of early digital and today's privacy-focused world.

This conversation digs into how the attribution landscape has shifted and why tools like Google Analytics are leaving marketers hanging. Jeff pushes back on the idea that digital marketing should be all about hyper-targeting and bottom-funnel optimization. Instead, he believes marketers have forgotten the basics: we're supposed to buy attention that builds awareness, not just chase clicks.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

Closing thought: "We invest dollars to buy attention, and that attention leads to awareness. When awareness is built up enough, people will walk into your store, and that eventually leads to clicks and sales."

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How AI search engines are becoming your company's most popular and least trained sales reps!

Michael Buckbee has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of marketing and technology, building solutions for everyone from the U.S. Navy and Fortune 100 companies to YC startups, presidential candidates, and even rock bands. Today, he's the co-founder of Knowatoa, a service that tracks brand visibility, rankings, and sentiment within AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.

Mike sees things differently, shaped by his background in both cybersecurity and software development. Rather than chasing high-traffic, low-intent content that worked in traditional SEO, Mikel advocates for focusing on mid and bottom-funnel content that actually converts. He explains how search is evolving from a destination into a feature, something baked into every application we use, just like spell check.

This conversation goes beyond just tracking AI search results. Mike challenges marketers to rethink their entire approach in a world where search journeys happen largely "below the surface" and traditional SEO metrics don't tell the whole story. His work with Knowatoa helps agencies and businesses understand not just where they rank, but whether AI systems can even access their content in the first place.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

As a closing thought, “AI search is already shaping how people talk about your company. You just can’t see it yet. But once you do, you can start shaping it back.”

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What if 90% of what businesses call "strategy" is actually just expensive to-do lists?

Alex M.H. Smith didn't set out to become a strategist, and definitely didn't take the traditional path to get there. In fact, he started his strategy consultancy before ever reading a single book on the subject. What he did have was curiosity, a knack for pattern-spotting, and a frustration with how often businesses skip over real thinking in favor of surface-level tactics.

In this episode of the Marketing Umbrella Podcast, Alex shares how his outsider perspective led him to discover the universal patterns that drive the world's most successful companies, without ever reading a strategy book. He breaks down why businesses like Tesla, Lush, and Monster thrived without traditional advertising, and how any company can build something so compelling that customers can't help but notice.

Alex also talked about the difference between doing strategy and just calling things strategy. He shares how small agencies, founder-led companies, and even big brands often run on autopilot, making choices without realizing they even had options. He also gets into what makes a company truly compelling, why bravery is underrated, and how being interesting at the core beats clever marketing any day.

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation: 

As a closing thought, "Strategy means creating something so wildly different that your competition becomes completely irrelevant.”

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Gaurav Bhattacharya, known to most as “G,” has spent his life building from the ground up. Raised by a single mom in New Delhi and teaching himself to code at age 10, Gaurav has followed a path shaped by resilience, curiosity, and a deep belief in solving real problems with technology. With over 14 years of experience across product, sales, recruiting, and machine learning, he’s built and sold multiple startups—including Involve.ai, a customer success platform that scaled to over 500 companies and 1.1 million users globally.

Now the CEO of Jeeva.ai, G leads a team on a mission to automate the manual, repetitive work that slows down sales teams. In this episode of the Marketing Umbrella Podcast, we dive into the strategy behind Jeeva’s explosive growth from 0 to $5M ARR in just six months, all without a dollar spent on marketing. Gaurav breaks down how Jeeva uses AI to find and enrich leads, personalize outreach, and handle top-of-funnel execution so reps can focus on what actually moves deals forward.

But this conversation goes deeper than tech. Gaurav shares lessons from bootstrapping, losing momentum, rebuilding from scratch, and why trust, not just innovation, is the backbone of every company he’s built. He talks about the importance of integrity with investors, what makes tools actually stick with users, and his belief that the future belongs to full-stack salespeople empowered by AI.

Whether you're a founder, agency leader, or just trying to scale smarter, this episode is packed with real-world insight from someone who’s building the future of sales in real time.

Key Takeaways:

As a closing thought:

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The Power of Weird: How Calm Used Quirky PR to Go Mainstream

Before Calm became one of the most recognizable wellness apps in the world, it was a nine-person startup in a tiny San Francisco apartment with a big problem: no one knew it existed. That’s when they brought in Peter Freedman, founder of Thinking of Think, a creative PR and guerrilla marketing firm known for turning offbeat ideas into global attention.

In this episode of the Marketing Umbrella Podcast, we sit down with Peter to unpack the viral campaigns that helped Calm stand out in a crowded market. From an AI-generated Brothers Grimm fairy tale to an eight-hour film of sheep standing in a field, Peter shares how calculated weirdness—and a lot of heart—became Calm’s secret weapon.

Peter also breaks down his 10 Golden Rules of PR and guerrilla marketing, explains why humor builds trust faster than a press release ever could, and makes the case that playing it safe is now the riskiest strategy of all. Whether you're building a brand from scratch or looking to reboot your messaging, this conversation will challenge the way you think about attention, emotion, and what it really takes to stand out today.

Key Takeaways:

Peter reminds us that standout marketing doesn’t always require a big budget, just bold ideas, emotional resonance, and a willingness to break the mold. In a world overloaded with noise, the brands that dare to be different are the ones we remember.

As a closing thought: “The best ideas don’t blend in. They break through. Quirky marketing works because it dares to be memorable in a world that forgets fast.”

Listen to the full conversation here:

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