Alex Barbarsky

I've bootstrapped a digital marketing agency with 15 team members and 50 active clients in 4 months. I also launched an IOS game with a total budget of $500. I’m happy to share my thoughts on how to: validate your startup idea with a super limited budget, develop MVP quickly and cost-effectively, find the best acquisition channels using Bullseye Methodology, and build a high-performing remote team.

Let's face it - we can't know everything, and we can't predict the future. That is why we should use testing on each step of the startup journey. I am a big fan of a technique called smoke testing. We can use it to validate our startup idea, target audience, positioning, landing page, etc. Just use it and you will be much more confident making your next step. I can give you advice on both a strategic approach and tactical test implementation.

I love marketing automation that saves time and helps you stay focused on strategies rather than tactics. As a program engineer, I’m not afraid of seeking innovative new solutions and workarounds.

Any paid ad campaign can be profitable. You just have to find out who your ideal customers are, what motivates them, and how to make your product stand out (grab their attention). Let's find answers to these questions together and make your paid ads profitable.

I believe that any analytics setup may be simple and easy to implement if you really understand what you want to measure and why. Start by defining questions that when answered can help you generate actionable insights. Then create a tracking plan that will include all metrics that you need to answer these questions. The final step is to make your team trust the data and actually use it. I will be happy to help you build this system for your company

There are thousands of tools on the market. Let's find out which ones will work best for your company, taking into account your goals and the options for integration with your current stack.

I use Google Ads as the #1 acquisition channel for most of my projects. I focus mostly on building funnels inside Google Ads: cold display campaign -> general keywords search campaign -> remarketing campaign -> branded keywords search campaign. If you can align traffic temperature with your offer temperature, you will stay profitable even in the most competitive niche.

A powerful product analytics tool that includes features like retention analysis, personas that can be used as a custom audience for ads, and lifecycle analysis. Amplitude allows you to understand how specific user actions influence the chances of them completing a conversion. Twitter discovered that a new user should follow 30 people to reach the "Aha" moment. You can easily find insights like this using Amplitude.

I believe that marketing automation platforms like Autopilot represent the new era of CRMs. I use them as one source of data and communications with customers. When you pipe all the relevant data into the marketing automation platform, you will find out how many cool automations you can build.

Customer.io is my favorite marketing automation tool – the most powerful yet simple to use. I believe that marketing automation platforms like Customer.io represent the new era of CRMs. I use them as one source of data and communications with customers. When you pipe all the relevant data into the marketing automation platform, you will find out how many cool automations you can build.

I believe that marketing automation platforms like Drip represent the new era of CRMs. Drip is more focused on the eCommerce segment, but you can use it for any business. I use them as one source of data and communications with customers. When you pipe all the relevant data into the marketing automation platform, you will find out how many cool automations you can build.

With a feature as powerful as lookalike targeting, you have to use Facebook Ads as a source of new high-quality audience. Using a seed audience of users who have already purchased, + a 1% lookalike audience = you get an audience of users similar to your existing customers. This is just one simple example – you can be much more creative with lookalike audiences.

GA is the most popular web analytics platform. While we are moving to event-based analytics, you should still use Google Analytics to track your marketing performance. In fact, I've made such complex GA setups that it was able to replace tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel. You can do anything in GA (note that it may not be the shortest path).

A tool that will save you a lot of time when you want to add new code to your website but don't want to bother your developers. Use cases: the only code you have to install on your website, limiting the scope of running expensive tools like Segment.

My favorite product analytics tool. I use it in most of my projects. It’s simple yet super powerful. Build beautiful dashboards and reports with all product metrics (MRR, LTV, MAU). When set up properly, it can be your only analytics tool. Note that if you are into mobile apps, you should consider Amplitude because it’s more powerful for app tracking.

One of my favorite tools for getting a better understanding of your users. Use cases: identifying why people are dropping off at a particular point, identifying problems with filling form fields, and running simple surveys.

My favorite CRM system – super flexible and easy to set up. I recommend it to most clients who need a CRM system in their business. Hubspot has a lot of cool integrations, so you can make it the heart of your marketing tech stack.

I love landing pages. You can use them for product idea validation, promo campaigns, feature testing, focused audience targeting, and more. Instapages is one of my favorite landing page builders. I usually build landing pages from Figma or Sketch design. I believe that with the proper skills you can make it almost pixel-perfect.

I love landing pages. You can use them for product idea validation, promo campaigns, feature testing, focused audience targeting, and more. Leadpages is one of my favorite landing page builders. I usually build landing pages from Figma or Sketch design. I believe that with the proper skills, you can make it almost pixel-perfect.

Knowing MySQL is crucial for a growth professional nowadays. It makes you independent in terms of data analyzes. You can build any report using MySQL, from something basic to really complex analyzes. I've personally worked with retention cohort charts, engagement charts, and all sorts of user segmentations.

A super powerful tool that I use in most of my projects. Implement all your events just once and let Segment do all the work of translating your syntax so that all your downstream tools understand it. Easily switch between tools (just one click, and all your data is sent to the new destination) and gather data together from different sources. Easily combine analytics data, email data, and advertising costs data, and send it to the data warehouse.

I love landing pages. You can use them for product idea validation, promo campaigns, feature testing, focused audience targeting, and more. Unbounce is focused mainly on PPC campaigns with cool additional features like dynamic keyword insertion. I usually build landing pages from Figma or Sketch design. I believe that with the proper skills, you can make it almost pixel-perfect.

I am not a WP developer. However, I am definitely a power-user. WordPress is the #1 CMS for me for any website because of its flexibility. You can build anything on top of WordPress: simple landing page (Elementor), blog, platform, SaaS product, etc.

Connect anything to anything. It may sound simple, but without a proper data pipeline, you can face some issues with more advanced connections. I believe that if you can map all your connections clearly on a piece of paper, then you can do it in Zapier.