Viktor Orlov: “The real question is, ‘How do we build a product and a marketing engine that deserves to win the auction?'”

I think a great partnership starts with mutual value. Both sides need to bring something meaningful to the table, and both need to feel that they’re getting real benefits from the relationship. If only one side is winning, it’s usually not a partnership that lasts.

One mistake I see quite often is that smaller companies try to partner with very large companies without offering a compelling reason for them to invest their time. We actually made that mistake ourselves in the beginning. We approached some of the biggest companies in our industry and tried to convince them to work with us instead of our competitors. Unsurprisingly, that approach didn’t work very well.

The conversation changed completely once we stopped talking about ourselves and started focusing on the specific value we could create for them. We showed where we could complement their existing solutions, solve problems they weren’t solving yet, or help them unlock opportunities they might otherwise miss. That’s when partnerships became much more meaningful, and those have consistently been the most successful collaborations for us.

I also believe that partnerships between companies at a similar stage can be incredibly powerful. When both sides are growing together and helping each other succeed, it’s much easier to build a relationship that creates long-term value. At the end of the day, the best partnerships are the ones where both sides clearly understand what they’re contributing and why the relationship matters.

I think the biggest impact of AI today is in creative production. The tools available to marketers now are incredible, and creative generation is probably the area where AI is already delivering the most tangible business results.

I actually saw this evolution long before generative AI became mainstream. Back in 2018, when I was working in the travel industry, we were one of the first teams in our market to use dynamic video generation with Smartly.io. We built video templates where destinations, hotel offers, and train routes were automatically populated from product feeds. That allowed us to produce hundreds of personalized video ads and refresh them every week.

Today, AI has taken that concept to an entirely different level. You can generate creative concepts, produce the assets, adapt them for different audiences, and even launch them into campaigns almost automatically. What used to take days or weeks can now happen in minutes.

Where I think we’re still only scratching the surface is bidding and campaign optimization. AI bidding has become a very popular marketing term, but if you look closely, many solutions are either fairly basic or don’t really use AI in a meaningful way. The real opportunity is using AI to understand signals in real time, identify the right audiences, optimize bids, allocate budgets dynamically, and make decisions that marketers simply can’t make manually at scale.

I think that’s where we’ll see the biggest breakthroughs over the next year or two—not just creating better ads, but fundamentally changing how campaigns are managed and optimized.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that scaling user acquisition is mainly about having a bigger budget.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen many well-funded companies enter the app market. Some of them come from completely different industries and have access to enormous amounts of capital. Their strategy is often simple: spend more than everyone else and dominate the market.

But that’s not how modern ad auctions actually work. Budget certainly matters, but it’s far from the most important factor. Platforms are designed to reward relevance and efficiency. The quality of your creatives, the relevance of your keywords, your conversion rates, and ultimately the user experience your app provides all have a huge impact on your ability to compete.

We’ve seen smaller companies consistently outperform much larger competitors because they understand the auction better. They build a stronger product, create more relevant campaigns, and optimize based on data instead of simply increasing spend.

So I don’t think the question is, “How do we raise enough money to outbid everyone else?” The real question is, “How do we build a product and a marketing engine that deserves to win the auction?” Once you get that right, even companies with much smaller budgets can compete successfully against players with far deeper pockets.

I actually think the biggest trend isn’t AI itself—it’s what AI enables.

The barrier to building software has dropped dramatically. For the first time, people with deep domain expertise, but without a technical background, can build products that solve very specific problems. I don’t think the future is about creating another AI document scanner or another generic productivity app. It’s about people who truly understand a niche finally having the ability to build software for that niche.

Imagine someone who’s spent years in film photography, healthcare, education, or any other specialized field. They understand problems that nobody else sees, and now they can turn those ideas into real products much faster than ever before. I think that’s going to unlock an entirely new generation of applications that simply wouldn’t have existed a few years ago.

The second trend I’m really excited about is demand generation through organic content. In the past, marketing was mostly about capturing existing demand. Today, platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and even AI-generated video allow companies to create demand where none existed before.

You can build a product that solves a problem people didn’t even realize could be solved, and then use short-form content to show millions of people that the solution now exists. That completely changes how new apps are launched. Instead of waiting for users to search for you, you can educate the market, create awareness, and generate demand almost from scratch.

I think the combination of these two trends—making it dramatically easier to build great products and dramatically easier to create demand for them—is going to reshape the mobile app industry over the next few years.

The biggest challenge we’re solving is giving app marketers complete visibility and control over their Apple Ads campaigns while making them easier to scale and more profitable.

Apple Ads is an incredibly powerful platform, but it’s also surprisingly difficult to manage at scale. As campaigns grow, marketers often lose visibility into what’s actually driving performance. Campaign structures become messy, optimization becomes manual, and making confident decisions gets harder over time.

At Asapty, we’ve built our entire platform around solving that problem. We can completely restructure an Apple Ads account in a single day, giving marketers full control over every keyword, every campaign, and every optimization decision. Instead of asking customers to trust us, we simply show them the difference. We rebuild the account, compare the before and after, and let the results speak for themselves.

What makes us different is that we don’t just provide another dashboard or another layer of reporting. We fundamentally change how Apple Ads accounts are structured and managed. That gives marketers transparency, scalability, and a level of control that simply isn’t available anywhere else today.