Leysan Zigangirova is CMO of Async, the AI video and voice platform the market previously knew as Podcastle. She spent roughly fifteen years building a marketing playbook in big tech before deliberately leaving for an AI startup: she started at Microsoft, became chief marketing officer of Yandex Cloud ('Russia's version of AWS') by the age of thirty, led that cloud marketing team for almost seven years, and then led marketing for Yandex's open-source portfolio. At Async she scrapped the annual plan within two weeks, rebuilt the marketing mix around social video and LLM visibility for an AI product with no existing demand, and led the existential Podcastle → Async rebrand — a complete repositioning into a chat-based AI video editor plus a developer API for voice agents, absorbing months of metric decline and internal resistance before recovery.
“When I joined Async, and we're building an AI product in a very fast-moving AI market, I had to relearn a lot of things. And I had to throw my marketing playbook away as well.”
“There is no demand yet for everything that we are building. Consumers just don't know what to go and search for. They need to see what magic AI is bringing.”
“I started to live in FOMO mode, in the fear of missing opportunities, because I started believing that whatever I do is either already done and I just don't know about it, or it's going to be done tomorrow.”
“The first thing I tried to do when I joined Async was to get the annual plan. And in two weeks, I understood that, first, it's not possible, and second, it's just going to be irrelevant in a month.”
“The one genuine thing that will stay with us marketing people is intuition — the ability to see beyond the numbers, to understand the larger patterns happening in the market.”
“AI is just going to amplify really talented people. And those who are not talented — just by using AI, they will not become talented.”
“All of the LLMs are grabbing information for their answers from the social platforms. Reddit is the number one source for them — there was a recent research from Andreessen Horowitz showing exactly that.”
“You need to be genuine, because a lot of companies go to this cheating farm and become really pushy. The best way is to try to help. If you are helping, then the attention will come organically.”