Igor Vranješ, Founder & CEO
Market entry, positioning and growth.
I started Stratika to solve a problem I kept running into: companies with a good product, a market full of established competitors, and buyers who had no clear reason to switch. Products cross borders easily. Trust doesn’t.
I learned marketing by doing it. Since 2017 I have run Meta and Google Ads campaigns, SEO and content, websites and landing pages, social media and community building, influencer campaigns, events and offline promotion, and worked with distributors and trade partners, before leading marketing as head of marketing and CMO. So when I recommend a channel, I know what it costs, how long it takes and what it can realistically deliver.
I come from Novi Sad, have worked from Novi Sad and Belgrade, and today work internationally from Ho Chi Minh City, in English, Serbian and Russian.
Stratika is deliberately small. You work directly with me, with our CTO, Sebastian Novak, and with our Director of Legal Affairs, Jelena Samardžija, not with a junior team you meet after the contract is signed.
What I Have Done
- Energo System – Led full market entry for a Serbian manufacturer of towel radiators that were more expensive than Chinese imports. We made domestic quality the reason to choose and expanded into Slovenia, Croatia and the Netherlands in the EU, and into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia in the region: 7 markets including Serbia, with a 300% increase in sales between 2018 and 2025, first in B2B and later in B2C.
- Fantasy Warden – Built an independent fantasy entertainment publication from zero: from 279 visits a month from Google in February 2023 to 66,758 in July, 239 times more in five months, and 1.2 million visits from Google since. Content strategy, search and community seeding on Reddit, one of its most successful campaigns, turned that audience into recurring advertising revenue.
- Škola Rajak – Growth for an online math school teaching since 2002: SEO, a rebuilt and redesigned website and a new brand. One influencer campaign turned the usual message around: instead of telling children to study, it offered parents more time for themselves while their children learn with the school. It sold a large number of lessons. With Sebastian, our CTO, rebuilding the platform, the new site went live in six days without losing a single one of its 2,269 URLs, and it scores 98/100/100/100 on Lighthouse mobile.
- Flower Couture by Studio Jana – Since 2017, first as a freelancer and later as head of marketing, for a Novi Sad floral design studio: the website first, then social media, influencer campaigns and offline marketing. The studio decorates weddings and private events and has worked on events for brands such as Plazma, Jaffa and Munchmallow, with projects for L’Oréal Paris, EXIT Festival and WWF, and the studio’s work featured in Vogue Adria. Along the way I have also worked with other well-known Serbian brands, including Noblice.
Earlier client work includes brands from Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Brazil, Colombia and South Africa. Read more in our selected work.
How I Work
- Buyers first, campaigns later. Before I recommend anything, I talk to the people who buy, sell and decide.
- The small thing first. Often the fix is a price that sends the wrong signal, a missing proof point or a page that makes choosing hard, not a bigger budget.
- Small, reversible tests. You learn what works before you commit serious money.
- Strategy and execution at one table. I have run the campaigns I now advise on, and Sebastian builds what we recommend, so nothing gets lost between the plan and the website.
- Honest about fit. If I am not the right person for the job, or you do not need outside help yet, I will say so.
The full approach is described in our method and in our market entry services.
Sebastian Novak, CTO
Websites, tracking, automation and AI.
Sebastian is a software architect and fractional CTO with more than 14 years of experience. He started on embedded TV systems at RT-RK, worked as a solutions architect and lead software architect, and then helped build VEED.IO, the browser video editor that grew from one user to millions, from no revenue to more than $10M a year, and from two people to over 150, backed by Sequoia.
Today he builds conversational AI voice agents at Eqho.ai.
He also taught computer science for 11 years, from first-year university courses to postgraduate level, and he explains technical decisions in plain language, to founders as well as to engineers.
Most marketing plans do not fail in the strategy. They fail in the hand-off, between the people who decide what to say and the people who build the place where it is said. Sebastian is the reason that hand-off does not exist here. Strategy and engineering sit at the same table from the first meeting.
Jelena Samardžija, Director of Legal Affairs
Contracts, procurement and compliance, sorted before they become problems.
Jelena holds a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Novi Sad and leads legal affairs at Stratika Solutions. Her work covers commercial contracts, public procurement and institutional advisory, the areas where cross-border deals most often slow down.
She also heads the legal team at a waste management company, so she knows the tenders, approvals and regulations that industrial and infrastructure clients deal with every day.
In the Stratika team, Jelena reviews client, distributor and agency agreements before they are signed, prepares companies for public tenders, and checks the legal side of entering a new market: registrations, permits and partner contracts. She sits next to Igor in commercial negotiations, so what is agreed in the meeting is also protected on paper.
A strategy can win a buyer and still fail at the contract. Jelena makes sure the deal you win can be signed, and that it holds.
What Sebastian Brings to Your Marketing
- Rebuilds and migrations without lost traffic. A new website should not cost you the rankings the old one earned. As fractional CTO at the digital marketing agency Holistic Digital Solutions, Sebastian led integrations with CRMs, CMSs and custom WordPress and PHP ERP systems on AWS. For Škola Rajak, a school he knows from the inside after 11 years of teaching there, all 2,269 URLs were kept, the new site went live in six days and it scores 98/100/100/100 on Lighthouse mobile.
- Speed at product scale. At VEED.IO he worked on a browser-based video engine that runs on hundreds of machines and serves millions of creators, including teams at Amazon and Google. The same discipline goes into client websites, because a slow page loses visitors before they read the first sentence, and with them the money spent on ads and SEO to bring them there.
- Tracking you can trust. Server-side GA4 and Meta Conversions API, consent-first tracking, and integrations with CRMs, CMSs and ERPs. In practice: ad platforms learn from your real leads and sales instead of guesses, reports from different tools finally agree, the site stays fast, and consent is handled properly, which matters in the EU.
- AI where it actually helps. At Eqho.ai he builds a conversational AI voice platform that makes and takes business phone calls, books appointments and handles inbound calls around the clock, using LLMs, AI agents and LangChain. He can bring the same tools into client workflows, for example to answer and qualify enquiries, route leads to the right person or take repetitive reporting off the team, and into how Stratika itself delivers work.
- Engineering leadership. As fractional CTO and Tech Excellence Officer for startups in 2024, he ran system design reviews, DevOps and disaster-recovery reviews, cloud cost control, security, release cadence, competency frameworks and hiring. Before that, as a solutions architect, he ran architecture workshops for senior developers and worked closely with top management on technical direction. He also handles negotiations with clients’ leadership and writes technical proposals, so your IT team and ours speak the same language from day one.
On Škola Rajak we worked exactly this way: I led the brand, SEO and the campaign for parents, and Sebastian built the new platform underneath it. Marketing decided what parents needed to see. Engineering made sure they saw it quickly, on every phone.
What Clients Say
“Our radiators cost more than Chinese imports, and on price alone we looked like the wrong choice. Igor gave buyers abroad a reason to pay more: quality made in Serbia, with galvanisation and CE standards to prove it. He also gave our distributors in Slovenia, Croatia and the Netherlands the materials they needed to sell it. Between 2018 and 2025 our sales grew by 300%.”
Siniša Vukoje, Director, Energo System
“What I am most grateful for is the Reddit idea. Igor understood that fans trust other fans, so instead of shouting about the site, we joined the conversations where players already were. Together with a content plan built around what they search for, it took us from a few hundred visits a month to more than 60,000.”
Vuk Radulović, Founder, Fantasy Warden
“Igor saw what we had missed for years: children don’t choose a math school, parents do. The campaign that promised parents a bit of free time while their children learn with us brought a wave of new enrolments. And the new website, which he and Sebastian launched in six days, didn’t lose a single page of our old one.”
Ilija Rajak, Founder, Škola Rajak
“Igor has been part of our studio since 2017. He started with our website and stayed through everything that came after: social media, influencers, events. What I value most is that he brought us corporate clients we would never have reached alone, including events for Plazma, Jaffa and Munchmallow.”
Marijana Štrbac, Founder, Flower Couture by Studio Jana
Let’s Talk About Your Next Market.
Tell me which market you are considering and what you sell. I will tell you honestly what is likely to make buyers there choose you, and what will not.
If I am not the right fit, I will say so in the first conversation.
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