← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#823: Hostinger CEO Daugirdas Jankus on scaling from a local player to a global force
00:34:47
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. This show is brought to you by Hostinger, a global all in one operating layer for businesses building and running online products. The company combines web hosting, domains, email, website, web app creation and business tools in a single environment. With artificial intelligence embedded across its products and operations, Hostinger develops its AI capabilities in house, enabling rapid product iteration, automation of complex technical tasks and AI driven customer support. Start your online success now at www.hostinger.com. in an era of social media empires and walled garden platforms, is owning your own digital real estate, your website becoming more or less critical for brand survival? Agility requires a business to both react to market shifts while also building a foundational platform that allows it to scale globally without losing its local touch. It's about having the core infrastructure in place to seize opportunity wherever it appears. Today we're going to talk about the principles of scaling a business from a local player to a global force. We're going to explore how the role of a brand's primary digital asset, its website, is evolving from a simple storefront into a dynamic engine for customer experience and growth and how to stay responsive in rapidly shifting markets. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Degerdis Jankus or DJ CEO at Hostinger. Dj, welcome to the show.
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Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me.
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Yeah, looking forward to this.
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Before we dive in, why don't you
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give a little background on yourself and your role at Hostinger.
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Oh yeah, so my background is broad. I studied music, I studied economics and politics, worked in banking, worked in Lithuanian Parliament for a little while and then turned to startups. So I think not the typical tech CEO background, but that non, that majority of non technical side throughout my career I think shapes how I think about product, how I think about the clients and how we can serve a common business owners, solopreneurs, mom and pop shops and basically helps us to understand how we can deliver more value to them.
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C
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. That diverse experience. Because I'd imagine Hostinger has a lot of different types of customers, so I'm sure that comes into play there as well. And just to that end, for our listeners who may not be familiar, can you tell us a little bit about hosting or, you know, what's the core problem you solve? Who's your ideal customer?
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Yeah, we do online presence. So we started as a web hosting company a while ago and now we are growing and expanding our service offering, basically integrating vertically across simple solopreneurs and business owners. So all things related to online presence.
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D
Great, great.
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Well, yeah, so let's, let's dive in
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here and want to start with, you know, just this idea of the, that how important that online online presence is. A lot of businesses start with a simple kind of online business card website, but as a company scales internationally, how
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does the strategic function of that website
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need to transform and what does it become beyond just a marketing tool?
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Yeah, I think it's not only the scaling part of things, but also changing digital landscape of things and changing Internet. Especially now over the past several months, maybe year, year and a half, with the development of AI, that the change of the Internet is, is gaining pace. Several years ago, the website was sort of a storefront of whatever you do, whether you do something online, whether you do something offline, and use the website as a virtual business card of sorts. That's changing because now we see that this storefront is kind of like emerging into a whole operating system of the businesses. What I mean by that is we see that websites become like a central stage for their operations. So for example, inventory management, payment processing, becoming visible not only on search engines, but on LLM solutions like Chad or, or, or whatever, alternative tools. And it's happening really, really fast. So it's not only that the facade matters, the infrastructure layer is getting more and more important. And several years ago the visibility was the key that people needed to solve for. Now we see that more and more questions emerge somewhat similar to, so how I become visible on AI search.
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Right.
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On tools like Perplexity or chatgpt or whatever. And with Hostinger, we are actually targeting these kind of questions and helping our clients to gain visibility on these LLMs.
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Yeah, and I think all of that comes down to really trying to understand your customers and what are the, not only pain points, but what are the opportunities for customers? And I know part of the hostinger culture really emphasizes this idea of customer obsession in the context of building a global digital presence. How do you balance the need for a standardized, scalable platform with that idea of localizing the customer experience for potentially vastly different markets?
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Yeah, so that's a tough place to be in. But we try to embrace this challenge, what we are trying to do is we try to go as close to our target clients as possible. We want to be as local as possible in more than 40 different GEOs that we operate in. And it's several things. First of all we localize through our product and through our pricing. So we go deep into, into the markets. We, we, we talk directly with the clients and we try to understand what are their particular needs, what is their purchase power, the budget that we are comfortable with in spending on, on services that we provide, how much they are willing to pay and how much they can pay to get online and then we build for them. I said we are getting close to the clients. So literally every employee in our organization talks with the clients face to face several times per quarter, several times per year. So we have a simple automated flow. We where face to face client interviews just automagically pops into your calendar. And then you get to speak with masseuse in Jakarta, you get to speak with the developer or agency in Paris, you get to speak with some sort of online entrepreneur or business coach from us. And you sometimes uncover very similar pains despite the different contexts that people are coming from. And this is when we know that we struck gold. I'm not sure I think Greg, I think I got this quote from you. It's like that informs and stories moves us. So this is our element in embedding this empathy across our organization towards the clients. When you see how people use the products, the features that we ship, it's easier to put things into perspective. It's easier to not get into this analysis paralysis and ship more value faster. And another thing, we embed lots of AI into our service offering. That's one side of things and internally as well for ourselves. So we want to be as productive as possible internally so that we could make no trade off to competitive price and high quality service. So as an example, Cody, our AI support agent currently handles more than 83% of all the client support conversation. You know, the agent not only talks with the clients but proactively solves client issues. Kodi can perform more than 350 unique tasks on our platform. And then when we get to that high end unique customer problems, we solve them with our human colleagues and we learn across the way. So whenever we face some edge case, we learn from it and we look for ways how we can automate it, how Cody can learn from it so that edge cases remain for people. The highest added value questions gets still solved by humans. And those the most repetitive cases which in many Cases requires lots of speed and accuracy. Get solved by AI agent which is fast, never sleeps, doesn't make typo mistakes. Somewhat simple stuff like my domain is not working for some reason, DNS is not propagating. Maybe I made a mistake in, in routing my domain. If humans are doing it, it takes time and there's always some room for simple human error, you know, like just a typo. You know with AI agents we don't have this anymore.
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D
Yeah.
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And I mean I think that's great that it's not one replacing the other. It's using the best tool for the job. And I mean I love when companies, I think there's some, at least a few companies out there that really make an effort to have their people talk with end customers on a regular basis. So that's amazing to hear that you're doing that and it's part of the work and part of the job. And yet customers can also go to AI when they just to your point, need something very quickly that a human, they don't need a human interaction for that, but when they do. So I think that's the right kind of balance.
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Yeah. To all the listeners I cannot recommend enough doing just simple non scalable thing which sometimes feels counterintuitive. But just you know, drop an email to a client of yours, you know, some of them won't reply. But if you send 10 emails, most probably one or two people will reply. You will get to a Google Meet or Zoom or whatever kind of face to face call with them. Just ask questions how to use your product or service. Right. You will uncover, you know, like golden insights, product ideas. And honestly I think it's a very inspiring exercise because you actually see people using the stuff that you put out there and, and that's a very rewarding feeling, you know.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well yeah. And you know there's, there's several benefits of this. Obviously, you know, happy customers that feel listened to and also that feel like they can get help when they need it, but they can also get something done quickly when they also need it.
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from a business perspective, you know hostinger seen some some remarkable growth and in a pretty competitive space as well.
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From a leadership perspective, what's a.
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What's maybe a non obvious operational or marketing decision that you made that was critical to that success of really scaling?
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Honestly, I think it's how to say, like mindful rejection of growth at any cost approach.
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Yeah.
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So there was a moment, and still is a moment in our corporate development history where we could have raised external funds to fuel our growth, maybe burn some cash along the way and gain more market share faster. But we stayed bootstrapped and up until now we are bootstrapped company. Which means we always had to maintain this fiscal discipline from the get go. And sometimes, sometimes we had to sacrifice some crazy ideas, but it worked.
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Yeah.
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Especially after, after Covid where rules of the game changed and growth at any cost became not that popular. Somehow we felt that now everyone is playing by our rules. The difference was we did not had, you know, that pressure to deliver, you know, after, after fundraising rounds. And yeah, the growth is there. The growth is there. For the past four years we are growing like 50, 60% year over year. Actually the growth was always there since the very beginning of our company. Like I joined in 2017, the growth was already there like 50, 60% year over year. But you know, we are growing from nothing basically. Sure. So you know, if you, if you, if you check last four years, if they are on the graph, the period from 2010 to 2022 looks almost like a flat line. But you know, it's just because the scale, you know, is expanding. So, so the growth was always there, the discipline was always there and we constantly looked for ways in how we can drive this significant growth in, in a sustainable cash flow, positive way. That's, that's one major thing. Another major thing. I believe that this kind of mindset kind of pushed us to innovate more and on a different level. So as an example, like we, we placed our bet on AI way before it was obvious. For the, for the masses. Yeah. So I think back in 2019 or 2020, we started to experiment with GPT and GPT1 model.
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Oh wow.
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Yeah, yeah.
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When it was just purely optimized for tech people and not for general audiences. When GPT 3.5 API was launched and I think it was first major shift towards the mass market adoption, we deployed customer facing AI features within weeks. Within a couple of weeks. And there's this internal anecdote. OpenAI technical team reviewed our architecture and our integration because we were one of the first ones and they were not able to suggest any kind of improvements. They just said, job well done, nice, keep on doing what you're doing. So yeah, you know, so we kind of have a head start on things and that's one of the moats that we have.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, well, and along those lines your, your customer base is also people that are at the forefront of a lot of, of trends. You know, creators, entrepreneurs, small businesses, innovators. So you know, they're also probably, you know, that was probably an amazing thing to be able to access, you know, GPT 3.5 back, you know, back then when it was first available. Because you know, some of these people are keeping up with those things as it is. How do you leverage feedback and data from this user base, these people that are, you know, often early adopters of things so you can anticipate other types of market shifts for, for your own business.
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Yeah. So now with, with the further development and further skill of AI, it's, it's getting easier. So there are many tools and applications and we build them internally just to manage all of the feedback that we get and we try to generate as much feedback as possible. So direct face to face interviews which I mentioned, we record them, we transcribe them, we link actual feedback to the clients and to the products that we use and we synthesize it for all of the organization to use. We enrich this data with net promoter scores that we collect, customer satisfaction scores, we track features and updates that we push to life and how people react to those. And it's like a loop of feedback and content and context that we are building. That's one side of the thing. Another is we proactively measure a potential success of our clients. As an example, how fast they go live with their website. Is the domain pointing active, is the content custom or some dummy template, you know, so we proactively seek these moments of activation, these wow moments across the customer life cycle and with a simple object objective is to decrease the time to wow, the time to live, the time to activation as much as possible. And we plug our frontline feedback as well. So our customer success team, Cody, our agent, our staff so need to check on data. But it was more than thousand different product improvements that we got from our customer success staff that got implemented and pushed to our clients. So we try to build this 360 infrastructure of feedback collection and we synthesize this and we go to life as fast as possible. So we want to go live as fast as possible and we do our best to help our clients to go live as fast as possible.
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Yeah, well, yeah, and I would imagine the sooner that they are, you know, the time to value, you know, is a way of looking at that right for them. So, you know, the sooner they get value out of it, the I, I would Imagine that's also tied to loyalty and long term retention as well, right?
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Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The faster they get to value and for some clients, the value is just getting their website live.
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Right.
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And seeing that first impression of, let's say, simple virtual business card, you know, who I am and what I do. And that's already a huge motivation boost for them and it kind of helps them to think, you know, outside of the box, what else is possible. You know, if I was able to get my virtual business cards so fast.
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Right.
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Maybe I can do something else as well. And yeah, so that's an amazing thing and I think it's also part of our history. So throughout our evolution as a company, we are growing together with our client base and together with our clients.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So we listen to them, we develop features and tools for them. In this way they are able to do more and more with our platform as they are scaling. And also we get new ways to attract new clients as well as we develop our offerings. So I think it's a really nice customer feedback fueled flywheel that we are running.
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And I know we talked about AI
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a bit here, your early adoption of GPT 3.5, how Cody is integrated in as well. But looking ahead, it seems like at least for the, for the time being, AI is going to continue changing things and continue evolving really how how marketing works and lots of things work. How do you see AI fundamentally altering what even a website is over the next few years? And you know, is it, is it
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going to be more conversational than static?
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You know, what are you seeing?
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First of all, it's very difficult to predict.
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Sure, sure.
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And internally we kind of run several potential scenarios. One of the craziest scenarios that we think about, you know, what can happen in the near distant future is what if the web as we understand it now totally disappears? Let's say the future where everyone has an agent and the Internet is just a pack of agents interacting together and this storefront human optimized interface is not even needed. Right.
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Yeah, that's an interesting scenario.
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Yeah. Most probably it will not be as crazy within the next two, three years. Maybe it will, maybe not. But for sure we see this agentic shift happening. We're just not completely sure to what extent it will happen and whether it will go full agentic or mix of things. So for example, our Web2 agent feature. So basically we built a protocol layer where our client websites are understandable by these agent crawlers. And the information on our client websites, it's optimized for These crawlers to consume, no matter which company, which brand. And we see the adoption of this, and we see the usage of this, it's increasing. There are more and more crawlers out there. The context is getting scraped, consumed, synthesized, and for sure there is some kind of movement. So that's one thing. Another thing is these agents will still need to be hosted somewhere. So AI agent, which knows your inventory, which knows your availability, for example, you are a masseuse, right? And you do the best massages in town and you don't need to answer the phone or book the slots of the potential clients, your AI agent can do it for you. If you become so good and the demand is so high that people are booking three months in advance, maybe your AI agent will suggest you to increase the prices, maybe decrease the backlog of potential clients, but increase the profit margins. We see that as a potential future. But still this digital footprint will still be there for you, but maybe it will be less of a storefront and more of a backend of operations. So we'll see how it goes.
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Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely have to talk more about this. It's definitely a fast moving space there. Well, dj, thanks so much for joining today. I've got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. The first one, maybe a little along the lines of the last one, but if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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Good question. I think we would still be talking about the AI, but maybe from a different perspective, how AI and agentic experience and agentic AI tools are transforming businesses worldwide, especially in the emerging markets. Maybe we will, we would be talking about how these tools are helping people to go live with their ultra local, ultra specialized businesses of whatever kind. You know, fruit stands in Indonesia, massage salons in Stockholm, you know, pottery courses in Vilnius, whatever.
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Right, right.
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Maybe we'll be talking about not AI tools, not only AI tools helping to do this kind of stuff, but actually economic activity which is purely driven by agentic AI experiences. And according to recent research, I think from Oxford Economics and some more, it's some estimate that this is potential market with potential of trillions of dollars.
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Right.
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So that's one thing and another thing. I think it's a platform and infrastructure of AI. Will there be some sort of open platforms and open infrastructure for these AI agents to thrive? Or maybe there will be some sort of closed platform with exclusive ecosystem. Maybe we would be discussing about this kind of model and which of the model is gaining more traction in the economy.
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Yeah, well, we'll have to talk again and see.
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Yeah, why not?
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, and thanks again for joining today.
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Last question for you.
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What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Yeah, that's a good, that's a good one. So one that really comes to my mind first is singing. So I mentioned my, my background is I have some part of my background in, in music and in singing. So I still do it as a hobby. From time to time we have a garage band and we sing and we play good old classic rock covers. So from time to time I still do it. And music, it's like form of meditation for me and improvisation. I like to switch my modes of thinking and at least for me, it helps to understand the business better. You know, it's pattern recognition, it's improvisation and it helps me to cope with things. And two more things, the second one is this client interaction and connection with the clients. I do it every day in one form or another. It can be LinkedIn chat, Facebook chat, some public discussion in some sort of community discussion board or live calls and face to face interactions with our clients. It really helps me to not get stuck in analysis paralysis in all of the data and market signals. It helps me get inspired and see the true meaning of our work that we do with Hostinger. And the final thing I would, I will dare to say it's like, it's like healthy paranoia of things, you know. So yeah, and I personally, we constantly think about the future of tech, which we briefly covered and we see scenarios where we as a business and overall as an industry become obsolete. And I think this safe element of paranoia helps us to keep building for the future and keep innovating for the future. So we hope this future where we get obsolete is not going to happen. But if it does, our job is to be prepared on behalf of our clients and in general as a business.
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Yeah, love it. Well, thanks again.
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Again. I'd like to thank Degerdis Jankus, CEO at Hostinger for joining the show. You can learn more about Degerdis and Hostinger by following the links in the show notes. This show is brought to you by Hostinger, a global all in one operating layer for businesses building and running online products. The company combines web hosting, domains, email, website, web app creation and business tools in a single environment. With artificial intelligence embedded across its products and operations, Hostinger develops its AI capabilities in house, enabling rapid product iteration, automation of complex technical tasks and AI driven customer support. Start your online success now at www.hostinger.com and thanks again for listening. Listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode hit, subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile. The Agile Brand.