Antonio Gabrić

Hunter.io

Some of the current responsibilities and achievements:

- leading the link building at Hunter
- establishing and reworking processes
- hiring freelancers
- managing a team of link builders and writers
- running a Slack community of amazing link builders
- experimenting with different outreach approaches
- managing affiliate program approvals
- working with influencers
- ensuring Hunter is featured on most authority industry-relevant websites consistently
- increasing organic traffic by 78%

Outreach Manager

Some of responsibilities and achievements: 

- managed guest blogging campaigns
- establishing relationships with relevant link builders in the industry
- managed multiple cold email campaigns
- automated parts of prospecting and contact lookup processes
- 2x the referring domain count
- grew organic traffic by 26%

Link Builder

I help people write cold emails that convert 🚀 | Marketing @ Hunter.io

Hey! I'm Antonio. I help SaaS companies grow their brand's presence and revenue with outbound marketing.

Building backlinks that move the needle is hard. Here's how I can help you:

- Set up hyper-personalized and automated link building outreach campaigns
- Build contextual backlinks from relevant DR70+ domains at scale
- Get your brand featured on Hubspot, Zapier, Wordstream, and more
- List your brand in high-traffic listicles (top X tools)
- Grow your brand's presence, authority, and revenue

Why me?

- Grew Hunter's organic monthly sessions from 100k to 300k
- Built semi-automated processes for effective link building (7,000+ referring domains in 2 years)
- Sent tailored outreach campaigns with 12% conversion rates
- Featured on industry-leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Wordstream, and many more
- Managing a Slack community with over 100 active SaaS link builders (SERanking, Toptal, Hubspot, and others)

Ready to leverage link building to grow your SaaS into a multi-million dollar success?

🔔 I'll be posting SEO and cold email case studies – so hit that "Follow" button! 

Cheers,
Antonio.

GrowthMate

We’re a relationship-based link-building agency that helps ambitious B2B brands outrank competitors in SEO and generate more revenue with powerful backlinks.

Founder

YTILI | Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative

YTILI is the U.S. Department of State’s flagship fellowship program for emerging European entrepreneurs.

Selected as one of 50 innovation leaders from 39 European countries to participate in this highly competitive program.

Participating in an intensive hybrid experience focused on entrepreneurship, leadership, and cross-cultural collaboration

- Engaging with top U.S. accelerators, founders, and organizations during a 4–6 week fellowship placement in the U.S.
- Leading a social impact project and expanding transatlantic innovation networks
- Representing Ukraine’s startup ecosystem and bringing back best practices to support local innovation and growth

Fellow

MentorCruise

Mentor – Growth Marketing

Startup Wise Guys

Mentor

Mailtrap

For 3.5 years at Mailtrap, I contributed to projects & experiments that helped to increase ARR by 67%: 
- Set up a growth experiment that got an additional $140K in sales
- Built internal experiments prioritization framework that helped the company choose the most valuable hypothesis in terms of revenue focus
- Released product landing pages that got additional 10K sign ups
- Conducted user interviews & validated hypotheses that led to the launch of Email API product and the first 895 users
- Built the user feedback framework that helped to gather, analyze & prioritize insights from emails, support tickets, & other channels
- Interviewed customers and managed the release of 3 case studies (design, content, website)
- Built the content strategy & launched video direction for YouTube channel (first 128 subscribers, 5K views) + managed the production & released branded product videos for landing pages
- Built the process & launched influencer marketing direction
- Validated hypotheses on customer acquisition, conversion, adoption & retention including the launch of A/B tests, onboarding emails, custom email campaigns, CTAs on a blog, messaging, and UX, to name a few.
- Was responsible for hiring marketing interns, outreach specialists, sales team (8 hires in total)

Growth Marketing Lead

Key achievements:
- Launched scalable outreach & link-building process that helped generate each month 40+ manual, high-quality links with an av. DR 72
- Grew up site referring domains from 950 to 4.5k in less than 2 years
- Skyrocketed external content marketing with 100+ guest posts on top sites, including HubSpot, Smashing Magazine, Envato, G2, Sendinblue, etc. 
- Built a network of 40+ active link-building partners
- Crafted outreach copies for link building (guest posts/link insertions) that got on av. 15% in conversions
- DR 96 is the highest link I got for Mailtrap, it was placed on Amazon AWS tech blog.
- Hiring, managing, and mentoring in-house & freelance teammates

Growth Manager

Railsware

RetargetApp

- Worked on customer development (questionnaires, interviews, feedback forms) to get valuable insights and prioritize the backlog
- Conducted Ads experiments that increased CTR and resulted in higher ROAS by 4x

Product Manager

- Was responsible for all marketing and partnerships initiatives that helped develop a competitive marketing strategy
- Implemented content seeding on Quora, answers were featured among 50K+ people on Quora Digest; became the most viewed writer in 8+ topic-related categories
- Partnered with 30 Shopify apps to implement co-marketing initiatives
- Operated with VIP clients and made 3 case studies
- Analyzed, structured content and prepared a new iteration of the Landing Page
- Mastered skills in Affiliate Marketing by developing a partner program

Inbound Marketing Manager

Very Good Security

Very Good Security is an easy and efficient way to operate on sensitive data without the cost or liability of securing the data. VGS provides the fastest and simplest end-to-end world's most secure and compliant solution in the industry. 

Key responsibilities:
•	Collect data and report on traffic, rankings and other analytics metrics. 
•	Run A/B tests on the website
•	Set up heatmaps and report on important aspects
•	Make researches on various marketing tools  (e.g. marketing automation, cold outreach) 
•	PPC (Facebook Ads, Google Ads)
•	Review technical, SEO issues and recommend fixes on website optimization. Conduct SEO competitors keyword research

Marketing Analyst

Everything Content

Digital Marketing Agency with a deep focus on result-driven content marketing.

Key responsibilities:
•	Content strategy
•	Content creation
•	Marketing funnel optimization
•	Content promotion 
•	SEO/SEM
•	Managing team of freelancers 

Key accomplishments:
•	Was responsible for the account where I’ve managed to grew client website by 633%
•	Provided Website/Landing page analyze & optimization for our clients
•	Mastered the skill of auditing content marketing performance and setup metrics
•	Strong collaboration with freelance writers and designers.
•	Writing technical tasks for designers

Content Marketing Manager

GUD bags

GUD is a brand of reliable, handy and practical backpacks, bags and travel accessories.
We create high-quality carry products perfect for travel, daily commute, sports or studying since 2012.
Each of our products is constructed with quality materials and made to last.
Every GUD product in produced at our own production facility in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Our mission is to create long lasting, high quality and well-designed bags and backpacks with an everyday urban appeal that will help simplify your life.

Corporate Sales Manager

Brand mentions, backlinks that boost SEO, LLMs visibility & drive revenue | CEO @ GrowthMate | Startup Mentor & Speaker

I’m Andriy from Ukraine — a hands-on B2B SaaS marketing expert & consultant. I help to attract, convert & retain customers. For the past 8 years, I’ve been growing early-stage startups & SaaS products.

My product marketing expertise consists of content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), outreach & link building, conversion rate optimization (CRO), customer development & user interviews.

Here are some of the highlights from my previous experience at Mailtrap:
✅ Set up link-building process & grew up site referring domains from 900 to 4.5K
✅ Launched CRO experiment that got $140K in sales
✅ Conducted user interviews & validated hypotheses that led to the launch Email API product and first 895 users

I’m experiment-driven & growth-oriented with a user-centric approach. Passionate about SaaS companies and striving to achieve results.

Friends call me “networking guru” – I know people that know people and can help you with connections! :) 

Contributor to 100+ product & marketing blogs including HubSpot, Smashing Magazine, Mind the Product, Envato, G2, Hackernoon, and tons of others.

As a primary focus now, I’m developing GrowthMate – a relationship-based link-building agency that helps small and mid-size brands grow in SERP and generate more revenue. Delivered hundreds of juicy backlinks to websites: Small PDF, Cloudtalk, Jasper.ai, Community Phone, Belkins, and AppSumo, just to name a few.

Got a question on growth marketing? Need a consultation? Contact me!
Email: andriy@growthmate.io
Facebook: fb.com/zapisotskyi

*****
P.S. Also, hard experience working with:
Content strategy, content creation, content distribution, guest posts, outreach, digital PR, influencer marketing, growth marketing, lead generation, video marketing, social media, email marketing, onboarding emails, A/B tests, retention, project management, hiring marketing/sales teams, mentorship.

Andriy Zapisotskyi 🇺🇦

Anyone else feel like SEO + AI news are trying to speedrun a decade in one month?

Between tools getting smarter, products dying, and giants going shopping, my brain (& eyes) are tired and excited at the same time 🙃

👉 Adobe acquires Semrush for $1.9B – analytics + content in one ecosystem, fun times for martech stacks.
👉 Google’s Gemini 3 Pro powers Search’s AI mode – deeper reasoning, query fan-out, new generative layouts in Search
👉 Search Console gets query groups – a more sensible way to cluster queries inside Google’s own tools
👉 GEO startup Lorelight shuts down – apparently “the problem didn’t need solving”
👉 OpenAI launches GPT-5.1 – more conversational ChatGPT and stronger reasoning baked into everything.
👉 Google extends AI travel planning + agentic booking in Search – Search is slowly turning into your travel agent
👉 Google rolls out AI shopping updates across Search and Gemini – conversational shopping, agentic checkout, AI calls to local businesses
👉 Perplexity will pay Snap Inc. $400M to integrate into Snapchat chat – AI answers going deep into consumer habits
👉Microsoft Copilot adds prominent, clickable citations + aggregated sources – pressure is on everyone to show where answers come from
👉 Positive acquires Surfer (AI-for-SEO pioneer) – more consolidation in the “AI + SEO” tool space

What did I miss from last month?

Exactly 3 years ago, I got fired from my previous job. 

It was a shock, especially right before my birthday, Christmas season and during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine with massive blackouts unfolding at the same time.

Actually, it felt like life was trolling me.

Then I did the boring, adult staff and opened a spreadsheet. I realised that I had a small financial cushion that would let me take a risk, so I made a deal with myself:

I’ll give it 6 months.
If it doesn’t work, i’ll just go and find another job.

That’s how GrowthMate was born — a fully remote link-building agency that scaled to 25 full-time employees.

3 years ago, I had no office, no team, no website, and no experience running a business, just an idea, a willingness to learn fast and my amazing network.

If i could talk to that version of myself, I’d say:
👉 small steps, iterations and constant improvements are better than trying to build the “perfect rocket” that will not launch
👉 trust but document – contracts with clients and team members are essential
👉 don’t be afraid to hire, delegate, and make changes if someone isn’t the right fit — it helps the whole team thrive
👉 manage finances & legal from the very beginning – even basic tracking saves you headaches later

Looking back, the hardest part wasn’t losing the job.

It wasn’t even the uncertainty.

The hardest part was the MINDSET: stopping thinking like an employee and starting to think like an entrepreneur.

And that switch, as painful as it was, really did change everything.

Had the best time last Friday at the Hub of Sense Bank sharing our GrowthMate journey! 🎤

Talked about the crazy ride from getting laid off in late 2022 to building a 25-person international agency during the war and... you know, everything. 

Covered the messy bits – first hires, financial chaos, learning to delegate, working with US clients while explaining what's happening in Ukraine on every call.

The Q&A was 🔥 – we went deep on hiring struggles (it never gets easier, friends), why we still don't have a sales person, and how referrals + personal brand carry us way more than our embarrassing one-pager website.

Best part – the conversations after, this is exactly why I love offline meetups – you can't recreate this energy on Zoom.

Huge thanks to Olia Padiak and Mariana Shevchyshyn from Bee for Biz for having me, and to everyone who spent their Friday evening talking business with us.

P.S. Multiple people told me "your story is inspiring" and it makes me so proud, truly. So I would be happy to take other invitations as a speaker, this was so inspiring for me as well.

That’s me on a call, hearing the same BS about link building for 10 years. From clients, from colleagues, even from some “experts.”

So I decided to put it all in one post. Next time someone brings up one of these myths, I’ll just send them the link.

Let’s break them down.

Link builders, what did I miss? What are the most common myths you still hear?

Link building myths

While Cloudflare is down,  time to have a break and listen to smth cool :D 

Just finished the latest Ahrefs podcast episodes with Tim Soulo, Ryan Law, and Patrick Stox — and both made it straight to my top list.

The main takeaway:

Marketers are thinking about how to show up in AI search because people are using it more and more. But without a proper conventional SEO infrastructure, it’s not possible to build a solid GEO foundation.

Ryan shared some really powerful data and insights based on Ahrefs own research that further strengthened my previous observations.

A few key notes:

1️⃣ More off-site mentions mean better visibility in AI search. LLMs learn what your brand is about based on how others talk about you, which brands you’re mentioned alongside, and the topics you’re commonly associated with.

2️⃣ The strongest correlation we found for appearing in AI overviews – branded web mentions. The research showed a 0.67 correlation between how often a brand is mentioned across the web and its visibility in AI search.

Mentions on Reddit, Quora, G2, industry blogs, and even YouTube are especially important — these are among the most commonly cited sites by AI.

3️⃣ Commonly cited pages include blogs, guides, comparison content (like top lists or versus articles), videos, and core site pages.

4️⃣ Research analyzing 17 million citations shows that AI tools prefer newer pages, so fresh content can boost visibility.

5️⃣ Check your visibility for key topics and compare it with competitors – this helps you spot content gaps.

A good example is how Patagonia and Fjallraven both make high-quality backpacks, but they appear very differently in search results for school backpacks. Fjallraven ranks strongly, while Patagonia barely shows up at all 🎒

What I find most interesting is how this aligns with what we’ve been doing for clients for a while — building branded mentions, citations, and off-site visibility.

It’s exactly what Patrick Stox calls “the era of off-page SEO”: being visible in the right places, not just on your own website 🔍

How to measure all the buzz around AI visibility? Use Ahrefs Brand Radar. Or some other tools like Profound, Amplitude, AI Scope Pro, or Rank in AI (this is a recommendation from me, not from speakers)

We’ve always focused on creating a genuine off-site presence — getting brands mentioned in credible listicles. And it’s great to see the data now proving that this approach works in the AI-driven world too.

Big thanks to the guys for putting together one of the most data-backed, practical discussions on AI search.

My #1 podcast recommendation right now — dropped links in the comments (2 episodes) 👌

Which SEO or marketing podcasts are you relying on these days? Always looking for new ones to add to my playlist 🎧

What if link building had a Thanksgiving dinner 🤔 🍽️

If I set a Thanksgiving table for my 2025 gratitude list, it would look something like this:

- AI sits politely in the corner, watching, but hasn’t taken anyone’s job yet. Thx!
- Google is giving mysterious updates — always exciting. :D
- ESPs are the picky guests, occasionally letting our outreach emails pass through the feast.
- Partners show up fashionably late, promising “the link goes live today” which usually means 19 days later, but they’re still our favorites.
- My emotional intelligence is the turkey — the main dish, grown thanks to 200+ reminders that buying links ≠ building links.
- My team & clients around cooking together, keeping everything together and making it taste amazing.

And me... 
I’m just happy that I’m still at the table and surrounded by the best team, partners, and clients. 😎

How would your Thanksgiving table look in your job edition? 😁

taplio

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Antonio Gabrić

Andriy Zapisotskyi 🇺🇦

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taplio

The Battle

Antonio Gabrić

Andriy Zapisotskyi 🇺🇦

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Andriy Zapisotskyi 🇺🇦's LinkedIn Performance

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