Doncho Dan Miladinov

After working with 200+ clients in the last 5.5 years here are the 4 steps I started implementing in client communication to help me prevent client misalignment.

During a Clay Cafe weekly call on Friday (thanks Kellen Casebeer for the awesome community) the topic of client misalignment and "we never approved these parts of the project" came up.

These things happen because humans forget, assume, take shortcuts, and get busy. And as service providers, that becomes our problem fast.

I've been there. More times than I'd like to admit. So I shared a few things that have saved me over the years. Especially for GTMe's working solo or freelance, new agency owners, or anyone working directly with clients:

1️⃣ Share your screen and take notes live during the meeting. Write down key decisions, action items, and feedback as you talk. Then spend 2-3 minutes at the end reviewing them together.

It gives the client two chances in real time to agree or push back. No room for confusion later. This skill took me longer to acquire, but trust me, it is so worth it.

2️⃣ Might be a hot take but I don't like relying on automated post-meeting notes. Yes, they feel productive. But if you don't have time to write these out after the call, the client probably also doesn't have time to read through AI generated notes that might or might not hit the mark.

I believe real notes beat auto-summaries every time and if you followed point 1, you won't even need post-meeting notes, they are already there.

3️⃣ Meet the client where they actually live. Some prefer WhatsApp. Others are Slack-only. I've used email, Telegram, Discord, you name it. Adapting to their preferred channel eliminates most of the friction before it starts.

This step might become a problem as you scale operations and start working on 50+ clients at a time, but champagne problems once you get there. In certain situations it will help the client pay attention and keep track of the results.

4️⃣ Hardest step. Not every client is a client for you and that's fine. This one takes experience to recognize. You don't need to keep clients who drain your energy or constantly misalign with how you work.

If there is a partner on the team that matches their energy better, let them take lead. There are clients built for your style, and clients built for someone else's. That's just reality.

I have yet to master this one.

*BONUS*

If there is a serious misalignment that pops up with the client, getting them on a call as soon as possible is a life-saver! 

By the end of that Clay Café call, I realized how universal this issue is no matter your experience level. That's pretty cool about this community: everyone shares real situations, not theory, and we all get better because of it.

If you're building a GTM agency or running solo: Client communication isn't a "soft skill." It's a survival skill - the thing that keeps great partnerships going for years.

Done Miladinov

Head of GTM Operations | Built outbound systems for 200+ companies | Clay

Client Management

Unexpected easter egg from Zoominfo.
Pair it with Google + Clay + Zenrows and get revenue and funding for your TAM.

Whenever you search this, the first result on Google has the revenue or funding info in the span text and you can get it at scale with Zenrows. 

A few constraints:
1. New companies won't be in the zoominfo database
2. Companies below 5M yearly revenue are all shown <$5M
3. Companies with the same names might get mixed up, but from what I saw using the domain, it usually pushes the right company as the first result in Google, with the rest following up as the 2-3 results. 

Let me know if you want the json for catching this info by using Zenrows in Clay.

Paul Bakaus

Spotter

Responsible to build and bring new tools for creators to market that provide novel ways and workflows to help them accelerate and succeed.

EVP, Product and Creator Tools

Koji

As the Head of Creators at Koji, I’m responsible for Koji’s marketing, business development, community, partnerships, DevRel and more. Most recently, I've switched my focus to product to level up Koji's templates.

Head of Creators

Google

Created, and led the Creator Relations team at Google, and started the "Google for Creators" outreach program.  Built tools & infrastructure, created educational & inspirational content, and built community through social, forums, newsletters & events.

Head of Creator Relations

Led the AMP Developer Relations & CMS/WordPress Relations teams at Google, where we helped publishers, creators and developers to create better, and more content on the web.

Ran big flagship developer events (see AMP Conf, AMP Roadshow), built lots of tools for developers and content creators (see AMP for WordPress), and created a heavy amount of documentation, tutorials, educational materials, blog posts and videos (see AMP YouTube channel, amp.dev, blog.amp.dev).

Lead, AMP & CMS Developer Relations

As the DevRel lead & de-facto co-PM for Chrome DevTools, I've popularized the DevTools further and expanded its audience way beyond the 'hardcore developer'.

Features I've envisioned and brought to life as part of my "DevTools for Designers" initiative, such as the Device Mode, Animation Panel and colorpicker, are now used by tens of millions of web developers & designers.

DevRel Lead & Moonlighting PM, Chrome DevTools

Zynga

Became the CTO of a highly strategic internal studio that later reported directly to the CEO. Worked on experimental and radically different game ideas implemented in HTML5, built on the web platform, for the web platform.

For example, our team created a working version of FarmVille and CityVille, running in a 2012/13 mobile phone on Facebook, and we pioneered the idea of Instant Games with social messenger Kik, building HTML5 games that generated an incredible amount of DAU/MAU in days, before Apple shut down Kik's app-platform-like features. Fast forward now, "Instant games" are now a thing on FB Messenger, and mini-app ecosystems exist and strive around the world (see WeChat).

Studio 5 CTO

Transformed the vision of a full blown HTML5 Game Engine into reality.

W3C(World Wide Web Consortium)

On a mission to making the web a better place for games, I've convinced Zynga, as first gaming company ever, to join the W3C. I spearheaded several efforts to make the web's APIs more inviting to game creators, including proposals for stuff like hit testing, but it was largely an uphill battle.

Advisory Committee representative for Zynga

jQuery Project

As creator of jQuery UI (currently in use by 36.16% of the top 10k websites, according to trends.builtwith.com), I helped millions of websites succeed building rich UI and interactions on the web, significantly accelerating the Web 2.0 era. I kicked off the project, contributed numerous core widgets (Draggable, Sortable, etc.), and led the engineering team over the course of 4 years.

In addition, I've been a core team member and contributor to jQuery core, shaping the project, its conferences and outreach. The early dimensions plugin is now part of Core, and so are a couple of nifty APIs first introduced in jQuery UI.

Creator and lead, jQuery UI / Core contributor, jQuery

Dextrose AG

Dextrose was the incubator for my 'Aves' concept, later destined to become the first isometric game engine in JavaScript/HTML5, running entirely without plugins. As part of a 2-person team, I brought in the product vision and direction, and developed all engine and game prototypes from scratch. These prototypes generated so much attention that we were able to sell Dextrose to Zynga to scale up our operations internally within months.

Cerego Japan

Changed social learning platform smart.fm to please a broader target audience with easily accessible JavaScript applications, a killer smart.fm framework, creating a truly unified experience. While smart.fm ceased to exist, the core framework is still being reused.

UI Architect

Liferay GmbH

See 'jQuery UI Lead' job description. This was a full time sponsored position to work on jQuery UI.

New Identity AG

Came on board as full stack engineer (and architected several large PHP classes used in large-scale production apps) but quickly specialized to frontend at a time when there was no such thing as "front-end engineer".

Took over frontend leadership for their highest profile client, T-Online, and significantly improved several large code bases comparable to the size of Gmail and Google Calendar (T-Mobile in Germany has their on rich clients). T-Mobile was stuck in Web 1.0 era and kept iterating, so I devises a big product pitch, and prototyped a new Web 2.0 client for their email and calendar offerings from scratch within weeks, which then scored us a multi-year contract.

Systems Engineer

Senior product, eng & outreach lead and former entrepreneur. True hybrid executive with 15+ years of leading eng & product teams and bringing creator & developer products to market.

Created jQuery UI (used by 17%+ of the web) the Aves Engine, the world's first interactive HTML5 game engine (acquired by Zynga), and recently Web Stories for WordPress, a Photoshop-like WYSIWYG editor that is powering the emerging Web Stories creator ecosystem.

Has touched almost all facets of software development and content creation, including leadership, engineering, product management, project management, outreach, video production, acting & scripting, marketing and design roles, and approaches all problems with entrepreneurial startup mentality.

Congratulations to Google for beating me to market with a compelling initial stab at generative UI!

After soft announcing my plan to do a genUI startup I’ve been a bit quiet these last few months. GenUI is a fascinating problem, but I wanted to be sure that I have a viable business model and company to build and not just a problem to solve.

At the same time, having been in executive positions for a couple years now, I needed to prove to myself that I can again perform IC work at the level that I used to and more (0-1 full stack engineering, product and design).

One way to do that while exploring my business plans was to jump into a challenging consulting project (in this case, building a SOTA AI-powered SaaS app from scratch for a client, utilizing AI engineering maximally to replace the need for a 5-8 person agency team). You win some, you lose some: the consulting project is way more consuming than I initially expected and has delayed my next career steps for a few months, but I’m learning so much about SOTA vibe engineering, and I’m building lots of tools in the process (some which I’ll likely open source)! It’s a lot of fun, but I’m itching to jump back into a singular mission in the next few weeks.

It’s actually reassuring to see that the big labs are, after all, not sleeping on genUI. I initially went on the quest because I couldn’t believe nobody attacked the problem head on.

As for what next for me, things are still a bit in the air: There is much more so do in generative UI so I might very well stay the course and start in earnest (Google’s version is both amazing and not as structured and powerful as it could be, fo example, it doesn’t have server state or advanced capabilities beyond data/image gen), but there are so many interesting problems to solve at the intersection of AI and creativity. Stay tuned!

Solving fun AI problems | Eng+PM+UX combo deal

Launched our first generative UI project today! Thrilling to build this new capability with a killer team. The future of design is wild.

Many thanks and congrats to Corey Koberna Adam Cristobal Harsh Kharbanda William Leszczuk Frank G. Vishnu Natchu Gloria McGee Jake Sumpter Claudia Ng Nina Sers Lauren Lax Avital Friedland and many more.

Open article: Google Search with Gemini 3: Our most intelligent search yet by blog.google

Google Search with Gemini 3: Our most intelligent search yet

If AI makes creating easier...why aren't more people becoming professionals?

Because making something is not the same as
understanding why it works.

Most AI tools can generate.
Very few can teach judgment.

We don’t need more AI assistants.
We need AI mentors.

Tools that don’t just finish the work,
but help shape taste.

Tools that nudge, question, reveal,
until we start making choices like professionals.

That’s where hobbyists become practitioners.

👇 I wrote about why “Cursor for X” isn’t enough and what comes next: tools that create professionals, not just outputs.

Ever noticed that cursed corner restaurant? The one with a revolving door of hopeful new owners, always promising a fresh concept, then quietly disapp

Open article: The Curse of 'Cursor for X' by Paul Bakaus • 4 min read

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