From Developer to Demand Generator: Vahagn Sargsyan on Building the Krisp Brand and Voice

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Mark Evans: Today on Marketing Spark, we're joined by someone who's lived and breathed the full journey. From lines of code to headline marketing campaigns. Bahagan Sarkzian is a former full stack developer turned marketing leader, bringing more than fifteen years of hands on experience across top tier tech companies. Currently, the VP of marketing at Crisp, one of the leading noise cancellation companies, Bahagen has built his career on one core philosophy, marketing shouldn't mask product flaws. It should spotlight product excellence. And at Crisp, he didn't just market a feature, he helped invent an entirely new category by listening to real customer experiences and crafting messaging that resonates. In today's conversation, Va Hagen will walk us through how Crisp created the noise cancellation space, how he aligns marketing strategies with evolving customer feedback, and how agile marketing tactics can keep startups nimble in the face of rapidly changing markets. Now whether you're leading a lean marketing team or scaling for enterprise growth, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Vahagin, welcome to the show. Thank you, Mark. As I said off the top, you've had a very interesting journey to becoming a marketing leader. I started off as a reporter. I joined a startup and became a marketer, and then I evolved into a senior marketing leader. Yours is different. You started as a full stack developer. Walk us through your journey. How did you go from writing code to doing marketing campaigns? Walk us through that path that led you to Crisp.

Vahagn Sargsyan: I started as an engineer. I was a full stack developer, and I was writing codes with PHP, JavaScript, jQuery at the time was a hot topic. And I worked around three years as a full stack developer, but pretty early on, I found myself around to something entirely different, which was marketing. I think the reason is that I've always been fascinated by how people think, how people make decisions. When I discovered that marketing is this perfect intersection of psychology and system thinking, I just fell in love with it. Around 2011, I had this shift in my career from a full stack developer into a marketing specialist, and I started as a SEO specialist. So that was my entry point in marketing. Then I grew towards performance marketing, then leadership roles, and so on. Before joining CRISPR, worked in a few different companies. One of them was Rocket Internet, which was the first place where I got exposed to the startup world and tech ecosystem and so on. The experience really sparked something in me. I felt the excitement of building products and shaping marketing from the scratch. And I also realized that I truly enjoy working in an early stage environment where nothing is set up yet. You have to create from the ground up. And, yeah, that eventually let me join Crisp in 2019. I joined as the marketing director. At the time, company was still on early days. No marketing engines, no revenue, no clear product category, but the vision was clear. So I was joining a company that was trying to shape a new product category.

Mark Evans: We'll talk a little bit about Crisp and how it has established market leadership. I want to ask you about your view on being a developer, understanding how code is written, and how that gives you an edge as a marketer. A lot of marketers, including myself, were writers or creative types. If I'd gone back in time, would have learned how to code. As a developer, how does that change your approach to marketing? Does it give you an edge? Does it give you insight that you think other marketers don't have?

Vahagn Sargsyan: In my experience, it's been very helpful for me as a marketer because first, being a developer changes your mindset. You start to think more structured. You try to be more structured when planning, when coming up with new ideas, and so on. So that's the part that stays with you your whole life. It's the part that impacts the mindset and how you think and how you manage projects. The other part is how good you understand and perceive products. Because if you are working in a tech company as a marketer, you need to have a good enough understanding of how the product works, how the code works, how the features are designed, and so on. I think that's where having a development background gives you an edge, right? You start to better understand the product itself, and also it improves your communication with the tech teams. So it becomes much easier to communicate with a product manager, with head of engineering, and so on. So to me that's been very helpful.

Mark Evans: I want to talk about your experience at Crisp and what you're doing there. Let's take a step back and have you deliver the Krisp elevator pitch or the value proposition. Great brand. You've been there for, as you said, six years, building the brand from scratch, the marketing engine from scratch. So talk about Krisp, what it does, who it serves, and then we can talk about how the company has leveraged marketing to establish itself as the market leader.

Vahagn Sargsyan: Crisp is a voice AI company with the main goal of improving communications through AI, human to human communications. And we started as a simple noise cancellation feature back in 2018, but now Crisp is a voice AI platform that operates in three different business lines. So we have our AI meeting assistant business line, which is a tool that transcribes, summarizes, records the meetings, plus some additional AI features. The second business line is Kris for call centers. So we have special product designed for call centers. It includes lots of features like noise cancellation, accent conversion, which is our latest technology, and there are lots of other products like live interpretation, for example. That's our new product that we have created for call centers. And finally, have our third business line, which is Krisp as a technology. And in that business line, we have lots of other voice AI companies that use Krisp as part of their product. So they simply integrate their product sorry, Krisp inside their product and get the values that our customers get. So Discord, for example, is one of those clients that we have. If you use Discord, you can see Krispies working in the background as a noise cancellation tool.

Mark Evans: From a marketing perspective, I'd be interested in the path from a single application, noise cancellation, and Kris got a lot of traction. Maybe we can talk about how that happened and what levers you pulled to build the Kris brand. And as well, how does marketing evolve and your product portfolio starts to expand? And you're dealing with different types of customers with different needs. Pretty juicy, chunky question. Why don't we start with the original premise of Krisp and noise cancellation and talk about what kind of marketing did you do? How did Krisp become one of the leaders? How did you build that brand so that it had the firepower to expand into other markets?

Vahagn Sargsyan: That's a great question. I will start from the times that Krisp was just a noise cancellation tool. And one one big problem that we had at the time was that unlike my previous companies where I was operating in already established product categories and markets, at the time that I joined Krisp, no one was searching for a noise cancellation tool. Right. So it was a new category that we were trying to build with zero demand, so people were not looking for it. It was different from my previous experiences, because in my previous companies, we were trying to capture a demand that already existed in the market. But at Crisp, we were trying to build a new category, which is, I would say, a fundamentally harder and more expensive type of marketing problem because you are not just explaining your product, you first have to explain that the problem exists, and then you have to explain why it matters. And finally, you have to position your product as a solution for that particular problem. It was a difficult problem to solve. I remember at the time, we were trying to basically list our product into websites like G2, Gartner, Trustpilot, and the other ones. But it literally didn't have a place to belong, so there were no category as noise cancellation on G2, on Gartner, and other platforms. So we started to build that. We worked with G2 in order to define what noise cancellation software even means. Who are the players? What is the problem that we are solving? How is noise cancellation different from other audio tools? And so on. So probably that was one of the biggest challenges that we had at the first place.

Mark Evans: Was that the initial marketing motion to establish the category? I'm not talking about advertising or content marketing or influencer marketing. Did you start with category building and using g two and Capterra and Trustpilot as the foundation for what you would do from a marketing perspective? Because as you said off the top, there was no marketing team. There was no marketing engine. Likely, it was you. Why did you

Vahagn Sargsyan: make that decision to start with g two and other platforms? G two and other platforms were part of the journey, but they were not the starting point. We started with actually launching the product in different platforms, like Product Hunt at the time, which brought lots of popularity to Chris because we were recognized as the product of the year back in 2019 on Product Hunt. And then we started to get some traction from tech savvy community because there were lots of gamers, lots of freelancers on Product Hunt, and we started to get some sign ups, installs. They started to use Krisp. And because it was a new technology at the time, the first early adopters started to basically do the marketing for us. So they were sharing the product on Twitter. They were sharing with their friends. And because of that, we got lots of brand awareness, word-of-mouth and so on. And as we started to get that early demand, we were thinking about how we should position this product moving forward, because there were different type of users. There were gamers. They were freelancers, they were call center agents, and each of of them had their own kind of perception of the product. So we wanted to have one single category, one single umbrella that we can place all these different use cases. So that was the time that we started to work with industry analysts, with G2 and other platforms in order to build that category.

Mark Evans: One advantage you did have was Krisp was, in many ways, the right product at the right time. Podcasting was starting to emerge. Obviously, you have gamers. You have call centers. And there may not have been a lot of competition, but there was a lot of demand, I suspect. I remember back in the day when I started to use Kris, eliminate background noise. And at the time, I had a dog and I had kids and they would come into my office, and it was almost like this was the most amazing technology because it dealt with the world around me. Was that one of the advantages with Chris that you entered in? Like you just had this built in demand and people were waiting for a company like yours to step into it and then you get a little bit of a reality. It built upon itself. Is that the initial formula for

Vahagn Sargsyan: success? We launched the product in 2019 for the first time, and a few months later, COVID started. So lots of people were working from home, lots of background noises, pets, and so on, And suddenly, Krisp went viral because it was solving a problem that was a new problem, actually. Probably before that, no one was thinking about background noise being a real problem. But as people started to work from home, noise turned into a real problem. And at the time, we were the only solution in the market that was working with different platforms. Chris was working with Zoom, was working with Google Meet, and so on. And suddenly we had, like, millions of people looking for a solution, which was one of the reasons that we got this huge brand awareness in 2020. Yeah. I would say being at the right place at the right time was one of the things that really helped Crisp become vital.

Mark Evans: Once you've got that market momentum, once you've built some brand awareness, which is amazing given many companies, most companies never get brand awareness, And you've got a growing community. How do you leverage that? How do you capitalize on the fact that you've got brand presence? It's a lot easier to use PR, for example, or to do influencer marketing when you've got some momentum. People already know that the brand exists. It's harder when you're building from scratch. So once you've built once you've got notoriety through Product Hunt and you're on Zoom and Google, what other marketing levers did you pull to accelerate marketing and sales?

Vahagn Sargsyan: I think the most important thing is to have this connection and sense of community with your users. In our case, our early adopters and users, most of them were decision makers in their companies. They were tech savvy people. They were influencers even. We were trying to keep this close connection with them and help them get the best out of Krisp. And even we were getting ideas from them about the features, about the products. We created this sense of community, and that helped us to basically be able to build a product and grow into a product that our users keep using. But at the time when we were just a noise cancellation software, we were thinking about, okay, so what should be next? What other features and products we should start building? One of the main inspirations for us was the feedbacks that we were getting from the customers and early adopters. So they were keep asking about new features, new products, and that was the main source for us to get our ideas on what we want to beat next. From that perspective, if you are an early stage startup, it's super important to have that close connection and collaboration with your early adopters.

Mark Evans: I want to take a step back and talk about community building because for marketers, community like the Nirvana. If you can build a vibrant community of users who love your product, evangelize it, provide you with feedback, talk among each other, then it's basically marketing goals because they do a lot of the marketing for you. How did you build that community? Was there a formal approach to community building? Were you supporting different external groups? A lot of marketers would be interested in. Where do you start with community? How do you build community? How do you take advantage of community to do the marketing that you wanna do?

Vahagn Sargsyan: I think for us, it was more about having direct connection and direct communication channels with the customers. Because at the early days, Chris was still a very small team. There were just a few people in the marketing. It was me and one of the cofounders that was focused on marketing. And we were answering all the comments. We were replying to all the comments on, let's say, Product Hunt, AppSumo, and all the other platforms. And because of this direct engagement and connection with the users, and since users also were realizing that, like, we are the decision makers of the company that are in touch with them, they were feeling much more kind of relaxed and easy to share ideas. And I think for the early stage startups, especially for the cofounders, it's very important to be in direct connection with the customers. Because if the customers feel like feel that their comment, their feedback can be turned into the next feature or next product for the company, they feel much better. And I think from that perspective, our our cofounders did a great job because they were basically the frontline. They were supporting customers, replying to tickets, replying to comments, and I think that was one of the playbooks that we basically dealt with. It's an interesting approach to marketing because it's one thing to talk to customers, but customers want to feel like they're being heard. Their ideas, their feedback, their input matters to the company, and

Mark Evans: the fact that you've got your cofounder and the head of marketing on the front lines and users are aware of that, That's marketing magic because you start to build relationships and as important trust. They recognize that you matter to them and they matter to you. In many ways, develops this virtual circle, which is great. As Kris gains traction and as you look to expand the product portfolio, what challenges are you facing or did you face from a marketing perspective? Yes. You can build community for the original product and you get on product hunt, and g two does really great job for you. But what about these new products? Was the marketing different? Were you able to ride the Krisp brand? Walk us through that marketing exercise.

Vahagn Sargsyan: Definitely, each product and each business requires its its its specific type of marketing. For us, in each of our business lines, we have different approaches. So in our AI meeting assistant business line, which is our consumer product, our motion is more sort of product led type of acquisition. So we try to build the best possible product and then gain new users, gain the brand awareness through viralities that happens through the product itself. From a playbook perspective, I would say product led growth is one of the main motions that we currently have. But it's different in other business lines. So for enterprise and call center business, that is our second business line. It's a totally different motion. It's a more sales led marketing assisted type of motion. So you still need to have the marketing team creating the demand, creating the leads, and then sales team working on closing that. So we have these two different type of motions right now. But one thing that basically combines and units these two different approaches is the brand that we have built on top of our business. Right? So we try to position Krisp as the voice AI platform that uses AI to improve communication and that resonates with both of these business lines, because for both call centers and also for consumers, that's what we offer at the first place. It's an AI that helps you improve communication to become more productive, and that's the main positioning that we have across both business lines.

Mark Evans: Great to hear how Crisp is handling things from the top down in terms of product led growth and and sales led growth. What about underneath when you open up the engine and you've got to connect the two businesses? You've got some consumers that are are product led and some are sales led and then they blur and the business starts to get more complicated, more complex because the types of products you're offering, you can buy this and that, can buy in different ways. What is Chris done from a revenue stack or marketing stack perspective to make sure you've got synchronization and that sales and marketing from both types of businesses are working together?

Vahagn Sargsyan: One of the best decisions that we've made at Crisp in the past couple of years was to separate how these different business lines operate. So we used to have centralized teams, like centralized marketing teams, sales team that were handling the operations for both business lines. But at some point, we realized that even though these two business lines are for Krisp, are under the same brand, but they require totally different approaches. So we started to create smaller teams that are dedicated to one specific business lines, and that happened across all functions. So that started from engineering. We started to have different distinct engineering teams that were focused on just one product. And then that happened across product team, marketing team, sales teams, and so on. So on the leadership layer, we still have this centralized leadership. But when it comes to operational excellence, we have teams that are focused on specific problems and specific business lines, and we try to keep these two business lines separate because we are targeting completely different audiences. They have their specific needs, and that's the reason that we separated that.

Mark Evans: How do you underpin your business in terms of technology to make sure that you have systems in place that can support product led growth and sales led growth.

Vahagn Sargsyan: From a product perspective, we still have this big Crease Voice AI platform that is the foundation of the product. But depending on what business line and what customer we are serving, we are able to build and add different sort of functions and add ons on top of that VoiceAI platform. So if you are an SMB, you can choose to use Krisp AI Meeting Assistant, Meeting Transcription, and those kind of tools. And if you're a call center, you can pick AI Accent Conversion, for example. So from a product perspective, the foundation, the platform is still the same, but we allow users and customers to choose the specific features and products that they want to use.

Mark Evans: There's a lot of talk these days about brand building. The pendulum seems to be swinging back to brand from data driven marketing. The idea that not everything necessarily needs to be quantified, not everything needs to be measured. There's some things that can be quasi measured or not measured at all. So as the VP of marketing, how do you balance long term brand building? And Chris has a great brand with the, I don't know if it's the right word, urgency of short term growth metrics. Building the brand, but also driving

Vahagn Sargsyan: the business from a metrics perspective. I think having that balance is probably one of the most important and difficult jobs of a marketing leader because sometimes you have some immediate goals to hit. It can be revenue. It can be, like, a number of leads and so on. But at the same time, you need to build this long term brand that you want to invest in. For that, there are a couple of things that we do at Crisp. One of them is to use clear frameworks and templates. So for the frameworks, we use OKRs for the short term planning and short term goals. And for the long term, we have this company vision, which is about what CRISP should be in the next three to five years. And then it works like a waterfall, right? You have this big vision of the company in the next three to five years. Then we translate that into annual goals, which are in the form of revenue targets, ARR, and so on. And then for short term planning, we break that down into OKRs. So on the top, there's vision, then there's revenue goals, and then we have OKRs for the short term planning. When it comes to marketing for the short term planning, we usually focus on channels that kind of are fast to act and response, like performance marketing, for example, advertisement. Those are the channels that we use for achieving our short term goals. But for the long term investments, probably brand building and SEO are the most important channels for us. SEO has been one of the most important channels from the day one, and we always treated that as a long term investment for the company. Brand is also one of those channels that we always try to build and invest for the long term without basically looking for short term gains. Another hot topic these days is SEO versus LLMs

Mark Evans: and the emergence of Perplexity and ChatGPT and Claude. From a marketing leader perspective, what's the what's your approach to these models, and how does it impact or how has it impacted Crisp's marketing? Because as you said, you guys depend a lot on SEO, and now there's a question of whether SEO matters or whether it's changed. So interested in how you're approaching this whole new world. Sure. So I think on the surface, a

Vahagn Sargsyan: lot has changed. People used to search only on Google, getting some links in order to view, but now they get AI generated answers. Most of the users do not search at in Google at all. They start with LLMs and so on. So a lot has changed on the surface. But I think from a marketer's perspective, you still need to create high value and high quality content. So that part has not changed. It's still the same. And even now, if you create high quality firsthand content, a content that is really useful for customers and users, you still have a high chance to be listed both on search engines and also to be promoted by LLMs. So from that perspective, what has changed at Crisp is that we started to leverage AI tools. We started to leverage LLMs in order to create more high quality content and firsthand content. But, yeah, from users' perspective, basically, they used to start with Google at the first place, but now there are lots of different LLMs. But we try to basically, yeah, still continue what we were doing, create high quality content, create something that is firsthand, and then distribute that.

Mark Evans: Do you have any tips for fellow marketers on how to make sure your content is tracked and indexed by the LLMs? Because it's one thing to write content, but you have to make sure that JetGPT picks it up and starts when somebody puts in a prompt about noise cancellation technology, CRISP comes up. Any tips and tricks that you can share?

Vahagn Sargsyan: I recently noticed that Google Analytics has added a separate section under referral traffic for LLMs, so now we can see how many sessions and traffic you are getting from ChatGPT and other LLMs. So that's something that we try to keep tracking, that we always monitor. That's super important. I also learned that other tools such as Ahrefs and other standard SEO tools have added specific features for tracking LLM traffic. But from a leadership and marketing leadership perspective, I think one of the channels and one of the tools that helps us to be listed on LLMs is PR, because LLMs do not just look at the signals and content that is listed on your website, but they also look at the third party reviews, what other websites are writing about you. And from that perspective, PR has been one of the most important channels that has helped us to have more listings on LLMs.

Mark Evans: At the right time and the right place, PR can be a very good investment. PR can also be very expensive. There's no guarantees of returns no matter how good a PR agency says they are and the things they claim they can do. When is the right time for PR? At what point does it make sense for a company to leverage PR? My thesis is that early days probably doesn't make sense because it's expensive and you haven't got a track record, but as a brand like Chris Gaines Momentum, get some brand presence, you can amplify your store using PR. Does that make sense to you? Is that a reasonable approach to PR?

Vahagn Sargsyan: For the early days, you just need to focus on building those inbound muscles like SEO, for example, Because you need to have a strong and a compelling story to tell in order to have a PR campaign. And that usually doesn't happen in the early stages of the startups. You need to have a user base. You need to have this interaction with the users in order to be able to craft compelling stories. On that front, I fully agree. It's not a channel for early stage startups. But I think maybe after a couple of years, when you have the money and you also have the stories to tell the world, the stories that are coming from users, are coming from the feedbacks that you receive, are coming from the case studies that you have built with the customers, that's the right time to start testing PR as a channel. I would say the right time for doing PR is when you have a strong point of view or interesting story or strategic narrative to communicate to the world. That's the right time to start.

Mark Evans: We've covered a lot of ground, everything from AI to PR to SEO and brand building. Wanna thank you for your insight. One final question. If people are interested in you and Crisp, where do they go? What do they do?

Vahagn Sargsyan: Type in crisp.a and you can land on our website. You can see the products that we have, and I'm also always available and active on LinkedIn so we can get in touch there.

Mark Evans: Awesome. Thanks, Vahegen, for your insight, and thanks to everyone for listening. If you found this episode valuable, leave a review or share it with a colleague, especially someone wrestling with the same marketing challenges and opportunities as Crisp. Marketing Spark is all about helping b to b SaaS founders, marketing leaders, and entrepreneurs uncover what's working, what's changing, and what's next in the world of growth. If you're a b to b SaaS marketer or founder with a unique story or a fresh take on marketing, growth, or leadership, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and let's talk about getting you on the show. Until next time, thanks again for listening to Marketing Spark.