Insight Place — a place for work, meetings and events

ClientInsight PlaceNicheCoworking, video studio and community, PhuketWe built this project from scratch.

In November 2025 I met Maxim (Maxim Spiridonov, a well-known international entrepreneur and investor, ex-founder of Netology) — he had an idea for a new startup and was looking for someone to take responsibility for marketing and product.

We met in a café, talked for about 20 minutes and quickly found common ground. Then we shook hands and went straight to the construction site to see what was going on.

The idea of the startup is to create a point of attraction in Phuket for strong people who live on the island or come here often. Such communities and places of power already existed in some form in Bali, another place with a large concentration of expats, but there was no such place in Phuket.

A place that gives a lot of energy, where it is easy to work, shoot videos, meet partners, come up with ideas and create. Everything had to be thought through and built from the very beginning.

So first of all I dug into the product itself: values, meanings, pricing plans, branding. And from that I started sketching out in broad strokes a product and marketing strategy — how to bring it to life and make money.

Funny enough, we started launching marketing and preparation while the building itself was practically still under construction, so at first we had to generate photos of the location from the architectural and design drawings — how everything was supposed to look. And it came out quite close: in the end we brought to life exactly what we had generated at the start. A 100% hit.

For each business unit we laid out a SOSTAC strategy, then set goals, priorities and steps. I analysed the market for each product — coworkings, video studios, events on the island: what is going on, how big the market is, what demand and supply look like now, what the strengths and weaknesses of the niche are, how to take it for ourselves.

The space itself was already being built in Bang Tao — the most prestigious area, where people spend the most money. That worked in our favour too.

I split the audience into segments using JTBD: who our clients are and what tasks they come to us with. I gathered offers and meanings for each product and from that started building the product site.

Launch

We built the first site in 7 days to launch. Construction dragged on, the builders kept delaying, but it all seemed almost ready. The whole team wanted to get going. And it was important for us to open exactly in early December, no later — in time for the start of the season on the island. So at a rapid pace we put together the site, social media and marketing and launched a promo campaign for the opening.

We opened. We gathered more than 100 people for the launch event. Maxim did a business roast — we thought through the format, entertained the guests, gave tours. Aaand... on the first day we sold damn nothing.

That was a kick in the backside. Yes, inviting people to an opening is not the same as selling them a product. As it turned out later, the product is much more complex and each business unit mostly has its own audience. So we wiped our chins and right after the opening started building full marketing processes: launching lead generation, geomarketing, viral content and the affiliate programme.

Right away we polished the first landing page, expanded it and brought it to working shape for every product. And right away we started running events: every week — meetups for entrepreneurs about business, management, marketing, sales, AI, content and finance. The logic is simple: people come to the events and learn about the video studio and coworking along the way.

Website

The first site was built on Framer and lived for a few months. During that time the AI revolution happened, and it changed the approach to development and marketing. I dived into it head first, started working with an agent, figured out the models, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Next, sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt — luckily, I had solid experience working in IT companies and knew a bit about development, architecture, the back end, how VPS, containers, clusters and kubernetes work.

In just 2 weeks we had a completely new site.

We rolled out the new site the right way. We brought all the products into one system: developed a brand book and a design system, thought through the site structure, navigation logic and CTAs, and connected the products, payments, pricing plans, reviews and everything else.

We saw the result very quickly. 10 days after the deploy the new site reached top 1 for the main keywords of every business unit, and after 3 weeks for all the important keywords. It was a very big success and a sign that agentic development at the junction with marketing gives a very good result.

Along with that, conversions to sign-up and to a lead grew, brand reputation improved, and the number of residents and visitors increased. SEO started bringing walk-in clients to the coworking and more and more shoots to the studio. We launched a blog and wrote dozens of articles for search results and AI agents, which were indexed right away and started bringing in leads. Every little bit adds up.

AI and automation

At first, in 2025, we used AI like everyone else: for copy, ads and creatives. Then in early 2026 I fully dived into agentic development and rebuilt the site, SEO, GEO, the blog and link building.

Alongside, we started developing our own ERP — a business management system. Here there are 3 business units in one business, each with its own specifics, and there were no available solutions on the market that suited us. So we decided to build our own and delivered the whole roadmap in 4 weeks.

In our ERP each business unit got its own dashboard where revenue, profitability and all management accounting are calculated. All the management sections are there too: documents, tasks, advanced product analytics.

We tied everything to the ERP and started accurately counting customer acquisition cost (CAC), revenue, profitability, margin and payback.

Lead generation in Meta Ads and Google Ads

We launched lead generation for every direction. First we made strong static creatives, and then shot video creatives about each unit together with the production team. Video, of course, gave much more: a higher CTR and more qualified leads.

We built the whole process to get video studio leads at an average CPL of up to $12 and sign-ups for events. Alongside, we ran ads for followers to promote the brand as a whole: events, coworking, community. A follower cost about $0.45, and that way more than 300 followers came through ads — exactly for events and the community.

SMM

First of all we launched in Telegram and Instagram, and then started duplicating content for the different units on YouTube and TikTok.

In Telegram we fairly quickly reached 500 subscribers, and then got to 700. These are all fairly warm members: people who really live in Phuket, come to events, watch and subscribe. We gained them partly through word of mouth: people came to us, recommended us and brought friends. Ads helped too — we also ran them to the Telegram channel. Plus we pulled people from all the social networks into Telegram with viral content.

In Telegram we sold events. In total we held more than 50 events with strong speakers: every week experts in marketing, business, management, finance and content spoke, and guests shared experience in a networking format. Among the speakers were Maxim Spiridonov, Vladimir Yakuba, Anton Elistratov and other experts. We posted all the event listings in the Telegram channel — following them was the main reason to subscribe.

In Instagram we also focused on events: showed videos from the meetups and shot different formats built to go viral. They gathered loads of views locally, because we put the word “Phuket” in as a hook everywhere. We also shot content about production and the video studio — that brought in clients who came to us for shoots.

We tied all 3 businesses together to promote them in parallel. Reach went up to 200 thousand a month, and viral videos got up to 120 thousand views. In Instagram we reached 800 followers — a good result for a local business on the island.

Geomarketing

We created two points on the map. The first is the general one, Insight Place: mostly coworking and events. The second is a separate one, Insight Studio: people search for a video studio separately, and the businesses are quite different.

On the very first day, at the opening in December, we got a dozen reviews. After that we collected them every week: asked clients for feedback, put up calls to leave a review around the coworking and so on.

Here I largely carried over my experience from another project — MyReviews, a service for working with reviews. There I learned to manage reviews, monetise them, sell with them and grow SEO. We applied all of that experience here and fairly quickly boosted the listing. We became easy to find on Google Maps, and we show up first everywhere.

Product

Right at launch we developed pricing plans, prices, naming and branding for each unit and packaged it all. After that we kept fine-tuning the product and changing configurations, measuring the result by revenue, to sell more logically, faster and harder.

We also made a whole bunch of product presentations: about Insight Place, its founders, values and community, and a separate one for the video studio — for developers, agencies and brokers in Phuket.

Next we launched an affiliate programme to partner with other businesses in Phuket and exchange clients — mostly with hotels, restaurants, spas and barbershops. We made it a product too: a digital platform where we tracked conversions and partner commissions. That way we managed to bring in a regular partner who passed us leads for the video studio.

Results

Top 1in SEO and GEO for the key queries of every unitIn the end we arrived at a working business model: the three units echo each other and exchange clients. We managed to turn Insight Place into a real base for entrepreneurs, where any task can be solved.

50+business events with top speakersWe built a cycle of more than 50 business events with up to 100 participants and top speakers Maxim Spiridonov, Vladimir Yakuba and Anton Elistratov. We filled the coworking with clients and built a video production with a strong team.

200Kreach a month in Reels and Shorts$12cost per lead for the video studioStarting from zero, we reached the target revenue figures in the business units.