Maryna Hradovich is the Co-Founder and COO of Maestra, an all-in-one marketing platform that helps scaling DTC brands personalize beyond email & SMS to drive +15% conversions.

A visionary go-to-market leader, Maryna spent over a decade at Semrush, rising to Vice President of Strategic Growth & Development. In this role, she helped grow a European startup into a NYSE-listed marketing software company with $300M+ in annual revenue. Now at Maestra, she’s championing a platform that makes advanced personalization accessible to every retail and e-commerce brand.

Maryna, you spent many years scaling Semrush and now you are a co-founder at Maestra. What inspired you to make that transition, and how did your past experience shape your vision for contributing to Maestra?

I’ve always been passionate about customer-centric growth. At Semrush I built the U.S. operations from scratch, wearing many hats along the way. What stuck with me was how important it is to focus on the customer. Even with limited resources, we wanted every client to feel like a VIP. That challenge is what got me thinking about how to deliver personalization at scale — timely, tailored attention without needing endless headcount.

Maestra is tackling the very problem — but in e-commerce. And that’s even more exciting! For e-commerce marketers, delivering true personalization feels like an uphill battle. They want to reach customers on their preferred channels, so they connect multiple tools — but this creates duplicate data and turns segmentation into hours of work. They want consistent product recommendations across their website and emails, so they manually update everything or build complex integrations. They want to understand their customers’ needs and behavior, so they pull reports from different platforms and spend hours matching data from different sources. Despite trying to do right by their customers, scattered tools and tight budgets hold them back — and that’s exactly what Maestra is built to fix.

It’s a strong product, a promising market, and after meeting Maestra founders Alex Gornik and Ivan Borovikov, I was thrilled to become a co-founder and help bring the vision forward.

Personalization is clearly one of your passions. You often talk about the shift from channel-centric to customer-centric marketing. What does that shift entail?

It’s a fundamental change in mindset.

Channel-centric marketing means you organize and optimize by channels – you have an email campaign, a social campaign, SMS blasts, all possibly working in silos. The focus is on the channel’s performance.

In contrast, customer-centric marketing means everything starts with the customer’s perspective and journey. Instead of asking “How do we improve our email open rates?”, you ask “What does Jane Smith need and prefer, and how do we meet her where she is?” It’s about delivering a consistent, personalized experience across all channels, tailored to each individual.

Let me illustrate the difference. Imagine Jane shopping for living room furniture. In a channel-centric approach, she can’t find the right couch on the website. Marketers show her random couches in ads and send irrelevant email promotions. Each channel works in isolation, missing the mark.

With customer-centric marketing, Jane takes a product-picking quiz and gets a perfect couch recommendation. She hesitates – people want to try couches first, right? An automated SMS sends her the nearest store location. She visits, buys the couch from a nice consultant, then receives an email from that consultant with matching coffee tables and wall art – the perfect upsell. She doesn’t even realize it’s automated! It feels like a personal conversation with someone who truly understands her style.

That’s the difference: delivering a consistent, personalized experience across all channels, tailored to each individual’s actual journey and needs.

What makes this shift toward customer-centric marketing so urgent for companies today?

This shift is critical now because customers expect more. Think about how people experience Netflix recommendations, Spotify playlists, or Amazon’s product suggestions — they’ve grown used to personalization as the norm. Today’s consumer, overwhelmed with messages, will quickly tune out if you’re not relevant.

DTC brands that excel at omnichannel, customer-focused engagement see dramatically higher retention and revenue. For example, our client Enlightened Equipment achieved 22% revenue growth in just two months with no extra spend. Swimwear brand Jolyn saw 17% growth in total company revenue and +22% in repeated revenue. These kinds of results show how customers reward brands that “remember” them and respect their preferences.

You’ve highlighted how silos hold back personalization — what do those silos look like in practice, and how do they impact the customer journey?

“Tool overload” is something I hear about from marketing leaders all the time. Over the past decade, the marketing technology landscape exploded. Suddenly you had good tools for email, SMS, product recommendations, quizzes, pop-ups, lead forms, and BI. But managing them created a new problem: endless integrations, broken connections, and support tickets that pulled focus away from customers. Not to mention the costs.

To fix this fragmentation, marketers are looking for consolidation – replacing a pile of disconnected tools with one all‑in‑one solution that handles everything seamlessly. It’s like having an iPhone instead of carrying a calculator, camera, GPS, and MP3 player separately. In marketing, that’s the idea behind Maestra — one platform to manage email, SMS, product personalization, loyalty, promotions and more, so teams can focus on customers instead of juggling endless integrations.

Another benefit is cost savings. Maintaining many niche tools means you often pay for overlapping capabilities. A unified platform can be more cost-effective. For example, Furniture Fair consolidated its stack with Maestra and achieved a 27% reduction in marketing stack costs.

In addition, an all-in-one solution reduces internal friction. Many companies I’ve worked with found that consolidating tools freed up their marketers’ time by dozens of hours a month – hours they could spend on strategy and creativity instead of admin and data wrangling.

Saving time is crucial for marketing teams. How much comes from the platform versus your customer success model?

That’s a spot-on question. At Maestra, we believe that half of success comes down to implementation. That’s why every client gets a dedicated Customer Success Manager who does the heavy lifting – from migrating data and building integrations to redesigning emails, creating flows, and shaping strategy. CSMs are always available: each client gets a shared Slack channel for real-time communication and weekly strategy sessions. CSMs proactively monitor client’s results and reach out with fresh ideas – it feels like they are working in your marketing team. As one of our clients, Kyle from Furniture Fair, put it: “Maestra has set a new standard for what customer success should look like.”

This mix of software and people points to something bigger: the way SaaS itself is changing. Traditionally, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) meant vendors provided powerful tools but left customers largely on their own to figure them out. We see that model evolving. SaaS more and more often means Service-as-a-Software — when a high-touch service component is baked into the software offering itself. The idea is to deliver the best of both worlds: the scalability and efficiency of software plus the guidance and expertise of a service.

That’s why we consciously invest in customer service. While our competitors offer a dedicated customer success manager only for premium clients, we offer it as part of their subscription, not an expensive add-on. Moreover, we create conditions for our CSMs so they can give attention to each client: competitors typically assign one CSM to 50+ accounts, we maintain 15. That’s our way to ensure our clients get real results, not just a login to a tool.

If you had to give one piece of advice to DTC marketing leaders reviewing their tech stack, what would it be?

My advice would be: scale smart, not hard.

If you already have email and SMS running and you’re looking for the next breakthrough to drive 10-20% growth, focus on three key areas:

• personalizing the entire customer journey beyond just email;
• consolidating your fragmented tools to eliminate data silos;
• finding a strategic partner who can handle hands-on implementation.

This works especially well for mid-market brands. They’re big enough to see meaningful growth, but they shouldn’t have to become a tech expert to get there. The right mix of technology and support turns potential into profit.

If this resonates with your challenges, let’s make it practical – connect with Maryna on LinkedIn.

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