On burnout, delegation and a future with AI | founder of the Sdelaem agency
No Bullsh!t, August 27, 2025, 63 min, 1,016 views. Sergey Kuznetsov talks with Pasha Malyanov, founder of a content agency that is among the top three in its market, a school attached to it and a community of AI enthusiasts.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 63 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,016 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
Pasha describes the path from a copywriter working for a dollar a text to running an agency with telecom and technology brands as clients, and goes through three personal failures: a failed talent visa application to the United States that cost 10 thousand dollars, an attempt to scale the agency fast that burned around six million roubles on restructuring and left him badly burned out, and years of being unable to delegate, which he only overcame through sheer exhaustion. He also talks about hiring a personal assistant as one of the best decisions of his life, building a personal brand organically without advertising, and treating artificial intelligence as an accelerator rather than a replacement.
Key ideas
- Scaling an agency abruptly, hiring an HR director, a commercial director and a finance director at the same time while spending heavily on restructuring in 3 months, led to severe burnout rather than growth.
- Hiring a personal assistant was the turning point: it freed up around 5 hours a day and made it possible to cap the number of calls per day and protect weekends from work meetings.
- Delegation took around six years to learn and only happened through exhaustion, for instance a vow never to write a commercial proposal personally again.
- A personal brand works only as a side effect of genuinely wanting to share your thinking, not as a marketing channel: marketing has simpler and steadier channels.
- The large clients came organically through network, comments, a blog, search and conferences rather than through cold bidding on freelance marketplaces.
- AI in copywriting does not replace a specialist who understands the task and can frame it, it speeds up the routine part of the work.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript