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Pavel Konoplenko

I have spent fifteen years turning startup chaos into clarity, most of it in marketing, the last few building the tools instead of briefing someone else to.

I founded Needlepick, which tracks what AI models say about your brand when nobody from marketing is in the room. I built the platform underneath it too. I write a weekly newsletter for people doing this work without a CS degree.

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AI is fundamentally a management problem , not a technology problem. Clear communication is the multiplier.

Building

Needlepick Active needlepick.com Haystack Active needlepack.com
Workie Talkie Shipped
Carra Club Shipped
Needlepick · Founder
Tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity recommend brands, then connects that to your site, your competitors, and the market signals around them.
AI · Marketing intelligence · SaaS
Haystack · Architect
Built from scratch. Runs the blog, the newsletter pipeline, and subscriber management behind Needlepick.
Node.js · TypeScript · Docker · AWS SES
Workie Talkie · Creator
Persistent audio rooms for hands-free AI collaboration, wired through fast speech-to-text, an LLM, and text-to-speech.
Voice AI · Real-time · Python
Carra Club · Builder
A subscription database of exclusive events worldwide, built for ultra-high-net-worth members.
Next.js · Supabase · Stripe

Writing

A weekly newsletter for marketers, product people, and operators working with AI without a CS degree, plus essays on writing and attention.

AI for Non-Engineers Active needlepick.com Following Obsessions Feb 2025 Two Questions for Writing Feb 2025 Natural Conversations Feb 2025
Following Obsessions
A short note on concurrent obsessions, and knowing when enough is enough.
Two Questions for Writing
Where is the weird, and are you being precious? Two questions that find the authentic version of a piece.
Natural Conversations
The obsession with perfect prompting is counterproductive. Real work is iterative and messy. Approach AI the way you approach a colleague.

Speaking

Available for conferences, podcasts, and panels. I talk about what I build and what it taught me.

Why intent, clear communication, and feedback loops decide more than model selection. Managing agents turns out to look a lot like managing people.

Audience leaves with: A working mental model for delegating to AI, and why a business background is an asset rather than a gap.

What it is actually like to build a product solo with these tools — the compound knowledge effect, voice-first workflows, and where the tools still fall over.

Audience leaves with: An honest account of the workflow, including the parts that skip the demo.

Brand discovery is moving from ten blue links to a single generated answer. What ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini say about you is now the surface that matters.

Audience leaves with: A concrete way to measure AI-driven brand visibility and act on what it tells you.

  • Conference talk, 20–45 minutes, with or without slides
  • Podcast, remote, no prep questions needed
  • Panel — happy to be the one who disagrees
  • Internal workshop for marketing and product teams adopting AI

Now

Updated August 2026
Building
Needlepick, full time. Brand visibility measurement across models, and turning that into something a marketing team can act on Monday morning.
Writing
AI for Non-Engineers, weekly. Mostly the gap between what people claim AI does and what it does once it is load-bearing.
Thinking about
How much of AI work is really management work — scoping, delegation, review, knowing when to stop. The models keep improving; the bottleneck keeps being the brief.
Open to
Conference talks, podcasts, and panels, and anyone measuring AI-driven brand discovery.

Get in touch

You can email me directly or find me on LinkedIn. I am glad to hear from anyone building with these tools, measuring AI-driven brand discovery, or looking for a speaker who will not read the slides out loud.

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