How VALUE built its own tools by starting with client work
Ioanna Anastasaki, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at VALUE, explains how the Athens marketing agency combines in-house digital services with tools it builds itself. The conversation traces how referrals, hands-on client work and a decision to build rather than rent software shaped the business, and why customer understanding should come before choosing a tool.
Prove a customer problem through hands-on service before turning the solution into software. Understanding why people buy lasts longer than choosing the latest AI model.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
VALUE is my third company. I started Nettico in 2012 and Winks in 2014, and in 2018 I co-founded VALUE in Athens with Konstantinos Kotsigiannis. Each of the first two taught me something I still use every day.
What makes VALUE different is that we don’t rent our technology, we build it. Our line says it simply: "We don’t use AI. We build it." VALUE runs 360 digital marketing in house, from strategy and creative to performance ads, content, SEO, GEO and web development, and the same team builds the AI tools it works with. They run on ORION, our own AI server, so client files stay with us and never go to a public AI cloud.
The tools follow the whole customer journey. GEO and SEO monitoring shows whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity name a brand when people ask about its category. Glanzz, our predictive eye tracking, shows where people’s eyes will land on an ad, a landing page or a pack before it goes live. echo answers every website visitor around the clock, in their own language. Δelta alerts e-commerce teams when conversions drop. Clients feel the difference because the tools come from a team that runs real campaigns with them every day.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
The first clients came from my network. After Nettico and Winks, people had already seen how I work, so the first brands trusted VALUE because they trusted the people behind it.
Today new business comes from three places. Clients who stay with us recommend us. Speaking at events, like our workshop at GRECA, the Greek e-commerce association, has helped us a lot. And LinkedIn and the press, interviews like this one included, bring us people who already know how we think before the first call.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed our direction: we stopped renting AI and started building it. Rented tools give every agency the same answers, so every client ends up with the same insight as their competitors. Building our own tools and running them on ORION, our own AI server, was a big bet for a bootstrapped company. It turned VALUE into a marketing agency and AI software house, and it’s why brands come to us for what a typical agency can’t offer.
The mistake that taught me the most: building before proving. Early on we got excited about features before checking that clients would actually use them. Now every tool starts as a service we do by hand for a real client, and only becomes software once it works. It’s slower at the start and much faster after.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Two things changed. First, buyers now meet brands inside AI answers. People ask ChatGPT or Google which mobile plan, which olive oil or which agency to choose, and they get two or three names. If you’re not one of them, you’re not even on the shortlist, however good your ads are. We adapted by building GEO and SEO monitoring, which tracks real prompts and shows which brands the AI engines cite, and by doing the content and site work that earns those citations. For a challenger mobile brand in Greece, one SEO and GEO sprint in May and June 2026 took click-through rate from 5% to 14.8%, lifted AI-related impressions by 19,000% and got the brand cited by name in Google AI Overviews.
Second, patience is gone. Customers expect an answer now, in their own language, even at 2 a.m. That’s why we built echo, an assistant trained on a company’s own content. It answers every visitor with a source under every reply and hands complex conversations to a person.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: understand the customer before you touch a tool. Build real personas, talk to real buyers, and solve one problem by hand for a client until you know it inside out. Then build the tool, or choose one.
Ignore: the weekly debate about which AI model is the best. By the time you pick a winner, there is a new one. Models change every month; knowing why people buy doesn’t expire.
Thank you to Ioanna Anastasaki and the team at VALUE for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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