Anssi Rusi

Who is Anssi Rusi?

Anssi Rusi is the CEO and co-founder of Smartly.io, the social advertising automation platform that helps performance marketing teams run Facebook and Instagram campaigns at scale. He took the SaaStock Europe 2017 stage to share a topic he clearly cares deeply about: how the right company culture, rather than any single tool or process, becomes the real engine behind fast product development. Rather than open with metrics or a pitch, Rusi framed his session around what he called a genuinely interesting question for any SaaS leader, namely how to keep building quickly even as a company grows and the stakes get higher.

His vantage point is that of an operator running a product that sits directly on top of one of the most demanding advertising ecosystems in the world. Smartly.io, as he described it on stage, automates campaign creation, optimisation, and reporting on the Facebook ads platform for performance marketers, and works with some of the biggest brands in the world. Building reliably and fast against a platform that changes constantly is a particular kind of engineering and organisational challenge, and it is the lived experience behind everything Rusi argued at SaaStock.

This page collects Anssi Rusi's recorded SaaStock talk along with its transcript, so founders and operators can hear his perspective on culture and development velocity in his own words. His SaaStock Europe 2017 session, "Maximising Product Development Speed Through Company Culture," is the source for the themes and lessons summarised here.

About Smartly.io

Smartly.io is a platform that automates Facebook and Instagram advertising for marketers. As Anssi Rusi explained at SaaStock, the product sits on top of the Facebook ads platform and helps performance marketing teams automate campaign creation, optimisation, and reporting at scale. Where individual marketers might manually build and tweak ad sets, Smartly.io abstracts that work into automated workflows, letting teams operate across far larger volumes of creative and spend than would otherwise be practical.

The company serves performance marketing teams at some of the biggest brands in the world, per Rusi's description on stage. That customer base places real demands on the product: brands running large advertising budgets expect both speed and reliability, and the underlying Facebook and Instagram ad systems evolve continuously. Keeping pace means shipping product improvements quickly without sacrificing stability, which is precisely why questions of development speed and the culture that enables it sit at the centre of how Smartly.io is run.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Smartly.io grew into one of Europe's notable social advertising automation companies. The throughline of Rusi's SaaStock appearance is that this kind of growth is sustained less by heroic individual effort and more by an organisation deliberately built to develop product fast, a theme he returned to throughout his talk.

Key lessons from Anssi Rusi's talks

Culture is the real driver of product development speed. Rusi chose to talk about culture rather than tooling or methodology because, in his framing, how a company is built and how its people work together is what ultimately determines how fast it can ship. Process and tools matter, but they sit downstream of the culture that decides whether teams move with urgency and trust.

Build on top of demanding platforms by automating the repetitive work. Smartly.io's entire reason for existing is that automating campaign creation, optimisation, and reporting lets marketing teams operate at a scale manual work cannot reach. The lesson for SaaS builders is to find the high-volume, repetitive workflows in your customers' world and turn them into automated leverage.

Serving the biggest brands raises the bar on speed and reliability at once. Working with large global brands, as Rusi noted, means a product cannot trade one for the other. The organisational challenge is shipping quickly while staying dependable against an ad platform that keeps changing, which is exactly the tension culture has to resolve.

Frame the hard questions plainly and tackle them head-on. Rather than dress up his session, Rusi went straight to what he saw as the genuinely interesting problem of sustaining development speed as a company scales, a reminder that the most useful founder talks confront the real operating challenge directly.