If you’ve been paying attention to the Bïrch blog recently, you might have noticed things look and feel a little different. Over the last eight months, the Bïrch content team has been on a journey to reimagine this space from top to bottom. The project goes far beyond a simple visual facelift. It’s a complete rethinking of design, content strategy, measurement planning, and what it actually means to have a company blog in 2026.
The people driving this transformation are Elina (our Head of Operations and the central catalyst for this evolution), the brilliant minds of Valentina and Polina from La Sopa (our content and SEO agency), and our design duo, Stas (Head of Design) and Tatiana (Lead Designer).
Oh and there’s me, Scott. I’m mostly just wandering around, watching what’s happening and reporting back to you all.
As someone who loves marketing and is naturally curious about how teams operate, I wanted to document this journey because I find that often the best marketing lessons are hidden in plain sight. We get so caught up in the day-to-day execution of our jobs that we forget to look back at how far we've come and what we learned along the way. Elina echoed this sentiment perfectly when we first started to discuss this article:
We also realized that there is a distinct lack of transparent, step-by-step stories for other marketers that detail how to launch or transform a blog.
We sat down together to pull back the curtain on our successes, our challenges, and the realities of attempting to balance the need for SEO performance, the long-term benefits of brand marketing, and how to provide real lasting value to marketers through content production. The majority of this article focuses on the team’s work together since mid-2025, a point in time where this team and their shared visions were introduced. However, we’ll also seek context from the artifacts I dusted off from the Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) Museum of Modern Advertising.
Key takeaways
- Focus on reader intent, not just traffic. Bïrch had experimented with an SEO-heavy approach that generated “empty traffic” characterized by high bounce rates and zero conversions. The new strategy centers on uncovering what performance marketers are genuinely curious about and serving that intent with high-value educational content.
- Prioritize quick wins before building from scratch. La Sopa’s first tactical step was conducting a thorough content audit. They focused their initial efforts on updating existing articles to drive faster performance improvements before moving on to new publications.
- Embrace agile design over rigid perfectionism. To avoid getting paralyzed by long development cycles, the design team approached the blog’s visual overhaul through agile, iterative steps. By operating without strict, restrictive design guidelines, they fostered a fun, collage-based visual identity that can adapt freely.
- Treat external agencies like internal partners. A major key to this transformation was Bïrch’s ego-free culture, which integrated La Sopa as an extension of the internal team from their very first call. This success stems from a leadership philosophy that treats cross-functional collaboration as a true partnership rather than a top-down, task-oriented dynamic.
- Find your collective authenticity. In an industry saturated with aggressive hustle culture and AI-generated noise, Bïrch is attempting to balance its SEO requirements with qualitative, human-centric editorial pieces. Drawing inspiration from relaxed, educational material, they aim to create a “soft heartbeat” culture of content that doesn’t push ideas, but rather builds community and trust.
The “prehistoric era” and the problem with empty traffic
To understand where we’re going, you have to understand where we came from. The Bïrch blog didn’t just *appear* eight months ago. It has a history that Stas affectionately, and perhaps accurately, refers to as “pre-historical times.”
When we look back at the archives, we’re presented with a patchwork of differing marketing philosophies. In 2019, the company attempted a more artistic approach featuring colorful collage illustrations, but the written content didn’t perform well organically.
Then came 2022, a period defined by a heavy, almost mechanical focus on SEO. The content was written primarily for search engines, accompanied by generic stock images or early, unrefined AI generations. Looking back at it, Stas described the visual state of that era as “depressing,” an approach that ultimately failed to deliver meaningful results, organic or otherwise.
When Elina first got involved with the blog, she inherited the remnants of these past experiments. The primary issue wasn’t necessarily a lack of visitors; it was a lack of intent.
“We were getting a lot of what we called empty traffic, so the bounce rate was very high and there were no conversions, no reactions, no feedback from these people who came to read the blog,” Elina explained. The way the company was executing SEO back then seemed to priortize everything but readers.
Elina knew that SEO was important in terms of acquisition, but felt it wasn’t going to offer Bïrch any real meaningful longevity. Instead, the vision became to find out exactly what performance marketers were genuinely curious about and serve that intent with educational, relatable, optimized content.
To achieve this, Elina realized she needed a strategic partner to start building the right foundations. Someone who could integrate deeply into Bïrch and co-create, much more than a freelance copywriter or content producer.
La Sopa starts to simmer
The story of how Bïrch found its content agency, La Sopa, is a testament to the power of showing up and having genuine, human conversations. Elina wasn’t actively looking for an agency, nor was she officially in charge of the hiring decision at the time. The pieces of this puzzle started to fall into place when she attended a Semrush marketing event in Berlin.
There, she met La Sopa co-founder, Polina. What is fascinating about their initial encounter is how little it had to do with business. “We just started talking about something completely different, like not about SEO or a blog or anything. We just talked about life,” Polina recalled.
They connected on something fleeting and trivial, and only at the very end of their long conversation did Elina share her current vision and challenges at Bïrch.
A few weeks later, as Elina started to crystalize her plans, La Sopa was hired. She wasn’t weighing La Sopa against a massive roster of competing agencies. She simply saw a specific, undeniable match in Polina and Valentina. They shared a core philosophy: content should be educational, exactly what marketers are actively searching for, well structured, and optimized for search.
Securing the partnership required a leap of faith. Elina, in this period, had been given full responsibility for the blog’s future. She took her plans to CEO Mikel and requested the maximum budget the company had assigned for SEO, which was 4x the amount quoted by SEO freelancers.
“I went with this to CEO Mike and I was like, ‘I want to make this decision.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, then make this decision.’” Elina laughed at how he put the responsibility squarely on her shoulders. Some might see this as dismissive, or setting someone up to fail, but knowing what I know now about Bïrch’s culture, this was a sign of complete trust.
Maxing out the budget to hire an agency was clearly a daunting decision, but it paid dividends. Because La Sopa operates as a flexible, full-service agency (as opposed to the other common option, a single-skilled freelancer), they were able to assist in both strategic and tactical tasks, making the budget go further. “Considering the results we saw after a few months, now I think it wasn’t an expensive decision at all,” Elina noted.
La Sopa started with strategic planning before beginning to update content in their second month working with Bïrch. This work resulted in continued MoM increases in organic traffic to the blog until the end of 2025, as well as a 20% MoM growth in LLM traffic.
For La Sopa, the integration felt incredibly unique. From their very first call, they were treated as part of the internal team rather than an external vendor. This integration goes far beyond a shared Slack channel. Elina and the La Sopa team work from co-working spaces together, meet for dinner, exchange company merch, and are even co-hosting an event in Berlin together!
Their relationship is built not only on business principles, but philosophies about life. Even the name “La Sopa” stems from Valentina, who is originally from Nicaragua. She explained to me that in her culture, making soup (“sopa”) on a Sunday is an event that brings families and communities together.
Deep diving into SEO audits and quick wins
When Valentina and Polina audited the Bïrch blog in mid-2025, they found an infrastructure that was confusing for both readers and search engines.
“When we joined, the blog was just an infinite scroll of articles,” Valentina explained. “It was difficult to find anything. So you had to kind of ask yourself, what is this blog about? What is this content about? It just was like Meta, Instagram, Snapchat... there was no beginning, no end, no way to quickly understand core themes.”
The very first step was bringing in much-needed structure. Before La Sopa could even think about writing new articles, they had to perform a comprehensive UI/UX and content analysis. The goal was to systematically decide what to remove, rework, and create from scratch. Valentina explained that the foundation of their content strategy meant identifying the core categories the Bïrch blog needed to be known for, replacing the neverending messy scroll with clear, definitive topics that were easy to navigate.
With the architecture mapped out, they tackled the content audit. Bïrch had over 100 existing articles hosted on the blog. It’s a common trap for companies to bring in an agency and immediately demand new content to demonstrate performance. However, La Sopa pushed for a different, strategic approach: targeting “quick wins” by updating existing content that was performing well organically, but still had room to grow.
La Sopa identified ~50 articles to update, updating 10 in the first month after the strategy was defined. To date, they’ve updated 31 pieces of content and have established a content workflow that simultaneously publishes new content and updates historic content.
By refreshing, sometimes overhauling, these existing pieces through additional keyword research and improved on-page optimization, they were able to drive results and see performance improvements much faster than if they had relied solely on new publications.
These are some examples of articles that were receiving less traffic, but were updated and optimized:
La Sopa introduced a Notion board to organize content workflows and manage the content calendar. This structural addition allowed for a clear division of labor, where internal product-driven content was handled by the Bïrch team, and the broader educational content was produced by La Sopa. This workflow immediately opened the door for Elina to comfortably integrate her own editorial ideas into a functional, clear content pipeline.
One of the challenges content agencies face when working with new clients is the balance of satisfying the need for content delivery, but being confident that performance is being measured accurately.
In this scenario, La Sopa started to rebuild the analytics foundation while delivering content—another example of why hiring a multidisciplinary agency was such a key decision. Polina spearheaded this effort. When they arrived, the Google Analytics setup was broken, and the team was relying on a barely working dashboard to try to establish content insights. Polina and Aidar orchestrated a complete migration to PostHog by July, establishing a reliable analytical dashboard that finally allowed the team to see what was driving the performance they wanted to see.
The content dilemma: SEO vs. brand-led production
One of the most fascinating aspects of my interviews with the team was uncovering the inherent tension between performance-driven metrics and qualitative brand building. It is a balancing act that almost every marketing team faces, but very few discuss openly.
For La Sopa, the challenge was implementing a strategy fluidly while actively producing content. They also had to navigate the push-and-pull between what the data said they should do and what the Bïrch team wanted to do.
This is where the magic of the Bïrch culture shines. Rather than stubbornly sticking only to what generates immediate organic traffic, the team recognized the long-term brand value of expert interviews, opinion pieces, and relatable marketing stories.
As someone who has worked with hundreds of clients in the UK and the US, I can confidently say this is very rare. Many companies struggle with this balance of delivering narrative-driven, optimized content. Often ego gets in the way, or there’s a fixation on fast returns or quantitative metrics only. The Bïrch team, however, is acutely aware of the importance of qualitative engagement. They genuinely care about what people read and whether they relate to it on a human level.
Agile, rule-breaking design
With a robust content and analytics strategy taking shape, the blog desperately needed a visual identity that matched its new ambition.
When Stas, Head of Design, first looked at the blog, he saw it was designed for machines without any real character.. He could have simply tuned it up and made minor improvements, but he decided to take a completely different path.
Interestingly, when asked about his research process, Stas reveals a bold approach, with limited study of competitors. “I didn’t extensively look at other marketing blogs. I don’t have to look. I mean, it’s very predictable. I don’t really care for that approach,” he said. This avoidance of obsessing on what competitors are doing prevents the team from falling into the trap of simply copying others, allowing their true creativity to surface.
Stas proposed an overarching approach rather than a rigid set of brand guidelines. He introduced a typographic, collage-based style characterized by floating, jumping elements that gives the blog a distinct, vibrant feel.
He then handed the reins to Lead Designer, Tatiana, giving her complete autonomy to illustrate the articles. “I like that we don’t have any highly specific design guidelines,” Tatiana added. “We have an idea, a concept of this collage approach, so it’s very easy for me to work with and be creative.”
This freedom is practically unheard of in traditional corporate design environments, which are often stifled by strict review processes and overbearing creative directors. Stas views his role differently. He acts as a guide, ensuring alignment without controlling the outcome. “I don’t try to control Tatiana like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t fit our guidelines.’ It’s a very flexible approach.”
Big dreams start with small steps
A massive visual overhaul of this scale can easily paralyze a team. Bïrch avoided this by treating the blog redesign like software product development, embracing an agile methodology.
“When you start something like this, you have this big list of like 30 bullet points of what you want to do, and then you just find yourself stuck in half a year of development,” Stas explained. “The problem is that once you do things this way, you quickly find mistakes in your thinking and find yourself redeveloping your initial ideas, so it was better to take an agile approach than try to do everything at once.”
This agile approach wasn’t without its technical hurdles. The blog is built on Webflow, which offers great flexibility but also presents specific design limitations. For example, Tatiana noted that designing tables in Webflow often looked ugly on mobile devices, prompting her to use ChatGPT to write custom embed codes to achieve her visual goals.
Yet, Stas embraces these boundaries.
For the design duo, success isn’t necessarily measured by a line on a graph. For Stas, success is simple: if his internal clients (e.g. the rest of the content team) are satisfied and have the functionality they requested, he has done his job. For Tatiana, the reward is deeply tied to comprehension. “I manage to design something to make complex marketing information even easier to understand. That’s what I find satisfying,” she shared.
Becoming the “soft heartbeat” of marketing
Throughout all these interviews, a recurring theme emerged: the unique, ego-free culture at Bïrch.
Valentina pointed out that because Bïrch is a bootstrapped company founded by friends, with no external pressure from investors, they possess a rare freedom to shape their company and their marketing exactly how they see fit.
At the center of this cultural ecosystem is Elina. Her approach to managing a cross-functional team of freelancers, agencies, and internal designers is remarkably collaborative.
“I don’t actually tell people what to do,” Elina reflected. “I try not to act like a boss and treat my relationships like a partnership, rather than me just throwing tasks at people.”
When disagreements occur, which is inevitable when blending SEO strategy with experimental design, Elina’s philosophy is to find a space where the team can negotiate and look at options together. They lean heavily on majority rule for cross-functional decisions. Most importantly, she believes it is okay to tolerate slight disagreements, allowing teammates to execute their vision to see how it meets reality, provided no one feels a choice is a catastrophic mistake.
I asked Elina where she draws her inspiration from for this type of leadership and brand building. She cited two main sources:
- Her own team. She actively views herself as a student, continuously learning from the deep expertise of the designers and SEO specialists around her.
- Lenny’s Podcast and The Browser Company. She admires how the team at The Browser Company transparently explains the behind-the-scenes of their product development. Similarly, she loves the educational, relaxed nature of Lenny’s Podcast. “I like that it’s very relaxed in a way. It doesn’t push any ideas. It's just like, it’s a very soft heartbeat vibe.”
This “soft heartbeat vibe” perfectly describes the Bïrch approach. In an industry dominated by aggressive, fast-paced, “hustle culture” marketing, Bïrch is cultivating a gentler, quieter confidence.
“We are building a great product... we don’t need to be pushy. People are only going to be surprised in a good way when they start using the product,” Elina shared.
The results so far & the flight ahead
The combination of La Sopa’s structural SEO rigor and the design team’s visual flair has created a powerful foundation. By August 2025, shortly after launching their first content updates, the team saw immediate validation as organic traffic started to increase, including more frequent appearances in AI overviews.
However, the team isn’t just looking at top-of-the-funnel traffic. They have tracked quality metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and the rate of returning users. When a metric shifts dramatically, the team is now equipped to spot it instantly and investigate the cause.
Beyond the charts, the qualitative feedback has been incredibly rewarding. At industry events, people frequently bring up the blog to the Bïrch team, praising its content without prompting. We receive direct messages on LinkedIn from readers expressing genuine appreciation for our narrative approach and writing style. “This feedback and reactions are not maybe reflected on the graphs, but they are a signal that we are heading in an interesting direction,” Elina observed.
What’s next for 2026?
So, what happens now that the foundation is built?
For La Sopa, the next major frontier is distribution. “When we first joined, we said that we needed to focus on distribution just as much as production,” Valentina explained. Now that Bïrch has amassed a significant, high-quality content library, the focus will shift toward syndication and amplification. The ultimate goal is to get more eyes on Bïrch, beyond just organic search.
From an editorial standpoint, Elina wants to lean further into what makes the blog unique by focusing on the human stories behind the marketing we see every day. The core focus will be deepening the existing formats. “I’d love more interviews, I’d love more behind the scenes content,” she shared.
There is also a strategic push to make the blog a highly appealing platform for potential external contributors. The team wants this to be a space where people want to come and feel comfortable sharing their opinions and marketing stories. They also recognize that this high-quality, transparent content serves as an incredibly effective employer branding tool, showcasing a company culture that can help to attract likeminded talent.
Final thoughts: the future of content and collaboration
Something I’ve taken away from these interviews and my five months alongside Elina, Stas, Tatiana, Valentina, and Polina is that in an AI-dominated world, it’s human connection and experience that captures our imaginations, not just our attention.
In a world increasingly saturated with robotic, algorithm-first content, readers are absolutely starving for authenticity. We want to read about real struggles, real strategies, real scenarios, and real people. Even the concept of what it means to be “authentic” is at high risk of being muddied forever.
By stripping away the ego, embracing an agile and creatively free design process, and fiercely protecting their “slow heartbeat” editorial approach, the Bïrch team hasn’t just redesigned a blog; they’re building a media platform where marketers can actually flock to for the kinship of shared marketing experience.
If you’ve been paying attention to the Bïrch blog recently, you might have noticed things look and feel a little different. Over the last eight months, the Bïrch content team has been on a journey to reimagine this space from top to bottom. The project goes far beyond a simple visual facelift. It’s a complete rethinking of design, content strategy, measurement planning, and what it actually means to have a company blog in 2026.
The people driving this transformation are Elina (our Head of Operations and the central catalyst for this evolution), the brilliant minds of Valentina and Polina from La Sopa (our content and SEO agency), and our design duo, Stas (Head of Design) and Tatiana (Lead Designer).
Oh and there’s me, Scott. I’m mostly just wandering around, watching what’s happening and reporting back to you all.
As someone who loves marketing and is naturally curious about how teams operate, I wanted to document this journey because I find that often the best marketing lessons are hidden in plain sight. We get so caught up in the day-to-day execution of our jobs that we forget to look back at how far we've come and what we learned along the way. Elina echoed this sentiment perfectly when we first started to discuss this article:
We also realized that there is a distinct lack of transparent, step-by-step stories for other marketers that detail how to launch or transform a blog.
We sat down together to pull back the curtain on our successes, our challenges, and the realities of attempting to balance the need for SEO performance, the long-term benefits of brand marketing, and how to provide real lasting value to marketers through content production. The majority of this article focuses on the team’s work together since mid-2025, a point in time where this team and their shared visions were introduced. However, we’ll also seek context from the artifacts I dusted off from the Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) Museum of Modern Advertising.
Key takeaways
- Focus on reader intent, not just traffic. Bïrch had experimented with an SEO-heavy approach that generated “empty traffic” characterized by high bounce rates and zero conversions. The new strategy centers on uncovering what performance marketers are genuinely curious about and serving that intent with high-value educational content.
- Prioritize quick wins before building from scratch. La Sopa’s first tactical step was conducting a thorough content audit. They focused their initial efforts on updating existing articles to drive faster performance improvements before moving on to new publications.
- Embrace agile design over rigid perfectionism. To avoid getting paralyzed by long development cycles, the design team approached the blog’s visual overhaul through agile, iterative steps. By operating without strict, restrictive design guidelines, they fostered a fun, collage-based visual identity that can adapt freely.
- Treat external agencies like internal partners. A major key to this transformation was Bïrch’s ego-free culture, which integrated La Sopa as an extension of the internal team from their very first call. This success stems from a leadership philosophy that treats cross-functional collaboration as a true partnership rather than a top-down, task-oriented dynamic.
- Find your collective authenticity. In an industry saturated with aggressive hustle culture and AI-generated noise, Bïrch is attempting to balance its SEO requirements with qualitative, human-centric editorial pieces. Drawing inspiration from relaxed, educational material, they aim to create a “soft heartbeat” culture of content that doesn’t push ideas, but rather builds community and trust.
The “prehistoric era” and the problem with empty traffic
To understand where we’re going, you have to understand where we came from. The Bïrch blog didn’t just *appear* eight months ago. It has a history that Stas affectionately, and perhaps accurately, refers to as “pre-historical times.”
When we look back at the archives, we’re presented with a patchwork of differing marketing philosophies. In 2019, the company attempted a more artistic approach featuring colorful collage illustrations, but the written content didn’t perform well organically.
Then came 2022, a period defined by a heavy, almost mechanical focus on SEO. The content was written primarily for search engines, accompanied by generic stock images or early, unrefined AI generations. Looking back at it, Stas described the visual state of that era as “depressing,” an approach that ultimately failed to deliver meaningful results, organic or otherwise.
When Elina first got involved with the blog, she inherited the remnants of these past experiments. The primary issue wasn’t necessarily a lack of visitors; it was a lack of intent.
“We were getting a lot of what we called empty traffic, so the bounce rate was very high and there were no conversions, no reactions, no feedback from these people who came to read the blog,” Elina explained. The way the company was executing SEO back then seemed to priortize everything but readers.
Elina knew that SEO was important in terms of acquisition, but felt it wasn’t going to offer Bïrch any real meaningful longevity. Instead, the vision became to find out exactly what performance marketers were genuinely curious about and serve that intent with educational, relatable, optimized content.
To achieve this, Elina realized she needed a strategic partner to start building the right foundations. Someone who could integrate deeply into Bïrch and co-create, much more than a freelance copywriter or content producer.
La Sopa starts to simmer
The story of how Bïrch found its content agency, La Sopa, is a testament to the power of showing up and having genuine, human conversations. Elina wasn’t actively looking for an agency, nor was she officially in charge of the hiring decision at the time. The pieces of this puzzle started to fall into place when she attended a Semrush marketing event in Berlin.
There, she met La Sopa co-founder, Polina. What is fascinating about their initial encounter is how little it had to do with business. “We just started talking about something completely different, like not about SEO or a blog or anything. We just talked about life,” Polina recalled.
They connected on something fleeting and trivial, and only at the very end of their long conversation did Elina share her current vision and challenges at Bïrch.
A few weeks later, as Elina started to crystalize her plans, La Sopa was hired. She wasn’t weighing La Sopa against a massive roster of competing agencies. She simply saw a specific, undeniable match in Polina and Valentina. They shared a core philosophy: content should be educational, exactly what marketers are actively searching for, well structured, and optimized for search.
Securing the partnership required a leap of faith. Elina, in this period, had been given full responsibility for the blog’s future. She took her plans to CEO Mikel and requested the maximum budget the company had assigned for SEO, which was 4x the amount quoted by SEO freelancers.
“I went with this to CEO Mike and I was like, ‘I want to make this decision.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, then make this decision.’” Elina laughed at how he put the responsibility squarely on her shoulders. Some might see this as dismissive, or setting someone up to fail, but knowing what I know now about Bïrch’s culture, this was a sign of complete trust.
Maxing out the budget to hire an agency was clearly a daunting decision, but it paid dividends. Because La Sopa operates as a flexible, full-service agency (as opposed to the other common option, a single-skilled freelancer), they were able to assist in both strategic and tactical tasks, making the budget go further. “Considering the results we saw after a few months, now I think it wasn’t an expensive decision at all,” Elina noted.
La Sopa started with strategic planning before beginning to update content in their second month working with Bïrch. This work resulted in continued MoM increases in organic traffic to the blog until the end of 2025, as well as a 20% MoM growth in LLM traffic.
For La Sopa, the integration felt incredibly unique. From their very first call, they were treated as part of the internal team rather than an external vendor. This integration goes far beyond a shared Slack channel. Elina and the La Sopa team work from co-working spaces together, meet for dinner, exchange company merch, and are even co-hosting an event in Berlin together!
Their relationship is built not only on business principles, but philosophies about life. Even the name “La Sopa” stems from Valentina, who is originally from Nicaragua. She explained to me that in her culture, making soup (“sopa”) on a Sunday is an event that brings families and communities together.
Deep diving into SEO audits and quick wins
When Valentina and Polina audited the Bïrch blog in mid-2025, they found an infrastructure that was confusing for both readers and search engines.
“When we joined, the blog was just an infinite scroll of articles,” Valentina explained. “It was difficult to find anything. So you had to kind of ask yourself, what is this blog about? What is this content about? It just was like Meta, Instagram, Snapchat... there was no beginning, no end, no way to quickly understand core themes.”
The very first step was bringing in much-needed structure. Before La Sopa could even think about writing new articles, they had to perform a comprehensive UI/UX and content analysis. The goal was to systematically decide what to remove, rework, and create from scratch. Valentina explained that the foundation of their content strategy meant identifying the core categories the Bïrch blog needed to be known for, replacing the neverending messy scroll with clear, definitive topics that were easy to navigate.
With the architecture mapped out, they tackled the content audit. Bïrch had over 100 existing articles hosted on the blog. It’s a common trap for companies to bring in an agency and immediately demand new content to demonstrate performance. However, La Sopa pushed for a different, strategic approach: targeting “quick wins” by updating existing content that was performing well organically, but still had room to grow.
La Sopa identified ~50 articles to update, updating 10 in the first month after the strategy was defined. To date, they’ve updated 31 pieces of content and have established a content workflow that simultaneously publishes new content and updates historic content.
By refreshing, sometimes overhauling, these existing pieces through additional keyword research and improved on-page optimization, they were able to drive results and see performance improvements much faster than if they had relied solely on new publications.
These are some examples of articles that were receiving less traffic, but were updated and optimized:
La Sopa introduced a Notion board to organize content workflows and manage the content calendar. This structural addition allowed for a clear division of labor, where internal product-driven content was handled by the Bïrch team, and the broader educational content was produced by La Sopa. This workflow immediately opened the door for Elina to comfortably integrate her own editorial ideas into a functional, clear content pipeline.
One of the challenges content agencies face when working with new clients is the balance of satisfying the need for content delivery, but being confident that performance is being measured accurately.
In this scenario, La Sopa started to rebuild the analytics foundation while delivering content—another example of why hiring a multidisciplinary agency was such a key decision. Polina spearheaded this effort. When they arrived, the Google Analytics setup was broken, and the team was relying on a barely working dashboard to try to establish content insights. Polina and Aidar orchestrated a complete migration to PostHog by July, establishing a reliable analytical dashboard that finally allowed the team to see what was driving the performance they wanted to see.
The content dilemma: SEO vs. brand-led production
One of the most fascinating aspects of my interviews with the team was uncovering the inherent tension between performance-driven metrics and qualitative brand building. It is a balancing act that almost every marketing team faces, but very few discuss openly.
For La Sopa, the challenge was implementing a strategy fluidly while actively producing content. They also had to navigate the push-and-pull between what the data said they should do and what the Bïrch team wanted to do.
This is where the magic of the Bïrch culture shines. Rather than stubbornly sticking only to what generates immediate organic traffic, the team recognized the long-term brand value of expert interviews, opinion pieces, and relatable marketing stories.
As someone who has worked with hundreds of clients in the UK and the US, I can confidently say this is very rare. Many companies struggle with this balance of delivering narrative-driven, optimized content. Often ego gets in the way, or there’s a fixation on fast returns or quantitative metrics only. The Bïrch team, however, is acutely aware of the importance of qualitative engagement. They genuinely care about what people read and whether they relate to it on a human level.
Agile, rule-breaking design
With a robust content and analytics strategy taking shape, the blog desperately needed a visual identity that matched its new ambition.
When Stas, Head of Design, first looked at the blog, he saw it was designed for machines without any real character.. He could have simply tuned it up and made minor improvements, but he decided to take a completely different path.
Interestingly, when asked about his research process, Stas reveals a bold approach, with limited study of competitors. “I didn’t extensively look at other marketing blogs. I don’t have to look. I mean, it’s very predictable. I don’t really care for that approach,” he said. This avoidance of obsessing on what competitors are doing prevents the team from falling into the trap of simply copying others, allowing their true creativity to surface.
Stas proposed an overarching approach rather than a rigid set of brand guidelines. He introduced a typographic, collage-based style characterized by floating, jumping elements that gives the blog a distinct, vibrant feel.
He then handed the reins to Lead Designer, Tatiana, giving her complete autonomy to illustrate the articles. “I like that we don’t have any highly specific design guidelines,” Tatiana added. “We have an idea, a concept of this collage approach, so it’s very easy for me to work with and be creative.”
This freedom is practically unheard of in traditional corporate design environments, which are often stifled by strict review processes and overbearing creative directors. Stas views his role differently. He acts as a guide, ensuring alignment without controlling the outcome. “I don’t try to control Tatiana like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t fit our guidelines.’ It’s a very flexible approach.”
Big dreams start with small steps
A massive visual overhaul of this scale can easily paralyze a team. Bïrch avoided this by treating the blog redesign like software product development, embracing an agile methodology.
“When you start something like this, you have this big list of like 30 bullet points of what you want to do, and then you just find yourself stuck in half a year of development,” Stas explained. “The problem is that once you do things this way, you quickly find mistakes in your thinking and find yourself redeveloping your initial ideas, so it was better to take an agile approach than try to do everything at once.”
This agile approach wasn’t without its technical hurdles. The blog is built on Webflow, which offers great flexibility but also presents specific design limitations. For example, Tatiana noted that designing tables in Webflow often looked ugly on mobile devices, prompting her to use ChatGPT to write custom embed codes to achieve her visual goals.
Yet, Stas embraces these boundaries.
For the design duo, success isn’t necessarily measured by a line on a graph. For Stas, success is simple: if his internal clients (e.g. the rest of the content team) are satisfied and have the functionality they requested, he has done his job. For Tatiana, the reward is deeply tied to comprehension. “I manage to design something to make complex marketing information even easier to understand. That’s what I find satisfying,” she shared.
Becoming the “soft heartbeat” of marketing
Throughout all these interviews, a recurring theme emerged: the unique, ego-free culture at Bïrch.
Valentina pointed out that because Bïrch is a bootstrapped company founded by friends, with no external pressure from investors, they possess a rare freedom to shape their company and their marketing exactly how they see fit.
At the center of this cultural ecosystem is Elina. Her approach to managing a cross-functional team of freelancers, agencies, and internal designers is remarkably collaborative.
“I don’t actually tell people what to do,” Elina reflected. “I try not to act like a boss and treat my relationships like a partnership, rather than me just throwing tasks at people.”
When disagreements occur, which is inevitable when blending SEO strategy with experimental design, Elina’s philosophy is to find a space where the team can negotiate and look at options together. They lean heavily on majority rule for cross-functional decisions. Most importantly, she believes it is okay to tolerate slight disagreements, allowing teammates to execute their vision to see how it meets reality, provided no one feels a choice is a catastrophic mistake.
I asked Elina where she draws her inspiration from for this type of leadership and brand building. She cited two main sources:
- Her own team. She actively views herself as a student, continuously learning from the deep expertise of the designers and SEO specialists around her.
- Lenny’s Podcast and The Browser Company. She admires how the team at The Browser Company transparently explains the behind-the-scenes of their product development. Similarly, she loves the educational, relaxed nature of Lenny’s Podcast. “I like that it’s very relaxed in a way. It doesn’t push any ideas. It's just like, it’s a very soft heartbeat vibe.”
This “soft heartbeat vibe” perfectly describes the Bïrch approach. In an industry dominated by aggressive, fast-paced, “hustle culture” marketing, Bïrch is cultivating a gentler, quieter confidence.
“We are building a great product... we don’t need to be pushy. People are only going to be surprised in a good way when they start using the product,” Elina shared.
The results so far & the flight ahead
The combination of La Sopa’s structural SEO rigor and the design team’s visual flair has created a powerful foundation. By August 2025, shortly after launching their first content updates, the team saw immediate validation as organic traffic started to increase, including more frequent appearances in AI overviews.
However, the team isn’t just looking at top-of-the-funnel traffic. They have tracked quality metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and the rate of returning users. When a metric shifts dramatically, the team is now equipped to spot it instantly and investigate the cause.
Beyond the charts, the qualitative feedback has been incredibly rewarding. At industry events, people frequently bring up the blog to the Bïrch team, praising its content without prompting. We receive direct messages on LinkedIn from readers expressing genuine appreciation for our narrative approach and writing style. “This feedback and reactions are not maybe reflected on the graphs, but they are a signal that we are heading in an interesting direction,” Elina observed.
What’s next for 2026?
So, what happens now that the foundation is built?
For La Sopa, the next major frontier is distribution. “When we first joined, we said that we needed to focus on distribution just as much as production,” Valentina explained. Now that Bïrch has amassed a significant, high-quality content library, the focus will shift toward syndication and amplification. The ultimate goal is to get more eyes on Bïrch, beyond just organic search.
From an editorial standpoint, Elina wants to lean further into what makes the blog unique by focusing on the human stories behind the marketing we see every day. The core focus will be deepening the existing formats. “I’d love more interviews, I’d love more behind the scenes content,” she shared.
There is also a strategic push to make the blog a highly appealing platform for potential external contributors. The team wants this to be a space where people want to come and feel comfortable sharing their opinions and marketing stories. They also recognize that this high-quality, transparent content serves as an incredibly effective employer branding tool, showcasing a company culture that can help to attract likeminded talent.
Final thoughts: the future of content and collaboration
Something I’ve taken away from these interviews and my five months alongside Elina, Stas, Tatiana, Valentina, and Polina is that in an AI-dominated world, it’s human connection and experience that captures our imaginations, not just our attention.
In a world increasingly saturated with robotic, algorithm-first content, readers are absolutely starving for authenticity. We want to read about real struggles, real strategies, real scenarios, and real people. Even the concept of what it means to be “authentic” is at high risk of being muddied forever.
By stripping away the ego, embracing an agile and creatively free design process, and fiercely protecting their “slow heartbeat” editorial approach, the Bïrch team hasn’t just redesigned a blog; they’re building a media platform where marketers can actually flock to for the kinship of shared marketing experience.
