Leading a consumer brand in a crowded digital environment requires more than bold ambition. It demands disciplined execution, and a strategic understanding of how markets evolve. Alex Kartsel has spent more than 15 years scaling marketplaces, ride-hailing platforms, and consumer technology companies across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. With this experience behind him, he has found that brands don’t stumble due to weak products but rather because they misread the competitive landscape.
“Overestimate and at the same time underestimate competition,” says Kartsel, pointing to a tension that often dictates whether a brand accelerates or stalls. Brands that believe incumbents are unbeatable hold themselves back. Those that dismiss small competitors risk entering a fragmented market without appreciating how deeply customer habits are ingrained. Kartsel’s perspective offers an important starting point for any consumer business: clarity about competition is the first step toward winning.
Understanding the Competitive Realities
The strongest brands begin with a realistic view of what stands in front of them. His time launching Bolt in Poland illustrates the importance of this mindset. Entering a market already commanded by Uber, MyTaxi, and well‑established local taxi operators, Bolt had every reason to tread cautiously. Instead, the team chose to challenge the assumption that large players cannot be disrupted. Within two years, Bolt became the second‑largest platform in the country, proving that disciplined strategy can reshape even the most mature markets.
Large competitors are only half the story, a crowded field of small players can be just as formidable as a single market leader. When Kartsel led OLX Autos in Poland under the 321sprzedane, he encountered the opposite challenge. Instead of a dominant rival, the market was saturated with small dealerships that appeared easy to outpace but were collectively difficult to differentiate from. “Developing a distinct value proposition was quite a difficult exercise,” he recalls. Customers had grown comfortable with the existing ecosystem, making brand separation a steep climb. For Kartsel, winning in competitive markets requires rigorous research, realistic assessment, and an understanding that no competitor is too big or too small to influence consumer expectations.
How Sustainable Growth Is Built
With the competitive landscape understood, the next challenge is execution. “Believing people will just love it happens, but it is a miracle,” he says. The volume of new apps, platforms, and early-stage companies vying for attention means that disciplined go‑to‑market planning is essential. Proper marketing investment, targeted messaging, and structured activation strategies determine whether a brand gains traction or disappears into the noise.
But even smart marketing is not enough without economic discipline. The most important rule in scaling any platform is unwavering control over unit economics. He points to Perplexity AI as a cautionary tale. The company achieved rapid early growth but relied heavily on paid marketing and offered free premium access without a strategy for long‑term monetization. They overspent and the growth that had looked impressive began to decline sharply. By contrast, Bolt’s Poland playbook illustrates disciplined scaling. Subsidies for riders and bonuses for drivers were applied only in defined timeframes, gradually reduced as the platform expanded, and focused exclusively on the user cohorts most likely to activate.
How to Know When a Brand Is Ready to Scale
Recognizing the right moment to expand globally is another core challenge Kartsel helps brands navigate. The signals begin with strong product management. Companies must understand their value proposition, the customer segments they serve, and the tangible problems they solve. Without this clarity, scaling becomes guesswork. Competition analysis forms the next layer of readiness. Brands must examine not only who exists in the market but what people actually use and why. Only then can they judge whether their offer creates meaningful differentiation.
Kartsel’s structured approach at EWL Group, one of Europe’s largest labor mobility and workforce solutions platforms, brings discipline to this process. Markets move through defined phases: Discovery, Seed, Startup, Scale Up, and Mature. Early phases focus on research, legal checks, initial tests, and limited‑volume validation. “This ensures a safe and stable process of business development.” Spending and hiring scale only when results justify the next step. His ongoing work opening Brazil as a sourcing market for EWL embodies this philosophy. Early tests with a small number of workers allow the team to analyze conversion rates, operational performance, and marketing efficiency before expanding further. Only once the economics are validated does the market advance to more resource‑intensive stages.
The Principles Behind Lasting Success
Kartsel’s methodical philosophy reflects a deeper belief about the nature of digital platforms. Sustainable success is achieved not through intuition or luck but through research, economic discipline, and continuous learning. “For me it is a never-ending learning,” he says. Brands that adopt his approach learn to see competition clearly, scale deliberately, and grow with economic precision. It is a framework that rewards patience as much as ambition, grounding bold decisions in data and disciplined execution.
Readers can learn more about Alex Kartsel by following his work on his LinkedIn and on his website.
