For gaming companies whose buyers have never heard of them, a case for building trust and visibility long before the launch that needs both.
The pattern shows up all over the games business. Someone needs a speaker for an event, so they suddenly start networking. Someone is launching a product, so they start talking to potential customers. Someone wants investors, partners or introductions, so they begin reaching out to people they have barely spoken to before. “By that point,” says Melanya Laz, “it is already too late.”
Buyers have said what they trust instead. In Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 64 percent of “hidden buyers”, the colleagues in finance, operations and procurement who weigh in on a purchase, said they trust a vendor’s thought leadership more than its product sheets or brochures when assessing what it can do. That kind of trust takes longer than a launch window.
Melanya is the founder and host of GameBiz Heroes, a podcast and weekly newsletter on the business side of gaming, and Creator Campaign Manager at AppsFlyer, where she works with creators on campaigns that “connect brands with the audiences they actually want to reach.” Through Laz Network, her independent consultancy, she works with gaming and tech companies on creator marketing, partnerships and personal brand strategy. Her own numbers make the argument. She reached 20,000 LinkedIn followers this summer with no ads, no paid promotion and no growth agency, posting two or three times a week, and she puts the GameBiz Heroes audience at more than 30,000. “Reputation compounds,” she says. “You cannot decide today that you want to be known for something and expect the market to recognize you tomorrow.”
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Who Already Has Their Attention
When a company comes to her with a product its target buyers have never heard of, Melanya doesn’t begin with the sales question. “I don’t start with, ‘How do we sell it?’” she says. “I start with, ‘Who already has their attention and trust?’”
If nobody knows the company, she says, it doesn’t necessarily need more advertising. It needs to find “the people, communities, creators, events, and conversations that already have credibility with the audience you want to reach, and find an authentic way to become part of them.” The Edelman and LinkedIn study points the same way: 53 percent of B2B decision-makers said that when a company’s thought leadership is strong, brand recognition matters less.
What she thinks she does differently is connect these worlds rather than treat them as separate channels. “Creator marketing, personal branding, content, networking, podcasts, conferences, and partnerships can all become part of the same growth ecosystem,” she says. She has seen it from both sides. She creates and publishes content herself, and she works with brands on creator campaigns, so she understands what makes a collaboration feel valuable to the creator, what makes it useful for the brand, and what makes an audience pay attention “rather than scroll past another piece of sponsored content.”
“I don’t think the goal should simply be to get your brand in front of someone’s audience. The goal is to build enough relevance and trust that people remember you after the campaign is over.”
Melanya Laz, Founder & Host of GameBiz Heroes, Creator Campaign Manager at AppsFlyer
The thing she tells companies most often follows from that: “don’t just try to reach an audience. Build a reason for that audience to care about you.” She sees the opposite habit most often in her own industry.
A Small Industry Where People Keep Moving
Gaming, Melanya says, is a relatively small industry, and people move constantly between studios, publishers, platforms, agencies and tools companies. “The person you meet at a conference today might be a publisher tomorrow, a founder the year after, or the person who introduces you to your next major client five years from now,” she says.
That is why the biggest mistake she sees is people building relationships only when they need something. The strongest professional relationships, in her view, are built when neither side needs anything from the other. People meet, stay in touch, share ideas and help each other, and when an opportunity does come along, “there is already trust.” She says the same applies to visibility: a lot of people start posting or building a personal brand when they need a result immediately.
“I think of networking and visibility almost like product development: you build them continuously, before you need to see the return. The mistake is treating them as campaigns instead of long-term assets.”
Melanya, Founder & Host, GameBiz Heroes
She is careful about what that doesn’t mean. This, she says, “is not about collecting connections or posting every day just to be visible. It is about being genuinely useful, having a point of view, showing up consistently, and building relationships before there is a transaction attached to them.”
Her own career is where she tested it.
Sales, Growth, Then a Microphone
Melanya studied International Business and Communication at ISM University of Management and Economics, where she was a member of the debate club, and completed her degree in 2020. In January of that year she joined devtodev, a product analytics company, in Vilnius as a Junior Sales Manager. She became Sales Manager that September and Senior Business Growth Manager in January 2023. Over five years there she sold analytics to gaming and mobile app companies, mentored junior colleagues and represented the company at industry events. In April 2022 she became an ambassador for Women in Games, a role she still holds, speaking at conferences including Digital Dragons in Krakow and PGC Helsinki.
In December 2024 she became Head of Growth at Elevatix, a San Francisco company whose machine-learning platform personalizes in-app offers for mobile games, working remotely. She has written about leaving “a stable career to represent a San Francisco tech startup alone across all of Europe at 26.” The same month she set up Laz Network and started GameBiz Heroes. In early 2025 she mentored seed-stage game studios in the WePlay HUB Accelerator Program. The Elevatix role ran until December 2025, and in January 2026 she joined AppsFlyer.
“My own path has moved through sales, growth, analytics, creator marketing, content, podcasting, conferences, and personal branding,” she says. “None of those things was necessarily part of a five-year plan.”
Not everyone around her thought the personal brand was worth the time.
The Colleague Who Said Nobody Cares
Melanya has written about a senior colleague, someone she respected, who told her that building a personal brand was a waste of time. She recalls the words as: “It won’t help your career. Nobody cares. Focus on real work! We only need numbers!” For a moment, she wrote, she believed it, because the results weren’t coming: “Months of posting. Barely any likes. Zero new opportunities.”
“I felt invisible in this industry. Youngest person in every room. Everyone older, more experienced, more connected.”
Melanya, Founder & Host, GameBiz Heroes
She kept going, she wrote, not because she was confident it would work but because of a thought she couldn’t shake: “if I stay quiet, I stay invisible forever.” That was a few years ago. Her summary of what followed is “Zero budget. Just consistency and a refusal to shut up.”
She has also written about where the refusal comes from. She changed eight schools growing up, and not, she wrote, because she was a bad student. She graduated with honors and a 9.8 average out of 10. She changed schools because she couldn’t be silent in classrooms where “the teacher is ALWAYS right. Children have no voice.” Her parents had taught her one rule very early: if you believe something has a right to exist, own it, “even when the room disagrees.”
“I didn’t get here by agreeing with everyone,” she wrote. “I got here by believing my opinion deserved a place in the room.” She has a rule of her own for the rooms she works in now.
Three Things a Day
At a conference, Melanya tries to make sure every day includes three kinds of experience: one thing for business, one for networking and one purely for fun. The business part might be a meeting with a potential client or partner. The networking part is meeting people with no immediate business agenda. The fun part is dinner with friends, exploring the city or going to a party. “I don’t believe every interaction needs to have an obvious ROI,” she says. After a lot of gaming conferences, she has learned that “the most valuable conversations are often the ones you didn’t schedule.”
She calls the rule “a reminder to balance intention with spontaneity,” and she applies it away from conferences too. She likes having a goal, but doesn’t want it to become so rigid that she misses “the unexpected opportunity sitting next to me.”
GameBiz Heroes comes out of the same rooms. She has written that “conferences have become content engines”: the event lasts a few days, and the content created around it can reach people weeks or months later. “You don’t have to be in the room to be part of the conversation,” she wrote. What she is trying to build is “a way to bring the gaming business conversation to people wherever they are.”
Her partner work looks similar. At the ElevenLabs Summit in Warsaw, which by her account put 1,500 guests in the Polish National Opera, she was there for a post marked as a partnership with ElevenLabs. She described her own part in two lines: “As always with a microphone. Asking bold, unfiltered questions.”
Where Melanya Is Now
This year Melanya has been working freelance as Creator Campaign Manager at AppsFlyer, hosting GameBiz Heroes and publishing newsletters on Substack and LinkedIn. She has been collaborating with technology and gaming companies including Google, ElevenLabs and Xsolla. In June she gave herself until the end of summer to reach 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, and got there before the deadline. She skipped Gamescom this year for a friend’s wedding, and put together a guide to more than 25 of its events for the people who went.
The readers she has in mind are studio founders, publishers, and senior marketing, growth and monetization leaders in gaming. The invitation on her profile is to anyone looking for “a gaming industry voice for your next campaign, product launch, event, or content partnership.”
Outside work, she says, she is “learning to stop overthinking and be more open to new people and opportunities. Some of the best things in my life started with simply saying yes and talking to someone I didn’t know.”
“I want to keep building at the intersection of creator marketing, gaming, media, and personal brand,” she says of what comes next, and to “turn GameBiz Heroes into a place that creates meaningful opportunities for both people and companies.”
Her advice to someone starting out on the business side of gaming is the advice she gives companies: “don’t wait until you ‘need’ a network. Build it now.” Then she turns it on herself. “If I had understood that earlier, I would have started building my reputation much sooner.”
Five Lines from Melanya’s Diary
- “Invest in people before you need them.”
- “The best time to build your network is when you don’t need anything from it.”
- “Don’t just try to reach an audience. Build a reason for that audience to care about you.”
- “I don’t believe every interaction needs to have an obvious ROI.”
- “You don’t have to be in the room to be part of the conversation.”
From the Diary of Melanya Laz
Melanya Laz is a Warsaw-based gaming business creator and the Founder & Host of GameBiz Heroes.
| Role | Founder & Host of GameBiz Heroes, Creator Campaign Manager at AppsFlyer |
| Based in | Warsaw, Poland |
| Previously | Head of Growth, Elevatix (2024 to 2025). Senior Business Growth Manager, devtodev (2020 to 2024) |
| Also | Ambassador, Women in Games (since 2022) |
“Invest in people before you need them. Your network is still one of the most underrated career and business advantages.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary chose Melanya Laz because her argument and her record are the same thing. She tells gaming companies to build trust and visibility before they need either, and she built a LinkedIn following of 20,000 without a budget by doing that herself. She works on both sides of a creator campaign, as the creator and as the campaign manager, and her answers show it. What convinced the editors is how specifically she describes the mistake, and that she applies the correction to her own career first.
Executives Diary, Editorial
