When your ICP doesn't want to think about your category — Kuba's property managers actively avoid thinking about pest control — content marketing built around subject matter expertise falls flat. Pest Share's answer was to build a brand movement that has almost nothing to do with pests. What started as founders wearing bright orange shoes to stand out at trade shows evolved into custom Jordan Ones and a nomination program that celebrates property managers who exemplify the company's values. The result: conversations started without ever leading with the product. The tactical insight is straightforward — if your category is a pain point your ICP wants to outsource mentally, find a cultural hook adjacent to the work they're proud of and celebrate that instead.

Kuba's first major move at Pest Share was identifying that roughly 90% of property managers in America manage only a few dozen doors — completely outside the platform's ideal fit. Tightening to the top 5% of the market meant restructuring SQL targets, realigning the sales team, and absorbing short-term pipeline pressure. The lesson here is that ICP decisions aren't just positioning decisions. They cascade into hiring, channel mix, and what counts as a win. If your ICP work isn't causing friction internally, it probably isn't sharp enough.

With only 60 people per month nationally searching for anything close to Pest Share's core offering, winning organic search was never going to drive meaningful pipeline. Kuba's response is to build AI-powered tools that solve adjacent problems for property managers — specifically around surfacing and analyzing resident reviews — with the goal of drawing them in through utility rather than category awareness. This is demand creation at its most literal: build something your ICP actually uses, earn the relationship, and let the pest control conversation follow naturally.

Pest Share records all sales calls and runs them through Ask Elephant to extract patterns, objections, and positioning signals. For a team marketing to a niche of 10,000 to 20,000 people, this kind of signal is more valuable than any survey or focus group. Before spending on new channels or content, the transcript of what your best prospects actually say in conversation is probably your most underused asset.

When Pest Share ran a recent prospect survey, they used Claude to summarize and analyze the responses — and it flagged 37 submissions that appeared to be bot-generated. The data quality problem was invisible until the analysis surface it. If you're making positioning or messaging decisions off survey data, it's worth running an integrity pass before you draw conclusions. The cost of acting on bad signal in a narrow market is higher than in a broad one.

Kuba's framing on AI is practical: the pressure to "add more AI" from leadership is real, but the productive question is always what specific problem you're trying to solve. Pest Share has added Ask Elephant for sales call analysis, 11x for automated BDR outreach on email and LinkedIn, and Claude for internal workflows including survey analysis and content production. What they haven't done yet is build custom internal tooling — that's still on the roadmap. The distinction matters: tool adoption in service of a defined workflow beats "we need more AI" as a mandate every time.