Iliya Valchanov is the co-founder and CEO of Juma, an AI agent, or "super agent," for marketing tasks. Juma plans and carries out work like content creation, performance marketing, ads, images and carousels, and has about 100K users around the world. Before Juma, Iliya taught people how to train AI models and created more than 100 courses on it. He joined us in Episode 35 (March 14, 2026), and for once the guest did the demo.
Iliya calls Juma an agent for whoever does marketing tasks. The biggest group is marketing agencies, then small in-house marketing teams, then solopreneurs and founders who have a product but don't know how to market it.
It runs on hundreds of marketing "skills" that the Juma team writes by hand, not with AI. It connects to Google Analytics, HubSpot, Google Search Console, Google Ads and Meta Ads, and those connectors are built in-house. It also integrates with Webflow, which lets the team write and publish an article in three minutes, start to finish.
At 02:30 Iliya showed what Juma did for HipTrain, a one-on-one personal training app. After reading HipTrain's site he decided social media strategy was where Juma could help most, so his whole prompt was a request for an April social media calendar for LinkedIn, X and Instagram.
Juma picked its social media calendar skill, researched HipTrain's website, ran a competitive scan and presented findings. Then it asked a clarifying question, the way Claude Code does, and Iliya approved the plan. The output at 04:05 was a day-by-day calendar with content pillars (corporate wellness, fitness education, motivation), a breakdown of posts per pillar and next steps.
A second prompt turned the calendar into a multi-slide Instagram carousel, which Iliya opened live at 05:16 without having seen it first. With brand colors, he said, it would be ready to publish. At 06:28 he explained projects: Juma keeps memory per project, and a new Instagram connector will let it learn which posts performed.
So the first thing is it's not about doing stuff faster. It's about doing stuff better.
— Iliya Valchanov, Episode 35
Companies that do not have a dedicated person to lead AI transformation, whether it's a five people company or 50 or 500, they fail because they think, oh, I'm gonna get the tools, and it's gonna work.
— Iliya Valchanov, Episode 35
In the news segment at 16:26, Iliya said his whole team moved from Cursor to Claude Code, then canceled Cursor. They test OpenAI Codex now and then but see no reason to switch. Jordan disagreed: he finds Codex 5.3 and 5.4 on extra high slower but better at code quality. We cover that split in Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex.
Iliya's team tracks a "coefficient" of how much code each person reads, from 90% down to 30%, and it keeps falling. Instead of reading more, they spun up four more environments to test agents' PRs on the running product. For more marketing guests and builds, see AI in marketing.
Iliya Valchanov is the co-founder and CEO of Juma, an AI agent for marketing tasks. Before Juma he taught people how to train AI models and created more than 100 courses on AI and model training.
Juma is a marketing super agent that plans, executes and completes marketing tasks such as content creation, performance marketing, ads, images and carousels. Iliya said it has about 100K users worldwide, mostly agencies, marketing teams and solopreneurs.
Iliya says Juma's own sales and marketing team went from seven people to one while doing more work. He stresses the real gain is quality and new possibilities, not just speed.
In billable hours saved. Iliya said agencies typically save 10x to 20x the time on each task, while small teams benefit more from chasing ideas they could not try before.
Claude Code. Iliya said his team moved from Cursor to Claude Code, canceled Cursor, and tests Codex from time to time but sees no reason to switch.
