FROM RASKA
TO THE
WORLD.
Not a list of job titles. The real story of a kid from a small Serbian city who never stopped being curious, and turned that into a career worth reading about.
Little Nidza
Raska is one of those places where everyone knows your name. Small, beautiful, calm. Not exactly where you would expect an international marketing career to start.
But growing up somewhere small does something to you. It sharpens this instinct to look outward. To ask questions. To get involved. There was always some project going, always some NGO initiative or community thing.
The American flag on the sweater? Pure coincidence. The ambition inside the kid wearing it? Anything but.
The Johnny Phase
Belgrade hit like a completely different frequency. Enrolled at the Faculty of Organisational Sciences and immediately threw himself into student life like it was a second job.
Then came ESTIEM. A pan-European student network. Marketing. International projects across the EU. That is him standing in front of the room, running it.
But honestly, it was the team that made the biggest difference. The people who showed up, debated, built things together, and pushed each other further. That shaped as much as any course ever could.
The VP
Vice President of ESTIEM Belgrade. 150 members. Real budgets. Real consequences. And somehow, still finishing both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Marketing at the same time.
The Faculty gave something most people miss: actual understanding of how businesses work under the surface. How strategy connects to operations. How the technical and the human sides of marketing talk to each other. That is what separates someone who runs campaigns from someone who builds systems.
The Side Hustle
Still a student. Still running the org. But something needed to be tested against real clients, outside of academia.
Launched Izuvanje. A consulting passion project for small Serbian business owners who were trying to figure out social media. No agency setup, no big pitch. Just honest conversations and real strategy for people who could not afford to waste a single dinar on guesswork.
This was never about scale. It was proof. The skills were real.
Where Nikola Became Nikola
Agencies first. Learning the pace, the structure, what real client pressure actually feels like. Then startup culture hit and never let go.
Graphic Beast and Campster: 25+ major clients, 240,000 users. Then two simultaneous roles that pushed everything to the next level. Joberty: CPL dropped from $117.92 to $12.95 across 6 CEE markets. Vuk Multimedia: 350+ campaigns across the US in Housing, Real Estate, Energy, Infrastructure.
Two markets. Full ownership of every result. No safety net. This is where things got real.
Ognjanovic
Joined HighStrike as a Specialist. Got promoted. Now leading a team of 4, managing $95k+ per month across Meta, Google, and YouTube.
Newsletter from 545 to 27,321 subscribers. CPL at $1.09. 39.9x peak ROI. Two CXL Institute certifications.
But the numbers are only part of it. This phase is about leading, not just doing. Owning the entire process from strategy to creative to attribution to team. Being the person accountable when it works and when it does not. That is the standard.
What Is The
Next Chapter?
Every chapter so far started with paths crossing. A conversation. A team. A decision to bet on something real. Maybe that path crosses yours right here.
Let's cross paths