Before diving in, a quick note about me: I’m growing my own founder brand on Linkedin (43k odd followers), grew my company to $100k/mo from it, and I’ve now worked with over 80 B2B SaaS companies helping them build out a Linkedin program for their founders and execs, so I hope to have a few relevant things to say here. These days I advise technical founders via Thormeier.co.

What are the 3 paths?

1. Founder-only + structure

2. Founder + Head of Content (internal)

3. Founder + ghostwriter-content strategist (external)

I’ll also cover a few paths that do NOT work (at least I’ve never seen them work, but I have seen founders burn a lot of time and resources trying to pursue them):

• Founder-only + no structure

• Founder + junior ghostwriter

• Head of Content-only (no founder involvement)

• Ghostwriter/agency-only (no founder involvement)

Founder-only + structure

Most of the biggest founder brands you know start out DIYing it, writing everything themselves, and many stay that way forever (I’ve interviewed many of them, incl. Jason Fried, DHH, James Hawkins, Dave Gerhardt, Adam Robinson).

Why? Because when you’re building your founder brand, your content is your product. The better it is, the more people you attract. And the more involved you are yourself, as the founder, the centerpiece of the content, the higher the ceiling in terms of quality, partly because writing is thinking, and partly because another factor of quality is a unique style, and the ceiling for uniqueness is also higher the more involved you are personally. Long sentence, sorry. Could probably use AI to rework the sentence, but then it wouldn’t sound as fun to me anymore.

Why “+ structure”? Most founders, especially the technical ones I advise, are not natural content creators/storytellers/presenters. They’re deep experts in their narrow field, and that field is rarely social media algorithms or human psychology (two sides of the same coin). Structure can either be internally imposed (by having a clear list of inputs and time blocking) or externally imposed (by working with a coach).

I’ve written extensively here on the structure I suggest to SaaS founders starting out on Linkedin:

The TLDR:

• Post 3x per week

• Allocate 1h creation/writing time per post. Timeblock it on your calendar

• 80% of your posts should be problem/solution content. You need to become the #1 expert/authority in the PROBLEM your company solves. Pick a pain point/goal/priority your ICP has and help them make some small or big progress on it by sharing an insight, a story, a framework, strategy, tip, reframe, mindset shift, etc. Don’t be shy to mention your product/company, you should be PROUD about what you’re building and project that into the world

• Block off 30min every day to go through the following checklist, ideally right before or after posting:

  • Check all your notifications

  • Reply to all your comments

  • Answer all relevant messages/DMs

  • Write at least 5 comments on other people’s posts

  • Accept all relevant connection requests + send a conversation starter

  • Send 5 connection requests to prospects

  • Send 3 DMs to your existing network- come up with a meaningful thing to say to them

  • Check who visited your profile + send a conversation starter to relevant ones

  • Check post engagers + send a conversation starter to relevant ones

  • Check new followers + send a conversation starter to relevant ones

• If you do the math, this all adds up to roughly 5-6 hours per week, which should be about 10% of your workweek as a founder. That sounds about right to me, if you want your founder brand to be anything but an afterthought

• Again, much more detail, including how to write these posts, what a conversation starter is, etc here https://www.founderbrand.org/p/complete-guide-to-linkedin-for-saas

Summary

• People involved: Only founder (+ maybe coach)

• AI involved: Minimally (only for research, not for writing)

• Resources needed: None, though it can be helpful to do a workshop or take a course to learn the fundamentals and build your v1 strategy

• Upside potential: Maximum (top 1% founder brand)

• Time involvement: Highest (minimum 5h/week, up to 10h/week). Or more - for full context, the max I’ve seen is Alex Hormozi at 2 full days per week (15 ish hours/week) and Adam Robinson at 25h/week during his peak

When to use this:

• You’re early-stage and there only IS you

• You’re ambitious and want to aim for the highest ceiling in terms of results (reach/audience size + revenue from it) but you’re ok with also spending more time (that’s the trade off)

• Or you’re super anal about your content needing to sound 100% like you (this is the only approach where your content will sound 100% like you because it IS 100% you)

Founder + Head of Content (internal)

When I say Head of Content, that doesn’t need to be their actual, literal job title, but they need to be acting as that. It could be your Head of Marketing, your one and only marketer at the company if you’re early stage, your Chief of Staff, doesn’t matter.

What’s more important is that they are at a Director or above level. Meaning, you don’t want a junior person straight out of college, or a “TikTok”-native person. You want someone with business acumen, who understand what senior buyers (VPs and C-level) actually care about, how they make buying decisions, and they need to have a very solid understanding of your company, product, market, and customers.

And most importantly, it needs to be someone you, as the founder, have rapport with. Someone you can jam with.

What is their job? To pull you out of your day-to-day at least once a week, talk to you, interview you, prompt you, all with the goal to get you talking and sharing ideas, insights, and stories. They’ll record it and then use to write the content for you.

If you already have a ton of raw content materials, like podcast recordings, interviews, keynotes you gave, op-eds you wrote, etc, it’s also their job to collect this and splice it up into smaller Linkedin posts.

This is essentially the model we ran at my previous company, Project 33, as an agency. Our clients, founders, would get a fractional Head of Content, eg. Tobi who is still working with me now with clients at Thormeier.co, and he interviews them every week or two weeks and asks them questions around their work, what they’re seeing in the market, company updates, conversations they’re having with customers and prospects, and get their commentary on relevant industry pieces he found on X or Linkedin. I think this is the most repeatable, most straighforward model to run, because it’s easy to structure and stick to.

A recurring call 2-4x per month, recorded via Riverside, ran like an “internal” podcast interview.

After the interview, it’s the Head of Content’s job to pull individual content pieces out of it and write them.

I personally don’t care if the Head of Content writes them themselves, has a freelance writer they’re working/partnering with, or using Claude to write a first draft. The important piece is that you have source material and real depth and insight coming from the interview, to make sure you don’t product slop.

I will go into much, much more depth into how to execute this model because it will go waaay beyond the scope of this post, but if you need help with it or want my advice, or have us execute part of this, book a call with me.

Summary

• People involved: Founder + Head of Content + maybe: writer/video editor/designer

• AI involved: Potentially, but max for drafting

• Resources needed: Have someone in-house to be able to fill the role, even if just fractionally. They need to have rapport with you, deeply understand your company, product, market, and have good taste + judgement for content

• Upside potential: High (top 10% founder brand)

• Time involvement: Medium, can be anywhere between 1-5h per week, depending on your ambition, and how smooth your relation with your Head of Content has become

When to use this:

• You’re the kind of person who can’t get themselves to sit down and write for the life of you, no matter how hard you try, even if someone gives you a structure

• You have some budget to hire someone (prob minimum around $5-6k/mo) OR you already have a Head of Marketing / Chief of Staff etc who can fulfill this role fractionally and fits the above criteria

• You want great results, not quite as great as with the previous model, but you’re ok with the tradeoff given that you’ll spend less time overall

Founder + ghostwriter-content strategist (external)

Alright, last but not least. Or maybe actually least?

Most founders, if they want to do Linkedin, and don’t have someone internally who can help them with is, usually default to hiring a ghostwriter.

I’ll focus here on the setup that I’ve seen actually work, further down I’ll highlight the case where hiring a ghostwriter won’t work, which is why I’m talking about a “ghostwriter-content strategist.”

A ghostwriter-content strategist is a person who can write, but also has the business acumen to build and own a strategy that actually integrates with your overall company and GTM strategy. Similar to the “minimum Director-level Head of Content” role above, this person - generally - shouldn’t be a 21-year-old who spends 4 hours on Linkedin and their favorite creator is either Justin Welsh or Jasmin Alic. Nothing against those creators, but it’s a certain style of content that I’d describe as being more aimed towards a beginner-level audience, which is typically not the kind of content you want if you audience is VPs and C-levels.

You can find this ghostwriter-content strategist either as a solo freelancer or in the form of an agency, there are some good ones out there like Compound, Good Content, notus, or my previous company Project 33. Btw, we still take on a handful of agency clients every year to keep our execution muscle.

How can you identify that they’re a fit?

All the usual things when hiring apply, but the biggest sign which type of ghostwriter you’re dealing with:

Read the content they themselves put out. Do you find it insightful as a founder? Well written? Nuanced and mature, while still interesting and engaging? Or does their content feel cringe, obvious, non-insightful, gimmicky?

Obviously avoid the latter.

For a good freelancer, you’ll probably pay $2,000-3,000 per month. For a good agency, probably at least $5,000 per month. Agencies come with the added benefit that they have more capabilities, eg. video editing, graphic design, podcast editing, etc.

Other than that, the setup is very similar to the one with your internal Head of Content, just that it’s a contractor.

Summary

• People involved: Founder + Ghostwriter-content strategist

• AI involved: Potentially, but max for drafting

• Resources needed: Just need the budget and about a month to find a hire a fitting ghostwriter-content strategist

• Upside potential: Medium-high (top 25% founder brand)

• Time involvement: Lowest, usually 1-2h per week

When to use this:

• You don’t want to or can’t write yourself as the founder AND you don’t have any internal resources to get help from

• You have the budget to at least hire a good freelance ghostwriter and stick with them for 4-6 months

• You don’t want the best results, you want an 80/20 approach, where you spend the least amount of time possible while still getting a good outcome

• You’re ok with your content only sounding 85-90% like you (the only way for your content to sound 100% like you is if you write 100% of it)

Combining them - a note

You can obviously combine these approaches. You could write all of your content yourself as the founder, spend 5-10 hours on creation and engaging, AND then also have a Head of Content or external strategist who further leverages your content, helps with ideating, edits video clips or graphics for you to include, runs ads on your content, edits your drafts with feedback for sharpness/conciseness, etc etc etc. That has an even higher ceiling.

What doesn’t work

Ok, now to the setups I’ve not seen work so far:

Founder-only + no structure

Kind of obvious. If you have no natural knack for content / social / marketing, and you just post random things that come to mind, with no strategy, no plan, no structure to it, it will fail.

Founder + junior ghostwriter

This is probably the most common one I see. Founder thinks: I want to do Linkedin, but I don’t want to spend any time AND I don’t want to pay much. This is easy. It’s just content. So they hire a “cheap” junior ghostwriter they find on LinkedIn. They pay them around $1,000 per month, usually they are not from the US / UK / Europe at that price point, so there’s a little bit of a language and culture gap, which is fine on it’s own, but combined with the fact that they’re too junior and don’t have the “strategist” skill we discussed previously, you end up with fluffy, cringe content that sounds a little too much like an influencer and not enough like something a legitimate founder or CEO would say. Avoid.

Head of Content-only (no founder involvement)

Similar to the one above in the sense that founder thinks: this is easy and I don’t want to waste any time on content. They should figure this out on their own.

The problem that happens here:

Even though the Head of Content does have business acumen and can act as the strategist, understanding your company, product, and buyer, they get zero input from you. So what will they do if they need to create content for you without input from you? Come up with stuff. Listen to some calls, do some research with ChatGPT and Claude, think about what they themselves find interesting, and write it up. The problem? It won’t sound like you, and it won’t be YOUR IDEAS, OBVIOUSLY. Some founders are ok with this, 95% are not.

So you’ll end up in endless revision loops or you’ll spend 30min editing their drafts just to make it sound like you and have your actual POV in it, at which point you should’ve just front-loaded that time.

You’re the founder for a reason. You have a unique POV, you know your company, product, customer better than anyone else. You have opinions about your industry that DEVIATE from the norm / status quo, which are exactly the interesting bit, and which no one can guess unless you tell them.

Ghostwriter/agency-only (no founder involvement)

It’s the same idea as above, just even worse, because at least your Head of Content has a lot of internal knowledge to draw from, call transcripts, All Hands meetings, infos about upcoming launches or releases etc, internal company docs, so they’ll often be able to come up with something half-decent, while an external person doesn’t even have that. Complete waste of money and time. And btw, when I say “no founder involvement”, 30min per month falls underneath that.

Next step

Alright, I hope this helped. There’s so much more to each model that I will write about in future posts, so make sure to sub.

If you want to work through which model works best for you, and how to implement it, that’s what I host monthly group workshops for SaaS and AI founders on, to build their LinkedIn strategy together live. You can sign up for one here: https://thormeier.co/workshop

Before starting his consulting career in 2019, Dave spent over 30 years in various executive roles at enterprise software companies: CEO at Planful (then Host Analytics), SVP / GM of the $500m Service Cloud business at Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic, and CMO at Business Objects as they grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. He’s currently an EIR at Balderton Capital and sits on the board of various tech startups

Throughout all of this, Dave built one of the most respected executive brands in B2B software, which is what we talk about in this episode: the lessons, mistakes, and stories.

We discuss:

• The story of Kellblog: how it started, how it’s going

• The meeting with Ben Horowitz that made Dave never “write for the algorithm” ever again

• How to build an audience of very senior executives

• Why most thought leadership isn’t

• Dave’s definition of branding (as it applies to executive/founder branding)

• How he writes: note files, outlines, AI

• Lessons on voice using Jack Daniel’s “Postcards from Lynchburg” as an example

• How to get the word out in a world of “walled gardens”: blog vs LinkedIn vs X vs newsletter

• Why chasing 100k followers would cost him the audience he has (quality vs quantity)

SaaS & AI Founders: Want to grow faster on LinkedIn?

Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve helped 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it.

If you want to get unblocked, book a workshop here.

Show Notes:

Connect with Dave Kellogg:

Dave Kellogg’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelloggdave/

Kellblog: https://www.kellblog.com/

The Metrics Brothers podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-metrics-brothers/id1687214133

Balderton Capital: https://www.balderton.com/

Connect with Finn:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier

Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Mentioned in the episode:

Obviously Awesome by April Dunford: https://www.aprildunford.com/books

The Men That Don’t Fit In by Robert Service: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58012/the-men-that-dont-fit-in

The GitLab Handbook: https://handbook.gitlab.com/

Planful: https://planful.com/

MarkLogic: https://www.progress.com/marklogic

Pigment: https://www.pigment.com/

Ghost: https://ghost.org/

The Diary of a CEO: https://stevenbartlett.com/doac/

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: Alright, my guest today is Dave Kellogg. Dave is an independent consultant, executive in residence at Balderton Capital and a startup advisor. Before starting his consulting career in 2019, he spent over 30 years in various executive roles at enterprise software companies. Including, but not limited to, CEO at Planful, then called Host Analytics, where they quintupled ARR during his time, SVP and general manager of the 500 million Service Cloud business at Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic. He also invested in and sits on the board of various tech startups. Dave, thank you so much for taking the time.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, Finn, thanks for having me.

Finn Thormeier: Cool. And maybe a little bit on the why. I mean, beyond all of this that I just mentioned, the reason why I wanted to have you on, Dave, is you built one of the most respected executive brands in B2B software. Your blog, Kellblog, is read and respected by many CEOs and CMOs that I know and, well, Maybe your audience on LinkedIn is not the biggest, though certainly not the smallest with 25,000 followers. It is one of the most senior ones I’ve seen, again, with many notable founders, CEOs, and CMOs engaging with your content regularly, which is what we’re going to be discussing on this podcast. First, I want to talk a little bit about your journey and then we’ll talk a little bit about some lessons, points of views, and thoughts that you have on writing on the internet and building a brand. I believe you started your blog, which I guess was the starting point of your journey of building a brand on the internet when you were CEO at MarkLogic, kind of as a side gig, which must have been then early 2000s. Can you take me back to that and why you started the blog back then?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it was early 2000s. I started it because MarkLogic was an XML database company. And one of the industry sectors that needed XML databases was information and media. So I was selling to publishing companies. Is there any good marketer? I’m like, well, we need to talk about the business issues that matter to them. And one of the business issues that matter to them was blogging. So it was like, okay, well, maybe I should start blogging so I can kind of get firsthand experience with this thing my customers are dealing with. And that’s how it started.

Finn Thormeier: That’s the marketer in you. And I believe you told me a story about how the name of Kellblog came to be. I don’t know how early or late that was in the journey. I think it had to do with a partner at Sequoia, but how did the name come to be?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so the name, I mean, the funny thing about the name was it was, I tend to be very descriptive. One of my marketing rules is when in doubt, be clear. So like, well, what is this thing? It’s the MarkLogic CEO blog. And I started doing more side essays. And one day it was actually Mike Mike Moritz at Sequoia. I saw him in the hallway there and he’s like, ah, Mr. Kellblog. And I’m like, ah, Kellblog. That might not be a bad name. So I renamed it Kellblog. And then several years later, my wife is French and I lived in France for a while. A French guy came up to me and said, is that homophone an accident? Because Kellblog in French, transliterated, literally means what a blog. And I’m like, no, that’s a total accident. It was named basically because Mike Moritz called me Kellblog one day, and I thought, wow, that’s a good name. I mean, if Mike Moritz calls you that, then I guess you kind of got to go with it.

Finn Thormeier: And then since then, you publish almost 800 blog posts. Was it a linear story of, I don’t know, one blog post every week, or how did it go?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so I tend to be inspiration driven. So if you look at my process, and this hasn’t really changed over the 20 years, I keep a folder with one file per idea, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of files in that folder. And when I get one, I accumulate notes over time, right? So I’m talking to a CEO about an issue, I don’t know, called branding. I’ll crack open one of the files that talks about branding, and then I’ll dump some thoughts in there. And over time, you end up with this pretty rich... Collection of topics. So that’s my process. And then the question is always, what gets you over the hump? What takes it from this notes file? And usually there is an event or a conversation where it’s like, okay, I’ve had that conversation one too many times. I need to write a blog post. So there’s almost always a catalyst, but sometimes people think I’m writing about them, and that makes me nervous, frankly.

So I always try to insert several weeks of delay from the catalyst, part It just takes that long to finish the post. And partly, if somehow I write the post quickly, I’ll still schedule it in the future because I don’t want people to think I’m writing about them because I truly am not. Like, no, that file’s eight years old and it’s got eight different notes from eight different conversations. But that’s my process. And for me, content-wise, I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner. So kind of map... You got to map who you are to this. And that’s the way I work. And that’s why I’ve never written a book, just because I think books are for marathoners. And I’m a sprinter. So I just accumulate my notes. And then something hits me. I say, I got to write a blog post. I’ll spend the next six hours on it, right, in mad frenzy. And then stop and then maybe do it again and then post it.

Finn Thormeier: And then I guess during most of your, let’s say, blogging career, if you want to call it that, you had very active operational roles at companies. So I believe when we chatted, you also said that you had to kind of balance the idea that sometimes that can come across to other people, like you’re not actually focused on the main thing, which is running the company.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, this is always a risk. There’s two things there. That was another reason why I had to have the notes file. Because if you’re running a company as your day job and you get an idea, you don’t take six hours to write a post, right? You take five minutes, dump all the thoughts to a file, and then go on with your life. So thanks for the reminder there. In terms of... Look, I think any CEO or CMO who gets a little too active in the community, their board and their coworkers and peers get nervous. Like, hey, is Nick in this, hypothetical Nick, is Nick in this for himself? Is he just out promoting the Nick brand? Or is Nick doing this because it really helps our business in some way? And you have to be careful. And the MarkLogic CEO blog, The Founder Brand. Autonomy’s acquisition of Verity or any various competitor moves. And the kind of pseudo third party hot take didn’t work because I wasn’t a third party. I was in the middle of it all. But I think at Host Analytics slash Planful, I think that did work better because I was writing content for my customers about stuff I saw at customers. That worked.

Finn Thormeier: Right. Do you think that has changed since you started? I mean, Founder Brand is now an established idea and go to market motions and some of the, I mean, I don’t know how, it feels like Elon Musk is tweeting a lot. I don’t follow it too closely, but do you think that has changed?

Dave Kellogg: Look, I think it’s one of these things. So it’s definitely changed. It’s now more acceptable. When I did a lot of this stuff, it was borderline unacceptable. I had board members like, you’ve got to take this post down. And I had a shorter leash, partly because I wasn’t a founder and partly because it was 15 years ago when I was doing some of this stuff. I do think Founder Brand is a big thing right now. I do think founders have pretty long leashes. And my general advice is going to sound stupid, I think, but it’s As long as it works, it’s okay. Everyone’s in favor of success. If you’re pulling it off and you’re building a brand that everyone will be in favor of it, the risky place is if you’re half doing it and it’s not very good or it’s cheesy or painful or embarrassing, Or particularly, I’m going to stick with CMOs because I work with a lot of them. If your sales team thinks you’re off promoting yourself for your next job and not promoting your product to make them sell more, that’s a serious problem.

So I think you have to look at it differently as a Founder CEO versus a CMO because CMOs like to be active in the marketing community. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t see CROs do that. I don’t know many CROs I work with who are accused of spending too much time at CRO conferences. It just doesn’t happen. But for CMOs, it does. I don’t know for CFOs. But that’s the trade-off. When people look at it, they think, oh, Dave’s building his brand and that’s going to help the company, which I think you could argue it did at Planful. Or is Dave out for Dave? And is this a side project? At least I think some of my board members were suspicious at Planful. In the end, I was trying to do both. I was just writing about stuff that interested me, and I happened to be very interested in financial planning, and I happened to be interested in how to build startups.

Finn Thormeier: I guess the one take that I hear when I talk to executives who are not the founder, if your company sells to CFOs and you’re the CMO talking about marketing, you’re not going to help attract the ICP, but it might help with recruiting, right? Because you’re going to build an audience of marketers who might look up to you and see you as an expert that they want to work for.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think the best you could do in that situation is get the CFO. I mean, like Ramp has a guy, Dave, I can’t ever pronounce his last name, Wieseneck, who is a former customer who they made, I don’t know his title, evangelist of some sort. And he’s like finance guy talking to finance guys, right? And that works. But you’re correct. Marketing person talking to finance people, not so much. So, and by the way, at Planful, we used our CFO, Ian, a lot in a pre-sales capacity because he was an excellent spokesperson and he was kind of part of the tribe, if you will. He was part of their in-group. And so that’s important. So I hear you on that one. But yeah, a marketer, they’re not going to write a CFO blog. I mean, ironically, I did. I have a lot of CFOs who follow my stuff, but it’s also because I view myself as a kind of closet finance person.

Finn Thormeier: Now to another story involving a very famous VC. You told me when we chatted previously that there’s a story with Ben Horowitz, obviously one of the founders of a16z, that happened, I believe, relatively early in your blogging journey that taught you a big lesson. What happened there?

Dave Kellogg: Relatively early in the history of Andreessen Horowitz, too. The firm was probably only a year or two old at the time of this meeting. So I had left MarkLogic. I was off doing a little bit of independent advising and consulting. And a friend of mine was friends with the people partner, Jeff Stump at the time at a16z. And Jeff was like, hey, you should come in and meet Ben. So that’s the context for the story. The other piece of context is as a blogger, I’m always wrestling with, should I write only well thought out deep posts about passionate topics, which is my general process, or should I try and work for the algorithm? And if the algorithm wants post of this length at this frequency, should I do that? And of course, these two tracks collided one day, where the day before I met Ben Horowitz, I had written kind of a half-hearted post on open source and how open source can press markets. And of course, two things happen.

So I get to the meeting, they open the door to his office, I walk in, I trip on the carpet, I almost fall. So this is not a great start to a meeting, right? I’m six inches from going down. I get up, I pull myself over, sit down. I think it was a couch. And the first thing he wants to talk about is this blog post, which at one level makes perfect sense, right? If you do the quick homework on me and he’s drilling me on this post, And the whole time I’m sitting there just saying, God damn it, I’m never going to write another post for the algorithm again, right? Because this, of course, would be the post, one of the least well-thought-out posts I’ve ever written. And this is the one I find myself in Ben Horowitz’s office having to defend. And literally, at times, I’m just like, could you please read any of the 300 other posts? Like, ask me about any other post. But of course, I got drilled in on that one. So yeah, that taught me a big lesson, which... I’ve had stories like that happen in other companies, other contexts, but like every time I try to put out a bad piece of work, it’s the one that somehow gets pulled out of the pile and examined.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. So the lesson here is don’t play to the algorithm and never publish anything that’s below your own bar or below what you can fully stand behind.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah. It’s actually interesting because in hindsight, I actually... I think the post was more right than I gave it credit for in that moment, but I wasn’t ready to defend it. I didn’t want to defend it because to me it was a throwaway post. When I went back and looked at it, I was like, no, this post wasn’t bad. I should have defended it harder. But I think the moral I took from it. Let’s try and generalize it. For Dave Kellogg, if you’re going to be known as somebody who writes deep, thoughtful posts, don’t ever post a throwaway one. Or if it is, make it clear it’s a throwaway. Just a quick post to say I’m speaking at this conference next week. This relates to my whole thing of branding, which is staying in character. If your character is Dave Kellogg, deep thinker, long poster, ready to debate any posts, don’t go work for the algorithm and compromise that.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And this comes back to the core of what I think is the most interesting thing about you, which is you have built not the biggest audience, but a very sizable audience of very, very senior people. And I think this directly ties into how you were able to achieve that. Obviously, with the one notable exception of that blog post that then Ben Horowitz picked out. But it’s the point that you do publish very thought out, lengthy. It’s insightful things that naturally might detract a very surface level audience who’s looking for a quick takeaway, but it attracts an audience of more senior people who are looking for deep insights.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I mean, that’s where we’ve ended up. I can’t say it was a mindful strategy at the beginning, right? But the result of having my post be long, thoughtful, deep, operational is I have a stunning number of founders who read and senior executives, but even just founders alone. I’m always shocked how many people read the blog or at least the bare minimum who are exposed to some of the more popular posts.

Finn Thormeier: Now, you said that most thought leadership isn’t. Why is that?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think a lot of marketers and companies, when they try to do thought leadership, they just, the question really is that the acid test is, is your thought leadership actually thought leading or is it just recycled consensus? Because it’s pretty easy. If I’m a product marketing person and you want a topical white paper on topic, it’s not hard to gin up a white paper that just repackages the consensus. It’s pretty easy.

Finn Thormeier: Especially now with AI.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, but it’s even easier. And And, you know, the good news about that is you’re not going to get ripped apart, right? It’s safe in some sense. Now, maybe because it’s so easy with AI, you are going to get accused of AI slop, which is a different issue. But I don’t know. It’s just not thought leadership, right? If it’s not novel or interesting, it’s not thought leadership. It’s just repackaged consensus.

Finn Thormeier: One of the interesting things you sent me as we were prepping this episode is you said if no intelligent person could disagree, it probably isn’t thought leadership.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, that’s another good test. Look, I have another test. I’ll give you all the tests I have. That’s one. If nobody can disagree with it, it’s too safe. It’s not thought leadership. If you’re being a thought leader, you’re going to take an unsafe position, right? If it’s safe, then it’s not thought leadership. The other one was back in the early days of Gartner, the research firm. They used to put probabilities on notes. Every note had a probability. So you’d have to make a prediction and say probability equals zero point blah. And the rule in Gartner was if you’re going to say 0.5, don’t write the note. And I thought it was a perfect kind of.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And then your other test was start with what do I actually believe, not what should I post?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think that’s an important test. I mean, I have two other tests there. I mean, one is always start with a blank sheet of paper. Particularly for presentations, when people open up another presentation and start there, that’s like the road to hell. Particularly board slides. If you’re going to present to the board and you start by opening an analyst deck and renaming slides, I guarantee you that board session is not going to go well. Or the classic product marketing mistake is you take an analyst tour deck and turn it into sales training, it’s not going to go well. Start with a blank, start with the audience, start with what you want to say, and then go find stuff to go fill it in. Most people get that backwards in the name of efficiency. So same thing on thought leadership. It starts with a point of view. What do I believe? Not what do people want to hear? Because, again, if you start in the wrong place, if you start with what should I post, you’re never going to make anything interesting, right? You’ve got to start with, hey, what do we believe? Ideally, what do we believe that’s maybe novel that people aren’t saying yet? Or you’re going to create something for the algorithm like the one, the blog post that Ben Horowitz picked out.

Finn Thormeier: I think when you say start with a blank, to me, that’s because it forces you to actually think about what you want to say and how you want to say it and how to structure it, which... I’m curious to hear your take because I think that to me is one of the biggest traps with AI. I think there’s immense benefits with AI. I think there’s great use cases for using AI as a thought partner, as a writing partner, etc. But whenever I start with a draft from AI, it’s pretty decent, but you always never end up completely rewriting it because it’s quite good. But if you start with a blank page, you really have to think from scratch, what do I actually want to say and how?

Dave Kellogg: So I think two things. When I say, let me just unpack what I mean by start with a blank.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Dave Kellogg: Because what I mean, literally I’m thinking of PowerPoint, like do I start, do I open a blank presentation or do I open one of my existing slide desks if I need to make a deck?

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Dave Kellogg: My answer is always start with a blank. The reason is really if you unpack it, You should be starting with the audience. All marketers, like start with the audience. Who are we talking to? And therefore, what do we want to say? And the issue is when you open another deck, it may not have the same audience. That’s the actual problem. The reason the analyst tour deck fails in front of the board is you wrote it for analysts. So if you’re speaking to the board, don’t open the analyst deck. So I think ultimately it comes back to audience. I would say on the AI writing process, I’ll just tell you what I like to do when I use AI. I mean, first, you know I have all these notes, right? So literally speaking, I can’t start with a blank because I’ve got a file full of notes. I will tend to say, read the notes file. And then I say, I like outlines. Call me old school.

But I’d say, I want to build an outline. So let’s build an outline for this topic. And then I go back and forth at the outline where I can say, I move this here, move this there, cut that. And then once I have the outline, then I might say, try to generate an article. But I like... I like using it. Basically, I like the outline to really be me. AI can help me build it, but I don’t want to just say, hey, AI, go generate an outline for an article on branding. Who knows what it’s going to come up with? I know what I want to say. Stay in character. Be consistent. It’s about how you look and how you sound. It’s about trust. Those are the points. I want to feed it that and then say, okay, take a crack at it.

Finn Thormeier: Now that brings me to the next question, which is the second part of executive or founder brand is obviously brand. How do you define brand? How should people think about what branding is?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so branding, just a couple random thoughts on it. One, branding, that’s what it means, right? Like this is triple bar ranch brand cow. That’s where it all started. So you’re stamping your mark on something generic to say, no, this is not just branding. Gelatin, this is Jell-O brand gelatin, or Band-Aid brand, Band-Aids, or Kleenex brand tissue, right? That’s the whole idea. And then people figured out that brands became about trust, ultimately. You went from that pretty basic notion of burning something on to a generic cow to this notion of, well, wait a minute, what does it mean when Triple Bar is branded on it? Or what does it mean when Jack Daniel’s is branded on it? And people realize that brands had meaning. And the meaning to me came to be all about trust. And I always say, if I had to pick one word for branding, it would be trust. And it’s trust that you will look like you. So will Jack Daniel’s communication look like Jack Daniel’s?

That you will sound like you? Will your voice be, oh, that doesn’t sound like Dave. That doesn’t sound like Jack Daniel’s. That doesn’t sound like Nike. Will you look like you? Will you sound like you? Will you act like you? And of course, most important, will you act like you? Well, you’re not treating me like a Nordstrom’s retail rep should. You’re treating me badly. I expect to be treated a certain way at Nordstrom or whatever consumer product you’d like, Four Seasons, high-end hotels. So to me, brand ultimately is about trust. Will you look like you? Will you sound like you? Will you act like you? For food, will you taste like you? For Public Benefit Corps and B Corps, will you source like you? If you’re all about healthy sourcing and fair trade sourcing, are you actually sourcing that way? Are you building your shoes in Indonesia and your sweatshops? So it’s will you be you?

Finn Thormeier: Four, I’m curious, when we apply that to companies, obviously a company doesn’t yet exist. So you need to define this. You need to decide, I want my company to be like that and feel like that and look like that and sound like that and have these values because it’s a completely new entity. It’s a new construct. When it’s a founder brand or an executive brand, you’re starting from something existing, which is you. You’re a person that actually exists in the world who acts in a certain way, who has certain existing values, who speaks in a certain way. Do you think for you specifically, your path to kind of finding your voice and your style and what people know and recognize you for and the Kellblog, is this a deliberate process where you need to sit down or define these things? Or is it just... Allowing yourself to be the way that you are and that’s what your brand is going to be.

Dave Kellogg: So to me, because I want to answer in two contexts. One is a former CEO of two companies and one is a blogger. As a blogger to me, you’re a one man shop. So it’s. It’s easier, right? It’s just, Dave, you be you. And the Horowitz lesson is that here’s what happens if you don’t, right? I got one word wrong on a LinkedIn poll the other day, and I had like three friends smash me on it. So it’s like, okay, I’ve built this audience. They have certain expectations. I said, rather than saying what are the top goals for your major events, I said what should be. And it wasn’t a mistake. It was stupid. But I had literally three people like, Dave, you shouldn’t say should be. That was dumb.

Finn Thormeier: Wow.

Dave Kellogg: And so that’s my audience and that’s who follows me, right? It’s a reflection of me and they expect better from me. So I think largely you be you works for a one-person shop. It’s much harder when you’re starting a company, right? And companies use various mechanisms to try and kind of You can do them, they’re fine. But in the end, they all sound the same, right? There’s been enough work on that. So other companies did something that I thought I invented when I was at Planful, which is operating principles. Because I kind of realized the values, we had them, but they weren’t different. But we made rules. Like one of them at Host was a case of tie, I win. Or when in doubt, motor on. Those were our operating principles because I wanted it to be Applicable to your day to day life at the company. Like you get to motor on. If you give somebody 24 hours notice and say, if I don’t get approval, I’m motoring on, then you get to motor on and then you won’t get in trouble.

Right? So that was an operating principle. A lot of companies do that. The thing I’ve seen more lately, like I stumbled into the GitLab handbook for the first time somehow two days ago, and I’m like, oh my God, they took operating principles and encoded it into an entire handbook, and it’s really good. So to me, that’s the continuum of... How do you imprint a founder on their organization? It can either just be osmosis, a strong founder out there. It could be values which only work. It could be operating principles which really do work in my opinion, or you can take it all the way up to the handbook level. If you’ve never looked at it, go look at the GitLab handbook. It’s an impressive work.

Finn Thormeier: On voice, you sent me examples of Jack Daniel’s ads. Which I’m going to pull up. I’ve never seen these. And I found it really fun and interesting to look through them. And you sent them as an example of having a distinct voice and what a distinct voice is. Let me just share my screen here.

Dave Kellogg: So the series he’s bringing up is called Postcards from Lynchburg. And it was, I don’t know, a multi-decade campaign run by Jack Daniel’s. It was actually taught to me in a marketing class. I can’t remember which one, business school or somewhere else. I can’t remember. But yeah, that first line of copy right there, I love it. Bateman, Burns, and Branch sound like Philadelphia lawyers. Actually, they’re Rickers from Tennessee. There aren’t many men who can take a stack of hard made You can’t just go read the postcards from Lynchburg if you want to know what voice sounds like. Because once again, I could pull that, right? In 1955, a young Jack Bateman learned about how to make Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey at Lantwood’s knee. That he applied what he learned from Mr. Wood for the next 33 years. If you just look at that copy and pull it out, you’re going to know who’s talking. So the postcards from Lynchburg, the entire concept of the ad, and again, they did these over the course of decades.

Are you going to look like you? They all look the same. Are you going to sound like you? They all sound the same. Are you going to act like you? You don’t want to act in an ad, but to the extent they talk about action, the answer is yes. And by the way, for marketers, there’s no adjectives here. They don’t use adjectives. Adjectives to describe our whiskey is made the old-fashioned way. Because most marketers try to be descriptive and it almost always fails. The way you know you’re trying to be descriptive is by loading up on adjectives. Think about menus. This is the free-range, organic, pasture-raised, eco-friendly chicken. There’s eight adjectives jammed in front of it. That’s the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is through the storytelling itself. By the way, storytelling is super popular. So these ads, if you want to know about branding, look at postcards from Lynchburg.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, so much storytelling and such a condensed, I mean, it’s so little text.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s a postcard, right? Like they don’t have many words to work with, but they do it incredibly well. So if you want to, yeah, I just think it’s one of the things, staying in character, right? That series stayed in character for decades and Nondescriptive writing, storytelling with nondescriptive writing. They’re not describing the product with adjectives. In this case, they’re talking about the guys who make the product.

Finn Thormeier: That obviously then also comes down to consistency. You never yourself boxed yourself in and said, you’re going to be this person or persona. But eventually, I think people gave you a label. They understood who you are and your voice. First time someone called you the SaaS guy, you got upset?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, surprised more than anything. I’m a SaaS guy, I’m a software guy. Yeah, it’s very interesting. Look, as a marketer, you have to accept it, which is... Positioning exists in the mind of the customer, right? That’s the first rule. So you are what the market perceives you to be. And most good marketers, because you’re rarely starting from scratch, once in a while you start a company and you are, but most of the time you’re starting with an existing firm or existing product. So half the brilliance of marketing is distilling the essence and just saying, okay, what is this thing really? And then kind of doubling down on the good qualities of it. So, yeah, I never made an active effort to position myself. I think it would have been really hard, by the way, because it’s almost like some weird music genre that includes a lot of marketing and a lot of finance. Like, tell me, if I set out to write a blog that was read by as many CFOs as CMOs, like, no, that’s never going to happen, right?

But somehow I did it because of the nature of the subject I write for, that the CFOs tend to want to learn about marketing, and conversely, or I get the quantitative CMOs, and you get a lot of founders. So... But I think the short answer is, yeah, I never made a mindful, Dave, let’s go position yourself as blah. I just did what I wanted to do and then let the market position me. And when I saw a clear positioning coming out as like SaaS guy, I’m like, okay, I can roll with that. And then when SaaS started to be a four-letter word, right? Let’s say, uh-oh, I better un-be the SaaS guy because I don’t want to be a relic here. So I’m going to need to kind of reposition. So I talk, I’m back full circle just saying I’m an enterprise software person because that’s what I’ve always done.

Finn Thormeier: To me personally, that is one of the more interesting and exciting things about the difference between a founder or executive brand relative to a company brand, which is, I think, Traditionally, when you’re branding a company, you want something simple, distilled. There should be one audience, one persona. You should stand for one thing, one mission. But when it comes to people, as you said, the common denominator is you. And you tend to be interested both in marketing and in finance topic. If you sat down with a strategist, they probably would have told you, you need to pick one. Pick a line.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, for sure.

Finn Thormeier: But you didn’t. And that’s what makes you interesting. That’s part of what makes you interesting.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I agree with that. That it’s not like positioning a product. Because in a product, everything you said is true, right? You’ve got to have a category. Pick one. What’s the one word you stand for? All that logic works. I think for founders, it should be much more of an essence distillation process. Even for products, I feel that. But for people, it’s definitely that. Let’s go figure out your essence. Because you’re not going to be able to pretend to be somebody else. It’s just too hard. So let’s go distill your essence. Let’s find out how to communicate that and position that. But if you’re interested in both marketing and finance, that’s fine. And in the end, that’s what’s going to make you different. But no, you’re not going to get confused with Seth Godin, right?

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Dave Kellogg: You know, I didn’t tell you this story yet, but when I first read the book, Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, I was like, damn, this is a good book. And it is. And I was like, damn, you should have wrote it. And I could have, right? Like, I agree with 90% of it. And I could have, you know, it’s a great book. She did a great job.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Dave Kellogg: We actually have relatively similar backgrounds. And then I thought about it and I was like, do I want to position myself as the positioning person? And like, what does it mean to be April Dunford? And it means you do a lot of positioning workshops. That’s what it means. And that’s if you read, that’s why she created the book. It was marketing for her positioning workshops at work. And I actually participated in one of her workshops. And I was like, oh man, I couldn’t do this. I mean, even more respect for her because I couldn’t sit all day in back-to-back positioning workshops. So to me, it all comes down to pick what you want to be, but then be that. And she correctly, for her, picked positioning, has built a great career as the positioning expert. But for me, that would have been a terrible outcome. I like positioning, but not that much.

Finn Thormeier: I’ll throw out two more quotes that you sent me. One is from you, another one is from a poem. You said, and this is on consistency, individual posts come and go, a body of work accumulates. Eventually, readers know how you think, not just what you wrote this week.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, true. I said that. Hey, pretty good.

Finn Thormeier: You don’t have to react to it, but I think that’s almost the goal. To me, this means less over-optimizing for any particular post. Obviously, you want to have a high bar and you want to say things that you have conviction in, but it’s the body of work that actually represents you. It’s not the one piece of work, the one post that represents you.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s true. And when you look at posts, the most popular post I ever wrote was one about the difference between a manager, a VP, and a director, which, by the way, has nothing to do with either finance or marketing, right? So see positioning question. So yeah, I do think for my audience, it’s the body of work that represents you. It’s how you think about problems. If you ask people why they read me, I think they’d say, yeah, I like the way Dave thinks about marketing and sales and metrics. But the posts themselves They’re really both. They can have a life of their own. That post has a life of its own. By the way, the second most popular post is Answer the Question, also known as ATFQ, Answer the F***ing Question. Those are the two most popular posts. Again, nothing to do with finance or marketing. Those two posts have, I don’t know, 100x the visibility of some of the other ones. So a post can live and a post can bring you to new audiences, but it is the body of work that represents you.

Finn Thormeier: And I think, again, just I’m throwing out things that it makes me think of, but if you are the mosaic of the things that you publish and it’s the body of work that represents you, this works only if you do what we discussed earlier, which is you don’t play by the algorithm because If you fall into the trap of saying things because you think you should say them or you’re posting things because you think you should post them or you’re copying someone else because they’re doing well and they’re getting engagement and so you just emulate that style, then even though any individual post Or blog posts might do well through that strategy. Over time, you’re almost like assembling a Frankenstein version of yourself that might end up representing the complete opposite of who you actually are and what you want to be represented as.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think you’ve got to be really careful on this because, I mean, look, if you want massive audiences, you need to go play the game. So it all depends what your goal is, but you’re not You will have compromised yourself to do that potentially. Maybe you’re just natural and you want to play the game. Awesome. Go play the game. If that’s naturally you, then you have no conflict. But what gets hard is wanting to be both. If you kind of want to be a deep, independent thinker and play the game, because literally when I’ve tried to play the game, I told you the Horowitz story, but there are other examples where I wrote a post I didn’t like, or particularly on LinkedIn I do this, where I use my blog for Only deep, long-thinking posts at this point, prior lessons. But on LinkedIn, I’ll still mess around with throwaway stuff. And that’s where I get burned sometimes, where my audience calls me out. I just think it’s really hard to be both.

And one of the benefits about being older is you get to watch how this plays out over time. And you see people get super famous and then, hey, what happened to that guy? Or you see them surf the fads, but they go both ways. And or I think they burn out. It’s a tough lifestyle to be either an influencer, right, where you’re making all the short videos that take hours to make, or even kind of a pop B2B blogger. I know guys, I won’t name them. But I could just see that when they started to play the game, the quality of their work’s gone down. Because they used to only interview super amazing people, and now they interview anybody because they need a show this week. Or they used to only write about stuff where you could tell they had a really powerful point of view, but I need an article this week or every other day. And if you can manage to do that without degrading your content, then good on you.

Or you can just be a news publication, right? But then where’s your value? So I guess the real point is there’s trade-offs here. And if you’re going to play for the algo, first, the algo’s fickle, right? Like the algorithm, it could change and you’re, you know, Everything you’ve done is wrong. Also, I just think it’s super stressful. I don’t know how you don’t compromise quality. That’s all.

Finn Thormeier: I think Nassim Taleb takes this to the extreme. I think he said something like, anyone who publishes on a regular schedule, just disregard.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s very hard and you can see it. I have friends who write blogs and do podcasts and it starts out awesome always because they’re working through the stuff they really wanted to say. And then, you know, they’re at episode 187 and they’re kind of scratching.

Finn Thormeier: Yep. The other quote, and you don’t necessarily have to comment on it, but I really loved it. You sent it to me that I want to read. It’s an excerpt from the poem, The Men That Don’t Fit In by Robert Service. And it’s a small, small excerpt from the poem. People should read the whole poem, but it says... But they’re always tired of the things that are and they want the strange and new. They say, could I find my proper groove? What a deep mark I could make. So they chop and change and each fresh move is only a fresh mistake.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I love that. I will react to it. I love that quote. It’s an unusual place to go for branding. Robert Service is a... He was a Scottish poet who lived in the Yukon territory and he wrote kind of ballads about all the colorful characters who lived up at the Yukon with him. And I love the line, so they chop and change and each fresh move is only a fresh mistake because that’s how branding happens a lot, right? They’re tired of the things that are and want the strange and new. That’s why I like the quote, because you get bored of your own brand, right? The number one risk in marketing is you get bored with your own message. And David Ogilvy always said this, you’re not advertising to a standing army, you’re advertising to a parade, right? So marketers act like they put up a billboard and the whole market is just standing there staring at the billboard and therefore you should change it.

And Ogilvie’s metaphor is, no, you put the billboard up and people are walking by it. There’s constantly new people walking by. It’s a parade, right? And the service poem, it’s the same thing, which is... I know you might be bored with your message and you may want to chop and change, but what percent of the market has even heard from us once, let alone multiple times? They probably need to hear it from us five times before it sticks in. The last metaphor I’ll use here is politicians talk about a stump speech. I don’t know if they do this in Europe, but the stump, like you used to go stand on a stump in a park and give your speech. That’s why it’s called a stump speech because you’re standing on a stump and the stump speech It has to be the same, right? Because imagine the days before media, right? You’re literally just going from town to town, standing in the stump, going, I’m Dave Kellogg, and here’s what I stand for.

It has to be the same every time, right? So I think politicians get this. You have to imagine how bored politicians... When I watch a politician speak, my first reaction is, This is probably the 215th time he’s said this. It’s got to be so boring for him, but God bless him for staying on message. And that’s the way it is with your marketing. I don’t care if you’re bored.

Finn Thormeier: I feel like the... The small nuance there is maybe the stump speech. Yes, you have the same core message, but every time you get a little feedback from the audience where you lose them, where some people leave, where you get the cheers from the crowd and you slightly adapt the things, you double down on the things where you got the cheers and you You remove the sentence or you change the sentence where people nodded off or they walked off. Over time, you iterate yourself to something better.

Dave Kellogg: Absolutely true. I got to tell you a funny story that hopefully you’ll like. So true. As a stump speech, you should be improving it every time. It’s the same core message, but you’re improving it. I lived in New York for a couple months this spring, and I went to comedy clubs a few times. And I never realized this, but you can see A-list comedians in a venue with like 150 people. And I’m like, why is this person performing in this teeny venue? And the answer is they’re testing their new material. They’re working it out. And I never understood that. And some of them weren’t that good, by the way.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Dave Kellogg: So you understand why they’re doing it. But yeah, the other inspiration there is improv comedians. Like by the time you see it at HBO, they’ve done it 150 times and they’re tweaking it each time for the laughs, for the delivery, for the timing.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I think maybe at this point we’re overdue in this one, but I think there is a Seth Godin quote where he says, any website you sufficiently A-B test turns into a porn site. Where you could argue for a comedian, the only thing they’re optimizing for is maximizing laughs. And so they might do a joke that they believe in, but if it doesn’t get you laughs, they just delete the joke. Well, if you stand for something, you might have an unpopular message. You don’t want to over optimize for only the thing that gets you cheers because then you are people, then you’re a crowd pleaser, right? You don’t actually stand for something anymore.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, that’s actually an excellent metaphor. We should unpack the analogy more. But yeah, you’re right. The comedian is optimizing for laughs. So if it’s dead, kill it. They’re not primarily a communications vehicle. They’re an entertainment vehicle. So they’re effectively A-B testing what gets laughs. As a vendor or as a person trying to drive a message... You want to work on delivery and timing, yeah, but you’re not optimizing for laughs, you’re optimizing for changing minds, right? And you want to, to the extent you want to measure something, people agreeing with some of your conclusions, right? Do you agree that, you know, I do market research testing agreement on statements and that’s the needle I would try to move. And obviously, look, first rule of marketing, if the audience is asleep, they’re not even going to hear you. This is one of the challenges of marketing. How entertaining do you make marketing? Do you turn it into comedy? Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is. You’re just having fun and getting people laughing at your message. Well, there’s lots of examples of great entertainment that was terrible marketing. And on the flip side, if you’re too serious and too deadpan, you know, wow, what a great message, but the whole audience was asleep. Nobody heard it. So it’s a trade-off.

Finn Thormeier: Now on platforms, what’s your take on picking the right platforms? You obviously started out with blogging. You’re also quite active on LinkedIn, which as you said, you partly distribute the blog, but you also post things separate from the blog on LinkedIn. I believe you used to use X or Twitter at some point, but not super active anymore. How do you think about this, especially with what you told me previously about the death of the open web, walled gardens, how to get the world out these days?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s tricky. I mean, look, in general, the marketing rule is you got to go where your audience is, right? So, you know, I always tell this to vertical enterprise marketers, like, where’s your audience? Like, you might read TechCrunch, but they’re not reading TechCrunch. They’re reading Forestry today or whatever it is if you’re selling to Forestry. So you got to go where the audience is. That applies to platforms, too. So my personal journey on platforms was I started out on Blogger. I moved to WordPress. Basically, what I’m looking for in a platform is something that will last a long time because it’s a high fixed cost and changing. Recently moved to Ghost. I’m pretty happy with it. There are platform functionality questions like does it support newsletters? And that was like super important to me. Ghost has better newsletter support than WordPress did or at least my plugins on WordPress. The newsletter is the answer to the walled garden problem because Twitter wants you to post on Twitter using their editor.

LinkedIn wants you to write a LinkedIn article. Substack wants you to write a Substack and they want you to use Substack as Twitter because they have a feed. The Internet, sadly, is becoming walled gardens. This all started the day people started punishing external links. That was a very bad day. I was very depressed that day because it was like, oh, the open web is dead. LinkedIn now punishes external links. I think they may have backed off on that. Twitter definitely punishes external links. The question is, how do you reach your audience? And my frustration is the word follow doesn’t mean anything anymore. Because if I have 25,000 followers on Twitter, which I do, I can post stuff and 300 people see it. Now I know not all 25,000 are active and alive, but still, more than 300 people should get it. So I’m now at the mercy of the algorithm. Follow doesn’t mean anything. So basically, Twitter gave me no choice but to write for the algorithm.

Well, what’s the first thing I told you I don’t like doing? Writing for the algorithm, right? Therefore, need a new platform. LinkedIn, same problem. Substack does not have that problem, but when I did my eval, I was more comfortable with Ghost than Substack. But to me, first-party audience control right now is the buzzword, which is I can’t rely on the platforms to get my message to my audience. These people said they want to follow me, and you’ve put yourself in the middle using the algorithm to decide what they see. Well, that’s not a good trend if you’re a content producer. So that’s why the world is going to newsletters right now. Everything is becoming a newsletter.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, it’s a full circle moment. I’m definitely leaning more into my newsletter. I think podcasts are also still in that world. When I go on Spotify, it gives me for the podcast that I follow a chronological feed that just shows me every single episode published by all the people that I subscribe to in chronological order. And I just get to look at the headline and decide whether I want to listen to that or not. And that’s roughly what your LinkedIn feed used to be. It’s roughly what your Twitter feed used to be, right? But they’re so far from that today. It’s gone.

Dave Kellogg: I totally agree with you. Apple Podcasts follow means something. It shows me exactly what Spotify shows you. It’s kind of interesting.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, I believe X or Twitter has a follow feed where you only see content by the people that you follow. I believe it’s not super successful. I wonder if they would introduce that on LinkedIn, if people would even use that. I wonder if that is just a... Is it a matter of people actually truly believe, prefer the algorithmic feed despite what they say? Or it’s just a matter of, well, if you put, you know, I don’t know, a cheeseburger right next to broccoli and you offer both to them, to a person at the same time, it’s just much harder to resist the cheeseburger. And so if you have both of these options so present, people were going to pick the one that’s more dopamine optimized, let’s say.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think it’s an excellent question. So yes, they have a for you feed and they have a following feed. The following feed still has boosting, right? But I do believe it’s not going to show you people you don’t follow, but they still have to decide what order to put things in. So there’s some boosting going on there, but the... The For You feed is boosted all over the place. We’ll show you people you’re not following, etc. And I agree with you on the marshmallow test kind of thing. And I failed the marshmallow test on this one. I’ll hit the For You feed. But the issue is, it’s fascinating. It is the marshmallow. I’ll eat the marshmallow and take the For You feed, but it leaves me feeling sick when I’m done. Same thing. It charges the dopamine, but I feel like I had information junk food, so then I try to hit the following link, but it’s there. I like podcasts better. You made me realize that podcasts worked the way news feeds used to work when they were back in RSS feeds, we used to call them. I think humans failed the dopamine test, which is one reason why social media companies are so big, because we like it.

Finn Thormeier: Now, you used to run a podcast. It was called The Metrics Brothers Podcast for a while, and then you stopped. Any lessons or takeaways there for people who might be thinking about

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so I enjoyed podcasting. It’s why I have the fancy mic. I did a podcast called The Metrics Brothers with Ray Rike, who’s another SaaS Metrics person. I liked it for me, by the way, from a branding point of view. I like doing it because Because it was topical, right? It wasn’t the Dave Kellogg podcast or the Dave and Ray podcast. It was like, no, we’re going to talk about metrics. Because Kellblog is kind of me, right? It’s my name tied up in it. So it’s all the stuff I’m interested in. The Metrics Brothers was like, no, this is Dave and Ray and we’re going to talk about metrics. And so I like the topical focus of it. I think that brought value. We didn’t interview people. That was an unusual format. Because there were two of us and we wanted to go for sub-30 minute episodes, we figured we didn’t need guests. So we just talk, argued, bantered about topics. Like, you know, what’s the CAC ratio and how do you measure it?

Yeah, we could talk about that for half an hour. Or what’s the remaining performance obligation. It turns out there’s, once again, around 25,000 people was the audience size. There’s about 25,000 people who want to hear that. So we ran it. We stopped after 122 episodes. We haven’t killed it. We just put it on hold. Because I’m not sure what I want to do with it. We built a nice size audience. We had good engagements. We were top 20 to top 50 in Apple podcast management, which blew me away for such an incredibly tight topic to get that high in the management category because their category granularity is Lessons we learned from it. I mean, it’s a lot of work. Don’t have to tell you that. And that was always the question to me. The blog was suffering. I felt I had to make a choice. Ray had his reasons, but from my side, Kellblog posts had fallen in half. I was stuck on WordPress and hadn’t migrated off.

I had made no progress to moving to a newsletter. Because once again, it’s almost the dopamine hit of, oh, there’s an episode this week because we’re doing weekly episodes. So there’s always 48 hours of work on an episode. And it’s always interesting topics because we don’t pick them unless we’re interested. So it kept me very up on current affairs. I like that. But the opportunity cost was really high. So I don’t know if I have any big lessons from it, but it started to feel like work and it started out fun. Like in the beginning was just me and Ray kind of shooting the shit about metrics. And that was relatively easy and fun. But once again, you get 122 episodes deep and you’re kind of out of all the low hanging fruit. Any topic you can just talk about extemporaneously is gone. So now you’re having to do homework. So But I do think we reach different people. I get a lot of feedback on it. We had good metrics. I don’t know. I don’t have any, I think it’s a good brand building tool for a company. If I were in a company, I’d run one.

Finn Thormeier: Yes. I wonder if it also had to do with the fact that you were on a schedule, right? Like your blog, you publish when you want. There might be gaps in between. I wonder if, and it’s harder to do when you do it together with someone, but if there is a way to just say, we don’t have to do one every week. But when we are excited, let’s just hop on a Zoom call, talk about it, and that’s going to be the episode. And maybe that’s sometimes it’s two a week, sometimes there’s none for a month, and then there’s another one, you know?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, we may do that, by the way, if we go back to doing it, which we may. It’s on hold, as I mentioned. That would be a better format. But it was the weekly grind. The exact thing I didn’t sign up for on the blog, I signed up for on the podcast. And to me, it’s what made the podcast unsustainable. And the other issue was once in a while we were putting out episodes that neither one of us thought were great. And we’re like, okay, we got to decide here because we can either keep the weekly schedule or we can keep the quality bar, but we’re... We’re missing. I have no idea what that’ll do to the metrics, but I think it’s not a bad idea to just do infrequent podcasts. Ultimately, it was the grind that killed it, killed the fun, and it started to hurt the quality. That’s why we stopped it.

Finn Thormeier: I believe this is one of the big takeaways of this episode. It ties into the last point that I want to discuss with you, and then we’ll wrap it up, which is Audience size versus audience quality. I think this is a big running theme here that we have and or that you have and you clearly optimized for audience quality. And I think the interesting thing that that you sent me, there were two interesting things that I would like you to expand on a little bit is that the first one and this comes to the heart of it is instead of asking how many followers do I have to ask who is following me?

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I think it’s easy to go with the first order metric, which is size. But, you know, I’m trying to reach founders, right? I’m trying to reach founders and high level executives building their careers. So I want, you know, I’ll just pick in a finance department, I want the VP of FP&A, I want the CFO. In a marketing department, I want the CMO, I want the head of demand gen, the head of product marketing. Like those are the people I’m writing for.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Dave Kellogg: And if I get them, I’m happy. And so to me, and also I’m writing for founders, by the way, because a lot of my posts are basically Dear Founder. Like some of them are literally written as letters. So I think the thing I came to realize over time, the thing I learned from experience was, one, if you write for the algo, you can burn yourself out and you can hurt your quality. But if your strategy is to maximize that and make money being an influencer on that, then go do it. But my model was never that. My model was brand building, not direct monetization. So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those people. I’m saying they’re just signed up for a different thing. And I think over time, gravity is going to pull them towards worse content and it’s going to pull them to more superficial, more topical, more, right? It’s going to pull you. You can’t fight gravity. My gravity, I chose as I’m going to stick for this audience and therefore I’m going to measure my success.

And I don’t measure it that tightly, but, but. I don’t have a list that says how many CEOs follow me. I just go look at my followers and go, wow, CEO of this, CEO of that. Or I get fan mail. It’s almost always from a founder. Very often, I’ve read your blog for 15 years and never reached out before, but I wanted to tell you this. That’s a pretty common email to get. And I like getting them, by the way. But yeah, so anecdotally, I think I’m getting through to who I want to get through. And I think knowing what you’re doing is important because if I was just trying to be a big SaaS blogger, I’d want to quadruple my followers. But I’m not. I’m trying to write for people, pretty senior executives in enterprise software who care about marketing strategy and finance.

Finn Thormeier: And you also said every time that you did go broad or viral, you’re not loving the comments or engagements that you’re getting.

Dave Kellogg: Oh yeah. The engagements are another big clue that, that I can tell what I’ve hit outside my audience, but I could tell what I’m inside my audience where people are saying, you should have said is not should be like, okay, that that’s a Kellblog reader. I want somebody who’s paying attention and calling me out. And I could tell them outside when I get just very random comments or just bad engagement or ad hominem attacks or whatever it is, I can see like, oh, I’ve stepped outside the zone. And this person probably shouldn’t be reading Kellblog. So that’s another, it’s an interesting anecdotal way to do it is I just look at the engagement and some of the posts that get super viral get pretty strange engagement.

Finn Thormeier: And I think the, to add one more nuance in here, I think if you do end up trying to make the transition to a broader audience, what happens is that the overall makeup of your audience changes. You don’t just add new people. You lose people on the journey. I noticed this with, I don’t know, you probably don’t listen to any of this, but there’s a podcast by Steven Bartlett called Diary of a CEO. It’s a very big podcast. It’s one of the biggest podcasts out there. And I used to listen to it more regularly because I felt like he had very legitimate guests and he would ask very thoughtful, deep questions. And It feels to me that he has been going much broader trying to reach a mass audience and in the pursuit of that the questions and topics that he now covers have been almost like dumbed down to very basic questions like recently he had an entrepreneur on who I look up to and I want to learn from.

And he asked him the most basic questions around what is ARR. And he lost me there, right? Because I’m like, I want to listen to what this person can think about a couple levels deeper, but you’re asking the most surface level questions to reach the big audience. So in the pursuit of going from, let’s say, 25,000 followers that you have right now, To 100,000 followers, you wouldn’t just keep your existing 25,000 followers and add on 75,000 followers. You would lose those 25,000 followers that you currently have because they’re not interested in that more basic, broader, high-level, dumped-down content.

Dave Kellogg: Yeah, there’s a reality slash denial thing here. Like sometimes you’ll meet a startup that their deck will be all enterprise. Oh, we’re focused on enterprises and big companies. And you look at the customer list and it’s all mid-market. And you’re like, okay, now which is it? You’re telling me you want to be enterprise, but you’re actually selling to mid-market. And I guarantee you, over time, you’re going to start catering to your actual customers. So if you want to be enterprise, stop selling mid-market. And by the way, Pigment, as a European startup, did a tremendous job of avoiding that problem. They said they were enterprise, and they only sold to enterprises. And they kind of pick their first 10 customers. The CEO gave a great talk on that. Eléonore Crespo has a good talk on how to pick your first customers. But anyway, your point is you end up catering to who your audience is, not who you wanted it to be. So if you start catering to lower level executives or a broader audience, then you’re going to start writing content.

And over time, you’re going to become that audience, right? Like you cater to who’s following you. And therefore, you have to have some kind of editorial discipline about, no, no, no, this is where I’m going to stay. Look, I’d love to have four times as many followers, but not if it means I have to write kind of pop content. That’s what I call it. So I’ll take my audience size. And the point you made that I actually hadn’t realized is if I did that, you’re right. I could get to 100,000 followers, but I’d probably lose 10 of the 20 today, right? Because there’s just trade-offs.

Finn Thormeier: Yep. All right, Dave, this was awesome. Lots of lessons and insights here. Thank you so much for taking the time. Obviously, if people do want to check you out, I’m going to link Kellblog as well as your LinkedIn and any other things that we discussed here, the poem we discussed, et cetera, in the show notes. Dave, thank you so much for your time.

Dave Kellogg: Thanks, Finn. Thanks for having me.

Go sub on Youtube if you haven’t yet:

Or listen on: Apple Podcast / Spotify

Summary / TLDR:

1. He changed from doing solo videos of just him teaching business owners how to scale their company (by sharing a tip, strategy, story, lesson) → to bringing on a real business owner, having them present their business (revenue, growth, where they’re stuck) and then basically doing a 1:1 consulting session where Alex gives them very tactical advice on how to scale their company.

2. His main offer: a $5k in-person group workshop, which his company Acquisition.com hosts once a week with 70-100 business owners, where he upsells about 30% attendees into a $36k/year advisory program.

3. The math: 70 x $5k = $350k per event for just the workshop tickets, which is $1.4M per month, given that they do it every week. Upsells: 20 x $36k = roughly $700k per event from the upsells, which is $2.8M per month, so $4.2M per month or roughly $50M per year in total for just the advisory business, not including their PE portfolio etc.

4. His new style of video is hyper optimized to drive workshop ticket sales. Gotta watch the above video why. But a few notes:

   1. It’s just good content because it’s hyper tactical, which is what most business owners want

   2. It’s gamified, because they structure it like a game show, so you get emotionally involved and are more likely to watch the next video because there is continuity

   3. It not only shows that Alex knows how to scale businesses using his own businesses as examples, but that he ALSO knows how to coach other business owner into scaling THEIRS, which is exactly what you want to know before hiring someone as your advisor

   4. The winner of the “game show” is a perfect match for becoming a portfolio company of their PE arm, so all of it combined is also deal flow and filtering for them

This post is sponsored by Thormeier.co

Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve worked with 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it.

If you want to understand how I work with founders, book a call here.

Full Transcript:

[0:00] Alex Hormozi recently changed his content strategy, and I think it’s brilliant, but I think most people will miss it or not really notice how smart this actually is. So I wanted to break it down a little bit.

So most of his videos were just like this. It was like a 15-minute, sometimes much longer, video of just him teaching stuff. And then recently they started doing this, basically like a game show. They call it Scale or Fail. The first round of it was basically these videos where he would sit down with a business owner, and they would present their business and what they’re struggling with: revenue, growth, et cetera. And then they would have basically a one-on-one consulting session with Alex, where he would give them very specific technical advice for their business. So there were different kinds of businesses, like a theme park. I think this is a dentist or something. This is a service business, a roofer. And he would basically coach them.

[0:58] That was basically phase one. And then the best people moved on to this most recent show that they did a couple of days ago, where they basically all presented how they implemented the advice that he gave them and how much they grew. And then the people who grew the most advanced to the next stage, and from there it would progress.

[1:20] I don’t think people realize how much money he’s printing with this content. But if you look at some of the psychology, I think it’s super, super smart. So let me share some things.

[1:38] The way that Alex Hormozi makes money: obviously he owns a company called ACQ, and they have a couple of different offers. The first one is an in-person workshop that they sell for 5K. That’s a workshop. Two days. And it’s in person, at their office. That’s kind of the entry offer, right?

[2:01] Then from there, the upsell is they sell a 36K, which is basically their advisory, per year. So you pay this upfront for the full year. And this is basically a way you get access to Alex’s team, and you can ask them any question at any point. There’s a community. Alex does, I think, monthly Q&As where you can ask him questions.

[2:26] And then, I believe the main thing, and this is how he mainly started, was basically a PE firm, where they would own... I don’t know if this is disclosed. I believe it’s somewhere between 10 to 50% of companies that they own, and that’s the profit share that they get. So for the best, biggest, most profitable, fastest growing companies, they basically act like a PE firm. They get a stake in it, and from that they get a profit share.

[2:55] And so this is what he wants to sell, and then from there there’s the upsell, and then from there this basically funnels the absolute best companies, who want to get real one-on-one ongoing access to Alex, right?

[3:07] And so his YouTube channel obviously funnels people there. If you look at any of his videos, and this is more like the old style, “What type of content should you make that makes the most money”, him sitting down, sharing some advice, “How to become rich with social media”, the call to action is always to their lead magnet. So it’s basically a lead magnet. You get your free personalized roadmap, you put in your information, and you get it sent to your email.

[3:41] From there, once you get that lead magnet, the next pitch is basically: hey, if you like this resource and you want to scale your company, here you can sign up for the workshop. And their landing page is basically... if you go to acquisition.com right now, it’s the workshop landing page, with a little VSL here, “I’m ready to scale”, some testimonials, what you actually get at the workshop, more testimonials, and then a call booking form to attend the workshop. And they’re also explicit here that it’s 5K per seat. I actually attended one of these. So this is their entry monetized offer, right?

[4:27] Also, sometimes, I believe, if you look at his podcast, they directly lead you to the workshop landing page as the main CTA. This is the roadmap, roadmap, roadmap, roadmap. Here, you can see for this podcast, instead of it being the free lead magnet, the roadmap, the call to action is directly “book your spot at the two-day interactive scaling workshop”. So they’re experimenting with that.

[4:57] And I think what people are also not realizing is how much money they’re printing with this. Because it’s 5K per ticket. It’s a group workshop, right? They have about a hundred business owners there, 100 attendees at each of these workshops, in person. I would say not all of them are paid, because when you’re part of the community of the upsell, you get two of these every year for free. So let’s say 70 of these actually paid. So that is 70 times 5K, they’re making 350K per event. And they do them once per week, which means they make 1.4 million per month from just these workshops.

[5:55] But now it gets even better. So they have the 1.4 million per month from the workshops. But then at the workshop they do the upsell to the 36K advisory. And I know that they upsell roughly a third of people, so 25 to 33% of people do the upsell. So of the 70 people, let’s say, who are not yet part of the program and who actually paid at the event, a third of them buy the upsell. So let’s be conservative here and say 20 buy the upsell. 20 times 36K, what is that? That’s [720K]? That is another 700K per event. Again, they do four events every month, one per week. So this times four is, they’re making another 2.8 million per month in upsells.

[7:02] So that together is, they’re making 4.2 million per month from the workshop plus upsells, which is what? 48, like roughly 50 million. Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, none of these numbers are confirmed. This is just me doing the math from other numbers that I know and inferring. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less, but this is, I think, a good ballpark number of what they’re making just from this.

[7:27] And then obviously here, the upsell is that once someone does the yearly advisory, and the company is doing really, really well, and they’re growing fast, and they’re very profitable, and they want more access to Alex, and they want Alex to sit on their board or get weekly one-on-one calls with Alex, then from there they become part of the portfolio. And then from there they get a profit share, right? And when I was at the workshop two months ago, I think the biggest company that was at the workshop was doing 40 million in revenue. So these are not just tiny, tiny companies.

[8:10] So it’s printing money. But back to the content strategy, right? What he’s optimizing for with this YouTube and podcast (they’re very overlapping, he repurposes a lot of content between those two) is how to get more people to buy the 5K workshop, ‘cause that’s the main offer that they sell. And he needs to fill anywhere between 70 to 100 slots every week, which is, let’s say, 400 slots per month he needs to sell. And so that’s what his content strategy is laid out for.

[8:50] So if we go back to his YouTube channel, here it is. If you think about the psychology of the videos that he’s putting out: the workshop is essentially a scaling workshop, right? That’s how it’s positioned. Like, hey, you’re a business owner, you’re stuck somewhere, you want to double your revenue. Come and attend the workshop, work with my team, and we’ll help you get unstuck and figure out where your bottleneck is and how you can scale your company more.

[9:17] All of his content always, even previously, these sit-down videos with just him, they’re aimed at business owners. And they’re always aimed at helping them grow their company in some way, by sharing some framework, some tips, some roadmaps, some lesson that he learned: how to sell better, how to build better offers, how to do marketing better, how to run better ads. All of that is to serve their goal of growing their company. And so you get a business owner to watch the video, and then at the end the call to action is basically: hey, you now learned some small way of how to grow your company. If you want to grow your company even more, and, you know, trust me, because you watched the video and you saw that I have smart things to say, go and attend a workshop with us, right?

[9:55] Now, this new format is, I think, that on steroids. He’s basically sitting down with a business owner and advising him or her one-on-one on exactly how they grow their company. And I think it’s so good for multiple reasons.

[10:14] The first reason is that it’s just good content. If you’re a business owner, you actually want hyper tactical stuff. I think tactical especially, the better and bigger you get as a company. You don’t need this kind of generic, like, “oh, cold email is dead, you need to do organic content”, or here’s some philosophical take on how you need to approach your company. You want hyper tactical insights on the exact little things that you need to adjust in your business. So it’s super, super tactical, and it’s essentially a game show.

[10:56] So not only is it super interesting and relevant content for exactly his audience that he’s looking to attract, but you have this kind of gamification in there. Because instead of just hearing Alex Hormozi speak and share his advice, there’s also this element of, you know, you get involved a little bit. Some of these episodes are quite emotional. Like, if I go to some of these, like this guy here, he runs a theme park [clip from the episode plays], he gave up his 401k and poured it into the business to try to save it. You know, he gets emotional here. So with some of these business owners, you get really emotionally involved.

[11:44] But this is also the game show aspect. So you have emotional involvement. But then you also start rooting for people. You have your kind of favorites who you want to advance in the game, who you want to get to the next round, and who you maybe want to not get to the next round because you don’t like them. And so you have this kind of involvement, and you also have an ongoing series, which helps with retention, right? Because instead of just having a good video, that was good, and so you subscribe to the channel because you want to get more good videos, there’s an element of, like, oh, I want to see what happens next, because I want to follow along the journey of whether this person progresses or not, and who gets eliminated in the next show, et cetera, right?

[12:27] So it’s just good content. That’s number one, and that’s the good reason why it’s just working. But I think it’s better for more reasons than that, because I think this is the kind of relatively obvious stuff.

[12:42] If you think about the psychology of the thing that he’s selling, which is the workshop and then the advisory, which is essentially a coach, right? If you’re gonna hire an advisor or coach, you wanna know two things. Number one, they know their stuff. But number two, you wanna know that they’re a good coach. Because if you’re going to play football, of course it’s going to help if the person who’s training you, and who you go to for advice, was a good football player who played in a big league and who had success, right? That builds credibility, and you’re like, oh, I want to learn from that person. But not every single football player who is a good football player is also a good coach, right? That’s a separate skill, to be able to teach people and pinpoint their exact weaknesses, et cetera.

[13:36] And so his previous videos were basically just him demonstrating that he knows how to scale businesses, right? Because he talks about his lessons, his advice, his insights, what he’s done before, stories from his past. So you’re like, okay, this guy actually knows business and has done good things. But if you’re gonna hire his firm and his company and him to advise you, you also wanna know: is he actually able to help me specifically, and sit down with me and figure out my specifics for my specific business, and then give me technical advice that I can use, and not just do this for his own companies, right? And so this new format demonstrates this very, very clearly. So I think it drives even more interest for the specific offer that they run, which is a workshop slash advisory.

[14:22] Because he essentially does that in the video, right? What you’re watching is a one-on-one advisory coaching session that he does with a business owner, and that’s the exact thing that you would want to buy. So it’s the best possible thing to advertise the thing that you’re selling. So, again, I don’t have access to any of the backend numbers, but I’m very confident that the conversion rate of views to workshop bookings is much higher, because it’s a much more natural conversion path, right? You have a business owner, which is your audience. You have a video that is super relevant and interesting to them, which is tactical advice for another business owner on how to scale their company. It’s also gamified, so you’re more engaged and more likely to come back. But then what you sell is advisory and basically coaching. So it’s a direct conversion path.

[15:11] But I think where it gets even more brilliant is... and this already is the less obvious part that I think many people don’t think about when they create their content, which is that you don’t just need content that is relevant to your audience, right? If you create content, you have your ICP, and obviously your content needs to be relevant and interesting to your ICP, because otherwise you’re not going to attract your ICP. And how are you going to sell anything if the people who watch your content are not the same people who buy your product or service, right? So this needs to align, and you do that by talking about their problems, goals, desires. And that’s how you attract them, which is what Alex does, right? His ICP is business owners. What do they care about? They want to scale their business. What are their desires? They want to make a ton of money. They want to double their revenue. They don’t know what ads to run or how to scale a sales team. So all of his content addresses all of these things, and that’s how he attracts people.

[16:19] Beyond that, what you need to do is that the problems and goals and desires that you speak to need to also be the ones that your product actually solves, right? Which seems obvious, but so many people don’t do that. Let’s say, again, my ICP is SaaS founders. So if I want to attract them with my content, I need to talk about their goals, problems, desires. But what are SaaS founders’ goals, problems and desires? There’s a ton of stuff, right? Fundraising: how do I raise my next round? There’s sales: how do I hire a sales team, how do I train my sales team, how do I do outbound? There’s marketing: how do I get awareness, or grow pipeline, or get more leads? There’s obviously HR and hiring: how do I hire and find great people and retain them? There’s operations, which is: how do I reduce my costs and improve margins, how do I build better processes, how do I leverage AI? There’s a ton of stuff. So I could speak to any of these, and it would help me attract these people with my content. But I only do one thing, which is LinkedIn and founder brand advisory. That’s the only thing I do.

[17:41] And so if I create a piece of content around “how do you leverage AI to optimize your processes and improve margins”, that might be interesting to them, but then there is no natural path to be like, “and by the way, I help people with LinkedIn and their founder brand”, because it’s not what they signed up for, it’s not what they watch me for. But where it does help is marketing, right? So if they’re struggling with how to get awareness, or how to get leads, or how to drive more pipeline with enterprise buyers, this is directly what this impacts. And so if I create content that speaks to this problem, and then presents it in a way that has to do with founder brand or LinkedIn or both, then that’s a much more natural path to then be like: “and by the way, if you found this piece of content interesting and the solution makes sense for you, then you might wanna check out what I do, because I can help you do it better and faster.”

[18:31] Which is probably what this video is, right? I speak to founders, I talk about the marketing aspect, and it’s very connected to founder brand, because it’s Alex, it’s him running it as a founder. It’s definitely not LinkedIn, this is mainly YouTube, but it’s very much organic content related. So there’s a much more natural path for me to say in this video: hey, and if this resonated with you and you want to figure out how to apply all of this to your business and your founder brand and your content, go reach out to me so I can help you.

[18:59] But I think there’s more. Because, yes, he’s creating good content that is relevant to his audience, and it’s super tactical, and there’s this game show aspect. But as I started thinking about it [a few words unclear]. There’s another super brilliant aspect of this, because they run it as a game show, right? So they now have eight of these contestants who he did the advisory session with first, and now they basically show off what they implemented and how much they grew. At some point they actually go over how much revenue they added in the 90 days after they had their one-on-one session with Alex, right? This person added 920,000 in top-line revenue. This person added 500K. This person added 1.6 million in top-line revenue in the 90 days since the advisory session.

[19:54] And so this is a prediction, because this is their most recent video, from five days ago. But my prediction is that at the end of this thing they’re obviously going to have a winner of the show, of the Scale or Fail show, which is why it’s a game show. That’s part of it, that’s why you start rooting for people. And that winner wins a golden ticket, they say, to work with Alex’s firm, which seems like a perk to the viewers, right? It’s like a promise: if you win, then you get to work with me. I’m pretty sure that whoever’s the winner, the golden ticket means you become a portfolio company, where they probably invest some amount of money into you, and then Acquisition.com and Alex get a profit share.

[20:50] And why is this so brilliant? Because it’s basically deal flow that they’re generating here, right? It’s a funnel. They get applications from people who want to participate in this game, who are all business owners, and they want to scale their business, and they look up to Alex Hormozi and they wanna learn from him. That’s why they apply. Then they pick the best ones of them, do the YouTube video with them, which creates this incredible content. And then, as people go through this process, they see how well they execute, how coachable they are, and they get an inside look into the company metrics, right? Because part of this is them sharing how much revenue they’re making, and how much profit they’re making, and how quickly they’re growing.

[21:50] And so whoever wins at the end is the winner of the show, but they’re also the most perfect fit for the portfolio. They want to learn from Alex. They’ve demonstrated that they can execute well, that they’re coachable, and they’ve demonstrated that the company is doing super well, that they’ve been able to grow it super fast, that it’s super profitable. And so this is what they want for a portfolio company, right? And so it’s a win-win at the end for both: the business owner gets even more access to Alex and gets this continuous coaching and advice, and they found a perfect portfolio company here, that is growing fast, with a founder that listens to advice and implements it quickly and is demonstrably growing revenue by a lot through it.

[22:39] Just think about what that would mean for your company, right? That would mean that you invite your ICPs. Let’s say you sell to enterprise VPs of engineering. Imagine you would be able to invite VPs of engineering who are not yet your customers, and create content with them that they find valuable, that other enterprise VPs of engineering find interesting. So it’s great content that helps you with your awareness and top of funnel, that generates leads for your company that sells to VPs of engineering. But through the process of creating this content with them, you end up with people who become direct buyers of your product by winning the show.

[23:24] And I don’t think this is random, right? I think this is an evolution of how they arrived at that. And if I had to guess how they arrived at this strategy, because it’s a lot of planning and production and getting this right, you can see gradually how they learned that this is the best format for them right now, right? They were doing these just-Alex sit-down videos, what he teaches. And then at some point they did a lot of these videos, I think it’s on this other channel, where basically they would do these Q&A clips of people who attended the workshop. Right, this is at the workshop. This is Alex at the workshop, and then this is a person who is attending the workshop, and they do a Q&A, and they would just record the Q&A and put up that video. And that content did really well.

[24:24] And then they said, okay, how can we do this better and scale it? Increase the production. So they started experimenting with this format seven months ago. You can see this is the same format. This is another video like that, eight months ago, where they had the same format: business owners come, present their business, and get a one-on-one advisory session with Alex. But it was just one-off things. And I’m pretty sure they learned that, oh my God, this... And so they’re like, first of all, how can we do this way more, instead of once a month sporadically, and make it an actual thing that we do? And then they figured out this kind of gamification, to not just do a one-off advisory session with a business owner and then peace out and never see them again, but rather make this like a progression, like a game show, where the best people progress into the next round. Here’s another one: progress into the next round. And then the winner wins the golden ticket to become a portfolio company.

[25:19] Lots of good things here. I think if I try to summarize the lessons here: you need to create content for your ICP (this is obvious) that you can tie directly to what you sell. Meaning your product or service should be a natural progression from the piece of content. So if Alex talks to a business owner about how to scale their company, it’s a natural progression to say: and if you want to scale your company more and even better, and work with us directly, attend the workshop. So you want to tie it directly to what you sell.

[26:04] I mean, if you can somehow gamify it, obviously that is amazing, and have a kind of game show continuity in there, like a progression. And they basically engineered it so that the winner of the game show is also the best-match enterprise deal. Because a portfolio company is basically like an enterprise deal for them. It’s a super long process, it’s a super low probability that someone is a fit, but if someone is a fit, it’s a very high upside.

[26:50] And so I think it’s just brilliant, and there’s a lot to learn from it, and from the constant iteration and progression that you can see in this content. Hope it was useful. If it was, you know, unsurprisingly, as I said, I do this sort of stuff. For SaaS and AI founders, I have an advisory. It’s mostly LinkedIn stuff, and how I help people do similar stuff, but on their LinkedIn: how to create better content and how to drive more revenue from it. So if that’s relevant, book a call with me. If not, I hope this piece of content was valuable.

Owner.com built one of the most prominent founder brands and Youtube channels in B2B. They invested $1m into brand when they were still doing only $10m in ARR (now doing over $100m), resulting in 27M impressions last year, with organic generating 20% of pipeline every month.

In this episode, we talk about their approach to Youtube and leveraging the founder brand early.

We discuss:

• How to crush Youtube as a B2B company

• The #1 mistake B2B companies make when they try to leverage Youtube

• First order irrational, second order rational: why Owner.com invests so much into brand

• How and why Owner.com CEO Adam Guild spent 10 hours every Saturday to produce videos

• Variables to success and comparing 2 videos: same title and thumbnail, one with 100k views, the other with 3.4k views (30x less)

• Brand strategy -> topics -> script flow

• The 5 stages of building an organic motion from scratch

• Why a great Youtube editor is worth 10-100x a good one (they pay $120-150k to people straight out of college)

• David’s advice for founders who want to build their founder brand

SaaS & AI Founders: Want to grow faster on LinkedIn?

Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve helped 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it.

If you want to get unblocked, book a workshop here.

Show Notes:

Connect with David Fallarme:

David Fallarme's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dfallarme/

Owner.com: https://www.owner.com/

Connect with Finn:

Finn's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Mentioned in the episode:

Owner.com’s Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@owner-com/

Ahrefs’ Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AhrefsCom

Owner.com Founder Adam Guild: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamharrisonguild/

In-N-Out video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbx8EG9I0tY

Five Guys video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQnNJF79psk

NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: My guest today is David Fallarme. David is the VP Marketing at Owner.com, where he joined almost three years ago. Owner.com is a Series C startup valued at a billion dollars. It’s an AI platform for restaurant owners to grow their restaurant. Before Owner.com, David was Marketing Director at ODF, or called On Deck back then, and Head of Marketing for Asia at HubSpot. David, thank you for joining.

David Fallarme: Thank you, Finn. Glad to be here.

Finn Thormeier: Cool. The reason why I wanted to have you on is the way that I think about Marketing these days, it’s a barbell and there’s two sides of the barbell. There’s brand and there’s AI. AI is all about kind of efficiency and automating things and making sure you can do things with a lean team. And then brand, I think, is how do you actually get people to care about your shit? And you guys do well at both. You guys build a very big brand and you guys are very AI forward. So we’re going to talk about both of those things. We’re going to talk about YouTube. We’re going to talk about Founder Brand. So those are the things I want to dive into. But let’s start with the brand part first now. When I talked to Kyle Norton, your CRO, he told me that you guys were investing a million dollars into Brand back when you guys were doing 10 million in revenue, which is an insane amount. Obviously, now you guys are doing way over 10 million in revenue, but Brand is still a very important part of what you guys care about. Talk to me about that philosophy because that is an amount of money relative to revenue that very few companies come even close at.

David Fallarme: Yeah, I think it’s because we just started with the market and how they behave and then work backwards from there. So it wasn’t like, oh yeah, we believe in brand because everybody must invest in brand immediately. Like it’s not dogmatic like that. We serve almost like blue collar target audience. And our category is super crowded. Like there’s a lot of companies that say they’re going to grow restaurant revenue or a platform. You know, there’s all this jargony from their perspective, right? And so what we found is that the way-

Finn Thormeier: Toast is probably the biggest, like-

David Fallarme: Yeah, Toast is one of the bigger ones.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

David Fallarme: And they say a lot of the same things that all the other companies say. We’re going to grow your revenue. We’re going to do this and do that. We’re like, tech is going to save your life, you know? But we found that a lot of our ICP makes decisions kind of like through heuristics. It’s like, oh, yeah, that brand makes me feel good or they’re teaching me a lot of stuff. And so I feel more educated by them. I’m just going to trust them more because it’s an ICP that, you know, it’s very real life, handshaking community. You know, the restaurant owner life is very lonely. And so they try to self-educate a lot. And so we started with Market Insight that said, hey, it actually makes sense for you to be the brand that they go to first for education. And once they build up enough trust with you, all the brand stuff that we know kicks in. When they see your ad, they’re more likely to click. When they get in a demo, they’re more likely to just fly through the process because you spent hours and hours with them beforehand. So it wasn’t like this, oh yeah, brand, like, you know, we must invest early. It just, it made rational sense.

Finn Thormeier: I feel like that’s almost even more rare because you almost backed into brand from like it just performs better if we do this. But most companies never get to that because the problem with brand is that it’s harder to measure and it’s a longer payoff period. So if you do not have that strong conviction that this is just important to do because. I feel like it’s almost harder to even back into there because you need to have patience and stick through the low, long period where you don’t see long results. You can’t measure it perfectly. So anything to say to that?

David Fallarme: Yeah. And you’re totally right. And there’s two things I’ll say. One is that Adam, our CEO, is just the total believer in it. So that just removes a lot of the, hey, show me the spreadsheet and what’s the payback. This removes a lot of that. And he’s the one personally making the content. So there’s like skin in the game to make sure it does well. And it’s not like this marketing thing. It’s like, it’s his face, again, blue collar target audience that associates the brand credibility with the founder itself. So that removes a lot of the strategic rigmarole that we have to do. And the other thing is this concept that’s like, I think I read it from a VC a long time ago where it’s called first order irrational, second order rational. So it’s an investment thesis, which is like, if you invest in things that are first order rational, you’re never going to find alpha anywhere. So the things that have the most alpha are the ones where it doesn’t make any sense. You know, most people are going to say, no, this is irrational, but it becomes rational because it’s irrational. So the value is that few people will do this because it’s hard to measure, it’s hard to put on a spreadsheet, but that’s exactly what gives it the value. So it’s just like managing that paradox, I think, is one of the ways to unlock brand.

Finn Thormeier: Right. Now, you guys did, you wrote about on LinkedIn, you guys did 27 million in impressions or views last year, which I assume is mostly YouTube and then Instagram slash Facebook slash Meta. And you said that organic contributes roughly 20% of pipeline on any given month. You talked about the five stages of building an organic pipeline. content motion. Can we talk about those five stages a little bit? Do you still remember those five stages?

David Fallarme: I don’t, but let me see.

Finn Thormeier: So I’ll read them to you and then you riff off of the headline.

David Fallarme: Sure, perfect.

Finn Thormeier: So stage one is trust the process, aka just don’t quit.

David Fallarme: This is just like, I have a New Year’s resolution to lose 10 pounds this year. All you gotta do is just go to the gym. Just keep going to the gym. Kind of don’t think about how much weight you’re losing Until like month two, month three, just prove that you can actually have this repeatable process that you can build on. You know, most people are like, oh, I’m not losing five pounds in January. So I stopped and that’s why New Year’s resolutions are a joke. But same thing in content, like if you can invest in it, you’ve got to build the repeatable process.

Finn Thormeier: I think most people would agree. I think that the thing that stood out to me in that post, you said two quarters, which I think that’s longer than most people are comfortable with.

David Fallarme: Yeah, because you’re going to find that, oh, it actually takes me longer to produce some content than I expected. Or, you know, two quarters is enough time for you to really find the things that are going to challenge your process. Oh, yeah, this new priority is going to come into place. Well, how important really is content that you can make sure it’s resilient enough to withstand all the important priorities that come up? And I’ve just found, you know, one of the things you didn’t mention in my intro is before I was doing marketing consulting. I was doing the fractional thing. And a big part of what I did was standing up these content organic motions. And every single time it’s like, you know, it’s six weeks minimum. Sorry.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

David Fallarme: Like six weeks minimum to prove that there’s something, but really two quarters for the full thing to play out.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

David Fallarme: So it just takes longer and it’s a longer commitment than you think.

Finn Thormeier: Stage two was you see kind of your first viral spikes, but they’re super random and long space between them.

David Fallarme: And that’s one of the reasons why it’s such a long time is because let’s say you post a couple of times a week in the best case. Most teams are going to post maybe once a week as they build this muscle, right? If they’re lucky. And what I’ve just found is there’s a power law of content and it’s maybe one in 10 will hit, two in 10 will hit. So you really need that amount of time to get enough out for you to see, oh, like this is the thing that people are responding to. And so if you quit too early, you’re not gonna get that spike and you’re not gonna get enough signal.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I just looked at your YouTube. I think you just had one, right? Like your last YouTube videos about the In-N-Out $6 billion empire got 100,000 views. And then before that, you have like 3.5K views, 2.5K views, 26K views, 4,000 views. So like you just had one of your outliers, I guess.

David Fallarme: Yeah. Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Stage three was more operators, better operators.

David Fallarme: So once you have some repeatable process, you have some hint of what the market wants from you, then you can bring on people to amplify the system or people who are better than you at creating content, scripting, people who are better on camera. So now you have like something that’s kind of like embers of a fire, right? And I just want to put more fuel on it.

Finn Thormeier: How do you determine that it’s working? Because obviously one of the notorious things about organic and brand is that it is hard to measure. It is hard to attribute. You can’t perfectly see it. Everything in terms of ROI. So how do you, what are you looking for?

David Fallarme: There’s engagement on the content itself is a signal. All you’re doing at this stage is triangulating, getting signals, qualitative, right? And then around, yeah, probably like the second quarter mark of us really taking content seriously and professionalizing it, it started showing up in more and more sales calls. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching your videos on YouTube. You know, there was a couple of instances where somebody said they binge watched everything and they’re like ripping the product out of our hands and it was like a one call close. So you start to get hints of that as long as you’re consistent and as long as you start to get a couple of hits that tell you what the market wants to do.

Finn Thormeier: Phase four is the algorithm finally notices.

David Fallarme: Yeah, it makes you work for it. The algorithm is just not going to reward you unless you’re somebody who’s consistently making the deposit into the algorithm. Because otherwise, if you think about it from their perspective, they’re going to show you views, but then you stop posting. They kind of wasted all that attention on you. They want you to keep posting so they get more views and they get more ad revenue. And this is all kind of like the black box, like black magic. I have no idea if this is how it actually works, but this is just a pattern I’ve seen again and again. There’s a level of content velocity that you have to get. You have to push beyond. And then the algorithm is like, oh, this person is taking it seriously. Let me send more impressions their way. And we want this person to keep posting because it looks like they’re getting more and more impressions. They’re getting more and more people to come back to the platform so we can serve ads. So I think there’s something here around getting rewarded by the algorithm. This happened to us when we were posting on Facebook for six months and nothing was happening. Like just zero. And we were doing the same exact posts on Instagram. But then just like something changed at some point where even though we’re just cross posting, it started taking off. We don’t know why. I wonder whether it might be the algorithm.

Finn Thormeier: My first instinct always when people say that’s the algorithm, I’m like, what’s the human psychology behind it? And I wonder when I see a video on YouTube and it does well, I watch it and the next thing I do after that is I check out that person’s channel. And if I see only that video or I see three videos, I’m like, I’m not going to subscribe to that person, even though I like that one video just because like they haven’t put out anything. But if I like that person, I check out their channel and then I see, holy shit, this person has put out 50 similar videos to this and they’re putting a new one out every single week. I’m going to subscribe because I want to see more of that.

David Fallarme: That’s true. That tracks. And that’s definitely my behavior with LinkedIn as well. If I see a good post by someone. Oh, this person’s amazing. Let me like try to understand more from what they know. Then I go to their profile. The last post is like a press release from their company or it’s like four months old. I’m like, oh man, like I was hoping this person would be a new addition to my feed. So that also turns out.

Finn Thormeier: One of my favorite quotes from this post, you had it in the first stage, aka, just don’t quit phase, but I think it also fits here where you quoted MrBeast and he has this thing where he says, just make a hundred videos, then ask me for advice.

David Fallarme: Yeah. It’s the same. It shows up in every, in a lot of domains, I think, where it’s like, just keep doing things. Like Alex Hormozi has this thing where It’s like you have to do more volume than you think. Somebody asked him for advice and he’s like, how often are you posting? Oh yeah, it’s like once a day, once a week. And Hormozi’s like, you have to do like five a day. Don’t even talk to me until...

Finn Thormeier: Just don’t ask Gary Vee. He’ll tell you to do like 379 a day.

David Fallarme: Yeah, I read, I don’t know which book by Russell Brunson, the kind of ClickFunnels guy. And he says the same thing about podcasts. He’s like, do one podcast every single day for a year, then ask me for advice.

Finn Thormeier: Stage five is channel expansion luck. And you talk about Michael Lim came on board.

David Fallarme: Yeah. So once you understand the dynamics of your audience and how they engage with your content and how that looks like on one platform, it’s time to apply some of those things and expand to different platforms. And you’re going to get more lucky. More shots on goal equals more luck equals, you know, faster content flywheel spinning. And at this point, we’re lucky to bring on Michael Lim, who is ex-Hormozi, ex-MrBeast. So we’re just very lucky to have him aboard. And the flywheel is spinning even faster.

Finn Thormeier: Let’s talk about YouTube because you guys crush on YouTube and I think if a B2B brand wants to look at how to do YouTube well, they should check out the Owner.com YouTube channel. Do you think YouTube works for you guys only because you sell SMB and it’s almost at the edge of kind of B2C marketing where you’re talking to restaurant owners or do you think a B2B company is selling into mid-market enterprise?

David Fallarme: I think it can work. I mean, look at Ahrefs, right? I think their YouTube channel is one of the ones I look up to because, yeah, mid-market, not a super cheap product, certainly selling to some enterprise. I think it’s just everybody is on YouTube now.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

David Fallarme: And people are not realizing this. And this is such a huge opportunity because people associate YouTube with just consumer or like for kids or music only. But if you look at the usage stats of YouTube, it’s like everybody... Opens YouTube, spends half an hour minimum. Some people spend hours on it. So it’s just a huge opportunity. And I think given that everybody’s on it, that means your target market is on it, which just means it’s an untapped opportunity. And for your topic, probably less crowded if you’re a B2B company, because there’s just not a lot of B2B companies who are doing it well.

Finn Thormeier: So what advice do you have if you’re talking to a head of marketing, VP marketing, they want to approach YouTube, attack YouTube, like what have you learned? What has worked for you guys? How would you approach this channel?

David Fallarme: The most important thing is to realize that it’s not a library of your webinars. So I think this is like the greatest sin you can make as a B2B marketer. It’s like, we have a bunch of content. Let’s like repurpose it and like put some bumpers in the beginning and just to put it on YouTube. Like who is watching these? Like, I can’t imagine that anybody’s watching these. So you have to treat it like, what is the way to succeed natively on YouTube? Like, how do you, you’re not competing with other B2B companies. You’re competing with MrBeast. You’re competing with like movie clips, you know, you’re competing with Joe Rogan podcast or whatever. Like viral thing is happening. So you have to make sure that your content is native to the platform and that if somebody falls down a rabbit hole of something that’s within your category, your thumbnail looks great, the packaging looks great. There’s like a logical reason that somebody would follow you outside of whatever your company is. So Ahrefs, I can just go back to their example. They have a lot of different like fun ways to explain SEO. You know, I’m going to try to rank a website in 24 hours. So that’s way better than here was a webinar we did with some thought leaders about three tips for how to do AI in 2027. Something you would actually watch for fun, I think is one of the baseline expectations you should have when you start on YouTube.

Finn Thormeier: And it seems like kind of length for YouTube, at least for you guys is like 10 to 20 minutes, which is shorter than a webinar, right? Most webinars are like 60 minutes, 45 minutes, but it’s longer than just repurposing your, I don’t know, LinkedIn post and making a video for it.

David Fallarme: And that’s the hard part about YouTube. So I can talk all day about it’s an untapped opportunity and like the strategy behind it. At the end of the day, it’s just a new muscle you have to build. You know, a lot of B2B marketers today, I think came up in the era of content marketing, SEO, let’s write a bunch of blog content, you know, myself, I’m including myself in this list, which is what is the keyword volume or let’s think about, you know, text content for Twitter or for Facebook or for Instagram. Very, very few marketers came up in a world of thinking video first, scripting first, packaging first. I think that’s starting to change now with a lot of Gen Z folks who were like, you know, TikTok first or Instagram first. So it’s just a new muscle that people have to build where you’re thinking about the packaging first, what would get you to click on this thumbnail when you have an option to watch, I don’t know, Spider-Man movie trailer. It’s just a very, very different way of thinking.

Finn Thormeier: But I mean, your content is still educational, right? I mean, let me share my screen here. We can actually look at your YouTube channel. You seen the YouTube channel?

David Fallarme: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Cool. It is packaged in a very engaging way. I think people should watch some of the video to get a sense of the feel. There’s B-roll. It’s very tight. It’s clear that you guys scripted this video, not in the sense that it feels robotic, but it’s tight pace. The person isn’t just improv-ing and saying some random things, but it is still... If someone just wants pure entertainment, they’re not going to watch this. This is a restaurant owner that’s like, I want to grow my restaurant. I want to improve my margins.

David Fallarme: Yeah. It’s like edutainment. There’s a bunch of channels that are doing this thing where it’s like business breakdowns or how much money does this person make? So it’s riding that line of education, entertainment, which I think is where to make it valuable for the business. Because you made a good point. The point is not to get 100,000 views for the sake of 100,000 views. There needs to be some kind of connection one or two degrees away from the product or service that you sell. And that is the hard part of YouTube.

Finn Thormeier: And I think it’s also interesting when people look at this, I think they’ll see that you guys are learning lots of things from MrBeast in terms of the thumbnails. There’s a big face on here, right? There’s kind of very little text, but some text before, after, big announcement. You know, you do a lot of the kind of very open face, open eyes, open mouth, which MrBeast does a lot. So I think there’s a lot to learn here from the B2C world I take.

David Fallarme: Thank you, Tom.

Finn Thormeier: And then I think what’s interesting, so tell me about how this, how you guys started, because I believe I saw Kyle talk about that in the beginning. It was just your founder, Adam Guild, who’s this guy in most of the videos. I think spending 10 hours every single Saturday recording one video.

David Fallarme: Yes. So, you know, kudos to him for getting the momentum off the ground. You know, I mentioned like just don’t quit. And the only reason the YouTube channel is in the place where it is. It’s because he did that. If you just keep scrolling down, it’s actually crazy how bad the first videos were.

Finn Thormeier: Well, let’s do that actually, I think.

David Fallarme: It’s insane if you just do the, you know, how we started, how we got here. Two years ago, three years ago. There you go. It’s insane. He doesn’t even do his hair, you know? It’s some of these like iPhone videos. So it’s literally just, okay, let’s keep posting. Let’s get some momentum. Let’s just see what works.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

David Fallarme: The lighting is terrible. The microphone doesn’t, you know, his editing was bad, but it was just enough to make sure that we were seeing the signals and traction we can keep building on and building on it. And I think that’s the hard part about YouTube is the iteration cycle is slower than say social or text social or on like blog posts. Like you put something out there, but it takes, yeah, like 10 hours of filming and then there’s the editing and then you have to come up with a thumbnail, you know? So it’s very expensive from a time feedback cycle wise, but eventually you put in enough reps and you start to get a feel for it and everything gets a lot faster.

Finn Thormeier: Before we dive a little bit more into the process there, do you have a sense, I saw, I think it was a podcast by Hormozi some time ago where he talked about their best performing YouTube videos in terms of sales, in terms of people who book the workshop, which is their kind of entry product. And it was not the one with the most views. It was something that has a decent amount of views, but definitely not the most viral post. Do you have a sense of which of the recent videos you guys did the best in terms of?

David Fallarme: Sales? It’s gonna be the same dynamic, I think, across any content channel, which is, you know, you have your pieces that draw people into the ecosystem. So the In-N-Out is an example of that. It’s like, hey, who are these guys, right? But then you have some like mid funnel ones where you’re a little more forward around, hey, there’s like some software that we sell behind this. And then there’s a few that we used to do, but we haven’t done as often, which is like purely about, you know, product updates, feature updates. So it’s the middle ones that do the most lifting. Which is, oh, like there’s a problem that is relevant to me that you solve. So it’s the ones that are talking about SEO strategies, the ones that talk about how to grow your sales using some particular tactic like catering. So when somebody is like problem aware mode and you give them a way to solve that problem without necessarily saying that you must buy a product, those are really effective.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. It’s also super interesting. I’m just seeing this now. These two videos, this is the genius system behind In-N-Out $6 Billion Empire. This is the genius system behind Five Guys $2 Billion Empires. It’s just, I guess it’s, I mean, it’s the same title basically. It’s both burger chains, but then this one did 3.4K and this one did 100K.

David Fallarme: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: That’s insane. So talk to me about, so I think the second kind of interesting thing there is it seems like you guys are in the process of taking Adam out of that. You brought in, I think her name is Enga, who’s now kind of the main face of the YouTube channel. What’s the process? How do you guys come up with the topic? What’s the process for writing a script? What makes a good script? What are the highest leverage things, subtasks of creating a YouTube video that have the biggest impact on how it performs?

David Fallarme: You have to have, I think, at least the outlines of a brand strategy before you do any of that stuff. Like, what is the thing we are trying to change in the market? Is it perception? Is it just pure awareness? So you need to have an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, and YouTube is just one of the vehicles you can use to get there. So one of the things for us is we want to make sure that we are seen as a trusted source of education for restaurant owners, right? And so that gives us some creative balance. Okay, like we talk about things that are relevant to us and not just about every restaurant topic under the sun. Like typically we’ll talk about how to hire labor as an example, just because it’s so far from a product. So it’s generally around growth, making money, you know, systems, hands-off, because those are things that are relevant to our platform. Then from there, again, you’re just trying to re... Restrict the creative variants that you can come up with. So from there is that, okay, we probably want a mix of our portfolio of content bets to have some stuff that’s really top of funnel that gets a lot of attention, like In-N-Out. I think we did like a Boston Market, Chipotle breakdown. So things that people would find in the feed and click on out of curiosity, find that we are a credible source because we spend a lot of time in the scripts to make sure we’re uncovering useful novel insights. Then if we earn a subscription or earn a second view from you, Then you’re going to see us in the feed or you’re going to see us in your next video that’s, oh, there’s something around making more money for my restaurant that is really relevant to me or is top of mind for me. This is like, you know, reducing food costs is very topical right now because of the whole economic situation. How to increase online ordering because people are always trying to get more direct orders that are more profitable. Then inevitably, those are going to come... Into your feed, you’re going to find more and more of us. And for us, it gives us a lot more signal around which types of those content are resonating. So now we start to get this feedback loop around what to build, what types of scripts are working, what types of topics are getting engagement, what are types of content that’s getting reference and sales calls. And that allows us to make sure everything’s more efficient in one way.

Finn Thormeier: I think the fact that Adam spent 10 hours every Saturday also gives you an insight of how much work it takes to create a good YouTube video because obviously the actual video is 10, 20 minutes long, but he spends 10 hours figuring out what should I talk about. Comparing that video, writing the script, probably doing multiple takes of that 10 to 20 minute video. And then there’s the kind of post-production, clipping it, coming up with a thumbnail, all of that, which is, that’s a lot of work compared to using Claude to write a link, to write a blog post.

David Fallarme: So you get that brand strategy, right? Just to make it a bit more concrete. So that is just really important because what I didn’t want to say is, oh yeah, the script takes 45 minutes or two hours. Like you have to have all that in place for the other stuff downstream to be rational. So scripting takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, just depending on how easily it comes out as with all content, right? The recording for that, for a 10, 20 minute video is probably like an hour just because you’re doing multiple stuff. Some stuff doesn’t come out during the recording itself. Sometimes you find that the script is actually weaker in some spots and so you’re doing some live editing. The editing is probably the biggest constraint of this whole thing. So I think the recording and scripting, a lot of it is a solvable problem in a way. But editing is like really great YouTube editors are one of the scarcest resource in all of tech and marketing right now. Because you’re not just competing with other B2B companies. You’re competing with like Ali Abdaal. You’re competing with, you know, really big podcasters. You’re competing with Diary. You’re competing with everybody.

Finn Thormeier: But can’t you pay better if you’re a VC funded startup?

David Fallarme: You could, but sometimes you’ll get outbid depending if they’re really, really good. Like you’d be surprised at the salaries for really great editors. I remember we paid somebody out of college, like 120, 150K for the first job. That’s what they’re making because they’re an extremely good YouTube editor because that’s the part that takes a ton of time.

Finn Thormeier: Interesting. I would not have guessed that.

David Fallarme: Maybe we’re doing something wrong, but this is just what I see.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, you also don’t have the coolness factor as a B2B company generally, right? If someone can go to MrBeast or Hormozi, it’s like, yeah.

David Fallarme: They’re thinking about their long-term portfolio as well.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I saw you guys created kind of like this media page, landing page to attract investors. Talent, right? Where you kind of outline, and I think one of the bigger benefits that you guys have is, I mean, one, you guys have a good mission. Two, you guys can maybe actually offer equity, which is really the case for people who work with a creator. Interesting. Why is it so, like, how come? It’s just really surprising to me that editing is a bottleneck.

David Fallarme: The difference between a good editor and a great editor is huge.

Finn Thormeier: Like what? 10x? 100x?

David Fallarme: At least 10x. At least 10x. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 100x. The reason is the time, right? Because it’s so expensive to make these videos just from a time perspective. It’s not just editing a blog post and saying, hey, can you look at this draft? It’s like, okay, I have to go into Premiere, Final Cut, and do all these things and make sure it’s great. Oh, no, this animation doesn’t look great. Let me go back and redo that. So the cycle time is really long. And if you have somebody whose tastes aren’t aligned with yours or the standards is not good or is like missing things, costs you days, potentially a week. And so having somebody who can think of stuff you wouldn’t have thought of as an editor just takes a ton of time.

Finn Thormeier: What is there in the editing, the highest leverage part? Is it just them choosing the right clips of what to put into the video and what to cut out? Or is it coming up with interesting animations to kind of highlight the point that you’re making?

David Fallarme: A really great editor is going to have feedback for the next script. So I think that’s like the highest thing. Like, hey, I’m noticing in our retention curves, there’s a drop off whenever we do this thing in the script. So next time you do a script, spend less time doing this. So then like this person is affecting now the whole process. The other part is with YouTube, like the first 30 second retention is extremely important. So how good are they at structuring that first part in terms of either transitions or teasing, you know, what’s the biggest parts of the video, thinking about the angles and all this like animations that you could stack in the first 30 seconds. If you watch a MrBeast video, like the first 30 seconds, they’re working extremely hard. It’s like, just notice all the cuts that they’re making, all the animations they’re making, just to keep you past the 30 seconds and compare that to like what a B2B company uploads on YouTube. Again, it’s like welcome to our webinar on like-

Finn Thormeier: Have a logo animation with someone.

David Fallarme: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Interesting. Okay. How does it compare to Instagram? I mean, similar to YouTube, obviously, most B2B companies are not on Instagram or meta Facebook, or if they are, it’s kind of like an afterthought. How does it compare to YouTube? How does it work differently to YouTube? What would your advice be for VP marketing to think through? If Instagram even makes sense as a platform for them.

David Fallarme: We started off just using the long form videos on YouTube and clipping them and putting them on Instagram. And then that five steps just kind of start thinking like, just don’t stop. Okay. Like learn what the signals, what the market telling you, double down on what’s working and then scale it up. So it’s that exact same process. And we didn’t want to invest too much in the beginning because we didn’t know what the value of Instagram was. Once we started posting regularly, we saw our views and our engagement start to climb. And again, it started to show up in sales calls. I was watching your Instagram videos or I saw this clip you did on this one topic and we knew that that one topic really popped on Instagram. So it started feeding our conviction that Instagram that there was something. The endpoint you get to is you have separate people managing the platforms just because the algorithms are different. Like the YouTube algorithm behaves a certain way. So does the Instagram. And so does TikTok annoyingly, like the TikTok algorithm and the Instagram algorithm, completely different. And so that’s kind of the end state if you prove that these channels have commercial value to your business, is that you’re going to have somebody managing each platform and thinking about native content for each of them.

Finn Thormeier: Now, Founder Brand is a big channel or maybe vehicle for you guys. Your founder and CEO Adam Guild is very present. I mean, in the YouTube videos, that’s kind of fading out now in the Instagram content, obviously from the clips, LinkedIn. How much of your success or growth do you credit to that decision of Adam back in the day and then the team to build The Founder Brand and use that vehicle?

David Fallarme: Yeah. We’re still going to have Adam come back to the channel. We’re just using Enga as a way to diversify. Because, you know, the cool thing about Enga, she’s an active restaurant owner.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

David Fallarme: So she can speak about topics that Adam can’t, as Adam has never owned a restaurant, but Enga runs like an eight location pizzeria. So they’re just an insight that we wouldn’t have. And so it’s a way of us, we’re not thinking of like abandoning Founder Brand. In a way, Enga is like a founder in her own right. And she can speak with the authority of a founder because she is a founder of her own business, right? So in a way, we’re doubling down on Founder Brand in that way. If we could have gotten here without Adam, it would have just been way, way, way harder. Not only in the sense of the investment conviction in the channel, because he’s in there, so that sped up our progress because we just had fewer debates about is this worth it? Like he was totally invested in happening. And the other is just, you know, you can’t replicate the Founder effect on a target audience. We used to do these webinars for our customers and Adam would run them. And the response we would get just because he’s Adam and he’s our CEO and the natural enthusiasm he has and natural passion he has, like the webinars were like incredible and amazing and everybody was so much engaged and happy. When we do like, when I would lead a webinar, it’s like totally not the same, even though I would say the same things because, you know, I designed the slides. So there’s just some intangible magic you get with The Founder Brand that is really, really hard to replicate.

Finn Thormeier: Why did you stop the webinars?

David Fallarme: We still are doing the webinars, just Adam doesn’t have the time to do them himself. Like there were product demos or like, hey, we launched this feature, we do this recap. So we’re bringing them back. That’s one of the reasons we have Enga is so we can do them again with a different level of credibility than were I to run them. But again, it’s just different when it’s The Founder.

Finn Thormeier: From just working with Adam and then seeing him do his thing, what advice do you have for founders who want to build their founder brand?

David Fallarme: You have to commit. That’s the only thing you’ve got to do. You just really have to commit. You have to decide, is this important or not? And if it’s important, then that just means you’ve got to do whatever it takes to be consistent, to make sure that you’re showing up regularly, that you dedicate time to it. There’s a zillion things you have to do as a CEO. There’s always some good reason to not do it. There’s always some good reason to deprioritize it. But then again, is it a priority? If it’s not a priority, just completely stop and outsource it and do something else. So I think it is as binary as that, I think, which simplifies it a lot for folks. Oh, I need to have to build a founder brand, but I also need to do this other thing. If it’s priority two or three, it’s just not going to happen.

Finn Thormeier: Do you agree that you should pick one channel and then only later expand into a different channel?

David Fallarme: Yes.

Finn Thormeier: Because what is a lot of, let’s say, time and investment?

David Fallarme: It really depends on the person.

Finn Thormeier: Let’s say you’re a founder. I know Adam is working crazy hours, but let’s say you’re working 60 hours a week. What do you think is a, if you make it a priority out of your 60 hours a week that you’re working on this company, what do you think is an investment in time that shows that you actually mean it, but obviously you still have other parts of the business to run?

David Fallarme: It depends on the channel, I think. So if your investment strategy is going to change, if it’s YouTube, there’s no way you can do it in one hour a week, especially at the beginning. It probably is closer to 5, 10. Adam would do it on Saturdays, right? So if it’s YouTube, it’s probably that.

Finn Thormeier: So I guess it’s the seventh, right? He has seven work days. I assume he works weekends. So like one seventh of his time is YouTube.

David Fallarme: If it’s YouTube, yeah, in the beginning. He doesn’t do that now because now we have a machine around it. But if it’s like text-based, like Twitter or LinkedIn, I think it actually comes down to your personal... Ability to be prolific. So some people, once they decide that, hey, I’m going to start building Founder Brand, they just have a lot of things to say and they have a low threshold for what they’ll publish. So they’re able to get up and running very quickly because it’s like, I just don’t care about what other people think. I’m going to post what I want. And then they can get up really going and they’re not really thinking about it. But for some people who are maybe a little more gun shy or it’s like the ramp is slower, then it’s probably a few hours a week. For the text-based platforms, for you to be taking that seriously, because you’re brainstorming posts, you’re maybe massaging the content a little bit. I’m helping a few people on our team right now, right on LinkedIn. And it’s probably like three to four hours to get a couple of posts out in the early days. So that’s what I would assume.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I do feel, I mean, now that we talk about it, like I do work with a lot of founders on LinkedIn and I talk to a lot of them. I think that the top people like land in that 10 hour per week range easily. Like post every day, five times a week. And then, you know, a lot of them are just super active. They engage, they comment, they are on the platform.

David Fallarme: I think that’s the big variable. It’s like, are you naturally like every, everybody has their own natural, uh, social media channel, right? Like personalities match with different things. Like Adam is just always video first. So like, If he wanted to start writing on LinkedIn, it would actually take him more than 10 hours in the beginning because his brain just doesn’t map to that, whereas video is more natural. So I think it really depends on the channel. It depends on your personal fit. There is such a thing as founder channel fit, I think, when it comes to personal brand.

Finn Thormeier: What have you learned about the right way for the marketing team to support and leverage the founder as they’re building The Founder Brand? Because obviously, on the one hand, you do need their deep involvement and can’t just be like, You know, write something and then you just edit it a little bit, but they also should do everything. So what are the, where, where can you gain leverage and what should stay with the founder?

David Fallarme: I think that in the beginning it’s like productive, helping the founders set up productive guardrails around what types of content you should be creating. Cause one instinct that many people might have in the beginning is, oh, let me just post anything just so I can build the muscle. You could do that, but it’s better if you just constrain the universe of things you post about so you get more productive signals coming out of the thing. So I think that’s a big part of it. And then eventually you want to get to a point where the founder is only doing the things that only they can do. So whether that’s showing up on camera or injecting personal anecdotes into stories, you know, I think that’s the point you should aspire to where it’s purely the un- Outsourceable things that they are doing and everything else runs on the machine.

Finn Thormeier: But I mean, it’s also, I agree with that. And it’s also, if you’re the founder, you hopefully understand your market better than anyone else. You have a very unique point of view. So I think just handing them a script and be like, we, the marketing team decided this is going to be the video. This is going to be the title. This is what you say. And now you just read off the teleprompter because we need your face in the video. I feel like. I mean, MrBeast is heavily involved in deciding what the video is and what the thumbnail is.

David Fallarme: Yeah, I would totally agree with that. The best founders will push back on just read the teleprompter. That’s why I think that in the beginning, the productive guardrails is not marketing imposing guardrails. It’s a two-way conversation around, hey, what are the things we should be talking about? What are the topics that we should use as a beginning set of content pillars? I think this is a two-way conversation. So the marketer comes in with kind of like the product marketing, commercial strategy element to it. How does this connect to other touch points we might have? And the founder comes in with a market view where it’s like, no, no. If we do that, it’s too salesy or this is the core insight that I have from working with our target audience or building this product. So I think that is a way that for most companies is the right way to get started.

Finn Thormeier: I think the guardrails point is such a good point because I think oftentimes what happens for founders, they have their people or channels that they follow. They are competitive. So they’re like, I like the Hormozi thing or I like the MrBeast thing. So it’s almost, they want to get to that level of views when it’s like, no, no, no, you have a very narrow ICP and you want to get them to buy that product. So you shouldn’t make a video about You know, handing 100 Lamborghinis to, you know, giving away 100 Lamborghinis to get 100 million views on your video. You want to find the topic where you address a pain point that your ICP actually has that then ties into the actual product or service that you sell. And you can learn from how they design the thumbnails or how they structure the first 30 seconds of the video. But you will naturally end up with videos that have maybe 2,000 views or 10,000 views. And that might be a great outcome for... This is good. How do you guys use AI? Where do you use AI? What workflows tools have you found? Give you guys leverage.

David Fallarme: It is everywhere. Yeah, it’s completely embedded in our marketing team.

Finn Thormeier: What’s the workflow agent tool? Or let’s say if you had to delete everything, And you can only keep three workflows, play tables, tools. Which three do you keep?

David Fallarme: I think it’s going to depend on the person. So we’ve gotten to a point with our AI adoption where like every team member kind of has their own bespoke system. So I can speak for myself and I think for the team, you know, they’re going to have their own thing. Like we would all delete different things. It’s kind of an unsatisfying answer to your question. I’ll give you, I’ll invert the question as a good product marketer and answer the question I want to answer. Here’s some of my favorite ones. So, and I’ll use one that’s related to our topic and then kind of some general marketing ones. So one is a general like, sorry, one is for the media team, like scanning competitive topics, scanning competitors, And looking at what’s outlier topics for them. And then thinking about how that might apply to our own scripts. So we’ll have agents kind of look at audience competitors, not category competitors. Who else is in our audience? What’s working for them? What are some formats or things that we can take inspiration from? Feed that into us. What are some trends in our restaurant technology or restaurant news industry that might Inform future scripts. And so that goes into some agents and like informs our script writing process. Um, that just saves a lot of time and gives us a lot more higher. The percentage of shots on goal is just way higher as a result. There’s a lot of also like AI reporting that happens. So a lot of, um, our reporting is like proactive. Like it tells us stuff as opposed to, Hey, what was the outlier video this week? Or what was the video retention? It just like puts that into Slack. So that’s huge. Some of the more general ones are way for me to keep in touch with what’s going on in the company and thinking about how that can apply to my role. So I have an agent that scans like all our Slack and Notion related to our product team, Slack and Notion related to our sales and CS and go to market function. And then I have Claude create weekly briefings for those things because it knows who I am, what my top priorities are. And then I put those into NotebookLM and then I have like podcasts based on those things. So I can walk my dog and kind of keep up with what’s going on in our product world and our sales world. And that just allows me to make better decisions so that you catch me on a Monday today. So I listened to them this morning. So I go into my week in context without having to read a lot of stuff. We’re feeling like I’m out of the loop. And these are things like, you know, what, what feature launches are coming up and what the product team is working on and where future launches might be stuck on. Incidents, any issues we’re seeing around retention that might be relevant. So, you know, a lot of the stuff I work on now is like brand and product marketing. So what promises are we making on the front end that maybe we’re not fulfilling totally on the back end. So we need to make sure that there’s, that customer journey is solid, that we’re fulfilling the promises. That we’re doing. So where’s the weaknesses in that funnel? Or if there’s a recurring pain point that’s coming up in sales calls, oh, like people don’t think we have this feature, but we actually totally have this feature, which means I need to do a better job of bringing that earlier in the sales deck, you know, working with our sales directors to make sure that’s in the top track, putting that on the website, making sure it’s in our ads. So it just allows me to have like this ambient awareness of where the weaknesses and limiting steps are in our company from a go-to-market and product perspective.

Finn Thormeier: The turning it into a podcast is a cool thing. You’re basically doing the thing that Sam Altman tweeted about.

David Fallarme: Yeah, but less dystopian.

Finn Thormeier: You’re doing it for yourself, you know?

David Fallarme: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Interesting. Less, yeah. In general, what is your advice? Because we talk so much about kind of content, brand, creative, founder brand. Where do you think are the right places for To get leverage from in your content creation process, and what are the things that humans should still do?

David Fallarme: AI is good in the middle parts. I think that as we speak today, I mean, anything can happen with the models improving. As we speak today, I think the humans are really good at the beginning and the end, and AI is good at the middle. So I think Balaji said that. AI is really good at middle to middle. It’s not good from beginning to end. So humans should come up with the idea, and that can be informed by AI, but ultimately the best ideas we’ve had are still, you know, the synthesis made by human judgment. And it’s still really good. Humans are still really good at the end when it’s like, hmm, this edit doesn’t feel great. My interest drops off at this point because of this reason. The packaging, this thumbnail is better than this packaging for reasons I can’t articulate but just feels right. So I think AI is good in the middle. So it’s good at doing the first, second, third pass and edit for something based off what’s worked in your corpus of data. And it’s getting better and better there because you can start to put an eval around, hey, don’t show me an edit until it passes these like five checks around what our voice and tone is, represent our product properly, make sure you mention at least two customers. So I think that’s where the highest leverage is. The big fail is if you’re like just feeding an LLM And like give me 10 scripts or give me 10 LinkedIn posts. And this is why you end up with so much AI slop is because everybody wants to live in this world where you’re AI enabled and you can, you know, increase your content output and it’s really good. And you could do that. You’re just going to end up in the middle part of the bell curve where kind of like it’s generic stuff and it doesn’t totally hit the way it’s supposed to.

Finn Thormeier: You posted something a while ago on LinkedIn that went uber viral. Back then, I think it had like 28,000 likes. You know the posts I’m talking about. How many impressions is that?

David Fallarme: Seven million, I think.

Finn Thormeier: Seven million. Yeah, crazy. And the post was basically around a lesson that you learned where a CEO pulled you away at some point and they’re like, you’re doing great marketing work, but on the wrong things that are kind of low priority, low leverage. Maybe to flip the question a little bit, what do you think you’re spending right now time on over perfecting it that actually has a lower impact than you think it does?

David Fallarme: This turned into a performance review thing.

Finn Thormeier: Yes.

David Fallarme: I’ll tell you one broad theme that I’m noticing, and I think this is just, maybe it’s just me, but it’s also relevant in the AI era. And that is a lot of marketers who are creative brained or think of themselves as creative brained. We are spending too much time being artisans of our work where we need to shift to become more architects of our work. So your job is less to like craft every single thing about the thing you create and feel very precious about every single thing you put onto the world. I think that is still very valuable. I just talked about how the human is really valuable at the beginning of the end. I think that it’s important, especially as you get more familiarity with where the AI tools are strong, where it can plug into your workflow. Your job as a marketer is supposed to shift more into an architect role so you can help other people in your company raise the floor of their output. So instead of, I’ll give you a very concrete example. Again, I’m right now focused on brand and product marketing. And our team is getting bigger, which means everybody’s creating more content all around the company. And that’s just not just the marketing, that’s CS teams creating decks, that is sales teams creating cold outbound stuff, right? And maybe in a previous world, I would have wanted to put myself as a Gatekeeper of sorts to be like, Hey, this is not representing the brand. Well, you know, I catch in a cold email in the wild and like a ping that sales manager, like, Hey, like you shouldn’t message it like this. So that’s an artisan mindset where an architect mindset is really, how can I give everybody just a base set of markdown files that they can, you know, everybody’s going to use LLM anyway. How can you make sure that you can give them this base set of product positioning, voice and tone, word choice, um, company boilerplate. That this way everybody can lift the level of their output without you having to personally insert yourself. So I think that is, you know, the thinking of high leverage stops becoming you are the arbiter of really great content and taste. And maybe you could still do that for a small set of things, but it’s higher impact and higher leverage to make sure that you’re raising the floor of everybody else’s output and you’re uniquely able to do that today because of AI.

Finn Thormeier: Which is kind of the guardrails we talked about and guidelines and training people. Time. This was awesome, David. Thank you for your time. If people want to check you out or want to check out Owner.com, all of those things will be in the description below. Is your LinkedIn your main thing or where should we send people?

David Fallarme: Yeah, just LinkedIn. LinkedIn is good.

Finn Thormeier: LinkedIn. Very nice. Cool. Anything you feel like we should have covered that I should have asked you but didn’t? Any kind of last thought that you – Have bouncing around your head if the answer’s no, it’s fine. But if you have something where you like had another thought that I feel like I didn’t get to.

David Fallarme: I think that it’s easy to be hand wavy about brand and say that like, oh yeah, it’s just brand. You shouldn’t try to measure it Or you should be okay with like pure anecdotes. You know, I think I mentioned that in the beginning, but I think as a brand focused marketer, it’s your responsibility to make sure that there’s a commercial impact through the line that you could justify to a CFO that isn’t just like, oh yeah, don’t worry about it, we can’t measure it. Like you should be able to have that conversation and have credibility and have them walking away feeling like you know what you’re doing from a business perspective. Like one of the things that triggers me the most on LinkedIn is like, oh yeah, CEOs don’t get it. Or like, you know, like fine, you know, just life’s too short to work for a CEO doesn’t get it. It’s like, no, it’s your job to educate the CEO, CFO.

Finn Thormeier: It’s a little lazy.

David Fallarme: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s, it’s really important to say that’s a wild brand and product marketing is important and it is hard to directly measure it in the way you would measure performance marketing or outbound sales. It’s still your responsibility to make sure it is commercially rationalized. So I think that’s just important to reinforce because we wrap today.

Finn Thormeier: I think you said it’s a marketer’s job to make the company rich, famous and loved in that order.

David Fallarme: Yeah. Yeah. Here we go.

Finn Thormeier: Thank you, David.

David Fallarme: All right.

In this episode, we talk about why you should be weirder on Linkedin, how to find your flavor of weird, whether you can say the word FUCK on Linkedin, and more. This one’s for you if you feel like your writing is too boring or you’re not able to get your full personality on paper.

We discuss:

• Why “Linkedin is the fakest place on earth” is the best news for anyone willing to be weird

• The benefits of allowing yourself to be weirder

• How to find your flavor of weird

• Jillian’s envy-disgust matrix

• The three-pass editing routine (this one was eye-opening to me!!)

• Can you say fuck on Linkedin? Should you?

• How to become funnier

This post is sponsored by Thormeier.co

Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve worked with 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it.

If you want to understand how I work with founders, book a call here.

Show Notes:

Connect with Jillian:

Jillian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatjillian/

Make LinkedIn Weird: https://www.makelinkedinweird.com/

Jillian’s website: https://www.thatjillian.com/

Connect with Finn:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Mentioned in the episode:

Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual: https://ucbcomedy.com/product/upright-citizens-brigade-comedy-improvisation-manual/

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron: https://juliacameronlive.com/register/the-artists-way/

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard: https://www.anniedillard.com/books-annie-dillard.html

Kait LeDonne: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaitledonne-personalbrandingexpert/

Matt Barker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattjbarker1/

Jasmin Alić: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicjasmin/

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: All right, my guest today is Jillian Richardson. She is a ghostwriter for solopreneurs and executives, and she helps people be weirdo on LinkedIn, which I love. I think much needed. The platform can use it. Her message resonated with me. I found you like a couple weeks ago on LinkedIn for the first time, stumbled upon my feed. So I wanted to have her on to learn from her and maybe get a free consultation for all of us here. So Jillian, thank you for joining the pod.

Jillian Richardson: Thank you so much for having me.

Finn Thormeier: Cool. Let’s maybe start with making the case for why people should be weird on LinkedIn.

Jillian Richardson: Okay, so I’m someone, I go to a lot of dinner parties, a lot of places where I meet new people, and I say, you know, I’m a ghostwriter for LinkedIn, and the faces... It’s very telling of, I think, what LinkedIn’s brand is in the world. Like people are like, oh, LinkedIn, like LinkedIn is horrible. It’s so fake. It’s everyone just talking about how accomplished they are and their career milestones. And it’s just the fakest place on earth.

Finn Thormeier: LinkedIn invented slop before AI slop were the thing.

Jillian Richardson: Yes. Like even before AI, it was slop. Why would you ever want to write content for that platform? And so then I get to say to them, well, imagine if you didn’t fit into that mold, how happy people would be to see your content because the bar on LinkedIn is not very high and there’s so much room for creativity and humor and personal stories. And it’s pretty easy to make yourself stand out if you actually have a point of view and you have a little bit of fun with it. So that’s my case for it. Everyone knows LinkedIn doesn’t have the best reputation. And so if you can make it a little bit fun for people who are slogging through LinkedIn, trying to get a job, make a business contact, whatever, they will love you and they will remember you.

Finn Thormeier: Is it fair to say that being weirder on LinkedIn is the same thing as showing your personality?

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, I would say so. I think being weird, showing your personality, I say because I teach a class on this, it doesn’t mean you have to be posting memes every day or only telling jokes. I think everyone has their own brand of what I call weird, but it’s really just your personality. And so it might be sharing takes in your industry that a lot of people disagree with, sharing stuff about your personal life that you’re comfortable sharing, sharing hard moments in your business. But for whatever reason, the framing of weird seems to help people think about things in a new way. Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: And I mean, I would say it comes at a time where it’s most needed for the platform because there is so much AI. I think LinkedIn just won the award of the platform that has the most AI slop

Jillian Richardson: on it. Wait, what do you mean? I didn’t hear this.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I think someone published, I think it was some major publication that did an analysis and it was like 43% of all of LinkedIn posts was categorized as AI slop. However, that was being categorized and it was the highest compared to X and Instagram and Substack and all the other platforms. But I think having a personality, showing your personality, being willing to show up the way that you are, maybe not fully, but more so, has always worked. But now, given that there’s so much AI-generated content, which I think, one, means there’s just a lot more content and a lot of the content just looks and sounds the same, just because everyone basically has the same ghostwriter now.

Jillian Richardson: Yep.

Finn Thormeier: I guess that’s why it’s even more needed right now versus, I don’t know, two or three years ago.

Jillian Richardson: A hundred percent. And the thing on AI, I don’t know if you saw that there’s now a new button on LinkedIn. It sounds like AI slop, which is fascinating that LinkedIn decided to add that to the platform. Like three weeks ago, they had an AI rewrite feature, but, uh, If people are going to use some sort of ghostwriting tool, now that there’s that button, you have even more of a reason to work with a human ghostwriter.

Finn Thormeier: It’s almost like signaling to everyone, but just having one weird sentence in there that’s like, this is really me. I actually wrote this.

Jillian Richardson: Yes. A person wrote this.

Finn Thormeier: Now, um, you also, I think on your website, you list kind of some benefits of being weirder.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: What are some of the benefits of showing up weirder?

Jillian Richardson: So honestly, the biggest one I would say is that the more fun you have with your writing, the more you are likely to actually show up because so many people ha it’s kind of like with exercise. If you do a form of exercise that you super, super, super hate. You’re going to be less likely to go to the gym than, you know, if you sign up for a Zumba class and you’re like, oh, I love Zumba and I have all my friends there and it’s my favorite part of the week. So if you can actually see it as a creative writing exercise, a way to get to know yourself, a way to get to know the world, then you’ll show up and you’ll do it more. And consistency is what builds a social media presence.

Finn Thormeier: Okay. And I guess it’s, I mean, that’s one of the benefits, consistency. I mean, the other benefit I feel like is, and again, feel free to talk to other ones, but if this is actually you, you just have stronger bonds with people, with your audience, right? Because it’s...

Jillian Richardson: I totally agree with that. Because there’s this bizarre thing on LinkedIn where... People will hire a ghostwriter and then they’ll get some sort of AI commenting tool that’s like commenting and also in their DMs. And then I’ve heard this from a lot of people I work with. They have this bizarre experience of feeling like they know a person and then they get on Zoom and they’re like, wait, this person doesn’t seem at all like the person I was interacting with. Was I even interacting with the person at all? And a lot of the times it turns out that they literally weren’t. And what a terrible way to interact with your customer, that their first impression of you is, actually, I don’t know you at all.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. Well, it can also, I mean, it goes both ways. I think oftentimes people will realize if you don’t allow yourself to show that weird or Weird side of you or that personality of yourself that on the call they’ll be like, you’re actually more interesting than I thought. Yes.

Jillian Richardson: That’s a great point as well. That’s a good flip side of, oh, actually I enjoyed talking to you more than I thought I would.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. No broetry. You don’t speak in one line sentences.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Okay. I want to show, do you have a favorite example of a weird person? Post or being weird on LinkedIn. I’m going to share my screen here. I’ll just show one here. So like one example, let me make this big. Do you just see my LinkedIn now?

Jillian Richardson: Yes, I can see it. This is my like pièce de résistance.

Finn Thormeier: Exactly. Yeah. So this is kind of, it’s a good example of a weird post because it’s also your post where you make the case that people should be weird. This is the post how I found you. It started with, I am on my knees begging, be weird on LinkedIn, 10% weird, 100% weird if you had a good breakfast. It’s already clear that this post has personality. This is a hook that no one would use on LinkedIn. It’s a very bold choice to start a sentence like that and no one sees that on LinkedIn. Then also it’s like, there’s a joke here. Take that Claude, there’s personality in it, right? And I think if people just scroll through your LinkedIn a little bit, they’ll get a sense of what it means To write with personality. Break it in half and shove it into a deep grave for eternity. Like you write with color. You say things that people would say. Relax your butthole. It’s like on your banner, right? It’s like you’re almost breaking the rules of what is appropriate to say on LinkedIn, which is part of why it works. So I think this is a... Good example here. Okay, now let’s talk about how to become weirder because my assumption is there’s all kinds of different weird. So when you work with people, how do you coach them through figuring out what their flavor of weird is, how they can bring that out? And maybe use me as an example. If that’s somehow helpful, but I’m just curious how you coach people through that.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, so when I start working with ghostwriting clients, we do what I call a LinkedIn sample pack. And so it’s essentially, I create a content strategy for them and then I write three LinkedIn posts for them so they can get a sense of, One, help them figure out what is their voice, but also do they even like the process of working with the ghostwriter? Because some people really think that they will, and then someone writes for them and they’re like, actually, I hate this so much. And part of that is figuring out who on LinkedIn or on the internet in general, do you see their content and you like their voice, you like the way they speak, you like what they stand for. And then probably more importantly, Whose content do they see online? And it kind of grosses them out. Like the exercise I do is the envy disgust matrix of like whose content are you jealous of? Which is indicative of you might want to move more towards that direction. Like they have something that maybe you’re a little afraid to do, but you want to do. And then whose content you see and you’re like, oh, like if I posted that, I would jump out a window and never return. Gives you the ick. Yeah, like it gives you the ick. That is an incredible indicator of what your voice is because you’re like, this is the line I do not cross. That’s super helpful information to know. And sometimes you don’t know that until you see something you don’t want or somebody writes something for you and you’re like, this isn’t it actually. Okay.

Finn Thormeier: So envy, I love the envy and disgust. So I assume that a lot of people who end up Working with you or reaching out to you, they like your particular brand of weird.

Jillian Richardson: Yes.

Finn Thormeier: So there is that if you weren’t ghostwriting for someone and you were just working with someone who is writing their own content, but maybe they’re a little stuck in like this idea of what they think LinkedIn should be or how they need to show up because it’s LinkedIn, they have this thing in their head. How would you help them break that and then figure out their Brand of weird.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. So I also offer, you know, like coaching packages, like you said, for people they want to, they want to do it themselves, but they want support along the way. And often when we get on calls, like they’ll bring a few bullet points of like, Hey, here’s some stuff I want to put in this post. And I just don’t know how to make it unique or how to write the hook for it. Like, I don’t, I don’t know what the special sauce is. And literally as I’ll just have them talk about it. And as they talk, I will start to write the post for them. And sometimes that’s all they need is just realizing, oh, when I’m speaking about this in a conversational way, there’s stuff in here that does make an interesting post, but you know, they’re so in their head of what is the LinkedIn way of saying this? They don’t think about that. They can just speak like a person and you know, then I’ll be like, okay, Here’s an interesting hook to get us in and here’s your call to action that might be compelling to people to interact with you. But a lot of people really just need space to go back and forth with the human being to figure out what it really is that they want to say.

Finn Thormeier: So I imagine myself talking through a post. What are you listening for? I’m sure at this point it’s a lot of intuition. You kind of just know it when you hear or see it. But if you had to train someone on, here are the things you’re listening for. Here are the things that once you see them, hear them, make sure you include them.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a big thing is I’m listening for what might be The hook of the post, because on LinkedIn, you know, you have the first two lines that you see before there’s the learn more button. And what I tell people is a really good hook is often something that’s a little bit scroll stopping. Like you said, like I’m on my knees begging. That’s not a sentence that you usually see on LinkedIn.

Finn Thormeier: It’s a pattern disrupt.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, it’s a pattern disruptor. And then the second sentence is often something Leaves people wanting to learn more about where is this post going to go? Like you’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen next. So you want to read the rest of the post. And so that’s what I’m listening for. I’m like, oh, what is the thing that this person is saying that is not necessarily a common belief? It’s something that’s out of the norm. And how can I start the post with that in a way that piques people’s curiosity?

Finn Thormeier: But I mean, a hook is not necessarily weird, right? That’s more like what is the interesting, controversial, unusual thing in what you’re saying that we can use to hook people. But when it comes to the weirdness or the personality part on how to add flavor to it, how do you draw that out?

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. Well, one thing I think I would say that a hook kind of is quote unquote weird because it is the What is a way that you’re, what’s a point of view that you have that’s not necessarily the norm? Like I would argue that is kind of what you might say is weird. But another way I do that for the post is in the editing process where the first pass, it’s usually a more standard kind of regular, degular LinkedIn post. And then the second pass of the post, I’ll take out, you know, any fluff, any words that you might not need in there. And then the third pass of the post is where I will like to add, you know, colorful phrases, things in all caps, things that just make people laugh a little bit. And I think that’s where a lot of people miss out with their LinkedIn posts is they just, you know, they write the first draft and that’s it. And they never think about an example I like to give is just make up a person’s name. Like if you’re talking about an issue that happens in HR all the time. Don’t just say people in HR do this. Be like, have you ever had Mark from HR? He always does this thing. We, like, everyone hates Mark. Like, I guarantee if you do that in a post, the comments are going to be dudes named Mark. Like, hey, what did I do? And like, it’s going to be a fun bit that people can respond to. It’s like little things like that. People want to have fun with your post. You just have to give them something to latch on to.

Finn Thormeier: Interesting. I like that third pass, adding personality to it. How do you even come up with this idea? I love the example that you gave with Mark from HR, but maybe that’s just your unique skill and that’s what people need to hire you for. How do you even train someone to think of that? I don’t think I would think of that even once I give it a third pass and I’m like-

Jillian Richardson: I mean, part of me is like, I’m a special, beautiful genius and no one can do it like me. But in actuality, I’m like, okay, why is it that I can do that? A big thing is I have a lot of improv training. It’s just thinking of, you know, like what are jokes that you can insert here? What are interesting turns of phrase? Like I read a lot. I consume a lot of content. I know what is an interesting phrase that stands out and will get people’s attention. So. I think that’s a way that people can do it.

Finn Thormeier: So is it like learning about comedic writing, like, like learning from, I don’t know, Seinfeld or is it, is that how you would approach teaching this to someone like studying comedians?

Jillian Richardson: I think that’s one way of doing it. This is a good question because in my classes, it’s a lot about accessing your personality. Like essentially my classes are creative writing classes, but they’re not. Only teaching humor. So honestly, okay, if I was to tell someone, how do you figure out what is funny? I have two books that are underneath my computer right now. One is the Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improv Manual. Would very much recommend that. It’s such a stereotypical business piece of advice, but I am someone, I have done way more improv than the average person. I did improv for six years very seriously, which is a funny thing to say about comedy. But this manual, it’s a lot of exercises to help you figure out how can I think of something that’s out of the norm?

Finn Thormeier: I thought there’s two relevant books. You just said there’s two books and one of them is relevant.

Jillian Richardson: The other one is just... Honestly, actually the other one, I do occasionally mention this book in my class as well. The other one is called The Artist’s Way. Have you heard of that before?

Finn Thormeier: What’s the... Is it Austin something?

Jillian Richardson: It’s Julia Cameron is the

Finn Thormeier: author of that book.

Jillian Richardson: The Artist’s Way. This is a little bit woo, but it’s... Essentially, it’s this 12-week process of getting creatively unblocked where you are journaling three pages every day, free form, and then there’s a lot of questions and exercises to figure out, you know, like, what did you love as a kid? How did you find joy? How were you a creative person? Wait, do you have this book?

Finn Thormeier: No. Okay, no. But it made me think of that. It’s called The Writer’s Life.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Finn Thormeier: The Writing Life.

Jillian Richardson: Yes. I’m sure those books would be very complementary to each other. But like, I really do think my writing classes, they’re just, They’re creative writing classes. A reason people freak out so much, particularly about LinkedIn writing and why they can’t have fun with it is because it’s like a professional platform. So there’s all this extra stuff. I want to be taken seriously and I want to be known in my industry and seen as a A trusted person. And so there’s all of these barriers to saying anything that will make you like 1% interesting. So it can take some work to unblock yourself.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I think part of it is just giving people permission that it’s okay to use strong language or to use all caps or to say things like butthole on LinkedIn. Do you know if there’s a line? Like sometimes I think, I don’t know, if I was in conversation with someone and we were talking about something and I hate something, I would say, I fucking hate this.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: But then as I’m writing the LinkedIn post, I’m like, first of all, fucking hate is very strong language. Do I really want to say this? And then the second thought is like, you always hear like the random guru, LinkedIn guru who says you can’t use swear words because LinkedIn will like derank your post if you say the F word or, you know, like, and I don’t know if it’s true, but like, that’s also where my mind goes. It’s like, I don’t want to like, Shadowban my own post just because I use the word fucking hate in the post. I don’t know. Have you found, is there a line if I say fucking hate in a conversation? Do I just say that? Do I say frigging hate in the post? Like, what’s the line?

Jillian Richardson: So, I mean, one option is to literally just use an asterisk in place of the you. Like, you could do that. But then there’s also ways that you could use more fun language. Like, have you seen The Good Place before? No. In it, there are In like an alternate universe and they can’t swear. So instead of fuck, they say fork. And I’ve said this in a bunch of my posts. I’d be like, oh, I fork and hate this or something. And people find it so delightful. So like, you’re like, okay. I’m trying to get across this very strong language. Could I say, I freaking hate it, I fracken hate it, I forken hate it?

Finn Thormeier: So you also feel like fucking is too hard of a word to use on LinkedIn?

Jillian Richardson: I don’t think it’s, honestly, I have swear words in my posts sometimes, but I do also have the little fear of like, oh, if I do this too much, that might be a problem. So I don’t know why my own internal line, I’m like, shit for me is totally fine, but fuck, I get nervous. No clue why that is.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Jillian Richardson: Um, so yeah, asterisk or like figure out a more fun way to get the same thing across.

Finn Thormeier: Totally. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So taking some improv classes, reading about comedic writing and you know, the, the Upright Man’s, what was the book? The Upright Man’s?

Jillian Richardson: Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improv Manual.

Finn Thormeier: It’s a really

Jillian Richardson: long title.

Finn Thormeier: Who like Do you study anyone else? And this could be a creator on LinkedIn who you love or a comedian, a writer who you study and learn from?

Jillian Richardson: This is going to sound so horrible, but I’m like, honestly, no.

Finn Thormeier: Why does it sound horrible? No, it’s okay.

Jillian Richardson: I mean, I don’t know. I’ve just been a writer for so long where people are like, how do you do this so fast? I’m like, I don’t know if you do something every day for like 12 years, you’re going to be really fast at it and it’s going to come really naturally. Like that’s just how it goes. I mean, I love following creators who teach on LinkedIn because I do always have things to learn from them. Like Kait LeDonne, I love her, Matt Barker, Jasmin Alić. These are all people that they have a lot of interesting insights. But I think my unique advantage is just the personality piece, which is kind of like, it’s a little bit vibes based.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I think even beyond that, beyond giving people permission that it’s okay And actually works really well if you do these things. I think I just lost my train of thought.

Jillian Richardson: It’s black space. You got to give people permission to do something and then there’s something else.

Finn Thormeier: Permission. It’s okay to do it. Oh, I remember. I think part of it is also Giving people permission to actually care about how they write and how they show up. Because I think part of it is also because of the reputation that LinkedIn has, where it’s this professional platform that’s kind of sold us a little bit. You just show up there because you kind of have to and you want to get business and there’s a lot of slop, AI slop and human slop, slop and broetry and all these things that you kind of just do it because you kind of have to and therefore you don’t really care. Maybe you use Claude because it’s just easy and fast and you can prompt something and you get five LinkedIn posts out of it and people tell you that it doesn’t really matter and you just need to hope that one of your posts somehow goes viral. Part of what you’re also showing people is that if you actually care about showing up as yourself and you care about the craft of creative writing, it works. Like it actually makes it changes things.

Jillian Richardson: Yes. Like it’s more vulnerable. It’s more scary because you actually care. Like, you know, you hit post and you’re like, oh, these are my words. Now I’m looking to see if people are interacting with it. Versus if you do a Claude post and it doesn’t perform well, you’re like, well, Claude wrote it, stupid Claude, whatever. It’s a more vulnerable act.

Finn Thormeier: Which is actually a correlation to another thing because I think, and I don’t know if you see the same thing, But you got to be active on LinkedIn, right? You can’t just post something and then peace out and don’t engage, don’t reply to people. And obviously, if you wrote something yourself that you really care about, you’re naturally going to be more likely to be around and stick around and actually answer the comments and questions that you get versus if you have some generated thing You’re like, you schedule it, you peace out, you check in maybe the next day, maybe you have two comments, but you’re like, nah, I’m not going to answer those because, you know, it’s not really my thoughts anyway.

Jillian Richardson: Yep. Oh my God. That is such a good point that you, you feel more personally connected. So you’re more likely to stay and you engage with people more. Yeah, it is like this. Do you have a LinkedIn page?

Finn Thormeier: Do you have a LinkedIn routine? Do you have things that you do every day or every week besides, you know, posting that you found have a large impact on kind of how your posts are doing and how LinkedIn is working for you?

Jillian Richardson: I have a few little things that I do, which it’s funny, the things that I do, I would assume that everyone does. And then I learned that they did it. And I was like, Oh, this is maybe not as obvious as I thought it was. Uh, one example is when I get connection requests, I Respond to them. Like I don’t just hit accept. I hit accept and then I send them a message. And I like to do this in chunks because on LinkedIn you can get like freaking 500 connection requests and you’re like, ah, what do I do? So I have my little walking pad underneath me and I like to just get on my walking pad, play some music. And then I have an opening message that I use for everyone, which is now kind of a bit because people know it’s my opening message. And I just say like, hey, thank you so much for the connection request. If you found me through an embarrassing post, No, you didn’t. And the response rate for that is super good. And then people respond and I usually say like, did you follow me because you’re looking for LinkedIn support? Or are you just, you’re here for the laughs and the vibes? And the amount of business I’ve gotten, the amount of podcast invites, the amount of opportunities, Because when you accept a connection request, it just kind of goes, it files into their connections, but they don’t get a notification. So it’s like, there’s this person, they wanted to connect with me for some reason. If I don’t say something, I’ll literally never know. It’s such a wild wasted opportunity that so many people just don’t say anything.

Finn Thormeier: I don’t do it.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. Like just, I mean, granted, it’s a little bit of effort, but

Finn Thormeier: I do it for followers. I just thought, why don’t I do it? I go through my followers almost every day, and if someone follows me, I send the connection request, and I’m like, hey, appreciate the follow. How come? What do I owe it to? And then I try to do the same with profile visitors. I try to do the same with people who engage with my content but I’m not connected with, and they kind of fit my profile of the people that I’m interested in. But I don’t do it when I accept connection requests.

Jillian Richardson: And I feel like that’s the easiest one. I feel like connection request is like the highest, not status, like highest indicator of interest, I guess.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. Huh.

Jillian Richardson: So there you go.

Finn Thormeier: Freak business tip

Jillian Richardson: for me.

Finn Thormeier: Quick, quick tip there. Quick tip there. Okay. Anything else that you do?

Jillian Richardson: Um, anything else that I do?

Finn Thormeier: Do you have a minimum comments per day?

Jillian Richardson: I don’t have a minimum comments per day, but I do have a lot of people’s profiles double-belled, meaning I have notifications on for them for when they post because otherwise I will often forget to comment anything on anyone’s posts and so I have people in my industry who I will learn something from their posts or people who I just really enjoy what they post. So at the very least, I will do that. And then usually when that happens, I’m like, oh, right, I should probably go and comment on one or two other people’s posts. And that’s usually enough for me.

Finn Thormeier: I think I saw you post that you recommend people to comment on 10 to 15 posts a day.

Jillian Richardson: Yes, I think that’s definitely ideal, especially if you’re someone who your own posts aren’t getting that many comments yet. So the thing my students will ask is, well, how do I get my posts seen by a broader audience? Like my posts aren’t popular yet. So how do I expand that? I’m like, well, you need to tell people that you exist. And the best way to do that is go and comment on the posts of people who aren’t following you and interact with them. So I think especially when you were in the earlier stages, that is very helpful.

Finn Thormeier: It’s one of the first things I look at when someone is posting on LinkedIn. First, I look at their content and see if it’s any good, but if I feel like they’re actually posting decent things, then I look at how often they comment. Yeah. And oftentimes like, it’s like the last comment they left was like a week ago.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: And so I’m like, that’s, to me, that’s often like the first thing I would fix is like, just comment on maybe not 10 to 15, maybe five posts a day and just do that for a month. And almost always the content is better.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. And respond to their own comments. I’m like, when people post and they don’t respond to their own comments, I’m like, isn’t the whole point of this that you want people to comment and that you’re not even going to respond to them?

Finn Thormeier: No, no, no, no. The whole point is you build a machine with Claude and that automatically posts things for you and comments things for you such that you can lean back and you have just leads. Like running in your door.

Jillian Richardson: Yes. And they think that they were interacting with you and they never actually were, which is totally fine and normal for everyone.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. Now you also ghostwrite for clients besides being weirder and kind of allowing yourself to show personality. What are some of the other things that you’ve learned or seen that oftentimes helps get better traction, have your posts do perform better or get better results from LinkedIn?

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. So honestly, I think the biggest thing with a lot of my clients and my favorite clients to work with is that they start the ghostwriting process a little bit uncertain that they have something interesting to say. Like, they’ll be like, I don’t know if I should be posting. Like, I don’t know what’s unique about me. And I really enjoy that because it’s so fun to pull out from people. What are their interesting stories? What does make them different? Because everyone has stuff to share. And most people I work with, they’re very good at communicating their thoughts on their industry. If I ask them a question, they’ve got a lot to say. It’s just figuring out. You know, how do you position this in a little snippet of a LinkedIn post? That’s just not a skill that they have, but they could talk forever. Like that’s the ideal situation. And, you know, helping them gain the confidence that people are interested in what they have to say. And I think people especially need or could benefit from a ghostwriter in those early stages where, you know, they will Post, and then they’ll be so scared they’ll just leave and then not interact with comments or anything because there’s just this fear wall that they’ve got going on. And to also just have it in the calendar every week to be like, okay, first half of the call, we’re going to edit our posts for this upcoming week. And then second half of the call, we’re going to generate new content and like They just have that so that they don’t have to do all the mental gymnastics of writing a post every day. It just lowers the barrier to entry.

Finn Thormeier: If someone wanted to get started, founder, executive, solopreneur, whatever, do you have a program or a protocol that you would tell them, like, just start with this? Meaning, do these many posts a week? Spend this much time on the platform? Do these three non-negotiable things? What’s the kind of good starting protocol?

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, it’s a good question. I feel like it’s easier said than done, but I would say three to five posts per week. Ideally five, of course. Four is better, which some people don’t agree with, but I really do think that’s true. Respond to all of your comments. Do the five comments on a post that’s just a random post not connected to you at all. And respond to all the people who are sending you a connection request and chat with them in the DMs. Even if they’re not new business, they could give you insight on your content, why they found it interesting, what they want to hear more of. I’m just shocked at the amount of people who post on LinkedIn and then do not interact with the humans who are interacting with their content. I’m like, you’re literally ignoring your business. What are you doing?

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I think part of it, at least for me, the AI comment slop has negatively impacted that because one, obviously, if it’s a fully automated AI slop comment, you’re like, I don’t want to answer this. But then I noticed this for me where Sometimes it’s so obvious when it’s an AI comment, right? And sometimes it’s kind of on the edge where you’re like, I’m getting vibes that this might be AI, but I’m not 100% certain. So I’m like, If it’s a real person asking me an actual question, I want to answer it. But if this is just an automated thing that you generated with AI and you didn’t actually read my post, I don’t want to respond to you. There’s a little bit of this decision fatigue going on of like, do I actually want to engage with this? But yeah, it’s crazy how many people don’t reply to their comments. I think part of it is people want to skip the hard work of starting out slow and then slowly compounding over time.

Jillian Richardson: Yes.

Finn Thormeier: And so it’s like they post, they get two comments. They’re like, oh, this is not what I was hoping for. Right. I wanted to get the 50 comments. So like, I’m not going to even bother to reply to two comments, which is like, that’s how you get to the 50 comments. Right. So yeah. Okay.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. This is another argument in favor of making your posts more fun and incorporating humor because like on my posts, it’s painfully obvious what the AI generated comments are because AI doesn’t do humor.

Finn Thormeier: They don’t get the irony. Yeah.

Jillian Richardson: And so if you have jokes in your posts and then there’s a comment that’s like dead serious, you’re like, um, Read the room. This doesn’t make any sense.

Finn Thormeier: Or they’re a tech engineer who doesn’t get humor either. Okay. Three to five posts a week, respond to all of your comments, write five comments every day, DM all of the people who send you connection requests if they’re relevant. How long do you tell people to go through that until they should expect something to happen that resembles kind of ROI?

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, I feel like even after one month, there’s no way you’re not going to have an uptick. Like most of my students, I challenge them to post every weekday. Yeah. The numbers are always so good in terms of their impression increase because they straight up were not really posting before. And so it’s like, yeah, you’re going to have like a 12,000% increase in impressions because you were going from nothing to this or like 600, 900, whatever. So after one month, if you’re actually doing a thing, there’s no way you’re not going to see an uptick in your impressions. And then from there, it’s just having that muscle of doing it consistently. Uh, which for a lot of people is really hard and which is why I recommend getting help if you can, or if your company has the money. Um, but if you’re doing it solo, like just trying to figure out again, how to make it actually fun and where you’re learning about your business, you’re learning about your customers. You have a sense of curiosity. Cause if you don’t like you’re, you’re dead in the water, you’re never going to be consistent.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And I think that’s also the biggest case for why posting five times a week, because there’s people who are successful posting twice a week, but you kind of got to get through that valley of figuring out what works for you and building that audience. And obviously if you post five times a week for four weeks, you have 20 goals on shot.

Jillian Richardson: Yes.

Finn Thormeier: You’re going to iterate much quicker than if you do two posts a week, at which point it takes you two and a half months to get the same shots on goal as the other person that one month.

Jillian Richardson: That’s such a good way of putting it. I’m totally going to steal that. That’s really good.

Finn Thormeier: That’s why you kind of answer the question of like, because I think it’s not, people always ask me how many months until I see results, which is like, how many hours are you spending? Because it’s like, if you’re spending an hour a week prompting Claude, Um, you know, versus someone else who spends two hours a day, they’re spending 10 hours a week. They’re spending 10 X what you’re spending. So what you learn in 10 months, they learn in one month. So it’s, that matters way more than, than just the month from when you posted your first post.

Jillian Richardson: That is such a good way of framing it.

Finn Thormeier: Anything we should have talked about that we didn’t, anything that you find yourself often repeating to clients that you wish people understood about LinkedIn or how to be weird that we should have covered?

Jillian Richardson: Okay. One thing popped to mind. This is something I seem like I hear it more from my male clients, but it’s that People in their life start making fun of them for posting on LinkedIn. They’ll get a screenshot of one of their posts in their group chat, and they’re like, dude, what the hell are you doing? This is so embarrassing. People really rag it on them. And it makes them want to stop. Which one, I’m like, your friends are being Just major dickheads. Like they’re being horrible, but like, I get it. This is kind of part of dude culture sometimes. Um, but it’s just like, you’re trying something new. You’re trying it in public and make sure you have people in your corner who are game to support it. And like, because it’s LinkedIn, it’s extra easy to make fun of it, which sucks. Uh, But you got to be able to push through that. Like you’re doing this for a reason. You’re doing it for your business. You’re doing it for your family, whatever that might be. And sometimes people are going to be mad about it. And that’s just how it goes.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I also where my mind went is there is a difference between uncomfortable and cringe. Yeah. And I think the whole point of what you’re teaching people is Finding their brand of weird or, you know, showing the personality that they actually have in their content.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Which might be uncomfortable because it’s new and you haven’t done it before and you might get comments from your friends. But in the end, it’s you versus if you just do something that you believe you should be doing on LinkedIn because the gurus tell you that that’s how you need to write your posts.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: And it’s not you, that’s cringe, right? That’s you showing up in a way that’s not authentic to you, even though the word authentic is being overused. And I think it’s much worse to be made fun of when you’re performing in a way that’s not you just because you feel like that’s what you need to do given the platform versus you just show up how you actually are.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: And that’s uncomfortable for a while because it’s a new muscle, but in the end you’re expressing yourself.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah, totally. Like you’re, you’re being yourself, you’re bringing yourself out, which I guess, I think it depends on the person is writing it yourself even more vulnerable. Like, yes. If someone makes fun of you, actually you’re writing, is that going to be harder for you? Maybe like it depends on the person, but I really feel like a thing that I like to say is just trying is sexy. Just try. I feel like with AI and just LinkedIn culture and everything is like, oh, you got to optimize it and you got to do it so it’s the fastest thing ever. Shocker, what if you actually enjoyed it and you saw it as a slow creative process where you learn about yourself, you get to meet new people, you get to have fun. What if that was actually sustainable and good for you and you like it and it’s gonna be more vulnerable and that’s just how it goes.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I love it. Okay, my biggest takeaway from this conversation is I’m gonna try to learn some comedic writing. I’m gonna order the Upright Citizens book and I’m gonna ask Claude what the best books are that it recommends. On, you know, learning creative writing or comedic writing.

Jillian Richardson: Yeah. And Claude’s like, don’t do it. Don’t.

Finn Thormeier: I have been trained. Cool. Thank you, Jillian, for taking the time. If people want to check you out, obviously I’ll put your LinkedIn and your website in the show notes so people can reach out to you if they want to get weirder on LinkedIn or maybe hire you as a ghostwriter. They can do that. And yeah, thank you for your time.

Jillian Richardson: Thank you so much. I had fun.

I grew my own LinkedIn to 43,000 followers, generated over $3m in revenue directly from my profile, interviewed over 100 top founder brands (like Jason Fried, DHH, Adam Robinson) about their approach and playbook, and coached over 30 SaaS founders on how to grow on Linkedin. So I have my own experience plus broad pattern matching.

Subscribe now

Despite its flaws, if your company sells into senior decision makers (Director, VP and up), LinkedIn is still one of the best and most obvious places to be. And what works on the platform today is a founder-led content model. You know your company, product and customers better than anyone else.

Building your founder brand is one of the highest leverage things you can do (my POV). If done right, it personally makes you millions, helps you attract A-players, gets you exposed to opportunities you would otherwise never have access to, and it becomes a moat for your company that keeps compo…

Read more

Before Zapier, he was CMO at Tomorrow.io, where he helped grow the company from $2M ARR to a $1B+ valuation, CMO & Chief Culture Officer at ThriveHive, and Head of Global Advertising at HubSpot.

In this episode, we talk about the future of the CMO role, why the CMO should (?) own the company-wide AI mandate, his “red alert” for Zapier’s marketing team, strategies to speed up your team’s AI adoption, and much more.

We discuss:

• Why Dan took on Zapier’s company-wide AI transformation mandate as the CMO

• Dan’s case for fewer CMOs

• The “red alert” he called on Zapier’s marketing team

• The first step to making your company (and marketing org) more AI-native

• Zapier’s internal AI policy

• LLM jail, automation debt, and why only 24% of GTM workflows need AI

• Why AI is causing “generation loss” & what it has to do with your approval processes

• What every CMO behind on AI should do this weekend

  ---

Show Notes:

Connect with Dan Slagen:

Dan Slagen’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-slagen-718675a/

Dan Slagen’s website: https://www.danslagen.com/

Zapier: https://zapier.com/

Connect with Finn:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Mentioned in the episode:

ZapConnect (Zapier’s annual conference): https://zapier.com/zapconnect

Dan Slagen’s “LLM jail” & “Automation Debt” post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-slagen-718675a_our-team-keeps-hearing-the-same-two-words-activity-7490753511693930499-8NRJ

Zapier’s AI Workflow Index (Q2 2026): https://zapier.com/ai/workflow-index/q2-2026-report

Tomorrow.io: https://www.tomorrow.io/

Tom Wentworth (CMO at incident.io) episode: https://www.founderbrand.org/p/the-most-ai-pilled-cmo-in-tech-shares

Don Jeter (CMO at Torq) episode: https://www.founderbrand.org/p/how-to-radically-stand-out-w-don

Torq: https://torq.io/

Paul Roetzer’s SmarterX: https://smarterx.ai/

MAICON: https://www.maicon.ai/

Clay’s AI writing policy: https://www.clay.com/blog/ai-writing-policy

Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

Cursor: https://cursor.com/

Codex: https://openai.com/codex/

Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com/

HeyGen: https://www.heygen.com/

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: All right. My guest today is Dan Slagen. He is the Chief Marketing and Chief AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Zapier, I’m sure given my audience, everyone will know it’s an automation platform, or as they say, it’s the most connected AI orchestration platform. Dan joined Zapier a little Over a year ago as SVP of Marketing and recently was promoted to CMO and CAITO, Chief AI Transformation Officer, which is a very interesting combination and we’ll discuss that.

Before joining Zapier, Dan was CMO at Tomorrow.io, where he helped grow the company from $2 million in ARR to $1 billion plus valuation in five years. CMO at ThriveHive, where he led the team through a $1.3 billion acquisition. CMO at Alignable, Head of Global Advertising at HubSpot and many other roles including founder of a video tech company for a year and he was also named one of Forbes top 50 entrepreneurial CMOs of 2024.

Dan thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro?

Dan Slagen: No, appreciate it. Very, very kind words, but happy to be here.

Finn Thormeier: Cool. What’s the story behind the new title and is it disconnected or is there a reason why the company-wide AI transformation chief officer title was given to the CMO?

Dan Slagen: Good question. So I joined Zapier about a year ago and it’s a, you know, 13, 14 year old company, a lot of history. And so, you know, first and foremost, I think they want to make sure that someone coming in at this level is not going to stick around for a little while and leave. They want to make sure that someone who’s going to be really invested in the company and all that. And so it’s funny, you know, any Any executive marketing role these days, I feel like it’s a one-year trial, essentially. It’s a test. I’m going to see if I like the company, if I like working for the CEO with the exec team, and they’re going to do the exact same thing back to me.

And so as we were nearing the one-year mark, Wade and I... Got together, Wade’s the CEO, co-founder of Zapier, and we sort of had the conversation of is this a one-year deal or do we want to try and sign a multi-year contract? What do we want to do? And we both felt like the relationship was going well and this had been a fruitful experiment so far and it felt like something we both wanted to invest in moving forward.

And so as we did that, We also sort of talked about how else could the role expand and what else could you do outside of marketing. And so I’ve been extremely fortunate in the past to work for some smaller startups that went through hyper growth where you own everything. You know, I can remember roles where I owned marketing and sales and CS, BD, like everything, just building those systems from the ground up. Certainly not at the scale that Zapier is at, but I had some good familiarity. The one common factor with all of that was growth and pushing the limits on the technology that we’re using.

And so with AI, you mentioned my last company, it was a really, really small marketing team. With a very small budget. And so when AI came out, that was an aha moment for me of being this thing that we can finally compete with the biggest companies in the world. The playing field is finally level. I can do all these things I haven’t even been able to do. I wasn’t so excited about AI at first because it made the things I was doing better. I would tell you because I could literally do things that I couldn’t do before. I just told my CEO, can’t do that, can’t do that, can’t do that unless we, you know, get headcount or budget.

So I’ve stayed really close to that. And I’ve also stayed really, really close to the culture. In another previous role, you mentioned ThriveHive, I was the chief culture officer as well as the CMO there. So I started to learn a lot about that. And at my last company, the culture team and I partnered so closely together. So I’ve had all this experience that was sort of building towards something I didn’t quite know what it was. And it fruitfully ended up being this dual role of marketing and AI transformation at Zapier.

Finn Thormeier: Do you think marketers are somehow better suited for that type of role or was it just really this unique mix that you personally had that will not apply to other marketers as related to their peer leaders?

Dan Slagen: That’s an excellent question. I truly believe that someone sitting in The head of marketing role is in the best position in the company to lead it.

However, A lot of the personas that I see within marketing either have not had the experience that I just went through or do not have the mindset to be able to do it. They’re too focused on one thing. They know how to tell a really, really good brand story, but they have no idea how to think about pipeline and demand generation or the inverse of that. And it is hard to find someone that truly can spike across all three areas. Happy to dig more into that. I think if you can find the person with the right background, someone sitting in the marketing and growth department is an incredibly dangerous persona that can help the business immensely.

Finn Thormeier: Not to go on too much of a tangent, but you said At Tomorrow.io, you had a very small team. I think I saw you gave a presentation where you had four people reporting into you and that when AI happened, you felt like you could finally do these things that you hadn’t been able to do because of lack of headcount. Are there any specific ones that you can mention here where, again, things that you wanted to do but really couldn’t and now finally you were able to do?

Dan Slagen: Sure. One example that I like to tell is, you know, when I was at the company, we got included in an RFP from a major entertainment brand. They own theme parks around the world. They have lots of movies. You can probably guess who I’m talking about. And the RFP was really, really last minute. And we had a week or two to get something to them. And we knew there were 10 other companies all pitching. And we were added late. And they’re like, what are we going to do to stand out?

What we ended up doing was we created this video using AI where we went to all of the movies that the entertainment company had created and we saw where all of the characters were impacted by weather. And we’d be like, what if they had had access to our technology? They would know when to leave the dock. They would know when to go fly. They would know when to go outside. They wouldn’t be at risk. Literally use the exact scenes from the movies and the characters and all that.

And when we showed it to them, the response was literally, we love how much you just love our brand. You stood out so much compared to everyone else. We’re going to move you guys to the next round. We haven’t even looked at your technology yet. We’ll worry about that in the next round. But just they’re one of those companies that they want to see that people love their brand and get involved in their brand.

And so, you know, that’s something that, again, I wouldn’t have even proposed that prior. And, you know, we did this when, you know, Midjourney was really getting good. The video creator was starting to get good. We were using things like HeyGen AI to do all of our product marketing videos. So we were getting good at that really, really quickly. And so, again, it was sort of a new thing we could even offer the sales team that we wouldn’t have even thought about.

Finn Thormeier: The CMO role, I’ve seen so many posts about this recently, and even Tom Wentworth, a fellow Boston CMO who sends his regards, by the way, when I interviewed him about how he thinks the CMO role is evolving, Even he said he could see a future where the CMO title or role doesn’t exist. What’s your take? Is the CMO role dead?

Dan Slagen: No, not at all. I love Tom. Look, I go back to... Honestly, I go back to a couple things. One, you look at the education system and you look at colleges and universities. And when I was in school, the truth of the matter is I didn’t have the brain to go into finance, accounting, right? These are majors where you have to know your stuff. You have to know your numbers. You can’t BS your way through a finance degree. You can’t BS your way through an accounting degree. And a lot of kids Fall into the business school because they just think that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m going to do business. And you know, the entrepreneurial tracks, not for everyone. That’s its own thing.

And so a lot of people fell into marketing because it was seen as a little bit of a fluff experience. You could kind of BS your way through these classes. What’s creative? How do you judge creativity? What’s good? What’s bad? No college professor is going to sit there and tell a kid their creative thinking is not right. Everyone kind of got a free pass. And so one, I think you had an extremely low bar of people getting into marketing just because. And there wasn’t so much of that like rigor.

Two, how do you think about marketing? There’s so many ways to think about marketing. You can appeal to people through creative. You can appeal to people through direct response, through really good product marketing, positioning fit. Like there’s so many parts of the job and depending on where the company’s at and what they’re trying to do, you need to be able to call on different parts of those things.

You don’t see that in other roles on the C team. CFO sort of knows what to do, you know? Head of Sales kind of knows what to do. Marketing, whenever I talk to a CEO and they want a marketing lead, my first question is, well, what does the company need? You know, you would never ask that question if you’re asking about like a CFO role. You kind of know for the most part what’s going on. So there’s so much ambiguity and it’s very hard to find someone that can just run across all those things. You have to have extreme width and enough depth to be dangerous and that’s really hard for people.

Again, I think I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate the way I was raised, the jobs I’ve been able to have, where I have the analytical side, the creative side, I’m connected to the business, I know what’s going on with sales, but I can also take creative moonshots and do really silly things and turn around the next minute and do something that’s really buttoned up and directly focused on ROI. And it all lives in your head. There’s just a lot you have to think about and the composure. So it’s just a really, really hard role.

All that to say, There’s no way the CMO role is dead. It’s possible that we’ll see fewer CMOs, but I think the ones that retain the title are absolutely at the top of their game, and these companies cannot be living without them. I also think we could see a role where companies come back to wanting a CMO as well.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, that makes a ton of sense to me, and there’s obviously a lot of people doing clickbait stuff, and maybe you answered this question, but Is there a deeper reason why there’s even a conversation about the CMO role being dead or obsolete? I’ve not seen similar takes about the CFO role is dead.

Dan Slagen: One thing is I think you see way too much celebration in marketing without knowing if it improved the business. And you could have a great brand campaign. You could have an innovative way to think about positioning, but were you able to connect it to ROI? Were you able to connect it to revenue?

I remember my very, very first day at Tomorrow.io. We had got the whole team together. We were at all hands, and I’m introducing myself to the company for the first time. The first thing I said to that company was, I am a sales-oriented CMO. First and foremost. And this is coming from someone who loves big brand play. I do a ton on PR. I told you about video creation. And we’ve done a lot at Zapier this year. We did Super Bowl. I love brand.

But I am also talking to my CFO every single week. We have a shared spreadsheet with the numbers. We talk the same language. I know ARR. I know our time to close and our ACV. I know our churn rate. I am... First and foremost, living in finance world. Then I’m living in sales world. Then I’m living in marketing world. And so having that understanding, you know, my CEO can watch my CFO and I have a conversation and he knows we’re speaking the same language. There’s no confusion around that.

But I think one, not understanding the business. Two, not being real with yourself about the impact of marketing. I’ve done some campaigns in the past that looked fantastic that had no impact on the business. I’ve also done things almost in silence that have grown huge ARR. And so there’s just this notion of sort of celebrating. And then the last thing again is every company thinks what they want for marketing is different and what they need is different.

Finn Thormeier: Right. So if the CMO role is not dead, what is the future of it? How is it changing? I mean, you’ve been a marketing leader for a long time. Now at Zapier, how is the skill set changing? How is the role changing? Talk to me about the future of how you see it evolving.

Dan Slagen: Yeah, it’s a really good question. Paul Roetzer, who runs SmarterX and the MAICON Conference, has done some really, really good work around sort of how AI is impacting marketing. And he had a post sort of this week talking about the Astra release and just, you know, how his level of optimism got a little bit lower when this came out because he’s just not sure how much people are going to be able to adopt this stuff.

First and foremost, what I try and do is I think you have to call a shock and awe moment with your people. And I think you have to do a little bit of fear-based leadership, which is not my style at all. I hate it. But every once in a while, you got to wake people up and say, hey, if you don’t learn this technology, I’m genuinely not sure what the future holds for you. And I’m also not sure what the future holds for me. So... Full stop. Let’s start there.

The first thing I do is make sure anyone coming through the front door to join the marketing team now is at a level of AI that I’m comfortable with, and it’s got to be on the cutting edge. So we have an AI fluency bar that we hold people to in the interview process, and we’re pretty nuts about it. So you have to stop the bleeding of people coming into your organization that might not be at the bar that you’re trying to build into.

Two is you gotta get in with your people. And like I said, it’s gotta be a shock and awe moment. So earlier this year, You really started to see non-developers using traditional developer tools for go to market. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex. You could see where it was going quickly. And I felt like the Zapier marketing team could potentially be at risk of falling off from being the most innovative, you know, AI thinking marketing team. We were at risk of falling down at least like one rung on the ladder.

So I called a red alert, got the whole team together, and I essentially brought someone in to do a presentation and show people how they thought about the future of AI marketing, how they built their digital twin, how they were building agents, everything, the whole deal. And it was pretty technical. We were almost in a terminal the whole time. And it was a 45-minute presentation.

After that, I asked the marketing team, who’s feeling overwhelmed right now? Everyone’s hand went up. And I said, yeah, you guys didn’t know that this person existed when you woke up this morning. Like you don’t even know that you’re interviewing against this person for a future role at Zapier or for a future role that you want outside of Zapier.

You’re going to have three weeks to go learn any coding tool that you want. Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, whatever it might be. After that, we’re going to do a build-a-thon. And what I told them was, I know you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, but for the next couple weeks, I’m going to give you access to five coaches. We had five power users on the marketing team. And you can ask them any question you want. Spend as much time with them as you want. I’m not going to know who’s asking what question, what question is being asked. I have no idea. But in three weeks, you’ve got to show up ready to build.

The team did that. I think we were like 95% ready to go. The team heard me loud and clear. Then we did a two-week build-a-thon and everyone built something. At the most basic level, someone built an interactive dashboard showing leads or impressions or whatever. Other end of that, someone built a fully functioning app that our events team is using to run our ZapConnect conference, which happens later this month. It’s our big annual flagship conference. We’re now using a homegrown app to manage 100 plus speakers and the majority of the conference. Really, really cool.

It then broke the team up into essentially three tiers. Tier one, you got the most basic builders. They’re doing the dashboards. Tier two, people starting to build systems and roles. And then tier three, you got full functions and almost companies being built within the marketing team. Now I can go to each of those tiers and give them different business challenges that I would like them to solve, and each tier I’m giving them challenges that are at their level, tier one, tier two, tier three, versus just saying the whole marketing team try and get better.

First, stop the bleeding. Make sure your hiring’s in a much better place. Two, you got to get in the weeds and build with your people. You know, when I did the build-a-thon, I got about 60 plus projects that came in. Everyone recorded a two-minute Loom. I watched every single one. I gave handwritten notes to every single person. We gave awards. I also built my own thing. And that was a really, really big moment for the team. And now they are on just a different building trajectory.

So you asked about what are the skills I’m looking for? Resilience, adaptable, curious, willing to learn, willing to change. I’m not going to sit here and say that 100% of the people on the marketing team loved what I was doing. Not everyone stayed, right? We also said, hey, you might not like this new way of working. This might not be for you. The way I’m working now is so different than it was five or 10 years from now. Fully understandable if you don’t like this. But this is where we’re going. And you’re either on the ride or you’re off the ride. And it’s okay if you’re off the ride. But we have to be honest about it. So those are kind of the big, big cultural shifts that we made this year.

Finn Thormeier: How do you... I guess you just enforce it. I’m just thinking, I’m sure there’s a lot of resistance that a lot of marketing leaders will face if they will try to do this. I guess you need to get the buy-in of your CEO beforehand. How do you recommend them to think through and deal with the resistance?

Dan Slagen: It’s a good question. A couple of years ago, I would have told you top-down is the most important thing. At this point, what CEO doesn’t? We are extremely fortunate at Zapier. We have access to every single AI tool in the world. There is no So Zapier is like an AI playground where you can come in and use any tool you want. And it’s very unique, but it’s a really, really great place to be. But as long as you can give your people access to the most interesting tools that they need, that would be a good step one.

You know, two, we try and be as transparent of a company as possible. And for those that follow Zapier, you know, you’ll see us posting as much stuff about the company and what we’re seeing in benchmarks, but we also do that internally. So when I call this Buildathon, it is in the public marketing channel that anyone in the company has access to. Everyone’s project is in there. If you didn’t do a project, you’re going to be on the side of the line that says no project. And so there’s a little bit of FOMO and, you know, competitiveness that we’re driving there.

And like I said, you know, not everyone stayed and that’s okay. But the thing that I needed to solve for was I don’t want anyone in the middle. That’s the worst part where you have those people that are just kind of doing what they can to stay by, but they’re probably pretty toxic for the culture. In or out. That’s just a decision we’ve made. It’s also more fair to your A players who want those types of other peers to build and get inspired with.

So working in public is a huge, huge part of it. You know, Zapier, we go so crazy as to, we do most of our communication on Slack. And so every month we have a Slack transparency leaderboard that gets published in front of the whole company and it’s just for the executives but it shows the company what percentage of Slacks an executive did public or private that month. The reason we do it is one culturally it de-risks you from things hiding or toxic stuff or drama but on the more positive side when you’re trying to build this AI brain and institutional AI you need to have Your conversations in public so the AI can actually see it and pull from it and move it forward.

And so when I joined the company, I was about 50% public, 50% private. I’d never really measured myself. That’s just sort of where I netted out. And then I made a big, big push to change that. I’m now 98% public, 2% private each month.

Finn Thormeier: The number one exec.

Dan Slagen: They say I’m number two in the company, although we have yet to meet number one.

Finn Thormeier: You need to know who’s number one.

Dan Slagen: I know. They didn’t want to reveal themselves last month. We’ll see. But yes, by far and large, number one for how much I Slack.

The other thing we do is we built a marketing OS and marketing brain. And so every morning I ask the marketing team, this is the first thing you need to look at. It looks like an interactive dashboard, but it shows you What happened yesterday? What’s happening today? What’s happening tomorrow within marketing? What you need to care about? How are we doing against goals? And that was a change for the team. I said, you need to look at this every single morning because once you start to understand what’s going on within the business, now we can start to run agentically off this in a much more exciting way.

I have tracking in place so I know who’s looking at it and who’s not. And so it’s very easy. Again, it’s very easy for me to tell who’s paying attention and who’s not. I’m not here to Shame anyone. We’re not here to call people out, but we are here to enforce a behavioral change and you’ve got to be pretty strict on it.

Finn Thormeier: Do you, I mean, I love all of this. Do you think you’re losing something by almost, I mean, you talked about the kind of interview questions and the AI fluency score. Do you think you’re losing anything by forcing every marketer to be deeply AI native?

One of my favorite interviews I did with Don Jeter, the CMO at Torq, and I mean, They’re obviously crushing, incredible brand, very experiential. They do a lot of field marketing. And I asked him about kind of AI and he’s like, I don’t do a lot. You know, an AI, he himself, and they also have a rule that you’re not allowed to use AI to create any kind of design that’s customer facing, anything that the world sees. And they’re obviously crushing because they focus on the brand, the storytelling, the experience. Does every single marketer have to be AI native?

Dan Slagen: It’s an excellent question. I think... I’m gonna say yes. I’m gonna say yes on that one. I think it’s easy to say no. The safe answer is to tell you no.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, yeah.

Dan Slagen: I think... And look, Zapier... We do a ton of in-person events. It’s extraordinary. We are pretty much doing an in-person event every single week somewhere in the world. I was in New York last week with 20 or 30 major companies that you’ve heard of just in a room for five or six hours just talking AI transformation. What’s going on? We love the in-person stuff. We do these amazing events called Outposts where we get people to We had them at Zion National Park. We’re at a castle in the UK this week. We do awesome stuff because we believe in communities so much.

We also have tons of checks on what actually goes out to a customer. I personally don’t write with AI, especially for internal comms. I actually think that’s a superpower now that I...

That said, the way that our company works and the amount that we can speed up when these systems are in place is so important to us that I want people that are at least curious enough to go explore that. Now, I’m willing to hire someone that’s not Currently at the cutting edge of AI. That’s fine. And we’ve done it. What we look for is what’s the thing that’s going to be your hockey stick moment to really, really make you understand how to use systems. And I think the AI thing, the terminology gets overused. It’s like, would anyone on the team want a couple more headcount to help them do things? Of course they would.

So I have someone on the team that when we interviewed, They weren’t great on AI, but man, they were curious. They were so creative. The way they thought about it was interesting. And they were like, yeah, I think I’m getting to the unlock moment. And I felt like if we can bring you into Zapier, I can very quickly get you that unlock moment. And we did. And now that person is doing so much great stuff because they are creative first. But they have access now to essentially a much bigger team and resources and output that they can get stuff done with. And they think about what the customer is going to see first, not how much the AI can generate. And so I think that’s a very important distinction.

Now I’m speaking specifically for Zapier. There’s certainly, I can imagine, other... Other companies, other industries where maybe it’s not as important, but for us it’s something that we’re currently not really willing to bend on.

The last thing I’ll say is I think you’ve got to understand something to be able to ignore it and to be able to ignore certain parts of it or speak out against what parts you think are really dangerous. Unless you really spend the time getting in the weeds of what can be done, what should be done, Then how do you really know? You’re just reading headlines and you’re getting, you know, you’re kind of being led by clickbait to some degree. So I want my team to understand the pros and cons, the inspiring, the ethical concerns, all that thing. I want them to know that and master it so then we can make informed decisions.

Finn Thormeier: I’ll have a follow-up question on that, but before that, I’m thinking on the spot here, and maybe this is a stupid question, but when we’re talking about the future of the CMO role, it definitely seems like, at least from your point of view, systems thinking will be more important because you will be working more with AI, and for that, I think systems thinking is very important.

I don’t know who I talked to. I think it was Sydney Sloan, but there’s basically three tracks towards the CMO role. There’s the product marketing track, the brand track, and then the demand gen track. And I think she said most come from the product marketing track. Will that change where maybe because of that people who have more of a demand gen background, data background, engineering background, sales engineering background, where there’s a little bit more emphasis on this kind of systems thinking, will have an easier time thriving in that new world?

Dan Slagen: To some degree, yes, but Sometimes that mindset can also stop you from doing things that don’t scale. And that continues to be an important thing. There are parts of our in-person events motions that don’t make sense from a systems standpoint. They just don’t. But I fully believe in them and I would do it. There’s parts of our brand work that doesn’t quite make sense from a systems mindset. But we do it and we think it’s a good idea. So I think the problem with systems mindset people is sometimes they’re not as flexible as you need them to be.

This is where the role gets really, really hard. You know, again, I was extremely fortunate. I think the way I was raised, like I go back to like my parents, my mother was a nurse and my father was a psychologist. It’s the perfect combination of watching two people work. One is like helping people like with their heart and the other person helping people with their brain. You could see both like the left side and the right side working and you could try and find the perfect mix.

And so if you’re only systems thinking, you might not be able to go deep enough on one part. You might not be able to go deep enough on the brand and the emotional part. Or if you’re overly thinking on that you might not be able to connect it back to the demand or the product and the positioning. So again it kind of goes back to these people that can understand what a company needs and try and harmonize what the right balance of each three might be. So it is systems thinking but it’s the ability to Work in a flexible system as opposed to a rigid system. And I do see a lot of systems thinkers be too rigid. And that’s when I think you usually see marketing really fall flat.

Finn Thormeier: To come back to the previous topic, do you guys have any hard rules or published guardrails around how you allow your marketing org to use AI? What’s allowed? What’s not allowed? I believe Clay recently published their AI writing policy. Do you guys have anything in place? And if not, what’s your personal stance on where it’s useful and where you shouldn’t?

Dan Slagen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got internal, external. I’ll say for internal, again, we’re almost 800 people on Slack as our primary form of communication. So there’s a lot of comms. We started to notice it earlier this year. It’s like I saw my first Harry Potter wizard fight, essentially, at Zapier. This is a while ago. But someone had their AI create a doc, and they fired it over into the channel. And the other person clearly didn’t read it. They had their agent read it, and they fired their response back. They did this back and forth three or four times. And at some point, you can tell, guys, stop. Both of you. Turn it off, go read the docs, and we’ll come back and we’ll discuss this in person. But you could just see that stuff was starting to happen. And it wasn’t malicious behavior. It’s just there’s so much going on with more things being created. You’re trying to keep up, and people are just, they think something’s good enough, and they’re doing their best there. So you can start to see it.

We did implement an internal policy. It was really just rooted in respect. And this was a while ago. But it would be things like, it started with, You need to be honest with people when you send something, whether or not you read it and who wrote it. Like, hey, because there’s times when I’ve said, hey, I took what was going on. I just tossed in this prompt here. Let’s just, I don’t even know what’s in it. Let’s just start working on it together, brainstorm. Great. Then the person or the people I send, they know where I’m coming from. In my role, if I send something, people are probably going to read it or feel compelled to read it. So out of respect for them, I need to let them know, okay, I actually took time to write this. This is real. I need you on it. Or, hey, this is just a thing I made. Let’s just, I don’t know, we’ll jam on it later. So that was good to see.

Two, we look at, for external, we look at any comms that would ever go out. And there’s a lengthy testing period. And we are more than happy to keep humans writing when and where. It makes sense. Because I think the second AI takes the excitement out is really when you start to see, I think, diminishing returns.

So yes, internal, external policies, we’re pretty rigid about it. I think we’re, on the exec team, I’ll also say, I think we’re We are perfectly honest with each other and we have no problem shaming each other when someone clearly, I’ve been shamed before, we all have. But just being honest about that right from the start was the thing that really, really quickly improved the behavior.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, especially because AI likes to go for the 12 page report rather than the quick and concise feedback.

Dan Slagen: 12 page report, I also think there’s times when we’ll embark on A step function change in the way we operate as a team or a company and we’ll acknowledge the fact that it’s going to be really messy. And we’re looking for feedback and we say, if you ever need something, you know, just raise your hand and let’s have a real discussion about it.

But, you know, for instance, we do a monthly check of the business where we look at all the numbers, all the stuff that happens and we kind of have a mini all hands. The department leaders would sort of write their narrative and they’d get their numbers and they’d kind of all present. We moved that to an agentic motion where we just have the whole report written, sent ahead of time, and we show up and talk.

We were very honest with the company that, hey, the first time we do this, it might not work. The data might be wrong. The narrative might be wrong. But we were honest about the vision we had and where we wanted to go and why. And so if you can get people bought in as to why we’re doing this and they feel bought in, inspired, and most importantly, safe, then they’re more enthusiastic about it and they’re more willing to help improve it versus just throw stones.

Finn Thormeier: I’ve seen some of your recent posts. I’d like you to explain and or expand on a few terms. Let’s start with automation debt and LLM jails.

Dan Slagen: Sounds good. The LLM jail is one that I find happening quite a bit at the enterprise level. One of the reasons that we love Zapier and our customers love Zapier is because it gives you this notion of interoperability where, you know, one, different models are good at different things. We see that. We have our automation benchmarks where you can see certain models spike And so you want to be able to make sure that you can actually pick the right model and the right LLM for the thing that you’re trying to do.

The other thing is that you don’t feel lock-in if something happens that you don’t like, if they make an announcement that you don’t like, if they start to make an announcement that you don’t like. Make data decisions that you don’t like or you’re not comfortable with. And the other thing is that you are not bound to their rate of acceleration. You’re bound to your own rate of acceleration and you’re more in the owner’s seat there. So I think it’s pretty rare for me to meet an enterprise that says we’re going all in on this one. This notion of interoperability is pretty clear there. So that’s kind of what we meant by automation jail. You want to make sure that you’re LLM jail. You want to make sure that you’re not Not able to do things because of the system that you’ve put in place.

You know, automation depth, you know, there we really start to look at what gets automated and essentially like how deep we’re able to go. So for instance, you know, we all started by automating little things like, let’s say our communications. I now have it automated where if an email comes in, it goes into a folder, it drafts up my reply, but it doesn’t respond yet. So it’s not fully end-to-end. The depth isn’t fully realized. That will happen when I feel so comfortable with my system that I get an email in, it can craft up a reply, and it sends without me even looking at it. Now, when will that happen? This year? Next year? Never? I don’t know. It’s just kind of dependent. That’s where sort of the judgment call is. Do you want to take your hands fully off the wheel, or is that something where you do want to stay involved at the human level?

So I think the depth, one... It relies on the technology being at a place where we feel comfortable, but it also relies on the place where we have to make our own calls as humans as to what we want to still be in the loop on or fully own or turn over to AI.

I think, you know, I was on a panel last week at a conference and they’re asking about the predictions for next year. And my biggest prediction a year from now is that we’re going to see people pushing back on AI more versus AI pushing on people. Like right now, AI is pushing on all of us in the tech world and in marketing. It’s like if you aren’t up to speed on the latest model and the latest thing, it’s as if you’re going to be viewed upon as obsolete. And there’s a lot of pressure being put on you by Just the marketing campaigns coming out from the LLMs. It is rare to see marketing campaigns taken with as much... It’s as if there’s like whatever they put out is destiny and the world is responding to that. That’s what it feels like sometimes. Which we know is not the case.

And I think you’re now starting to hear and see, especially in the in-person communities, you’re starting to see the uprising. And you’re starting to see people pushing back on it and saying, you know what? Wait a minute. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. And it’s good to see because I think people have been getting pushed around for the last two years with this tech push. And it’s time for us to start pushing back.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, and I think part of that automation debt was also that you guys figured out that for a lot of workflows, you don’t need any AI. And I believe in that post, you wrote about only 24% of kind of the workflows, the things that you want to automate, the things that you build in, let’s say Zapier, actually need AI at any given step, and the rest you can just do without AI.

Dan Slagen: It’s the interesting thing. We call this fluid determinism. And so one of the things that Zapier is so good at is deterministic workflows. And it’s really what the company has scaled on in a lot of ways. And now as we’ve seen so many of these agents get built, ultimately what they are is fancy workflows. And the reason that token cost is so much and they’re spinning out of control is because they’re using AI for everything where you don’t really need it. For the most part, the workflow needs to do the same thing every single time. And it needs the ability to call AI when it needs to, but not run the whole thing like that.

And so that’s where we’ve been able to improve efficiency, drastically improve costs, reduce risk. And that’s the thing that people are really starting to warm up to. And that’s one thing that’s unique to Zapier. So yeah, that’s one part where I expect to see Big area of growth and almost like a resurgence of nostalgia and almost like going back to the original reason that Zapier existed. But in this new chapter of AI, when people are starting to come back to their senses and say, OK, we need to do this in a sustainable way.

Finn Thormeier: Right. Yeah. The other term that I saw that I loved that I want you to explain is generation loss.

Dan Slagen: Yeah, this was a really interesting one. So, you know, for those of you that maybe remember old VHS tapes, like movies, people used to make copies of them. Anything you make a copy of, you know, every time you make a copy of something, the quality gets worse and worse and worse. And back in the day, it was something like if you made nine copies of the same VHS tape, by the ninth version, it was completely blurry and fuzzy. And you didn’t even know what you were looking at.

And we see this in marketing, we see this in other departments, but you start with an idea or a brief, and it goes through so many different iterations of approval processes or changes that by the time it goes live, it doesn’t even look like the idea that you had initially.

Finn Thormeier: And it took me a little too long, but just so people can see on the screen now what that looks like, what you’re talking about, the first generation of a VHS and then... Third generation, fifth generation, and by the time you do the ninth copy, you get a bunch of ghosts.

Dan Slagen: Yeah. And so... As we started to build out our marketing brain and our marketing OS, we were really worried about generational loss because what we wanted was the most honest version of opportunity for Zapier to be the thing that goes live.

And so every month we have a meeting that includes the CEO and head of sales and our product marketing leaders. And we look at the last 30 days in everything, what happened in the world, what happened inside of Zapier, outside of Zapier with competitors. What deals that went well? What deals that did not go so well? What campaigns worked? What didn’t? And then we synthesize all that, and we think about the next 30 days. And we say, how much needs to change in our go-to-market? Do we have new messaging we need to test? Did something happen that we need to go jump on? Now sometimes, nothing really changes, and the next 30 days look very similar to the last 30 days. Other times, it’s time for a big change. Starts new motions.

The output of that meeting, you can imagine getting filtered as it goes from team to team to team and finally goes live. Where you just want the most honest version of the next 30 days will be this, go. And so as we took that and mirrored it with the marketing brain and the marketing OS, what we were trying to solve for was generational loss and not having that. We want the most honest version of the outcome of that meeting to go directly into the marketing brain and OS and immediately start to power our go-to-market. The content we’re going to create, the ads we’re going to run, the emails we’re going to send, the decks we’re going to show in the next sales meeting. And that’s really what we were trying to solve for there.

Finn Thormeier: Where does your marketing OS live?

Dan Slagen: Our marketing OS, we built it on Zapier. And so essentially people log into Zapier every morning and they go through it.

Finn Thormeier: But it’s like, it’s an interactive tool that you kind of build into the platform or?

Dan Slagen: It’s an interactive, it looks, to most people, it looks like an interactive dashboard.

Finn Thormeier: Okay. And I believe part of that is also, I don’t know if this is like a separate thing, but one thing I saw that you guys built Synthetic personas, but they’re built on actual sales conversations and product, how people act, behave inside of the product that then your team can ask and prompt to kind of get feedback on marketing copy and stuff like that.

Dan Slagen: Yeah, this one, we do it. I don’t think we’re, we’re not unique on this one. And it’s helpful, but it’s not at a level where I would replace real motions. But yes, the idea being is that you can build synthetic audiences to get a sense of what’s going on.

I think where it’s been the most helpful is actually with internal... Things where, you know, if the team knows they’re gonna present something to the CEO, they present it to a synthetic CEO first, or like AI CEO first, trained on all the things that our CEO is currently thinking about, talking about, posting about on Slack, pushing team for, and you can get a sense of, hey, If I give this to Wade, how is he likely going to respond? And so that’s been very helpful for the team. Before you go to anyone at the company, but definitely the C-level or CEO, make sure you’ve run this through. These are the expected reactions. You might want to think about doing this or that. That’s been a good kind of check step for people.

Finn Thormeier: Which is, again, that comes back to the transparency score that you have. Because if you, as the CMO, write 98% of your messages in the public account, Slack channels, someone can pull out of all of that and say, you know, look at all the things that Dan has been discussing and prioritizing and then cross compare that to what I’m trying to present here and give me a sense of if this fits anywhere to where Dan’s mind seems to be at right now in the last 30 days.

Dan Slagen: Exactly. And I will say the thing that the way that that works and the reason that works is because my CEO and I have trust. Because I’m willing to have conversations in front of the whole company. I am wrong a lot of times. I have ideas in public Slack channels where the CEO or someone else will say, that’s a horrible idea, that’s wrong, no. It’s okay. We’re all here. We’re learning together. We’re building in public. That’s part of being transparent is getting more comfortable with just being honest about the fact that people will be wrong sometimes and it’s okay to correct them in public and we respect each other and we trust each other.

But if I didn’t have that kind of trust with the CEO, I’d be having those conversations in private because I don’t want anyone to see this because what if I’m wildly off about, okay, does this new product launch mean XYZ for the industry or am I wrong? I can have those conversations in public, but it all boils down to trust.

Finn Thormeier: Now, last question. Obviously, AI transformation inside of your org starts with the head of the org, with the CMO. There’s so much pressure. There’s so much FOMO. There’s burnout. If a CMO is listening to this, they acknowledge that they are behind, that they need to do more, both personally as well as for their org. And they want to spend the next weekend getting ahead. Where would you point them to? What should they do? What should they read? Which specific resources should they get into? If they had, let’s say five to 10 hours to like get kickstarted, what’s that next thing?

Dan Slagen: The thing I would do is, marketers are notorious for measuring everything. We have a dashboard, a chart, a spreadsheet for everything. AI, I have not seen as many marketers think about how to measure it.

What I would do, especially if you’re leading the team, is I would go directly to your CEO and CFO and get a real agreement and a sense of what are the things that we want to measure with AI? Do we want to look at how fast campaigns go to market or how fast we get value from things we build with AI? Our success rate of pilots, The AI fluency of our people. It’s going to be different for every single company and every single CEO. The easy ones are, okay, token usage and ROI. Fine, but what does that actually mean? Boil it down to specific metrics that you care about and build a dashboard that’s connected to your system and report on it every single week and every single month.

If you don’t have the alignment with your CEO and CFO and then you don’t put that into a consistent structure that you look at every day, your mind is just going to spin and rot around the what ifs, I’m so behind, what do they care about? You’re never going to know. And then if you can keep that updated with your CEO and CFO and say, hey, the things we measured last month were this. Are we still measuring these things? Do we still think this is the most important thing? Maybe you have a new idea. Maybe they have a new idea. But work off a numerical dashboard that everyone’s in agreement on to the best of your ability. That’s a thing that for me has allowed a lot of structure and the ability to ignore a lot of noise.

Finn Thormeier: I love that. Cool. Dan, this was amazing. If people want to learn more about you or Zapier, I’ll link your LinkedIn and the website in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time. And that’s it.

Dan Slagen: All right. Thank you.

Before The Kiln, Patrick helped Clay stand up its early social, events and partnership motions, back when Clay had just invented the term “GTM engineer”.

In this episode, we talk about the state of GTM engineering 3 years in, whether Claude Code is eating Clay’s lunch, when a startup should hire its first GTM engineer, and more.

We discuss:

• Clay vs Claude Code

• Patrick’s top Clay / Claude workflows and agents: what he would keep if he had to delete everything else

• The newest tools Patrick is currently experimenting with

• When to hire your first GTM engineer and what makes a good one

• Into whom should GTM engineering should report into?

• Why Patrick sold The Kiln to 2X

Show Notes:

Connect with Patrick:

Patrick Spychalski’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickspychalski/

The Kiln: https://thekiln.com/

2X: https://2x.com/

Connect with Finn:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Mentioned in the episode:

Clay: https://www.clay.com/

Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

n8n: https://n8n.io/

Modal: https://modal.com/

Eric Nowoslawski (Growth Engine X): https://coldoutbound.com/

Deepline: https://deepline.com/

BlitzAPI: https://www.blitz-api.ai/

Tom Wentworth (incident.io) episode: https://www.founderbrand.org/p/the-most-ai-pilled-cmo-in-tech-shares

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: All right. My guest today is Patrick Spychalski. He is the co-founder of The Kiln. The Kiln is one of the leading GTM engineering agencies and clay partners. They recently got acquired by 2X. He also previously helped clay stand up their early social events and partnership motions. I wanted to have him on because I don’t think there’s many people who are deeper in the whole Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Patrick Spychalski: I appreciate you having me. Glad to be here.

Finn Thormeier: How would you describe the, I mean, you’ve been there since basically the, let’s say the dawn of GTM engineering when kind of Clay coined that term, which I guess has been like three-ish years, something like that. How would you describe the state of GTM engineering as of July, 2026?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s at an interesting stage right now where it’s evolved to the point where many people, I’d say even a majority in some spaces of people in marketing and sales have heard about it. They know what a GTM engineer is. It’s becoming a lot more in the vogue, a lot more prominent. Even a year ago, I would say it wasn’t a super popular job role. And now most companies, especially tech companies, are prioritizing it as kind of a core role to hire for. It’s also in an interesting state where the tool stack, I think, is shifting a little bit. Clay initially came up with the term GTM engineering. That was kind of their invention. And I’d still say they’re really core to the work that GTM engineers do. But for a while, I would say that it was really one of the only tools that people were using for a GTM engineer, at least the primary one. It’s now evolving to the point where the Claude Codes of the world, obviously N8N has come out probably into the vogue maybe a year ago or so. It’s getting to the point where the tool stack’s changing pretty significantly. And also, it’s starting to come out with sub-niches of the role where initially, let’s say the broad GTM engineer role is what everybody’s looking to hire for, but now they’re realizing that GTM engineers mean something different for every company. There’s different priorities associated with every business. Sometimes I talk to a company and their main priority is outbound, so they need a GTM engineer who’s got a lot of experience with outbound tooling and the tool stack connected to it. Really want more of like a data engineer, like someone who can go into a data warehouse and sequence all the information to something like Salesforce and create these bi-directional syncs. And so I think they’re coming to realize that, you know, different GTM engineers have different skill sets and need to be hired accordingly. So yeah, it’s at a very interesting stage right now.

Finn Thormeier: How would you describe what’s the leading edge of GTM engineering right now? I mean, I feel like three years ago, just having a clay account and having any workflow in there, that’s like the leading edge. Where are we now?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, so I would say like all of the most talented cutting edge UTM engineers I know are building a lot of really interesting infrastructure within Cloud Code. So I think a lot of the really talented ones that I’ve worked with have realized that, you know, you can recreate a lot of the workflows you would build in no code tools in tools like Cloud Code and save yourself a lot of money depending on what the workflow is. But they also realize that these things should not be completely agentic. So for example, if you have an enrichment workflow, the whole thing shouldn’t just be an agent going and finding information and putting it in a document. It’s a big waste of money. You’re using a ton of tokens to do that, and it’ll end up costing you actually more than a tool like Clay would. Clay, I think, is a really good combination of the agentic and the deterministic. So they have to actually rebuild the scaffolding that kind of supports a tool like Clay as well. I would say GTM engineers at a lot of startups I know are starting to try to create their own workflow interfaces and agents. This is a lot more difficult for enterprise companies because of security and compliance reasons. It’s pretty complicated to spin up your own agent and then connect it to Salesforce without there being any problems. But for companies, especially in the Seed and Series A range, I’ve seen a lot of GTMes create their own workflow scaffolding and cloud code and almost become their own host for the workflows that they’re building.

Finn Thormeier: What does switching or replicating things that maybe previously you did in Clay instead in Cloud Code, what does that unlock except maybe some cost benefits?

Patrick Spychalski: I would say the majority of it is cost benefit. There’s a little bit of added positives. I’d say one thing Clay isn’t very good at so far, and I’m sure they’ll improve this, is the relativity component. Let’s say you source Yeah. You can think when you’re using Excel or Google Sheets, you can reference another cell in a table. Clay can’t really reference another cell. So it’s really tough to do that relativity. And that surfaces in a lot of workflows. So things like that, I think, are nice to build yourself or build in something. So there is some unlocked benefit, but for the most part, I think it’s just that place changed their pricing recently. It’s a lot more enterprise forward. They’re really trying to target these bigger companies. And for people who are at Series A or C companies with pretty tight budgets, they were having a lot of trouble justifying the cost, especially to probably the founders or co-founders or CEOs. And so it’s just easier to build it, something like Cloud Code. And again, we’re not really seeing that shift on enterprise. I think enterprise companies will stick with Clay for quite a while, just due to the security constraints and the fact that it’s like a real tool you can procure.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, what is your take on Cloud Code eating Clay’s lunch?

Patrick Spychalski: I think it’s a lot more complicated a problem than people say it is. I see all these posts being like, Cloud Code is going to completely destroy Clay. Clay is dead. Clay is dead. And I really just don’t agree with that. I think Clay has built a really good platform for, and I kind of mentioned this a second ago, but combining the agentic and deterministic aspects of enrichment to create a really cost-effective platform, even with them up They still create a pretty cheap way to run enrichment, build workflows, and safely connect them to platforms. And I really think the safety part is important to hammer on because, like, if you create a Claude agent that connects to your Salesforce, there’s really no guarantee it doesn’t just, like, destroy all the data, wipe it out, not use a sandbox. There’s a million things that can go wrong. Clay really is, One of the safer ways to update your CRM or send messages through a sequencing tool or update a data warehouse because you’re able to visualize all of the outputs before sending it over. You’re not letting an agent just run crazy. It’s just a direct integration with data inputs and outputs. Yeah, I don’t see any large businesses moving over to strictly cloud code anytime soon. I still think Clay is probably their go-to, but I can totally see the justification for startups. One other thing I’ll add quickly is that I think there are some use cases There are cases that are great to be replaced with Cloud Code, and then there’s others that aren’t. So a great example of one that I’ve seen a lot of people effectively replace with Cloud Code is enrichment of lead lists. And so if you have a list of 1,000 contacts that you’re planning to reach out You just want to find their LinkedIn and their email and their phone number. You can just plug that list into Cloud Code, use a tool like an API like DeepLine or something or Blitz API and just run the whole thing and enrich the whole list and send outreach. And I’m seeing that being done really well. People like Eric Nowoslowski, who runs a really successful outbound agency, has essentially just built this huge Incredible automated system that does all of the enrichment and outbound message writing for all, all within kind of this like cloud code built infrastructure. And I think that’s a really good use case, but a bad one would be something like CRM enrichment or even like inbound lead aggregation, anything that connects to like core systems that you really care about.

Finn Thormeier: And besides, so when I asked you kind of what’s the leading edge, you kind of went, you know, a lot of people are moving to cloud code besides the infrastructure. In terms of use cases, so let’s say a very straightforward workflow you might build is you have a website de-anonymization tool, you identify people who visit your website, and then you maybe enrich them, you qualify them, and then you send them some sort of sequence. If that’s the kind of vanilla simple thing, what’s like a recent workflow or agent or clay table that you saw that blew your mind that the smartest people are doing?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah. So I think you very accurately described the more like, let’s say basic vanilla clay tables. It’s really centered around outbound. A lot of those, like it’s just sourcing lists, doing enrichment and sending out like an automated message. Like that’s what clay was initially made for. People would use it for, for the most part. I’d say as we’re working with more enterprise companies, what we’re seeing is like a lot of these businesses don’t want to get rid of reps. And I think that’s actually the correct decision in many cases, like sales reps still have massive value for reasons we can talk about in a second. But so instead of getting rid of those reps, They’re building these kind of co-pilots that just help enable the work that they do and make them work more efficiently. So, for example, being able to create an agent or like a clawed skill that you can plug into an org and reps can use to source lead lists or run enrichment or draft messaging. You know, because like every rep right now, I’m sure whether... If they’re willing to admit it or not, they’re using a ChatGPT or a Claw to do a lot of their work. It’s helping them source lead lists and find people’s emails and then write messages. And that’s a good thing.

Finn Thormeier: Researching accounts.

Patrick Spychalski: Exactly. Researching accounts. I think it’s a good thing. I truly think that is like a massive value add and it’s gonna make them more efficient, but there’s no standardized way to do that in an org. So people are writing different messaging. They don’t know which tools to use for enrichment. There’s no like structured way to go about these things. And so I’m seeing a lot of, Enterprise.org shift to how can we create these kind of like dynamic clawed plugins that have a variety of skills underneath them that reps can access and use to make themselves more efficient. And there’s so many things that you can do. They could be after a call updating the HubSpot record with all the calls Call notes and information that you found. You could have like a pre-call prep workflow where they can call a thing. It’ll prepare them for all the calls they have coming up for that day. It can be researching accounts and contacts to see which ones are qualified and which ones aren’t. It could be drafting messaging. So there’s a bunch of things that reps can do using just one cloud plugin. And I kind of see that’s where things are going, especially for these rep-enabled workflows.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, maybe for people listening, I recently interviewed Tom Wentworth, the CMO at Incident.io, and he showed me their cloud setup and they have an applied AI team for the go-to-market team and they’ve built a lot of these cloud skills. I mean, Fable 5 recently got unbanned. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to play around with it much. Do you see it having any Is there a big impact on any go-to-market processes where you see it being a real game changer?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, it’s an interesting question because I feel like the more I think about it, there is a ceiling to the model quality necessary to perform certain tasks. You don’t need Fable 5 to do most of the things we do in go-to-market, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Outbound is inherently a competitive thing. You have to stand out from the other people sending outbound. So you have to have some sort of alpha or some sort of nuance. So I would assume these models can have some improved way of running outbound where it can write better messaging or more nuanced messaging or just have better tonality that resonates with people in that messaging. But I don’t know how much better it’s going to make it. I still think having a human touch to outbound messaging, having somebody write at least like the examples or the scaffolding that surrounds messaging is super important because otherwise it’s just going to sound like every other AI generated outbound message. So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to impact it a ton. It’s a crazy model. Don’t get it twisted. Like it’s an insane thing to use. Like when I’m building stuff for myself, it just can build it so much more efficiently and it can ID it so much better. But for a lot of the good market workflows we’re building for big companies, it doesn’t seem to have that big of an impact.

Finn Thormeier: So you see it more as like the model that maybe builds your, I don’t know, internal tools that you might use in GoToMarket, but the actual day-to-day execution of enrich this account, research this person, you don’t need that for it. Which model writes the best outbound messaging?

Patrick Spychalski: That’s a good question. I’ve always thought, like, you know, I know there’s a lot of debate around this. I’ve always thought anthropics models write the best outbound messaging. And the way we generally work is we don’t write each message one by one for prospects. We’ll usually write some sort of template and then have kind of variables within that template. And so I usually try to use like the highest Opus model. It’s also obviously quite good. I think it’s meant mostly for creative writing. And I would imagine, I haven’t actually used it for this yet, but I’d imagine Fable’s incredible for it because we try to just have this template be really like sound and succinct and well-written. But yeah, I honestly, We use it as a thought partner for writing copy. We’ll have an output of template. We’ll usually make edits to that template. For so long, even when we started the agency, we had copywriters writing copy for our clients for way longer than you would imagine we would because we think it’s really important to have that human nuance.

Finn Thormeier: For the bigger, it sounds like you guys are working with bigger companies now, for those bigger companies and enterprises, how important right now is to them kind of cost management around the GTM use cases when it comes to picking the right model and maybe using some of those open source models for certain tasks?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, so you said, sorry, just to recap, because you said cost management, right?

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I think it depends on the business. There’s some enterprise companies we work with that are these fast-growing AI startups. They don’t care. They could care less. They’re like, whatever we got to spend to make the output good, it’s fine. But then there’s other businesses, of course, that have a lot more cost sensitivity, and they’re telling us, figure out what the best model is. If we can use API keys for any of these Clay workflows, we want to use them. We want to be really cost-effective. But it’s interesting, like when we first started as an agency, we were working mostly with startups. So we would just talk to these like series A, series B businesses. And they were all obviously, as you can imagine, super cost sensitive. They had raised a round. They want to make sure the round lasts them a while. So they were always telling us like, you know, we need to figure out what API keys to use. We need to figure out what tech to procure. Like focus heavily on cost. But then there have been some clients we’ve worked with recently on the enterprise stage where like, we’ll propose to them like, hey, if you buy this API key, it’ll save you like $5,000 a month on compute costs. And they’re like, Don’t care. We don’t even feel like going through procurement. The procurement for that is going to take so long. Just spend it. It’s worth the speed. We don’t want to have to get through procurement. It’s worth the speed of using the thing we already have. It’s interesting to see.

Finn Thormeier: I see a lot of LinkedIn posts where people talk about their personal cloud setup and they have this super complex thing. They have all the connectors and the MD files with context about them and the super... Complicated, complex, you know, context layer and all of that. I’m just curious, what do you see actually has a big impact on maybe the output that, you know, your cloud or your cloud co-worker cloud code has versus what is just, you know, people creating LinkedIn posts to get, you know?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I think, you know, a good rule of thumb is probably, like, get, like, somebody, like, get the system you see somebody posting on LinkedIn and, like, decrease the complexity by probably 30 to 40%, and that’s probably the right thing to do, you know, like, even I’m also guilty. I remember back when Clay was really on the up and up, I would be posting these absurd workflows. And they’d have some practical value, but you could probably get 90% of the value by decreasing the complexity by 50%. So I was just trying to put the absolute maximum. And I think that kind of applies to a lot of cloud workflows as well. And I think a lot of those interesting things you see on LinkedIn are coming from practitioners that are working at startups or working for themselves. And so they They can create these really complicated things because they know the mapping in their head. So they know exactly how it works. And they have these MD files that kind of just like navigate their own brain mapping of how they should do work. This becomes a lot more difficult when you’re working with big companies. Like, you know, we try to make things as simple as possible. So another, just going back to the kind of the clawed plugin example, like if you’re building a clawed plugin, we’re hoping that like you only have two or three MCP is connected to a given skill. For example, if you’re running an enrichment skill, we want to find one data provider, maybe two, that can cover everything for the enrichment, because we don’t want to find Five or six. We don’t want to have like email waterfalls with like cats. It’s just a lot. Like that’d be so much complexity and so much procurement. So like, for example, like if we found a, like, I think deep lines are great, like, you know, kind of up and coming API that plugs into cloud code and they have waterfalls built in. So like it’s one API for all the waterfalls. They’re like, okay, great. So we’ll use deep line for the enrichment for this component. We try to keep things simple. We try to have one or two APIs to plug into our skills.

Finn Thormeier: For your personal setup, anything that you changed or connected or set up that you feel like actually had a meaningful lift?

Patrick Spychalski: I would say, besides the enrichment providers that I mentioned before, there isn’t anything, I’d say, insane or cutting edge about the skills that we’re building. I think we build them well. I think we have pretty strict rules for how they should work, how they should connect to systems, and that’s usually the main nuance. I don’t have any LinkedIn posts prepared anytime soon that’s like, here are the 15 MCPs that I use every day. It really is just need-based, and most of it can just be used. For example, we have a workflow internally that every time we get off a call, it’ll update the HubSpot record for that company with all the new information. What stage the deal is at, it’ll change the deal stage, it’ll update the notes, it’ll change the next steps, and it’ll do all the updating for us after the call. And it’s really helpful, but it just requires a HubSpot MCP. Crazy about it. Maybe some enrichment if we need it.

Finn Thormeier: If you had to turn off or delete every single agent, cloud, code, routine, clay table you have running and you could only keep three, which three do you keep?

Patrick Spychalski: That’s a great question. I think the first one, and this is maybe unique to us, but I’m sure some people have like kind of adjacent workflows that they use. So we create statements of work at The Kiln when we’re building engagements with prospects. Like when we propose, When we build an engagement to a prospect, we build this really in-depth statement of work about the work that we’re going to do for the prospector slash client. Let’s say, for example, we’re getting on a call with Anthropic and they want to do work with us. We’ll build out this really detailed statement of work and send it to them. We have a really well-made agent that builds the majority of the statement of work. Otherwise, it would take us so long to type all of this out. And it frankly does a better job of summarizing all the calls and emails we had and sequencing that to engagement than we could manually. And I used to have to write these manually. I used to do it myself before the models were good enough. And it took me So that’s great. That’s the first one. The second one probably is the kind of dynamic HubSpot updating skill that we have. Pretty much when anything changes with the prospect, it will now update our HubSpot. And we’re continuously building this out to make it better. But in short, like prospect sends us an email saying something about an engagement. It’ll update the HubSpot record. We have a call with the prospect to update the HubSpot record. We’ll send an email to them, whatever. Something happens, it’ll all update in the record. And that’s so nice because like most sales reps don’t want to spend time updating things manually and they’re And there’s some things that just can’t be captured in a CRM update clay table. Like a clay table doing CRM enrichment mostly is covering like firm graphics and like third party stuff, but first party like new information using an agent to do that is great. So that probably would be the second one is this like kind of dynamic HubSpot updating agent. And the third one, I’ve really appreciated our like pre-meeting prep docs being created by skills now. I don’t know. I’m sure most salespeople can relate to this and probably founders as well. But my calendar is like ridiculous. Like I have like eight hours of calls. I probably have an average of like six to eight hours of calls a day. And it’s like a lot. And many of these I don’t have time to prepare for. Like I’m not like going to sit there and look through like, okay, what did I say this was for? And what’s the background? And having a document that just gets sent to me and I can open it for 30 seconds before a call and read through it every day. Such a value add. And I’m sure it’s a value add for most salespeople who have back-to-backs all day. So those would be the three that I think have been the most valuable for me.

Finn Thormeier: Do you have like a dream agent or workflow that we’re not quite there yet to be able to do that thing, but you would love for it to exist?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I think so. So all the stuff that I mentioned, I feel like is pretty... Like top of funnel. It’s generating proposals and updating HubSpot. I would love an agent that can truly Deal with the annoying logistics of a deal, which is like following up with prospects with like a well-written message saying like, hey, I wanted to follow up on this. By the way, here’s an extra piece of value add that we came up with recently. And then like if they ask us questions about procurement, being able to go into our company’s docs, like look at the procurement information and like truly like a more like agnostic AE bot would be really nice. I don’t think it’s really there and I don’t trust it. I mean, prospects... They’re valuable. I don’t want an agent even slightly messing up the wording of one of my emails, even if the content is correct. I think sales is such an art. It feels such a dance, and you have to make sure that every

Finn Thormeier: How do you think about balancing basically automation with human in the loop? Let’s say for the sales outbound prospecting thing, is this like a pure ACV question where for very high ACVs you just have more human and for very low ACV you do more automation?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I actually say that’s a pretty good way of describing it. Like I’m sure there’s exceptions, right? Like where it’s important to have humans in the loop for certain industries maybe where the people aren’t as susceptible to like emails, maybe you have to cold call them, right? So you have to like cold call these large lists of people in certain industries. But for the most part, I would argue that Uh, the majority of it is ACV based. So when we work with clients who have these big whale accounts that they’re going after, you know, million dollar plus ACVs, we’re like, we’re just going to create systems that can build assets for you better, but like you should be prospecting these accounts. Like we’ll build the slide deck for you. We’ll build the PDF for you. We’ll, we’ll even draft a message that you should probably edit a little bit to make sure it’s perfect. But, um, Yeah, it’s mostly ACV based. I mean, when you’re talking to a company that’s reaching out to whatever, a hundred thousand prospects a month, what are you going to do? Like, there’s not much you can do. You got to kind of automate the message.

Finn Thormeier: So like, should every company have a GTM engineer?

Patrick Spychalski: Um, it’s a good question. I mean, in B2B specifically, I think it’s valuable to have one, but not every company should have one. I mean, especially if you’re early stage. Um, I think, um, A fallacy I see a lot of early stage founders or operators fall into is trying And I don’t even really like using this word because I think it’s a buzzword, but trying to operationalize everything in the beginning, trying to create systems and methods of attack and really try to build infrastructure before you have PMF or you’re still doing founder-led sales. In the beginning, I really think it’s a lot of just brute force and you should probably just accept that maybe your CRM data isn’t perfect, but somebody in your org has it in their brain as to what a prospect is doing and how things are going. So I think there’s a certain stage by which you should probably hire a GTM engineer. And that’s, I think, when your sales team’s becoming more developed. Like maybe, you know, founder-led sales is over. You have like three or four AEs. I think that’s when it starts adding real value. We started working. There’s a company, Modal, we worked with a while ago. And they’re a larger company now because they’re doing super well. So congrats to them. But when they first started working with us, they had like four AEs. And I felt that it was a really good time to hire us because it was like they are now starting to build the infrastructure that these AEs are working in. They kind of have to have systems. And it probably benefits them to have systems. And there’s so many leads coming in now that they have to do something about it. So it felt like a proper time to hire one.

Finn Thormeier: What do you say to the haters who say a GTM engineer is just a RevOps person?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, we get that one a lot. And I’d say in a way it’s kind of right. It probably should fall under RevOps if you’re hiring one. It probably should be somebody that RevOps hires. But I think the average RevOps person that you talk to doesn’t know how to use half the tools that GTM engineers use. So it’s really just a tool difference. Like, you know, if you’re a RevOps person and you learn how to use Clay and ClogCode and N8N and connect those to your existing systems, I think you’re pretty much like, yeah. I think RevOps maybe should be given a little more credit than that. A lot of stuff RevOps does is pretty creative and drives direct revenue. I think it’s just a tool difference. Maybe one day it’ll just get usurped into the same thing.

Finn Thormeier: So if we take that company that you mentioned, they have three to four AEs, which I assume that means probably they’re 50 people, maybe they’re around Series A. Would you say that that GTM engineer should report to the head of sales or the head of marketing or someone else?

Patrick Spychalski: It’s a great question, you know, because obviously they never have rev ops people at companies that big, or at least they rarely do. Like, it’s usually just a head of marketing, head of sales. In our case, it’s usually, and this is not the best answer, but it’s usually the person whose workflows the GTM engineer is working on the most. So, like, sometimes both. But a GTM engineer should be pretty... I’d say autonomous in their work. They shouldn’t be getting ordered around. I think especially at the Series A stage, they should not be getting ordered around by heads of sales and heads of marketing. They should be figuring out things to build and maybe even reporting to the co-founder maybe once a month and just saying, this is the stuff I’m building. It doesn’t seem good. It’s adding value. And you should be talking to the head of sales and head of marketing a lot, but I don’t know if they should be ordering you around because sometimes a GTME, especially a strategic one, knows better on what tools to procure and how to build systems than a head of sales or head of marketing.

Finn Thormeier: And then for the bigger companies that you’re working with, do you, let’s say you have a head of GTM Engineering, where do you think is their ideal spot to report into at that stage?

Patrick Spychalski: That’s a good question too. I’d be curious, I’d have to ask some of the people, because I mean, there are definitely heads of GTM Engineering at more mature tech companies. I know I think Cursor has a head of GTM Engineering. Cursor Anthropic probably has their own variant of that. So they have them. I would, like, hesitantly say that they should probably report into either, like, into, like, the head of RevOps, if the head of RevOps, if the RevOps store is pretty big, maybe into the head of RevOps, or into the head of Ops, actually, like, if they have a good head of Ops. The problem is, reporting to head of marketing or head of sales is a big issue, because, like, Marketing and sales notoriously clash. And so like, if you report to any of them, they’re going to just prioritize their work over the others. And they’re also probably going to, there’s always the blame game of like marketing, sending us bad leads and sales is saying that, and then marketing saying, well, sales just is just bad at closing and we’re actually sending them good leads. And so there’s always like this kind of conflict between the two. And so I don’t think you should report to either. It should probably be to somebody who’s optimizing for efficiency or well-built systems. Um, And so it’s, it’s almost like somebody either separate from them or above them. I mean, obviously like if you can get them to report to the CEO, then it’d be great too, but you know, CEO is busy. Um, but it should be somebody who like, isn’t in the middle of that battle, I think.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I think you guys even help place GTM engineers now with companies. What, how would you describe the, the hiring profile of the right kind of person to be a GTM engineer?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I’d say it’s probably one of our most in demand services, just because everyone’s trying to hire a GTM engineer, and they’re really hard to hire for two, I think, core reasons. The first is that There’s not a massive talent pool for it. It’s pretty tough to find a really talented one. And if you want to hire one, they’re really expensive. So talent pool is pretty low, especially at the price you’re probably wanting to pay for one. And then the second is that, as kind of mentioned before, there are so many different kinds of GTM engineers. There’s ones that handle more RevOps-based work, marketing-based work, sales-based work. And so there’s no perfect profile for one, which is why we offer the service. I mean, the first thing I asked myself when we were thinking about offering this is like, Why would we do this when we need to hire GTM engineers? We’re cannibalizing our own business if we’re doing this. And then the more I thought about it, the more I was like, Like there’s a certain kind of GTM engineer that should be placed at some companies. And a lot of those are not people that work for us. And so we’re very picky about the clients we bring on. They have to be hiring a GTME that isn’t the sort of one we would hire because otherwise it’s completely a conflict of interest. Like, you know, whatever. If like, I don’t know, like Google tried to hire us to hire a GTM engineer and it was just a person who would work well for us, I’m probably going to prioritize us. And I don’t want to do that. So we have to find something to use. He’s looking for more of a specialized one. I think our people are really great all around GTMEs, but we try to find people that are hiring. We really need one for RevOps, or we really need one for sales. And the profile is usually someone who has a very hacky kind of personality a lot of the time. GTM Engineering, they don’t have a lot of... You know, well-known courses for it. It’s not something you learn in school. It’s not something you go to class for at college. So it has to be kind of a self-starter role right now. You have to kind of seek it out or have to have found out about it and decided to make the career pivot. So there’s a lot of real self-starters in GTME. The ones that we found are really great are ones that started in a technical role. They’re specifically good for rev ops based GTME roles. So people who were software engineers or forward deployed engineers and decided to become a GTME because it’s so natural for them to learn this stuff like clay is easy when you’re when you’ve learned code, like not a hard thing to learn. So, and then for more like sales-based GTM engineers, like AEs, especially like enterprise AEs who worked at a company that sells a technical thing seem to be really good. So like, you know, like I’m sure like a Databricks AE would be really good at being a GTME because they understand all the technical nuances of like a Databricks product and they have to understand that stuff and they know how to sell. So they know the plight of a sales team or a salesperson. So they tend to be really good. And then someone from MarOps who decided to become a GTME is really good, too, for marketing-based go-to-market engineering work. So somebody who worked in MarOps knows all the tool stack and then decided, I want to learn clay and cloud code and N8N seems to be quite good. So different profiles for different types of roles.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, it obviously depends on the kind of use case that you want to apply there, but it sounds like, I mean, there’s GTM and engineer, in GTM engineer, and it sounds like almost you want to lean more towards an engineering person who then learns GTM rather than a GTM person who now needs to learn systems thinking and that sort of thing.

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I think depending on the use case, like again, if you’re running an outbound motion and you’re hiring a GTME that’s doing outbound, Like it could be better to find an AE or an SDR who became a GTME because they understand outbound, right? But for any sort of like rev ops, like for CRM enrichment or any sort of like rev ops based work, I really find the engineers are better at figuring that stuff out because they understand systems thinking already. And for complex systems like that, it tends to work out better. So that’s why I say like there’s no one profile. I think it depends on what you’re trying to hire them for.

Finn Thormeier: I don’t know how to frame this question, but where do you think the kind of alpha or mode is? I think there’s some level of what’s happening is that GTM engineering is a buzzword. Companies just want to do it because they heard it and they’re like, we’ve got to do it, but they don’t maybe fully understand it. Where’s the alpha here? Is it just having one? I don’t know if that question makes sense to you.

Patrick Spychalski: No, I think I kind of get the idea. I think there’s an inherent issue with just deciding to hire a GTM engineer for the sake of it. That’s not, I don’t think, a good idea. And there are so many companies that I’ve spoken to and often ones that we tend to disqualify that are just like, we need AI, GTM engineers, AI, we need to hire this AI person. And usually that’s just coming from the higher ups, like whatever the board of the CEO being like, we need AI and that’s going to solve our problems. Sometimes there’s a big strategy gap. Sometimes your reps aren’t writing that great messaging or they’re not calling the right people. There can be a lot of real Creative strategy gaps in a go-to-market system that won’t be solved by a GTM engineer. When you hire a GTM engineer, you’re not hiring an AI wizard that can solve all your problems. You’re hiring somebody that can build systems to accelerate things you’re already doing well. We never work with a company. If a company comes to us and they’re like, hey, we want to build a scaled outbound motion. We want to get the messages our SDRs are writing. We want to automate that creation of the messaging. We want to send them at high volumes. It would be foolish to take that on if the messages suck and they’re not getting responses. Zero times 100 is still zero. Why would we scale that messaging? We would never take a client like that on. I think often there’s this gap problem where they just think AI will solve our problems and they likely won’t. You should probably just think a little bit more.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And I’m curious to get your take on this. I’ve talked about this with Tom Wentworth and he’s very deep in the whole Clay and Claude Code. His take is basically that right now it gives them an edge just because they’re deeper in it and more advanced in it than most of their competitors. They’re automating things that they’re not yet automating. They’re saving their AEs times in places where their competitors are not. Part of that is just because these tools have gotten easier. But they’re still kind of complex. But very soon this will be commoditized and it will be very easy to build any workflow and you just write one prompt and it will build you whatever you want to have. And so everyone will have access to these skills or agents or workflows or whatever it is. And then the real differentiator will be Brand or taste or whatever people say. What’s your take on that in general? Will this idea that you can build a very cool cloud code setup and clay table all be commoditized and everyone will be using the same setup and then it still just comes down to who has the better product and who has more taste?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, I think that’s partially correct, but I would say my overall take on this is as follows, which is that tech will always be commoditized to some extent. Whatever’s cutting edge will eventually be caught up to. The Founder Brand. I think Tom is correct in the sense that it’s a massive advantage right now for them to be doing this stuff over their competitors if their competitors aren’t doing it. And frankly, this is why we often target kind of boring industries to do our work with because if we implement it for them, it will be a massive competitive advantage for a pretty long time. I’m sure everybody’s talked to those companies that are just absolutely archaic. They haven’t moved past a certain tool in 25 years. Beating them, if you’re one of their competitors, is pretty easy if you have the right tech. But to your point, eventually it’ll get caught up and it’ll eventually get commoditized. And then in commoditized spaces, for example, SaaS is getting really commoditized with all of this. All the SaaS companies have the same tool stack at this point. They have clay, they have cloud code, and they’re all doing pretty similar stuff, depending on the SaaS, I guess, but for most B2B SaaS businesses. Then the main competitive edge is creativity. And Clay kind of had this concept marketed for a while with like GTM Alpha and the GTM Alpha is truly like your own creativity to create these like really valuable plays. And I still think that that tends to be true. You can’t have agents do this stuff for you. Like I think there is this like, I don’t know how to explain it, but like human ingenuity and intuition that can really create Outbound plays that agents never could. And so I think that’s where the real creativity lies. Like if one company is sending a pretty boilerplate outbound message just saying like, hey, I saw you raised a round recently. Here’s our offer. That’s a classic. Another company is sending this beautifully done, AI-generated, branded PDF, doing an audit of the company’s existing systems based on information that they enrich. The other will obviously win every time, and I think some variant of that is always important to keep on top of mind.

Finn Thormeier: Are there any new tools that you’re playing around right now that you’re experimenting with or that will be inside of the LinkedIn posts in six months?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think I’ve always had pretty like unidimensional LinkedIn posts every time I put them up. Like in the sense that I’ve never said that there’s 50 tools you should use. Like I’ve only really ever talked about Let’s say three heavily, which is Clay, N8N, and Cloud Code. And that’s because every time I’ve used one of those three tools, it’s felt like a real paradigm shift and worth talking about. It’s not just some new data provider that’s going to give you alpha for a week. I really think that the infrastructure problems are the ones I like solved. And I really do see the future being... Like plugins to the like cloud codes and codexes and Gemini’s of the world. I still think that those plugins are going to be what’s super valuable. And right now there’s not really one that I think solves every problem. I think, you know, I’m sure Clay at some point will develop their own kind of like MCP that plugs into cloud code so you can build workflows through it. There’s again, like the deep lines and blitz APIs of the world that give you enrichment data, but there’s not like, Uh, not one great like scaffolding layer. I think that plugs in the cloud code yet. That’s really been built. So until that gets built, I have nothing new. I mean, I’ve been talking a lot about cloud code and different APIs that plug into it, but nothing like super fundamental besides the actual tech behind cloud itself.

Finn Thormeier: Now last, a selfish question, uh, as an agency owner, what, uh, can you recommend selling your agency and what tips do you have to sell your agency?

Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, it’s, I mean, I think selling your agency really has to be kind of a, like, personal decision. I actually think, like, you know, obviously there’s a lot of financial decisions that are, like, sub-decisions of the overall decision, but the question should really be, like, Fundamentally, how do you want to live your life for the next few years? What do you prioritize? And how do you see the vision of your company being materialized down the line? So for us, there was a lot of questions. The first question was, You know, like where, where do we think we could take this if we built it ourself and does it kind of align with our own goals of what the company should be? And so for us, our goal was like, let’s work with all the biggest companies in the world on doing GTM engineering and just stay at the cutting edge. I frankly never had like, at least since we started the business, a dream to hire like 500 people and have this mega agency myself. Like that doesn’t appeal to me.

Finn Thormeier: I don’t think anyone dreams of that. That sounds like the worst.

Patrick Spychalski: Maybe, but you know, the problem for me, at least, was that, like, I think we have such talented people on our team. I think, like, I get fired up when I talk to the people on our team every day because I just think they’re so good, and I frankly think they’re all better GTM engineers than me, which was my goal when I started the agency. I wanted everybody on our team to be better than me, and I think that’s truly there. And when you hire, when you have 500 people at an agency, it’s really hard to achieve that same level of quality. I mean, it’s pretty much, it’s nearly impossible because, you know, like you have to have like 500 people that you’re paying like salaries to them that they could easily go find better salaries elsewhere. So like, yeah, there’s like the competitive, like, uh, like. Who do I work with? There’s so much bureaucracy and really talented people don’t want to work in bureaucracy. They want to be free. They want to be able to do whatever they want. They want to be able to have side projects. And so you just can’t have a really well-built agency with the same density of talent I think we have. And so I came to that realization and I was like, Okay, well, like, what do I really want then? Like, and it’s probably to work with the biggest companies in the world and keep working with these really smart people and keep doing cutting edge work. That’s what excites me. Like, I think for everybody on our team, building really cutting edge stuff is what excites us. And like being at the front line of GTM engineering, I think is like a legacy we’re all trying to achieve. And so when I came to that realization, And then 2X approached us. I pretty much said, as long as you let us keep our core group, continue slowly hiring and building the agency and working with really cool, exciting companies and give us the resources to do that, it felt like an enticing opportunity, which was just like, you give us a bunch of money to grow the thing and do the things that we wanted to do. Because we were bootstrapped. When we had a marketing initiative that cost $50,000, I was like, man, I could either buy a Toyota Tacoma or I could do this marketing initiative. It’s kind of a tough one. I do really like the Toyota Tacoma. I probably won’t do the marketing thing, but when you have real budgets from a larger company that’s pushing you to do a thing, it feels a lot more powerful. We now have this larger entity backing us and allowing us to grow more. Um, at the way we want to grow and hire really talented people. And that, and so that was kind of like the lifestyle decision we decided on is like, I don’t want to be a CEO of a 500 person agency. I want to run a small core group of people that are really good at what they do. Um, and as long as I can get a decent exit outcome from it, then like, it’s, it seems like a pretty good, uh, pretty good deal. And then, and then hopefully it’s a good deal to two X. Cause you know, as long as we keep growing this thing and adding value and adding enterprise value, then hopefully they get their good end of the deal. And it ends up being hopefully like a deal for, for, for both of us and ends up working out.

Finn Thormeier: So besides that, meaning to keep staying at the leading edge, work with the biggest companies, anything else that’s kind of next for the kiln?

Patrick Spychalski: I’m unsure. I mean, our recruiting offer has been growing a good amount, so we’re pretty pumped about that. But I think... We’ve always tried to stay pretty core to our offering because I think it’s something we do really well and it’s something we’re known for. And so I’ve always been really afraid to stray away from that. Our offering is just, we’re going to give you some really talented people to build really cool projects for you. And we feel we have the best collective GTM engineering talent in the world. So we’re giving you that as essentially a service and you get to pay us monthly for it, which is a pretty good deal. Yeah. We always have people on our team who are building SaaS products internally and building cool tools and cloud code plugins. I mean, the stuff our team has built, if it ever was productized, I’m sure somebody would make a lot of money from it. But I tend to let the team develop that themselves. If they want to use it as their own product, they can roll it out. And we use it internally and we roll it out to our clients all the time. So I’ve always been really afraid to like,

Finn Thormeier: All right. This was awesome. If people want to check you out or want to check out The Kiln or 2x, all of the links will be in the show notes below. Patrick, thank you for joining.

Patrick Spychalski: I appreciate you having me. Appreciate it, Finn.

So in almost a “déjà vu” moment, I’m doing something similar here, but with the roles reversed: Jonathan giving the advice, instead of asking it. We recorded this a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out where to take Project 33. Given that Jonathan had built a large agency but then also pivoted into other, more scalable offers (he’s the CEO of AJ&Smart and facilitator.com), he felt like the perfect person to ask for advice.

And if you’ve seen any of my recent stuff on LinkedIn, you might’ve seen that I pivoted the podcast and launched my advisory firm Thormeier.co. A good chunk of that was kicked off and inspired by this conversation.

We discuss:

• Why I’m the one getting coached this time

• Four ways to get a dream out of your system and “the tiniest announceable version”

• The agency/offer ladder: from DIY (do it yourself), to DWY (done with you), to DFY (done for you)

• 25% close rate: anything higher means you’re too cheap

• “If you have to sit down and do 10 hours of work to be successful, then you’re just doing stupid shit”

• How to make a 500-listener podcast worth $100k

Show Notes:

Connect with Jonathan

Jonathan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/

AJ&Smart: https://ajsmart.com/

Facilitator.com: https://facilitator.com/

The Unscheduled CEO podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/

Connect with Finn:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Mentioned in the episode:

Nat Eliason’s essay on de-atomization: https://www.nateliason.com/blog/de-atomization-is-the-secret-to-happiness

Built to Sell by John Warrillow: https://builttosell.com/

Sprint by Jake Knapp: https://www.character.vc/sprint

Skool: https://www.skool.com/

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: All right. I’m here with Jonathan Courtney, who is the CEO of AJ&Smart and host of the unscheduled CEO podcast. AJ and Smart is a portfolio of a bunch of companies. There’s facilitator.com, which is facilitation.com. You guys do in-person as well as virtual workshops. You have a course, world-renowned, I would say, studio. There’s AJ and Smart Studio, which is a product design and strategy studio with clients like Google, N26, and IKEA. And then there’s AJ and Smart Partners. Where you guys build funnels for companies that have generated over 30 million for partners. The reason why I wanted to have you on is I’ve been aware of you for a very long time. Like I think all the way back when I think you guys were working with Iman Gadji or something and he was pushing you guys very hard as a case study or something like that.

Jonathan Courtney: Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: I think that’s how I got aware of you first and then And then yeah, just over the years and I wanted to have you on because Or talk to you, and I don’t know into what kind of podcast this will turn, but I listened to your therapy session with Jason Fried like last year. I looked it up. It wasn’t like in March. Yeah, I listened to that back then and it really resonated with me. And then recently you’ve been popping up on my LinkedIn and it just feels like you’ve been having... More fun with LinkedIn. And then I also checked out AJ and Smart and I saw like the, I watched the 35 minute video where you announced kind of the future of AJ and Smart and facilitator.com.

Jonathan Courtney: That’s still on the website. I think so. Yeah. Nice. That’s good.

Finn Thormeier: I found it there.

Jonathan Courtney: Yes, it is. It’s still there. Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: Which is also a great video. It was really well made.

Jonathan Courtney: Thank you very much. And thanks to Eli at AJ and Smart for editing it and shooting it.

Finn Thormeier: So well done. And so you ran and partly still run an agency. I run an agency. It looks like over the years you went through many kind of iteration and modes. And I mean, you talk about in that video about how you struggled with on the one side, you want to be very creative and you used to make movies in the past and make music, but it almost felt like The less creative you were, the better the business was doing. And the more creative you allowed yourself to be, the less well the company was doing. And so you made some changes. And I guess I would like, if you’re open to this, almost use this as like the reverse Jason Fried call.

Jonathan Courtney: Sure. I don’t remember the Jason Fried call exactly, so as long as I don’t have to remember what

Finn Thormeier: happened. I want to just get your thoughts on a bunch of things because I think you’ve already played through this game through a bunch of versions and I’m trying to think through some stuff right now. I run an agency. We’re a small agency. We used to be me and nine people at some point. Right now we’re me and two and a half people. Lots of AI involved too. Been running this kind of as an agency for the last six years. We’re doing about a million. We’re doing LinkedIn for CEOs. So basically like a ghostwriting agencies for founders, CEOs, executives, mostly B2B tech. And it’s been amazing. It pays my bills and all of that and more than that. But it’s not what I want my legacy to be. I kind of fell into this LinkedIn and personal branding thing and it’s opened lots of doors and I don’t want to wake up in 10 years and still run a LinkedIn agency. I want to build a village. That’s what I really want to do, but that’s not necessarily a business.

Jonathan Courtney: A physical village?

Finn Thormeier: Yes. Well, it doesn’t have to be like a village, village meaning like in the middle of nowhere. It could be like within a neighborhood of an existing city, for example. Okay. But like an actual physical thing with people. I can go into that at length, but And so I’m trying to figure out what’s the path for me to not kill this amazing business that still teaches me a lot of things, but at the same time don’t neglect the dreams of the future and how can I have fun with this while I’m doing it. Not feel like it’s draining all of kind of, as you say, it’s draining all of my creativity where I feel like it’s just actually it’s harder to, you know, spend a day being creative about this new thing that I want to do because you’re so in the business. There’s always stuff. There’s always things to do. There’s more meetings there. So.

Jonathan Courtney: It’s easier just to run your business than to do the thing you’re excited about doing because it’s just, you know what to do. You just open your emails, you open Slack, you have stuff to do. Yeah. Easier, basically. Yeah.

Finn Thormeier: And so, like, I also listened to your podcast from, I think, last week where you talk about Done For You, Done With You, DIY. I’m aware of that concept also for a while, Sam Ovens and Niemangadji and And there’s been many points where I was like, should I just do the course? But then also I think like many people, I cringe at the idea of a course. And I know that’s kind of my own self-limiting belief. And what you said really resonated in that episode, but yet I’m still kind of struggling with like just doing it, even though it makes sense to me on a theoretical level. So maybe I’ll stop talking here for now. I really didn’t plan. Fully through how this episode could go, but I don’t know if you have some thoughts or questions at this point.

Jonathan Courtney: Well, I think the thing you’re saying is a very common challenge. Can I ask you how old you are, if you wouldn’t mind? 29. 29, okay. So you’re 10 years younger than me. Well, do you mind if I ask you, do you have kids?

Finn Thormeier: Yes, one daughter.

Jonathan Courtney: One daughter, same. Okay. Did anything change in your business of how you think about your business when you had your daughter?

Finn Thormeier: I definitely have less time to work on the business because I do like spending time with family. I think the whole idea around the village kind of started forming partly as a result of prioritizing other things in life.

Jonathan Courtney: Was that triggered by anything? What would the village thing, why do you want to work on that?

Finn Thormeier: There’s a couple elements to it. One is, last summer, I live in Berlin, we live now in Prenzlauer Berg. We moved here a year and a half ago last year. Um, and, and I know people in Berlin, but I don’t get to spend a lot of time with friends. Um, partly because I’m one of the only people in my friend group who has a child and that makes it very difficult to meet up with other people. And you know, Berlin is very big and widespread. So like you sometimes often still spend 45 minutes riding the tram just to get to someone else in a different neighborhood. Like it’s not spontaneous.

Jonathan Courtney: I don’t leave my neighborhood.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And so last year, a couple, two, three friends of mine moved close to where I live. And that was incredible because they also work with me at my company. And so we co-worked together. We did things spontaneously. We would, you know, go play pool in the evening or something like that. And so I just realized that that was a lot of fun. And so my thing is like, I think my quality of life, the biggest lever I have for raising the quality of my life is how many of my close friends and family live within walking distance from me. Like literally walking distance. I leave the house on fit and walk there in five minutes. Right now I have zero within walking distance because for different reasons they all moved away again. So I want to recreate that. The second thing is like, I just crave, I think we live in a unique point in history where you used to have to make the decision between either you wanted to build something and have an impact and build a career, build a business, build something. Then you had to move to one of the big cities, one of the hubs, right? LA, SF, New York, Berlin, London. Or you said, I wanted to be in nature. I want to walk barefoot. I want to be in touch with animals and small, tight community. Then you could move to the countryside, but then you’re kind of limited with that. I think now you could do both. You could have a village in the middle of Portugal, attract a bunch of builders and digital nomads and people who want to build things online. And everyone can have ambitious things that they want to build and create and put out into the world. And at the same time, you’re in The middle of nature and you can walk out barefoot and you have animals there.

Jonathan Courtney: Have you seen what Peter Levels has set up in Portugal?

Finn Thormeier: I know of him. I didn’t see that he’d set something up in Portugal.

Jonathan Courtney: There’s a couple of ways to think about the thing you’re talking about, and I’ll touch on the Peter Levels thing. First of all, you know about this concept of atomization and de-atomization. There’s an article that I really would recommend you read. It’s written by a guy called Nat Eliasson, and I think it’s called, what’s it called? Nat Eliasson atomization. I ended up doing an episode on this. It’s called deatomization is the secret to happiness. And the concept is that a lot of the things we do in life today are all living within their own little bubbles. So work happens here. Socialization is planned and has to happen here. I go on a, you know, dates happen here, holidays happen here. When I want to work out, I go over to this place and all of these things are separate and isolated from each other and don’t cross over. And when humans feel good, it’s usually when these things are blended into each other. What you’re talking about, being able to walk to people on foot. Now, And the act of just living life is you working out. So you go meet your friends and you go play football. Right, yeah, yeah. You don’t have to go, hey, let’s go to the gym. No, you don’t have to do this. You just go and hang out with your friends and then it’s happening. It’s all blended. So this is the idea of deatomization. And the idea that this Nat Eliasson guy has is that the more The internet gets really amazing. All of these things happen, all of these AI tools, the more isolated we’re getting. And by the way, the remote workification of everything just caused a major fuck up. I mean, I am a CEO of a company. I allow everyone to work from home. We have a big office here in Kreuzberg. And even I’m infected by it now because I’m like, it’s more convenient. I just got a bigger plate. And it’s not good for me and it’s not good for any of the employees, but it’s cheaper and it’s more convenient. So we used to have three offices, now we have one office. And it’s really hard to fight against the tide of convenience. So it’s like, do I want to be convenient and kind of numb and unhappy? Or do I want to have, you know, I don’t want to have to go all the way to the office and hang out with people and feel better. And so there’s a couple of like converging things causing this. I would say there’s a few ways you can approach this that might not be what you’ve thought of yet.

Finn Thormeier: Can I add the last missing piece where maybe that gives you more context? So those two things, I think I could see that just as I run my business and at the same time, I try to just get my friends to move here or I move to a village or something like that. It’s more like a, you know, just how people have their job and then they just decide to move to a different city. Like those things, where I see almost like My calling in it is that I follow Naval and one of the things that Naval talks about is basically like what are the things that feel like work to others, that looks like work to others but feels like fun to you. Yeah. Yeah. And in my free time when I’m not working, I read books that most people, when I tell them I read these books, they’re like, why would you read those things in your free time? Like I read very dense things around philosophy and politics and economy, economics. And recently, or two years ago, Balaji, the ex-CTO of Coinbase, he’s big in the crypto space.

Jonathan Courtney: Is that up like an island or this new- Yeah, he talks about

Finn Thormeier: network state. And it’s basically this idea that you should bring back entrepreneurship to country building and that we want to have a path for people to be able to basically start their own country. And the village is kind of like the proto- Country for me. And for me, it’s just like, I think it’s one of the highest impact things you can do to contribute to that idea. It would allow me to actually nerd out on, you know, culture and politics and philosophy and what values and, you know, do you have a religion or no religion? Which religion? Do you borrow from a bunch of them, right? There’s so many things you have to think through or just be like, I could see myself just doing this for 50 years and at least feel like even if I just make a small dent in it, it would feel like I did something with my life, you know? And so that’s where it feels like it’s not just like, let me do the business here and then just move to a village and have this life and get some friends there, because that’s the kind of MVP, let’s say, of that idea. But the real long-term idea is to contribute to that.

Jonathan Courtney: Right. Okay. Yeah. I don’t ever have this sense personally of this legacy thing. I don’t have any, that’s just not something I ever care about. I’m very focused on what’ll keep me entertained and what makes me feel good. And I don’t mean like that just means I discard everyone else’s emotions. I just think that’s a core when it comes to business for me with longevity. And being able to actually do things over a long period of time, I’m always just thinking, well, is this something I actually would like to do? And in five years, do I think I would still like it? So just to kind of clarify that if I’m giving you my thoughts, I actually don’t care about the legacy thing for myself at all. I couldn’t care less about that ever. And so I never do anything with that in mind. So I think that there’s a couple of ways. Basically, you need to get this out of your system. You need to clean this out of you or else it’s going to irritate you forever. And I think one of the things I’ve also said is I don’t want to be one of those guys in his 50s being like, I could have been in that band. I could have done this thing. And to get it out of your system, I think there’s maybe three or four approaches and there’s nothing else and you have to kind of choose a path. One is that you just sort of wait around until the moment presents itself. You keep running your current business, you keep reading on the side, you keep doing all of that kind of stuff. And then maybe you happen to bump into someone and that like moment It appears and you’re like, this is the thing, this is when I should push for it. And I’ll come back to like, I ran this, I started running these creative retreats because I couldn’t find that for myself and I started doing it. But first I talked about it for years. So the first thing is you just sort of do what you’re doing now, I guess in a way it’s the, let’s just see what sort of, you know, happens. The second thing you can do, which is not a lot of people talk about this, is you just try to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. You figure out what the number is and you figure out what the number for you where you say, well, if that was in my bank account, then I don’t give a fuck anymore and I’m just going to feel safe to try this. And then you rejig your business to be that money focused. It’s like, how does this just generate as much revenue as humanly possible so that I personally have so much financial security that I don’t have to think about this anymore? If it fails, it fails. I don’t care because I’m financially secure. So this is kind of what, you know, if you think about levels, Peter levels, you know, just get extremely rich, have like a net worth of, you know, 20 something million, whatever. Then you’re like, okay, I’m just going to buy a huge house or like, you know, even the proto version of this is you could buy a whole entire building. And then you could be this sort of center of gravity for people who you want to spend time around. And I see people do this relatively successfully where they accumulate so much wealth that they are the center of gravity of their social pool because everyone’s like, yeah, I want to live better. That I want to be around where this person’s doing stuff because it’s just they’ve got so much cool shit going on. It just seems like a perfect utopia for me and obviously just make sure it doesn’t turn into a cult. That could be your Or that could be another. I don’t know if you know the singer, this ginger guy, what’s his name? Red-haired guy. The big one? Yeah. And Mark Zuckerberg did this too. He just bought every house around his house. And now all his friends live in this area around him. Option two is get ludicrously wealthy. And then you have a path to it. And I guess option three is you have to stop what you’re doing, completely shut it all down, and you have to pursue it 100%. And I think that’s probably the hardest one to do because then you really have to commit to it. All of that being said, I actually think option four is the best option, which is what is the tiniest version of this experiment that could exist and that could be announced. So I’ll just give you an example of that. So I was talking about this, all of my grand plans to do these crazy retreats that are basically going to be like festivals, you know, like Fusion Festival is happening this weekend, kind of like that, but for just an unplugged retreat. And I was hanging around with a friend of mine. And he was like, Jonathan Courtney, because I was trying to find one for myself. I was trying to go to one. He’s like, Jonathan Courtney, you’re not going to find one. And so you have to make one. But I don’t want to do a big fucking event like this. I don’t want to be an event planner. And I also, I don’t know if I want to commit all of my time and money to this. And he was just like, yeah, because you’re just thinking about it way too big. Like, what if it’s just 10 people, they’re just your friends, you do a week, you just book an Airbnb. Okay, maybe it costs you 10,000, 12,000 euros or something. And you just do that. And everyone can chip in or whatever. And I was like, fuck, yeah, that’s right, I’ll just do that. And that turned into a 90,000 euro event because it just scaled off, which I ran in February, an hour and a half north of Berlin. And so that, in which we rented an entire Pretty much an entire, what looks like an entire village. We rented a farmland with lots of houses on it and everything which you can rent for like 30 people. And that was my first experience of this thing that I was trying to create, which was what if there was just no internet, no digital devices, only art, supplies, and books for an entire week. And also nobody knows where they’re being taken to.

Finn Thormeier: What was that Foundland called? I’m just curious.

Jonathan Courtney: I’ll tell you privately not on this call because the location of these events are supposed to be secret. Okay. But yeah, you can rent it. You can do 100-person weddings there, huge events, but we rented the entire location just for the 30 or so people we had. Which meant it felt abandoned. It felt like just for us. It was really interesting. And so one of the things you can consider is, is there, because the village thing is so big that you can almost constantly make excuses to yourself as to why this is not the right time to do it. You know, kids are a great excuse for this, for people dragging things out forever. But maybe there is a shortcut to experiencing So I think I’m

Finn Thormeier: already somewhat on that path. My 30th birthday is coming up in August and I’m currently looking to basically do some version of what you just said, rent a big ass house somewhere. Cool with a lake and a big garden and get a bunch of my friends and family to just join me there for a week. Yeah, that’s great. And it’s working-ish. I try to block every Friday. I call it Village Day, that every Friday I’m not allowed to work on the agency and I only do things Village. I’ve so far had one. The last two I skipped because my wife was traveling and I was alone with the little ones. I was like, there’s no way I can do this. I just need the extra time for the agency. That’s working, I don’t know, mediocrely.

Jonathan Courtney: It’s hard to set aside time for things that are not Extremely real. Like, as soon as I announced this retreat to my audience, you know what I did is I just booked the place. You had to. And it cost 90,000 euros. And so then I was like, I actually have to do this now or else I will be so embarrassed and so fucking disgraced. Yeah. That for me helps me... I realized I can’t make things real unless they are actually real, and so I have to manufacture. Because if you’re an entrepreneur, that’s also what we thrive on, sort of real stakes. The stakes have to feel very real.

Finn Thormeier: So it’s almost like just announcing like, hey, next year we’re going to do a month here and just burning my boats to some extent.

Jonathan Courtney: There needs to be a possibility that you can really be embarrassed. I think what happens a lot of people when they have these dreams is that it’s used as a thing to talk about something I’ll do in the future, which also makes you focus on things you don’t care about in the present. The future thing also never really happens. It’s like me with my music, I was like, I’m going to get back to being a musician as soon as AJ and Smart hits this point, or I’m going to get back to movies. But then that just also... It’s just not true because if I would want to really do it, I would just do it. The temptation is not high enough to actually pursue it. And for me, I then have to test, okay, I need to get this out of my head. I need to stop thinking about it so I know whether or not I actually give a shit. And now I’ve done actually that event. And now I’m like, yeah, I don’t know if I need to do that again, actually, even though it was the center of my entire attention for like five years. I loved it. I don’t know if I want to do it again. I don’t know if I want to be the person running that. Yeah. And yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s really one thing Americans are good at that we as Europeans are not good at is they have the balls to just fucking keep trying stuff. And you know, if you rarely talk to an American entrepreneur, when I’m talking to an American entrepreneur and I’m like, ah, I have this, they’re just like, then why the fuck don’t you do it? And I’m like, oh, but yeah, you don’t understand. I have a business. I have a kid. And they’re like, yeah, but you just, why are you still talking to me about this? And in the meantime, they’ve done like 10 versions of these things and like three failed, but they don’t care because they have more of this kind of boldness. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, yeah.

Finn Thormeier: If hypothetically someone were interested in the second path, which is get as rich as possible as quickly as possible, how would you approach that in my situation?

Jonathan Courtney: Well, first of all, you do have to actually kind of decide that you want that. So you have to decide, okay, I...

Finn Thormeier: Did you ever decide that? I mean, you never talk about money, but I assume from everything I see, you must be... You could probably retire.

Jonathan Courtney: I don’t know. I mean, I spend a lot of money, so if I would live a more reasonable lifestyle, I could have retired. Yeah, that’s the annoying thing about the AJ and Smart numbers being public because I remember I had an event like last year and someone was like, oh, I heard you guys made six million last year. And I’m like, how the fuck do you know this? Looked it up on the Internet. Fuck. So. This is hard for me to talk about accurately because I started the company so long ago that I’m sometimes putting together the narrative in a way that might not be accurate. I’ll just try to be as accurate as possible. I just mean like I don’t remember 100% what 26-year-old Jonathan Courtney was thinking. Well, so first of all, I’m not that connected with money in terms of I don’t keep checking my bank account. I’ve never have. I don’t know much about investing. I don’t... I never was good at budgeting or any of these things. When the company and AJ and Smart, even in our best times, at the end of the year, I’m like, so how did we do? Even on our 6.5 million year, Kyle, my finance guy, is like, yeah, we made like 4 million profit or something. I’m like, cool. I just move on to continuing running the business. So I don’t have a strong hyperfixation on the topic of money. However, what I will say is I do use it as a sort of like a, or my brain definitely uses it I’ve seen it as a sort of like feeling of whether I’m winning or not winning. And that actually does seem to matter to me even though I wouldn’t like to admit it. It does definitely matter to me. So numbers going up absolutely affects my mood and excitement about work. And so I think what happened to me is about six years into running AJ and Smart, we were sort of stagnant maybe around Again, it could be 1.5 or 2 million. I can’t remember. It’s stagnant around that number with maybe a 15 to 20% profit margin. And I just started like, honestly, I started reading some books like Built to Sell was a really good one that kind of clicked in my mind. I started, I read... I was listening to a lot of Tim Ferriss’ podcasts. I heard like Derek Sivers who sold his company for like, I don’t know, 5 million. Then I started traveling. I just had this in my mind where I’m like, if I just spend more time in the US, I’ll be connected with people who are just more in the world that I want to be in. And they were often just a lot more wealthy than me. Their businesses were often doing a lot better than mine. Honestly, it just slowly and quietly raised the stakes for me. An example of that, I flew to San Francisco. I had the opportunity to meet. Do you know this design sprint thing? We used to talk about the design sprint a lot.

Finn Thormeier: I’m aware that you guys did that. I’m not in that world too much.

Jonathan Courtney: So I read a book. I really loved it. I was like, holy shit, this book is really clicking with me from How to Run an Agency. And I contacted the guy. He was based in San Francisco, a guy called Jake. I hung out with him. And he was like, how much do you guys charge for running these things for clients? And I was like, oh, like... You know, 16 to 25,000 euro or something like that. And he was like, oh, yeah, like in Silicon Valley, if you charge anything less than 35, people won’t take you seriously. And I was like, oh, OK, so 35 is the next, you know, the next client who contacted us. And they’re like, yeah, fine. And so immediately I started to realize, oh, like there’s a lot more. There’s a lot more playroom with numbers than I thought there was. And then I started traveling back and forth more and more to the US. And every time I would go there, I would just get more of this entrepreneurial, explosive kind of energy. And you mentioned Iman Gaji. So what happened there was very interesting and I’m sure this was a turning point. I never want to pretend that I am the reason why we succeeded 100% because like meeting him definitely changed a lot of stuff in my brain. What happened there was like I was on Instagram because we were doing a lot of Instagram content back in the day. I got an Instagram ad from this guy who says, I can get you more call bookings or something. I can’t remember exactly what it was and he had a free discovery call. I jumped on the discovery call the same day, had a call with Iman. He was 17 or something. And he was just very good at selling his product. And he charged us, I think, and it’s probably cheap now. I guess he doesn’t even do this anymore. But he charged us £25,000 to spend two days at the AJ and Smart Office to show us how to Do a funnel or something. And it was then when I realized, okay, if I’m paying him $25,000 and he’s 17, and I’m 26 at the time or something, I’m like, why does he have this much leverage and why don’t I? So I think I was always thinking about how is it that this person gets this much for two days and it takes me Three weeks to make the same amount of money. So I was always looking for that, these leverage points, like how can I do less, you know, the four hour work week concept. And then it was him who showed us a funnel. And so when it came around, I think a year later or something to the time where I wanted to do a course, and the interesting thing is we didn’t come at a course from the course world thing. We came at making a course because our clients, which are large corporates, wanted to have videos of our training. So we came at it from that perspective and we were about to launch it from that perspective. But then Iman was like, Oh, you know, like a business like yours could make millions with a course like this selling to actual individuals. And we paid him €5,000 for a call to do a phone call. Because I was like, dude, can I just ask you some questions? And he was like, yeah, like 5,000 euro. And he was like, yeah, you put the course on this platform called Teachable. You like do a webinar, blah, blah, blah. And he told me about Sam Ovens, who I didn’t know about. And yeah, that kind of brought me into this world of like, I guess it’s called like Course Bros. But the funny thing is like, we were selling something that was very unrelated to what everyone else was selling. Everyone else was selling sort of like marketing courses. And we were selling facilitation training essentially to corporates. But the techniques and tactics there were fascinating to me. And what I was really fascinated about, which I’d never experienced before, was we ran a webinar. And in that webinar, which is just a live like one and a half hour thing, we made 18,000 euro. And back in those days, that would have taken like five or six calls with a client to close a deal like that. And we’re like, whoa, okay, like 18 individual people bought this thing for a thousand euro and we don’t even have a list yet. We’ve never run ads yet. This is just some, we made a Facebook group and tested that out. And so we, I think at that point I started to think, okay, there’s definitely a Money to be made here. It’s very interesting. This is a very interesting potential good way to have better cash flow for our business. And yeah, it’s a very long roundabout way of saying I do. I do care about money. I do focus on that as a measurement of is something working or is something not. But also for me, it’s like if it’s not going up, then it feels like kind of pointless to work on something. And so I’m not saying that that’s a good way to think, by the way, for your audience. I know some especially fucking Europeans get weird about that shit. No, it’s not all about money. The funny thing is about the Europeans who get pissed off about this shit are the people who have all the money from their parents anyway, so they don’t need to ever worry about it. It’s not all about money, bro. Let’s hang out in the forest, bro. Yeah, your parents are giving you like two million, you know, just your little trust fund. Shut the fuck up. I’m from Ireland. We don’t have that shit. Oh, yeah. I think the money thing is a focus for me. And that... From that point, I’m always looking for ways to increase the leverage and how can I do one hour of work for what normally it used to take me a month for the same amount of money so that all of the rest of the time I can just do all my weird stuff. I guess that’s the way I’m always thinking

Finn Thormeier: about it. Okay so I’m just trying to think through do I on the path of let’s say gaining more leverage both have more optionality in the future as well as let’s say free up time to dedicate towards getting started on the village idea or really putting stuff down there would you tell me To start selling the done with you thing, which right now, like we’ve been kind of gradually going out market. I’d say we used to be working with very early stage startups and just work with the founder. And now more and more, we’re getting companies that are not enterprise, but they’re doing 10, 20, 50 million in revenue. And we’re working with multiple executives at that company to kind of done for you, interview them, create LinkedIn content for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I’ve thought about this idea of like, do I just offer companies to train their in-house content or brand team on how to activate their executives and how to, you know, build out their LinkedIn and do all of that? Is that just something that you feel like is a no brainer for what I’m doing or?

Jonathan Courtney: So generally, I just think every agency should have the following business model, as you already saw on my podcast, but for your audience who don’t know about it, at the very top is your most expensive thing, the most hands-on thing, which is your done-for-you package, which for you guys is Managing and, I guess, growing people’s LinkedIn profiles as a ghostwriter, managing the whole thing, growing it for them. I guess, is it so that they get more leads or why is it? Is it for authority?

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, well, pipeline, they mostly sell into enterprise. So we then run ads with it. We connect it to a clay table. We pull up people who engage with their content. Got it.

Jonathan Courtney: You help them get more B2B leads for themselves. That should be for the people who want to pay you the most. And ideally that should be at a price range where only 25% of those leads actually close. Meaning every 10 people you talk to, only two and a half of them should be actually up for it. It should be so expensive that anything more than 25% close rate means you’re not expensive enough. Sometimes when I’m chatting to an agency owner and they’re like, oh my God, 80% of the deals are closing. I’m like, Well, first of all, you probably don’t have enough calls coming in to even, it sounds like then you’re just doing two calls a week or one call a week or something. And then they’re so qualified, it’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of them are We’ll close and that’s, well, it’s not scalable. So then the second thing is the done with you option where someone calls. So let’s say the same person who you’re doing, let’s just say you’re doing some guy called Dave’s LinkedIn account, right? He calls, you say, well, we charge, I don’t know, 25K a year for this service. And he’s like, oh man, yeah, that’s a bit too much. And then you can say, well, We also have a service that is a lot lower, a lot cheaper if you’re willing to put in a little bit of work. And that is we have this closed private community with weekly coaching calls. And so I’m going to talk a little bit about this. I’m going to talk a little bit about this. I’m going to talk a little bit about this. They build up their LinkedIn profiles and you can essentially be part of this private thing for and we charge, for example, we charge between five and six thousand eight hundred euro for this package. That for us is our are done with you, one of our main done with you packages. And so it’s that the key here is you’re moving your one to one client to a one to many client. And in that group, you could have 30 people paying.

Finn Thormeier: And are you selling this to the same audience, meaning the corporates? Or is it that naturally you attract kind of like a lower market audience?

Jonathan Courtney: So we have, for us, we just want to have all of the options for people to buy. And so we advertise generally to... The B2C, so individuals wanting to do something with us. And this automatically, you’ll have someone from Microsoft jumping on one of these B2C calls. And they’re like, hey, I’m personally, individually interested in learning facilitation. I want to buy your course and I want to buy blah, blah. And then we’ll say, cool. Or... How about you get nine or 10 more of your colleagues in and we can do an in-person version of this or whatever. And so we will upsell to the done for you or bigger things. But if you look at our YouTube channel, it’s always kind of advertising to individuals, We’re learning the thing because it’s very hard to advertise to corporate entities or enterprises or CEOs. And so we always advertise rather to the employee who might be working with that person who we want to sell to. And so yours is a pretty easy one, like you’re selling hands-on, Social media management services to individuals. You could just as easily give those same individuals a video onboarding with a weekly group coaching call. And say, you’re part of this program for six months. It costs $5,000. If you want to stay in after that point, it’s an extra $2,500 per six months. And then you can keep joining those coaching calls. I have two of these communities active right now. I can share my screen and show you exactly how that looks. And those for us, I mean... Those, it’s hard to say exactly now, normalized over 16 years, but I would say they’re pretty significant. Some years those have maybe been, are done with you stuff has probably been responsible for 80% of our revenue on some years. We still do large corporate deals, but now the cool thing is like we can do a 500k deal without me having to do a lot of work because I can, so for example, I have a deal, Where in September, I’m going to fly to the US, do a two-day workshop for a corporate client with 75 people in the room. That in itself brings in 200K. And that’s a large scale training, right? Instead of doing one to one. But they then buy licenses to our program for the employees who they don’t want to pay to be in the room with me. And then that can be another year’s worth of licenses being purchased. And so it just gives us, again, more options to sell more stuff.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And do you do it on school? Is that where you do the community?

Jonathan Courtney: We have the community on school, yeah. Some people use Circle. There’s a lot of other options as well. I use School just because I was in Sam Oven’s Mastermind for years and I saw him making it.

Finn Thormeier: And you went to the – because my head when I thought about let’s offer a done with you, like mid-tier offer would be to say, hey, you know, like we train you kind of like the workshop that you do where you actually – Maybe not go there in person, but virtually like it’s just you with us and we’ll just spend a month or a couple of weeks or a two day or whatever. And we just train you on everything on how it works. And that’s the done for you. But you went to weekly coaching, put them in a community, give them a course or like a setup course to get started.

Jonathan Courtney: Well, there’s a few options. Another option is an easier one. So if you go to ajandsmart.com forward slash partners, I think this is probably It’s as close to your business as we have. Is it agents? Yeah. So our main thing we offer costs. So the main thing we do with clients here is the two-day growth jam where we spend two full days with the CEO of a company, usually some of their team members. They pay us a hundred thousand euro. It’s me and Laura who both have been running AJ and Smart for years. And over those two days, we just... Figure everything out for growing your business over the next 12 months usually. And at the end of it, we have this guarantee that if you don’t feel like you’re going to be making an extra 200K after spending these days with us, we’re just not going to charge you. So that’s our done for you, extremely hands-on offer. And as you can imagine, not a lot of people can buy that. And so our done with you is group masterminds and those are in person, although I just did a virtual one like three weeks ago. They’re in person mostly and usually up to 25 to 35 people will come to it and we charge usually around 8,000 to 9,000 euro per ticket. The difference is that you’re in a group. You’re hanging out in a group and I’m helping broadly everybody. I’m answering everybody’s questions. The days are long, but I’m not sitting with you and helping you. And so that’s a really easy in-between step before you do any sort of courses because courses are annoying as fuck and they take loads of time. Basically, what I’m trying to say is One-to-one or one-to-many. It’s the same thing, but you have to just figure out how do you deliver it in a one-to-many approach. And the beauty is, as you can probably guess, you get 35 people in a room for a one-to-many thing, and then two or three of them will be like, actually, can you just do it for me? And then they want the one-to-one thing.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit reframing how I think about done for you, whether it’s done with you because the two-day, you kind of positions the two-day growth gem as the done for you because it’s one-to-one. But obviously, it’s still kind of like, hey, here’s what needs to happen. It’s not that you guys run their marketing for them as a retainer.

Jonathan Courtney: Yeah, we do not because we don’t want to is the main thing. However, we are sitting there, we’re writing the copy. We are, in some cases, creating the landing pages on the fly, making the email. We are executing as well within those two days. I’ll give you an example. Actually, let me just check if they’re on the actual website as a testimonial. Well, almost every example that’s on the website, what happened is they spent two days with us and within seven days, they’re already making double, triple, quadruple what it is they spent with us. Part of that is because we’re actually helping them make the thing as well. So I’ll sit there and write the person’s webinar, like with Alan, who’s on the website. I’ll sit there, he has his phone on record mode, and I’m like, all right, here’s what you say. And I’ll just say the whole webinar, the hook, everything. And so there is the execution element, but the minute the two days is over, it’s over.

Finn Thormeier: Right. And And to come back to, because one part of it is obviously, and I know we’re almost running out of time here, one part of it is gaining more leverage to make more money, which I am not opposed to, even though I’m German.

Jonathan Courtney: That’s also so that you don’t have to do stuff you don’t want to do. Like that’s a big part of it for me. I also don’t want to, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do someone’s marketing for them.

Finn Thormeier: Right, because then you’re in the day-to-day grind and optimizing their ad campaigns. And to you, those two days are more fun because you’re actually in person. You create things you do think. It’s one of, it’s new for you. And then the kind of, let’s say, day-to-day, okay, let’s check the ad manager every day and let’s do a webinar every week. That type of routine is not executed by you guys.

Jonathan Courtney: No, I would hate to do this.

Finn Thormeier: Interesting.

Jonathan Courtney: We have this other option which we very rarely sell where if you are making over a million per year revenue and we do the growth jam and it works out, then we might do like a 12-month advisory with you where we take a cut of your revenue, you have access to calling me, all of that stuff. But I mostly don’t like doing that. Rarely even pitch it as an option. I also just don’t like to be on anybody else’s schedule, hence unscheduled. I don’t want to do that. A lot of the leverage building is just to not have to do anything on someone else’s time.

Finn Thormeier: All right, let’s wrap it up. I have lots to think about. I took notes.

Jonathan Courtney: By the way, I’m not in a rush if you have more questions. I have to record my podcast. You have to? As in, I would like to.

Finn Thormeier: Well, I think part of the problem for me, and it sounds like it’s a little bit similar to you, On the one hand, I’m money motivated. Like, it’s not like I’m opposed to money. I like money. I also like nice things. I like the fact that we have a nice apartment here in Berlin. All those things are expensive. On the other hand, every single time where I was like, okay, you know what? I’m just gonna fucking heads, go heads down. Just, you know, stop doing the reading and the this and the that and go play billiard with my friends. And I’m just going to lock in and just like go ham on this stuff. The second that we reach a really healthy point where I’m making, you know, after tax, I’m making really good money that’s beyond what I need. I’m just like. Oh man, but I really do want to go play billiard. And I really do want to, you know, read in the morning for an hour or an hour and a half before work. And like, it’s just like drains me if all my day is just sitting here for, you know, the eight or 10 hours and grinding away. You’re dumb.

Jonathan Courtney: You’re literally not you didn’t hear it. If you have to sit down and do 10 hours of work to be successful, then you’re just doing stupid shit like you don’t need to. I’m joking, by the way, that you’re dumb. I know you’re not. Who knows? All of all of those things that you do, you should also have time to do while you’re building your business and making it successful. I think that anyone The only people I know who are grinding that hard and are successful are Silicon Valley folk who actually need to do because they’re building crazy shit and they’re trying to win. When you’re not in a crazy zero-sum game, you’re running an agency, there’s no reason on this planet that you should be working What do you even do in 10 hours? What is there even to do? The only reason that you would fill that time is if you’re making the huge mistake of being the CEO and delivering stuff. Founder CEOs of agencies should not be delivering more than one to two days per month. And all of the rest of the time is about looking for the leverage, right? It’s like, again, if you just want to be a freelancer, that’s fine. That’s different. But if you’re running a small business and you’re looking for leverage and you want to do interesting things, then... An example, this week is our biggest week of the first half of the year. The two biggest days at AJ and Smart are Black Friday and this week. This is the summer sale. And... I have nothing to do with it because I did my like couple of hours a couple of weeks ago with my team and this now I’m sitting here chatting with you. I’m going to do my podcast afterwards. I am not sitting around executing that and I’m not talking to the clients. I’ll turn up to that two day workshop in September. I’ll get on the plane. I’ll do those things. I think that it’s often It’s a lack of looking for ways to be more leveraged. And I think that in Germany, especially people, when I’m chatting with people and they’re like, oh my God, I’m so busy, I have to do this. And I’m like, don’t you have a personal assistant? And they’re like, oh no, that’s stupid, I can do it all myself. Yeah, but this 1,500 euro per month to get a good executive assistant means that you don’t have to go and figure out the thing that broke in your apartment and now needs to be fixed and now it’s taking up your time. I think that, again, that’s why I come back to this concept of leverage. If you have to work, if the only way that you make more money is by working harder, it means that you need to tweak the system a little bit. For example, this podcast, my show, The Unscheduled CEO, I record once per week with no prep. I mean, like you’re doing here. It’s not a huge amount of prep needs to be done. I don’t know what you’re doing, how you’re monetizing this show or if you are at all. I’m not.

Finn Thormeier: I’m not.

Jonathan Courtney: So I monetize my show. So the leverage from my show is I’ll do an episode and I’m thinking the whole time, well, what’s the way for me to I actually like to do the podcast. That’s something I like doing. So I’m like, if I’m putting my time into that, well, how does that turn into a million euro in a year? How can unscheduled CEO be one million euro per year? Because then I’ll keep doing it and I like to do it. Versus And then I test things out with that. An example of that is I’m doing the podcast and then I’m like, okay, how do I just see if this thing can make 100K all in one go? And again, almost no one’s listening to my show, but I want to test it out. And so I say, hey, Next month, I’m going to be in LA. If anyone wants to learn this marketing stuff directly from me, I’m doing a little mastermind. It’s 8K per ticket. You can buy it. And then I’ll see how many people buy it. I’ll see how many people sign up for it. And so then I see, oh, okay, 20 people signed up for that. That’s based on only 500 people listening to the show. If 10,000 people are listening to the show, I could do that twice a year with 50 people coming to it. And then I’m always just thinking, How can I do the things that I enjoy doing? I like to play video games. That’s my thing, by the way. And so I want to record one hour in a day, get the episode out, and I want to not have to think about it until next week again. And I will monetize it once or twice a year and that covers the entire year of that one thing. And so, yeah, I’m always just trying to figure that out. What is the hyper leverage? And by the way, I stole this idea from other people. Maybe one of the biggest things I can recommend to you is spend time with other people who are so over the top high leverage that you feel like an idiot.

Finn Thormeier: I do feel like an idiot on this podcast.

Jonathan Courtney: But you know what? Listen, one of my mentors, a guy called Blake Lagrange, I did an episode with him. I chatted with him and he was like, he was like, all right, Jonathan Courtney, I’ll mentor you for 100K. I’m like, what? He’s like, yeah, come hang out with me for two days and it’s 100K. And I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? And And I fucking paid for it. He managed to sell it to me. And guess what? That’s why AJ and Smart Partners two days cost 100K is because he unlocked that for me. It was extremely valuable, like the two days with him. And the fact that I paid $100K meant that I took it extremely seriously. And it was like, if you are able to find people... Who are doing things that are so high leverage that it seems actually ridiculous and it seems like not, like sometimes you hear like, oh, did you know that this famous singer, well, let’s say Ed Sheeran, you know, like he probably goes on stage for two hours and makes 30 million.

Finn Thormeier: Sure.

Jonathan Courtney: So why should we be...

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, why should I not be making 30 million in

Jonathan Courtney: two hours? It’s not about 30 million, but why should we be trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel so often and not think about... I mean, you spend all this time reading all these books, you’re collecting all this knowledge, you’re providing a service to clients that maybe makes them a lot more money than you charge them. I think sometimes it’s just about finding what’s the way, what would it look like? And this is a Tim Ferriss thing, which I think is fantastic. What would it look like if I could only work four hours per week? What are the activities that I would actually do? What would I do if I could only work four hours a week? And the weird thing about doing that experiment is that maybe that’s all you actually need to do to build something extremely leveraged.

Finn Thormeier: You can head out here any second you want. And I know that in the end, it’s me who needs to do that thinking. But if you were me with the things that you know now, which are limited, what would be the first thing that you would do to gain more leverage in my business, to make more while working less?

Jonathan Courtney: Honestly, I would say try to find... This sounds really stupid. Try to find an American... Business owner who’s willing to mentor for a day or something. They will show you in a day or two hours or three hours what no European can show. I think you just need to sometimes be shown how And like how unbelievably inefficient it is what we are doing. Like, you know, when I saw, when Iman Gadji came to my office and he was like, oh, you guys are like, we were 36 people at AJ and Smart running design sprint. We were 36 people, I think, making 3 million euros. And there was then a point where we were like 14 people making 6.5 million euro. So it’s a... There’s really often... Often it’s not just that you need to sell more or you need to put your prices up or whatever it is. It’s often that we’re choosing hard mode by selling very hands-on complex services. And... If you just see someone else doing something similar to you, but doing it in a much more leveraged way, it can be shocking. And like Blake, he didn’t have any social media following. I didn’t know anything about him. And he’s like, Yeah, a hundred thousand euro. I’m like, fucking hell, dude. All right. The other thing is also like, you know, there’s another thing to all of this is you want to look for people who are, who understand the value of buying a shortcut. Like if you’re trying to sell to people, if you’re trying to sell your service to people who are nitpicking and we’re like, I don’t know, maybe I could do this myself. Then it’s also more difficult than it needs to be. Often, it’s about who you’re selling to, looking for the highest leverage or the people who just really respect their time and really want someone else to do stuff for them. You don’t want to be wasting time trying to convince people who are frugal and do everything themselves already. It’s a waste of life. But if I were you, honestly, I mean, if you can... I don’t think Blake mentors anymore, unfortunately. I have a recommendation of a really good mentor, and this is not a, I don’t get something if you use this person or something, but I worked with a guy for two years. I don’t know if he does one-on-one anymore. His name is Brian Franklin. He used to be, coincidentally, the business mentor, business coach of the CEO of LinkedIn, so there’s a connection for you. And I worked with him for two full years every week. And this was someone who This was someone who changed a lot for me in terms of business growth. And he’s very good also at the personal stuff like the village thing. He actually does something like this actually in the US. I won’t talk about it in case he doesn’t want me to talk about it because I used his name. But he does something like a very large community thing. It’s funny because I remember I was... So I was at a conference in Nashville. I was having breakfast. I sat next to this guy and this guy was like, hey, were you in Sam Owens Mastermind? Really weird coincidence. And I was chatting to him and he was like, yeah, man, currently the thing that’s the biggest impact on me is that I’m working with this guy called Brian Franklin. And I asked him to connect me with him. It took a month because Brian does not respond.

Finn Thormeier: It’s Brian with a Y, right?

Jonathan Courtney: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He should have like- Yeah, I think I found him.

Finn Thormeier: Executive coach.

Jonathan Courtney: Yes, exactly. I can personally say that he was a very good coach and every session afterwards, I felt like, okay, this person is just smarter than me. This person is more leveraged than me. This person makes more money than me. This is important as well, actually. I think it’s also good if the person is just more balling out than you and basically doesn’t need it and is only doing it for fun. Brian does not need to do this, I promise you. It’s the same with Blake. That’s why he’s like 100K. If I had said 50, he would have said, yeah, I don’t care anyway because I spend time with him. This guy doesn’t need one cent more. If you can find these people who are done making money and just looking to chat to other entrepreneurs, it’s just insane value. Brian is great. Okay, I’ll check

Finn Thormeier: it out. I think there’s probably some blocker in me too because I’ve never

Jonathan Courtney: had a mentor or coach or... Dude, that’s insane. That’s insane. That is actually kind of probably...

Finn Thormeier: I mean, I follow people and I listen to people, but not like one-on-one, you know, that type of thing.

Jonathan Courtney: Can I tell you something that’s probably blocking you more than anything? Yeah. If you’ve never spent money on something like that, then... I say this to people all the time. If you don’t spend large sums of money to get a shortcut, then it’s hard for you to sell things that give a shortcut to other people for large sums of money. So it’s very easy for me. If I was your salesperson for some reason, it would be very easy for me to sell your thing because I buy that kind of thing all the time. So I’m like... When someone’s talking to me about that, it’s so clear to me that they should buy it because it’s a shortcut. Yeah, I think this might be a case of just breaking some limiting beliefs and getting into the habit of also being a buyer. So then you can see, for example, when you’re working with Brian, you’ll see he turns up to a 90-minute call. I don’t know how much he charges, but it’s a shit ton of money. And you’re going to be like... You’re going to be like, this is a week’s worth of my time to make this much money and he makes it in 90 minutes and he didn’t even prep. And he probably doesn’t even remember who I am until he gets on the call. And yet it’s really effective. And by the way, this guy, he’s a great example of someone, at least the last time I worked with him, he doesn’t even ever try to lock you into any sort of, like, you have to do six sessions with me. You just continue it if you want, you don’t if you don’t. And he said his minimum is two years with every client. And I was like... I was like, for me, I don’t think that’s really makes sense because I always outgrow. But no, two years, two and a half years, I think I worked with him and I still never really outgrew him.

Finn Thormeier: Noted. All right, let’s wrap it up here. I have a page of notes. This was really, I really appreciate you taking the time to- Yeah,

Jonathan Courtney: thank you, man. Thanks for having me on.

Finn Thormeier: Cool.

Jonathan Courtney: The Executive Brand Podcast.

Finn Thormeier: There you go. The most unusual episode.

Jonathan Courtney: What’s it usually about?

Finn Thormeier: Building an executive brand. So like I usually interview CEOs or founders or executives who have a big brand, which you have, like you do and you are kind of represent, like you’re a CEO and you have a big kind of personal brand. But we didn’t talk about how you did that.

Jonathan Courtney: Yeah, well, next time. Next time.

Finn Thormeier: All right. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Jonathan Courtney: Of course. Yeah. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And thanks for letting me ramble and see ya. Nice.

Tools used: Riverside, Ordinal, Claude, Fibbler, Jungler, Clay (no affiliation with any of them)

If my CMO told me we need to “do more on Linkedin”, here’s how build our content / thought leadership strategy in the next 30 days. Let’s say we sell $100k ACVs into the Fortune 5000:

1. Focus on people, not the company page. I think this is now well-established: personal profiles get about 8x the reach of a company page given the same amount of followers

2. Make a shortlist of potential candidates among the execs and SMEs at our company. I’d be looking for people who

• (a) have relevant expertise for our ICP (if we sell to technical leaders, I’d be looking at my technical leaders)

• (b) are good communicators/presenters (they’ve …

Read more

He started the newsletter in March 2021 as a side project and went all-in about a year ago. Since then, his one-person business is doing over 7-figures a year, between brand partnerships, subscriber revenue, and advisory work.

In this episode, we talk about how to build & monetize a newsletter, including how Kyle tests every newsletter idea before writing it, why Kyle’s pulling away from Linkedin, leaving Substack for beehiiv, and more.

We discuss:

• How Kyle started & grew his newsletter from zero to over 85,000 subscribers in 5 years while having a full-time job

• How Kyle validates newsletter ideas before writing them up

• How he creates his graphics, which are a large part of his success/shareability

• Why Kyle is pulling away from Linkedin even though he has 110,000 followers

• The math behind running a 7-figure/year solo creator business

• Why he left Substack for beehiiv after 5 years on Substack

• Why subscribers you get from the recommendation feature are mostly “garbage”

Show Notes:

Connect with Kyle:

Kyle’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-poyar/

Growth Unhinged: https://www.growthunhinged.com/

Mostly Growth podcast: https://www.growthunhinged.com/podcast

Connect with Finn:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: Alright, my guest today is Kyle Poyar. He is the founder and writer of the Growth Unhinged newsletter where he talks about monetization, pricing, GTM growth and other practical advice for B2B startups. He started it in March 2021 when he was still working full-time at his job and it has since then grown into one of the most popular newsletters in the B2B space with over 85,000 subscribers. He is also a prolific writer on LinkedIn with over 110,000 followers. His background is in Venture Capital where he was an operating partner at OpenView, which invested in companies like Datadog and Calendly, as well as, found this out during research, a company called Project 44. My company is called Project 33, so clearly they have the edge on us. Matter of fact, we’re 25% worse than them. Kyle is also the host of the Mostly Growth podcast and he advises B2B startups on growth and monetization. Kyle, thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro?

Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on. No, I think you got it right, but it’s been interesting that I started the newsletter while working full-time in VC, but it’s grown big enough to kind of support an independent solopreneur business, which is pretty cool.

Finn Thormeier: Nine months ago, right? Nine months ago, you went kind of fully on this business?

Kyle Poyar: Exactly. So it was August of last year, of 2025, that I made the decision and then really went in earnest in September.

Finn Thormeier: There you go. Okay, so you started it in March 2021, and then you were full-time at OpenView. In those five years, it’s about five years, you’ve grown it to 85,000 subs. Before we talk about the lessons, I’m just curious about your writing process. What does it look like? How much time do you spend on each thing? How do you pick topics? Just start where you want, walk me through your process.

Kyle Poyar: So the starting process I had is probably the most relevant for anyone that’s thinking about starting a writing practice. I began on LinkedIn actually before I ever had a newsletter — wrote long form content around COVID. Very active on LinkedIn. And I would realize I’d have these pieces. I mean, a lot of my posts would fall flat and have no engagement, but I’d have other pieces that would do quite well, but I would run into character limits, or I’d post something and then it was impossible for someone to find a couple of weeks later. I’d also get DMs from people that were smarter on a topic than I was. And so I was like, I feel really constrained by LinkedIn.

And so what I decided is not just that I would throw out LinkedIn for a newsletter, but I would test ideas on LinkedIn. I would see what my audience cared about. I would take that as signal to go write a deeper piece on a topic, or sometimes string together multiple LinkedIn posts to turn it into a piece. And then I’d promote that back on LinkedIn. And so it all became a flywheel where for me, it wasn’t like I’m going to have this brilliant idea and write about it and then post. I think about content as a place where writing and distribution need to be on equal footing, and where the best practices create a flywheel where you’re building for and with a community. And I think that’s what can make a newsletter really stand out.

Finn Thormeier: And if I remember correctly, back then when you started on LinkedIn, you were an operating partner. So you were working with the portfolio companies at your VC firm on their go-to-market strategy, pricing. And I think you were kind of talking about lessons, takeaways, insights, things that you were seeing with those portfolio companies.

Kyle Poyar: Exactly. Exactly. And so for my content calendar, and even for the LinkedIn content calendar, often it was pretty informal.

Finn Thormeier: Did you back then have like a, “I’m going to post every single day” or “I’m going to post twice a week,” or was it just completely ad hoc whenever something popped into your head?

Kyle Poyar: Back then it was pretty ad hoc. I mean, some of these people post literally daily, including weekends. I don’t know how you have the stamina to do that. I’ve always been long winded and I just don’t have enough good ideas that I want to go that deep about every single day. My cadence over time has been about two to maybe four times a week — almost never publish more frequently than that, unless something is like really wrong with me. And it’s pretty ad hoc. I like to post multiple days a week. And so if I don’t have any ideas, I might find something from my archives and kind of tweak it or tailor it. But generally it’s not super planned far in advance. I try to keep things fresh.

There’s one point in my career when I used a scheduling tool, actually the native post scheduling tool within LinkedIn. And then I realized it was either the content was outdated, or maybe it was LinkedIn penalizes you for scheduling content — I don’t exactly know what it was, but I felt like that was actually having way worse results than publishing fresh insights. I almost always post in the morning. I do find that that’s when I have my best ideas, I’m sharpest, but also that’s when people are most engaged. Sundays work surprisingly well. I think there’s just a lot less competition and you get all the LinkedIn diehards on Sunday, but then your post is the first thing people see on Monday too. So I do find that that works quite well.

And I will say one thing that works quite well for me is I think about the visual as much as the text. I spent six years in consulting and so I would make decks — I’ve always thought in terms of slides — but I would translate that to LinkedIn infographic style visuals. And that’s become a bit of a signature, a calling card for me. But those visuals perform far better than text only posts. They’re way easier to share. I think it’s partly to do with, it feels save worthy — like, oh, I should save this and maybe bookmark it for a presentation I’m working on, or I can share this with a friend or colleague. I think it’s also something that drives more dwell time. These are generally not super simple infographics. They’re pretty complicated ones, which means people are actually spending real time reading it. And that means they’re spending more time on LinkedIn, which means LinkedIn can get more ad dollars. And so they’re going to push that harder. And so these dense infographics are the starting point for most of my posts.

Finn Thormeier: How much time do you spend on an infographic?

Kyle Poyar: 30 minutes, maybe. I actually do them all by hand. I have got a Google Slides template that was made by a great designer when I was at OpenView, and I’ve kept that template and made some tweaks. But it has a couple of fonts in it that are out of the box in Google Slides, a couple of colors, nothing fancy. But I literally will make the visuals myself, which feels weird to be doing point and click in 2026. Some people would say, is that really the best use of your time? But honestly, if you get the visual right, that can make the difference between a post being viral or not. I reuse posts in speaking decks when I go out and do public speaking. I’ll put those visuals in my newsletter articles. A great visual is so valuable that it feels very hard for me to give that up. But yeah, I’m not taking hours and hours on it.

Finn Thormeier: Do you start with writing the text and then later you find a graphic that works for it? Or do you start with the graphic and then write?

Kyle Poyar: Oh no, the graphic is the starting point. And then I write something to go with it. I think of a hook that I think is useful. And then the graphic is so dense, there’s actually a lot of writing in the graphic itself. And so I often copy and paste from what I wrote for the graphic into LinkedIn. It’s kind of like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, people put captions with their posts, but realistically, you scroll through Instagram for the image or for the video. And I think people do similar things on LinkedIn where the hook has to be strong, but the visual also has to be quite strong.

Finn Thormeier: Which visual are you very proud of that we can a little bit use here as an example?

Kyle Poyar: You can take the pricing one. That’s the one you’re hovering on right now. This was a pretty basic one, but it’s rare for a pricing LinkedIn post to go viral. Over 3,500 reactions, over 200 shares. And this is something I didn’t pay to boost at all. I just was seeing people really struggle with pricing for AI. And as much as I thought I had some good guidance for people, really the reality is every company was kind of all over the map in what they were doing. And I just wanted to highlight some examples of really interesting pricing models from the big players and from others. It gets almost used as a brainstorming thing probably that a lot of teams can share internally to be like, hey, here’s a bunch of very different examples from a bunch of oftentimes well-known brands on how they do it that can get us started on how we can think about changing our pricing model.

Finn Thormeier: Plus you obviously have quite a few recognizable logos in here. So I think that also helps.

Kyle Poyar: But you can see this is not done by a designer. This is something I literally put together in Google Slides. The resolution could be higher. I actually think that overpolished stuff looks too corporate-y and people actually get turned off by that. So something that feels a little bit more rough works better.

But yeah, I mean, to me, the best content that’s going to do well has to either educate or entertain. And the entertainment is a very high bar. Some people do it extremely well. Like Elena Verna has such amazing memes and, you know, hilarious content. I’m not a standup comedian as much as I would love to be. And so for me, that educate bucket needs to be there. And so I need to fit into: this needs to be a how-to guide or something that a reader can take and immediately do something with what they read. And if I’m not at that bar, if it’s just like information, that’s maybe like, oh, I learned something — that’s not really enough anymore. News isn’t enough. Information isn’t enough. It really needs to educate and teach someone how to do something.

Finn Thormeier: What’s the correlation between — so when your process was, hey, I post something on LinkedIn that I learned working with the portfolio companies or that I kept repeating myself and this resonated, let me make a newsletter out of it and expand on it — how close is the correlation between “this did well on LinkedIn” and now expand on it in a newsletter and it did well too? Is it like 100%? I’m just kind of curious on that.

Kyle Poyar: You know, it’s a positive... I don’t know what the exact correlation would be, the R squared, maybe like 0.6. I don’t know. Don’t hold me to that, but it’s not a perfect correlation. There’s definitely things — I wrote this LinkedIn post about customer success: don’t blame customer success for your churn problem, here’s all the other things that are probably causing your churn problem. That did incredibly well on LinkedIn. I think every customer success person probably liked it so their boss would see it. None of my readers cared about it. I think maybe it was because a lot of that was not necessarily totally new information, or maybe they didn’t have a big churn problem, or they just see me as more marketing and go-to-market focused rather than customer success oriented. I don’t know what it was, but that one fell completely flat when turned into a newsletter.

I do find things that don’t resonate at all. So screening out things that no one cares about, that’s the most useful bit, because then I’m not spending hours and hours writing a full newsletter post about something I already know is not going to do well. And at the very least, even if the newsletter post doesn’t perform as well, I’m going to be able to repost that same kind of idea on LinkedIn to amplify my newsletter. And I know my second LinkedIn post will actually probably do quite well. So that correlation — if it did well on LinkedIn the first time, having it do well on LinkedIn the second time, that’s maybe an R squared of 0.9 or something.

Finn Thormeier: Is that still your process today? You said this was kind of how you got started.

Kyle Poyar: So that was my process for several years. I’m no longer an operating partner. And so I still do that sometimes, but honestly, I’ve been really disillusioned by LinkedIn. And so I’m kind of moving away from LinkedIn right now. And I also just have... I’ve published more than 200 newsletter editions. I think I’m coming up on 250. So at this point I have themes that I know my audience cares about. I try to have a mix of content that touches on different themes.

Finn Thormeier: You said you’re disillusioned by LinkedIn. Tell me more.

Kyle Poyar: I mean, LinkedIn used to be fun in 2020, in COVID times, but that’s when I really started getting active. I did it because I wasn’t going to events. I wasn’t meeting people. And I actually met real life, very smart people on LinkedIn. They would maybe show up as someone commenting on a post, or maybe they’d DM me as a result. We’d hop on a video call. Some of the best networking connections I have came from that period.

And now I’ll write something, no matter how good I think it is, the comments are like 80% garbage LinkedIn slop comments. The engagement on content has fallen a lot compared to what it was before. LinkedIn seems to be prioritizing content that is of mass appeal. I think they’re even piloting showing things like how much of your content is shown to in-network versus out-of-network. But I have over 110,000 followers. My followers don’t consistently see my content. It’s like the content is shown to random people who might or might not care about my stuff. And that means I need to have hooks that are basically bragging about myself or telling people that don’t know me who I am. I like to have 201 level content — I don’t write for a beginner audience — but to do well on LinkedIn these days, you kind of have to be doing 101 level stuff. And that’s just way less fun all around for me. And there’s not a whole lot in it, except for yes, the occasional post does quite well and it drives a lot of newsletter subscribers even still. So I’m kind of forced to be on it. I’ll also scroll it occasionally to get inspired by what’s working for other people. I’ll use that to find some experts that I’ll interview for my newsletter or some case studies to share. But even that’s gone downhill, because my feed just — I rarely see that kind of good rich post on LinkedIn anymore. I see like AI slop stuff.

Finn Thormeier: And do you think that is — I mean, there’s the kind of AI slop automated comments. I definitely see that too. And it just ruins your experience, because I feel like it makes you question every single comment. Some comments are obviously AI. Some comments are obviously not AI. But then there’s a lot in the middle where you’re like, this could be AI, but this could also be an actual person trying to ask me a question right now. And I’m trying to decipher, is this AI or not? Because if it’s a real person who wants to ask me a question, I want to answer them. But if it’s someone who automated this stuff, I don’t want to answer them. But it makes me second guess a lot of comments anyway. So that’s obviously happening. There’s a lot more content happening. And then it sounds like this algorithm change, that it’s less and less of a follower based feed and rather an algorithmically driven feed. When did that shift happen time wise, where you’re like, I’m just not enjoying LinkedIn anymore?

Kyle Poyar: Really, it’s been the last six months. I mean, I’ve always been hot and cold with LinkedIn, because there is a real creator burnout phenomenon where I could have a couple bangers in a row and be feeling on top of the world, even though I’m like, LinkedIn doesn’t matter, LinkedIn doesn’t matter. But really, from a psychological standpoint—

Finn Thormeier: The dopamine is real.

Kyle Poyar: Yeah, it has an ego effect. But then you go a couple posts that are full crickets, no one cares at all. I’m like, I have 110,000 followers, but I got like five likes on something. Did I completely lose it? But the highs and lows are really challenging to deal with. And so that’s been the case for a while, but this slop era has really been since probably January of this year. Everything’s like slop or hype posts, or they just feel — it lost the fun that it used to have. We’ll just say that.

Finn Thormeier: Given that you want to move away from it — I mean, I think I saw a newsletter by you where you talked about growing the newsletter, and I think LinkedIn was your biggest or second biggest kind of growth driver in terms of subscribers. Given that, how do you think about it? Has the newsletter now reached a scale where it’s self sustainable to some extent? Or how does that affect things?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah, you know, as much as I would love for my mental health to be off LinkedIn, it is probably the most powerful growth lever that I can control. And if you think about what options you have available to grow, there’s some platform growth opportunities. So Substack has recommendations and they have Notes, which is kind of their LinkedIn. beehiiv has a recommendations feature as well. And so that’s a core part of growing any newsletter, I think. But it’s a little bit more algorithmic. It’s tied to the platform, tied to your relationships with other authors. So definitely recommend — that’s really low hanging fruit acquisition for anyone growing a newsletter.

Then there’s paid. And so you can pay on beehiiv for boosts, or you can pay on third party platforms like Meta or like LinkedIn. I am doing some paid testing with boosts via beehiiv that are coming in at decent cost per acquisition. I haven’t really scaled that channel.

And then otherwise you’re looking at word of mouth, which is a really fantastic channel, but hard to measure, hard to control. I get a lot of growth through just readers forwarding the newsletter, dropping it in Slack organically, sharing it on LinkedIn. That’s fantastic. But I’d love for every piece I write to be a banger that people organically share, and it’s just hard to fully rely on that as a growth channel either. And so when you look at things that you can control that are not that expensive, LinkedIn is one of the few channels out there. I do think AEO and SEO has some low hanging fruit and that’s something that I neglected for a while. And then my own referral program for readers has been another area. But yeah, LinkedIn is the single largest growth driver in terms of both my direct traffic sort of attribution, and then I now have a survey of new readers when they sign up — I have a “how did you hear about us” field and LinkedIn is number one there too. And so I’m just like, that is so organically tied in with the content I’m writing. These are inherently shareable on LinkedIn. I’ve got a large LinkedIn audience. I’ve got to keep relying on that even if I hate it.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, it is interesting. I had Emily Kramer on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, who has one of the biggest Substacks, the MKT1 newsletter. And I think she said her biggest source right now is recommendations. And for her, LinkedIn is a surprisingly small part. Where she even has more subscribers on Substack than she has followers on LinkedIn.

Kyle Poyar: I would be very careful with recommendations. They’re a great source of growth. And at one point, about half of my new subscribers came that way — I had over 500 publications that were recommending Growth Unhinged. And essentially what this looks like is, in the signup flow, someone goes to sign up for another newsletter and it’s like, hey, this writer recommends these 15 other publications. Do you want to subscribe to these too? And a lot of people click select all, and then all of a sudden they’re auto subscribed to 15 newsletters they know nothing about.

It’s great for growth. Don’t get me wrong. If you care about the vanity metric of your number of subscribers, it does go up. But often deliverability is really bad with those subscribers. Unsubscribes is really high. Substack as a platform doesn’t really let you dig into unsubscribes very well or get much visibility into the subscriber quality by channel. But realistically, a lot of the recommendations oriented subscribers were garbage. And that’s why even Substack started tightening up that growth lever a bit. And that’s why I was seeing less subscribers come from it. But I also just think that was a channel that was fantastic in like 2023. And then like every channel, it kind of got saturated, where instead of you having a handful of other writers you’d maybe swap with, I see some publications that have like 60 publications they recommend, because they’re gaming the algorithm. And then there’s some reciprocity where you’re like, maybe I want to recommend them back. But show me — I want someone to show me what’s the delivery rate and the open rate among the subscribers they got through recommendations, especially for people doing this gaming. It’s a vanity metric. The reality is there’s not a lot of real quality subscribers to that channel. And your own channels — if you get subscribers through LinkedIn or direct to your website or through word of mouth, there’s an affinity to your newsletter. They subscribe purposefully for your content, and that’s going to be a way healthier subscriber.

Finn Thormeier: Now, I have similar feelings around the LinkedIn part and the algorithm, and that it’s less enjoyable. I’m just curious — so I’ve been playing a lot more with this idea of a newsletter. But I’m also aware of this idea of grass is always greener. So I’m just curious, you have the perspective on both, and actually having a big audience on both and kind of keeping the machine fed every week. Is the newsletter a more, I don’t know, sustainable, less up and down journey? Or are there just other downsides that make it net-net just as bad or just as good?

Kyle Poyar: Well, with the newsletter — I think that anyone that is trying to do any sort of creation online, whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is, the algorithms are fantastic for getting some initial reach, but they’re increasingly feast or famine. There’s no guarantee that anyone following you will see your content. Linking someone outside of the platform is really challenging. So you’re stuck within this sort of walled garden. It’s just a really challenging place to have any sort of control over your growth or what people are seeing. And so I encourage people, yeah, sure, use the algorithms, build a following there, but quickly pivot people from the closed social media platforms onto something that you control.

And what I find for the newsletter, with my control audience, views and engagement are extremely consistent. I mean, yeah, do I have some open rates or some subject lines that do better with open rates than others? Yeah, of course. But my open rates range from like 42% to 46%. It’s a pretty tight window. My deliverability is consistent. As much as people talk about inboxes being spammed, I have pretty good confidence that my newsletters are getting delivered to someone’s email, and that a lot of people are opening them. And then my views are pretty consistent from newsletter to newsletter. I mean, we’re looking at within a range of plus or minus like 15 to 20%, right? So you’ve got some good ones, you’ve got some bad ones, but it’s very consistent.

And I get a lot of replies. So one thing that’s great with a newsletter is someone can just reply and end up in your inbox. And so I also just feel a much stronger direct connection, and it’s almost always a positive connection. If someone doesn’t like a post, they’ll just unsubscribe to the newsletter. They’re not going to send me hate mail about it. If they do really like a post, they’ll reply. It’s often a great source of leads for some of the consulting and advisory work I do too. I would encourage just about anyone — a newsletter is one of the best things that you can build. The challenge though is the growth is a little bit more linear. It’s slow and steady growth. You don’t have these algorithmic highs and lows. So you have to be willing to build over the long term. And you need content that stands out, that I think needs to be so good people are willing to pay for it. Otherwise you don’t earn the right to end up in someone’s inbox week after week. And not everyone is willing to invest that much in content.

Finn Thormeier: How do you feel about saturation for people who don’t yet have a newsletter? Because obviously, similar to LinkedIn, which is getting more and more crowded, when you and Emily Kramer started on Substack five years ago, there were a lot fewer newsletters and people on Substack. How do you feel about the opportunity now for someone new starting?

Kyle Poyar: It’s funny. When I started my newsletter, I thought I was late to the game. I thought Substack was already saturated. Lenny had been on Substack for a couple of years at that point. There were already a number of newsletters that had really taken off. I felt like it was cliche in 2021 for someone who worked in VC to have their own Substack. The thing is, it’s just hard to predict with a lot of these channels. Even if something seems saturated, there’s often still room for one more. And just because something in aggregate might be saturated doesn’t mean people aren’t going to care about your content specifically. I think that there’s always space for one more.

And my advice for people though, is niche down. So yes, marketing as a concept might be a pretty saturated space, but do you work in demand gen or product marketing or content marketing or a different part of marketing? Are you an expert in like AI tooling or XYZ channel that most people haven’t really optimized for? What’s that really specific expertise? And if you can find something that maybe a thousand people care about, but those thousand people care about a lot, that gives you permission to expand from that position of strength. In my early days of writing, a lot of my writing was around pricing and product-led growth. I actually don’t have that much on product-led growth anymore. And pricing is maybe one out of five, one out of six newsletters. I’m much broader. I’ve broadened my topics. I’ve added a lot of new content pillars. But I started with a niche — I even had posts that were about pricing for product-led growth companies that were specifically B2B software, like series A through C. I don’t think that there were more than 100 companies that would really care about that content. But if you can write the best content for a hyper-specific niche, that earns you the right to grow with your audience.

Finn Thormeier: And then for people who want to do that and run it as a business, so monetize the newsletter — what’s your recommendation? There’s different levers, obviously. I think you have premium subscribers, which is $15 a month. I think you have some affiliates with companies that you recommend. You obviously have an advising practice. I think you have sponsorships and partnerships. Across these things, what advice do you have for people who want to start writing but then have a path towards actually making that a real income?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. I mean, I pay a lot of attention to monetization. It’s where I started my career. I spent my first six years doing pricing strategy consulting work. And so monetization is near and dear to my heart. Substack will tell you that is the number one way they make money. They take a cut on every transaction from a subscriber. That is their business model. I don’t think that’s the business model for most B2B newsletters. I personally am probably going to make six to seven times as much revenue from ads as I do from paid subscribers this year. And I have a six-figure paid subscriber business. It’s just that the ads are that valuable. And that is with publishing once a week.

Finn Thormeier: And when you say ads, is that when I go to your newsletter, basically in the top, you recommend like...

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. And I’m very careful — I don’t recommend products, but in the top, I have an ad slot that’s up to a hundred words. So there’s a specific offer that I have, and yet the text is in my writing. So some of my partners like to just promote the product, other partners like to promote like, hey, we’ve got a webinar coming up, and so the offer is about attending their webinar. Or they’ve released a new content playbook about a topic and that’s the offer. But really it’s like — if you read The Economist and you read it in print, there’s the inside of the magazine cover, right? What’s that first ad that everyone sees as everyone opens to the next page? That’s how I think about the ads in my newsletter. And so that inventory is very valuable to advertisers.

Finn Thormeier: So you always do two slots per newsletter? Because I think there was beehiiv and then Monday.com.

Kyle Poyar: I do one slot, the monday.com feature. And this is, I think, something I should probably clarify for my readers. I love featuring case studies of interesting things people are doing, and that does help promote their company, but I don’t charge for that. I mean, I think the way I charge is through a lot of their time — these are very time intensive pieces. And I ask for very potentially sensitive information that a lot of brands are not willing to share publicly, but I want them to be able to share some of these next level insights with my readers. And so for people that work on collaborations with me, it’s free to collaborate — bylines, guest posts, some of these case studies. But I monetize that ad slot at the beginning.

Finn Thormeier: And so you said you have a six-figure business just from premium subscribers, which is the 15 bucks per month, and then you’re going to do six to seven times more than that from the ads.

Kyle Poyar: Exactly.

Finn Thormeier: Which, I mean, that means you do minimum 600k a year just from ads. And is it fair for me to say to just divide that by 52, if you’re going to do a weekly newsletter, to get a rough estimate of an ad spot cost?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. People can do the math. It works out to be a little over 10 grand per slot. It’s not totally apples to apples to think of the cost per slot, because when I think about ad packages, I have multiple editions. I have minimum duration. So my minimum buy for most partners is quarterly, but I have a number of partners that actually have annual ad buys. And so there are in some ways volume discounts, but also some of these partnerships also include like I’ll speak at one of their customer events, or we’ll do a couple of webinars together, and then maybe do some LinkedIn posts around that partnership as well. And so these are partnerships that are anchored in the newsletter, but there are different packages to monetize things beyond just the ad slot.

And for my partners, that’s valuable because it’s really about maximizing that exposure over a long period of time. Because if you’re trying to promote an enterprise-grade billing software that might be six figures or maybe even a seven-figure purchase for customers, someone’s not going to see one ad slot and buy your product. That’s just not how it works. You want to stay relevant — you want them to know who your brand is and stay relevant for them, so that when that customer has the purchase need, they already trust your brand and that brand is front and center in their consideration set. And that’s where I find quarterly actually gives more time for attribution, for marketers to actually see that these ads are generating a return for them. And it also gives more time for some of the early pipeline to either close or not close, so they can ideally attribute deals. Because at the end of the day, for ad revenue, the ad business models have been about cost per impression or cost per thousand impressions. I think that is total BS in B2B, because it’s really about influence on purchasing within really target customers.

Finn Thormeier: Right. And who is your audience, right? I mean, you have a very specific audience and probably quite a few senior leaders in there. So that’s very different.

Kyle Poyar: Exactly. I think about the ceiling on how much you can charge for ads is based on what ROI you generate for your advertisers.

Finn Thormeier: Right. What part of the business is the advising, consulting? Is it a meaningful part of how you monetize having this audience, or is it something you do on the side that’s nice but not super meaningful?

Kyle Poyar: So the advising, consulting is about a third of my overall revenue. So still fairly healthy. And for that, I devote probably about half of my time to advising and consulting work. And the way I think about that — so it is healthy from a monetization perspective, I do a good business there, but realistically, it helps me stay fresh to what’s top of mind for high growth companies. And it holds me accountable to real life problems and trying to be helpful to an individual person and company on something that is hard for them to solve. And by doing that, I think that it gives me a lot better insight into what topics I should write about and how to write in a way that’s really going to speak to what people care about. And so, yes, I do monetize on the advising, consulting side, but honestly, a lot of it is picking the right companies to work with and problems to solve with them. And if I can do that, it really makes this whole thing a stronger flywheel.

Finn Thormeier: How do you think about — I’m just curious. So I have a Substack. I have 3,000 subscribers. It’s basically just my podcast. I have a podcast where I interview mostly around executive brand and LinkedIn and audience growth. It’s not monetized at all. The only way that I kind of monetize it is that I run an agency that does executive brand, but it’s very indirect. Because I oftentimes talk about things that are not at all LinkedIn or executive brand related. How should I think about — is this worth trying to turn it into its own thing that I monetize, by trying to grow it more aggressively, by trying to charge premium subscribers, which I don’t do, but trying to find advertisers, which I don’t do, but trying to monetize it in different ways? Or should I just keep it as the podcast, the Substack, that every now and then sends a person to my agency? How would you consult me through this?

Kyle Poyar: Well, so yeah, 3,000 is on the smaller side for monetization, but it’s not too small for monetization by any means, especially if it’s a very hyper-targeted audience that is at an executive level. And so if you could run your subscribers through an enrichment, or if you have a reader survey where you get a sense of who these people are — if these are executives at interesting companies, I think there could be some monetization opportunity.

A few thoughts I have for you. One is, podcasts are worth a lot more in terms of cost per impression than a newsletter ad. And I think part of that’s like, it’s a host read in your voice. Maybe people can double dip where they get promoted in your newsletter and your podcast. I think it’s also a longer ad slot usually, and so it can convey a lot more nuance and information about the company. So having ads that run in your newsletter and your podcast — I think that you could do that. And I think you could start charging — I don’t know exactly how much for them, but I think you can start charging a handful of partners.

And my personal view is that your readers and your listeners will not be fazed by it. I went five years before having a single ad in my newsletter. I was really nervous about what happened when I ran my first ad. There was zero change in terms of click-through, open rates, anything. When I partner with great brands, I actually get good feedback from a lot of my readers, because they all work in tech. They’re working in go-to-market. They’re getting exposed to tools and offers that they had not heard of before, that are going to help them do better at their job. And so for a lot of readers, if you partner with great companies and the offers are valuable, they see it as a win-win. And so in your space, if there are products that you’re regularly partnering with on your consulting work with companies and finding yourself recommending frequently — these are products you already trust, you think your readers and listeners are going to get value using — I don’t think people would be that turned off by the ad slot.

And by having the ad slot, that’s actually going to give you money that you can invest in acquisition. It’s going to give you more reason to keep doing it. You’re going to be on the hook to keep publishing. When you get busy with the consulting work, you’re not going to fall off an episode — you’re going to have a reason to do the episode. And so I would start there. I don’t think that the paid subscriber model makes as much sense for a podcast newsletter combo, but there are some things if you wanted to go paid from a subscriber standpoint. There are things that you could do, like publish somewhat regular in-depth reports, or take some of the consulting work.

That kind of has a monetization ladder to more effectively monetize different folks. And honestly, that’s how I think of paid subscribers for my newsletter. I’m not actually gating almost any newsletter post. They see the full edition. What I do is I produce these in-depth reports that are like 60 page PDF reports. And I do that once or twice a quarter, on topics that I think are really valuable to readers. And every report has a summary in the newsletter. That summary is fine for 95% of people. Maybe 5% want to read the full 60-page report. That’s worth a lot, I think. And that has a lot of my kind of proprietary expertise, that are the things that I work on on a consulting basis too. And so I charge for that. And I don’t think it hurts the free reader experience that I charge for it.

Finn Thormeier: beehiiv versus Substack. You switched to beehiiv a couple months ago after using Substack for many years. Obviously, I think you’re now a beehiiv partner, so that’s important to disclose here, I guess. But I’m curious about how you would compare them, what you like more of which, which one you think in the end is the better platform for whom?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. So I went about five years on Substack. And then it was when I started getting serious with things like wanting to have advertising, wanting to have paid subscriptions — that’s when I started realizing all the limitations in the platform. So if you have a free newsletter, Substack has great free tools. They don’t charge a subscription fee. It’s really intuitive. There’s some built-in growth through recommendations and Notes. It’s a really simple platform to start using. But if your ambitions are much more advanced with your newsletter, I think you’re going to find a lot of limitations.

Things that I ran into with Substack that people should be aware of before getting locked into the ecosystem were: for a while, your website had very little customization abilities. I think that’s changed a little bit. It’s hard to produce ad slots that feel kind of carved out from the content, because there’s not a whole lot of customization in the editor. It’s kind of meant to look more like Substack. The emails get delivered via Substack deliverability, and so their deliverability health impacts yours. On beehiiv, you can send from your own domain.

Finn Thormeier: Have you seen a big change in your deliverability?

Kyle Poyar: So yeah, my deliverability rates were trending down to low, like 91, 92% on Substack. And when I moved to beehiiv, they’ve been at 98, 99% pretty consistently. Open rates have gone from low to mid-30s to mid-40s. So my emails are getting delivered and read at much higher rates.

Finn Thormeier: What’s the theory on the — I mean, that’s a much higher open rate, right? What’s the theory on why is that?

Kyle Poyar: So I think some of it is just the deliverability tools that beehiiv has, and also being able to deliver from your own domain. I think that actually lands in people’s inbox at a higher rate. I did a one-time cleaning of a few thousand people that had not gotten any emails in months via Substack. But that cleaning is not nearly enough to account for how big of a jump I did have and how consistent it’s been. Other things I did — I did a staged rollout. So I actually did a couple of sends to a smaller, more engaged audience before ramping up the sends to the full list. And I think that staging did really help warm up the domain and get the emails landing in the primary inbox. I’m not a deliverability expert though. That’s the kind of thing that I’m really happy for a platform to manage. I just want the emails to be in people’s inbox.

Finn Thormeier: Sure.

Kyle Poyar: But other things — analytics are totally different. So you can actually see things like unsubscribes. You can see much better analytics on the website and on the subscriber behavior via beehiiv. You also see a lot better click based analytics, where they have a distinction between all clicks and verified clicks, which is really important for advertisers, because you get a lot of clicks that are just spam platforms, even like checking your links. And so on Substack, I think it consistently misreports click behavior versus what the advertiser would see as valuable clicks. Just my opinion — I mean, I’m not an expert at all of these things. But then they have an API and an MCP, so you can access everything through Claude, which is my preferred AI tool. I connect my beehiiv with Zapier and also have a lot of automations I run within beehiiv. They also have things like digital products, and they don’t take a cut on your ad revenue.

I could go on about this stuff because I’m a nerd about it. These things are not things that you probably care about if you don’t have big aspirations to build a business, or you’re not building a really serious newsletter. And so if you just want something basic out of the box, I do think Substack is okay. But these things — I mention them both because I’m a nerd, and because I think that people that do have those ambitions, they should know about these before they maybe get locked into a platform too early.

Finn Thormeier: Do you think — Substack has this home feed with Notes and stuff. Do you think the fact that beehiiv doesn’t have that, is that a benefit or a downside?

Kyle Poyar: Oh, this is a tough question. So to me, I’ll be honest, I was a beneficiary of some of that social media feed. You do get some growth on it through Substack, through Notes, and through just your posts popping up algorithmically via the app. But what I found is that Substack kept pushing following as opposed to subscribing. And following was great for their ecosystem, not so great for you as a publisher. It had a lot of junk and noise on it and just was not super valuable. It was a lot of people posting about like, if you put your newsletter in the comments, I’ll go subscribe to it. And then those would go viral. And you’re like, I don’t need another social media platform.

The other thing that stood out to me was that I kept noticing that Substack was promoting the app. And so my readers would sometimes get automated notifications to download the Substack app. And I also would notice — I think they’ve stopped this — but they would have some tests where if your posts were going to be cut off by the email provider because they were too long, Substack was going to push you to go read the rest of it in their app. A lot of Substack’s growth is built on this idea of, the audience is Substack’s and they’re kind of locked into the Substack app and algorithm ecosystem. And that is great right now for writers, because you’re going to benefit from those readers that are locked into the ecosystem. I got worried about this being another algorithm that had control over my audience and my data that would hurt me long term. And so I did not want to be locked into another one. And that audience control was really important to me. But, you know, you do sacrifice some growth in the short term for that.

Finn Thormeier: Because of the recommendations and the notes.

Kyle Poyar: Yep, exactly.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I mean, one of the big reasons why I decided to go with Substack — I was overthinking it way too long — is because beehiiv at the time didn’t have the podcast hosting thing. Which seems to be a solved problem now.

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. So man, maybe you’re going to give it another look?

Finn Thormeier: How painful is the migration?

Kyle Poyar: I am a beehiiv partner. They’re great. I actually have known Tyler, their CEO, for like three years. He’d been trying to convince me to move to beehiiv for a while. And I didn’t move because of the partnership. I have plenty of other ad partners. You’re not going to switch your entire platform just because there’s an advertiser who wants to advertise. But it is very helpful that I have that direct relationship with them. I was given a white glove treatment, and I don’t know if everyone gets that treatment. I hope that they do, but it’s been amazing for me.

Finn Thormeier: I guess with 3K subscribers, I got to do some work. Cool. No, this makes sense. All right, we’re at time. Kyle, thank you so much for all of your insights. Obviously, if people want to check you out, either your LinkedIn or your newsletter, both will be linked up in the show notes. And that’s it. Thank you for your time.

Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on.

In this episode, we talk about Adam’s founder brand playbook, how he batch-writes 5 Linkedin posts every Sunday night, his three content pillars, the $10-15k/month Linkedin ads setup behind Fibbler’s growth, and how their pink lion mascot became one of their best marketing assets.

We discuss:

• How Adam writes 5 Linkedin posts every Sunday night

• The three content pillars behind Fibbler’s growth

• Why almost every Adam post is an image post now (and why pure text posts stopped working for him)

• His 100-like threshold to decide which organic posts get promoted into Thought Leader ads

• Fibbler’s two-layer ad structure

• The $100,000 ad-spend post that’s been running as an ad for over a year

• Why the founder of an attribution tool ignores attribution for his own advertising

• The pink lion mascot

• Running ads on Hulu & HBO Max through Linkedin CTV

Hope you enjoy!!

Connect with Adam:

Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-holmgren/

Fibbler: https://fibbler.co/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Founder Brand & LinkedIn Consultancy: https://thormeier.co/

Full transcript:

Finn: All right. My guest today is Adam Holmgreen. He is the co-founder and CEO at Fibbler. Fibbler is a paid ads attribution tool that we use at my agency, Project 33. It allows you to connect your LinkedIn and Google ad account as well as your CRM, say HubSpot, Salesforce, and then it calculates influence pipeline or revenue for you. It’s great. Obviously, there’s other parts to it. I’m sure we’re going to talk about it. It’s a company that Adam and his co-founder bootstrapped over the last, I think, a little over two years, almost two and a half years. I mean, I think originally it was just you and then you had your co-founder joined a little later. They just recently hit a million in ARR. It’s just Adam and his co-founder, so they’re super lean. And before Fibbler, Adam was a Head of Demand Gen at Rillian and Head of Demand Gen at GetAccept. So I think you basically solved your own pain point here. Is that correct?

Adam: Yeah. And I mean, I feel like that’s the way you want to create a product or a company, right? Solving something you feel and then hopefully more people feel the same way. And I think that’s definitely proven to be true for us.

Finn: And it helps you with marketing because you’re basically marketing to people like you and you’re a user of your own product.

Adam: I mean, I’ve never marketed to marketeers before. And like, it’s crazy. It’s nice, right?

Finn: Yeah.

Adam: I mean, at my previous company, we were Marketing to CFOs. Like it’s two different worlds. I mean, it’s crazy how hard it is to market to a persona you don’t really know in the same way, at least. And now I can kind of, you know, create something funny and more people will at least think it’s funny than if I did it to the CFO.

Finn: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s also more competitive, I would say, you know, especially when you look at LinkedIn trying to reach the head of marketing persona, as well as head of sales and CEO founder type. It’s just the most crowded. So that’s a benefit if you’re selling to heads of IT or CFOs.

Adam: And I would say like, marketeers to marketeers, they are also very good, usually, like they do very good marketing. So that’s the struggle, of course.

Finn: Now, the reason why I wanted to have you on is because obviously you almost exclusively grew and bootstrapped Fibbler through LinkedIn. And that’s mostly your own founder profile, your organic content, as well as... The ads that you guys are running, Thought Leader ads, as well as regular single image ads I saw through Fibbler. And so this is what the show is obviously all about. So you’re very much in the weeds every day. And so I just want to talk to you about what’s working for you today. Both on the organic side as well as the ads side. How do things integrate with you guys? And yeah, that’s the main topic I want to dive into.

So maybe first question, I mean, how would you describe your approach to LinkedIn today if you had to put it into a nutshell? How are you posting, what you’re posting, how much time you’re spending? And then maybe we can compare that to, I don’t know, six or 12 months ago.

Adam: Yeah, but I think it’s even more today, like finding it. People should feel that it’s me writing, that it’s very authentic and coming from, you know, it should sound like me. And I feel like I write in a certain way and I want that to always be there. So I think in general, I spend maybe less time than I did 12 months ago. Not that I focus less on it, but I think I’ve become more efficient in general.

Finn: How much time? Like, what are we talking?

Adam: I mean, I still, I spend a few hours on LinkedIn every day, right? And during that time, I always put notes down if I read something inspiring that I want to write about and so on. But then typically my writing is done maybe two, three hours during the weekend.

Finn: So you post, it looks like daily, right? Monday through Friday, like about five posts a week?

Adam: Yeah, exactly.

Finn: And then you’re saying you batch write all five posts on the weekend?

Adam: Yeah, almost always at least, or at least a couple of posts. And then I might, if I’m not as inspired, I might do a few and then I have to add one during the week. But typically that’s how I, so during the week, I will be on LinkedIn for a couple of hours a day because that’s how it is. And during that time, I try to take as much notes as I can when I, you know, I typically put it just in my notes in my iPhone, just like outlines for posts or outlines.

Finn: What does a post, like a note might look like, like what might Say how long is it?

Adam: It could be that I read a post about someone talking about LinkedIn ads, right? And a strong point of view on it. And then I might write an outline about that, but another point of view on that topic. So it’s more that I try to Find topic ideas from what people are writing about.

Finn: So it’s more like a sentence or two rather than like a path fleshed out.

Adam: No, no, it’s 100% a sentence and two. And then typically during the weekend, I sit down, I open up my notepad and look at all of And then I start outlining the kind of post structure for the week because I always, I try to have a few, like two, three, maybe four even content pillars that I want part of my every week. So I want to have something about these certain topics always.

Finn: Do you have them like other explicit? Can you name your two or three content pillars?

Adam: Yes. So one is of course attribution because that’s kind of what we do with Fibblers. I want to talk about that as a topic. The second part is more about me building this company in public. And then the third part is more about LinkedIn ads specifically since I’m like an operator in that. So talking more about how to do that well. And those three are typically the ones I do. And then I sometimes add a fourth that’s more personal, what I’m doing, what I’m, you know, but those three, those should always be there during a week for sure.

Finn: And so how does it, like, okay, let’s, so you sit down, do you always sit down at the same time on the weekend?

Adam: I almost always sit down during like the Sunday evening-ish.

Finn: Oh, evening. That’s when your brain is already dead though from spending all day with the kids.

Adam: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is.

Finn: Like what are we talking, like five till eight or like eight till eleven?

Adam: No, more eight to twelve or something like that, I would say, because that’s typically what I do work during the evenings. During the week as well, because we have a lot of customers in the US and the West Coast doesn’t align perfectly with Sweden, right? So I typically always have a slot between, at least I work between eight to 11 when the kids start to sleep and I do that also.

Finn: Okay. So eight till 11 on Sundays, you write five posts, you have your list of, you have your notebook with the different ideas that you jot down. Do you like... First thing, you go through it and you’re like, these are the five, and then you start drafting? Or do you go one by one? You’re like, this one feels good, so let me write it right now. Okay, I’m done. Let me pick the second one.

Adam: I do that. I typically find the ones I’m most passionate about and start with them. And then my kind of, you know, it gets later and I get less passionate about certain topics. And that’s, you know, I do like, I try to fully complete them, but I will change them most likely during the week as well when I have more energy and realize that they suck.

Finn: And so it sounds like you do like two to four hours maybe of a block. And so that’s like for five posts, that’s 30 to 45 minutes per post.

Adam: Yeah. And sometimes it’s also, if I don’t have five ideas, I might have to, during that time, also research and scout for a few more. So that also ends up in there. But then I definitely put maybe, I don’t know, 15 to 30 minutes a day, you know, editing these posts and coming up with maybe another angle to them during the week as well.

Finn: So it looks like you do almost always an image post, almost all of your posts. Let me actually share my screen.

Adam: And that is very, that is something that has changed dramatically during my time posting on LinkedIn, I should say, solely based on me seeing the biggest success with that.

Finn: Interesting. And do you think that’s just kind of you realize that over time that images just do better? Or do you think that’s something that actually changed about LinkedIn itself?

Adam: I do think it’s 100% algorithm. Or at least in the beginning when I started posting on LinkedIn, I almost only did text posts, pure text posts, no images. And those worked incredibly well. I mean, in terms of reach and kind of engagement and so on. But over time, at least my feeling is that that stopped. I feel like it became more competitive. So an image is a way to kind of stand out in the feed and get people to stop for a second and think. So that’s why I’m mostly running. And then I’ve had a few iterations of trying video as well, but it doesn’t work for me really.

Finn: What do you use to create these mascot things?

Adam: I have like, I don’t know, 100 to 500 of these mascots variants of the different poses and so on. And then I just use camera to put it together mostly. But for some of the images, I have designers as well that helped me, like for the more advanced images and so on.

Finn: Like this one?

Adam: No, not that one, but the latest one I did today.

Finn: So you just have like 500 different kind of versions of your mascot doing all kinds of random things.

Adam: Random things. Exactly. That I can put onto stuff.

Finn: Interesting. And this one, where do you create something like this?

Adam: That’s a designer that I’m working with.

Finn: Okay.

Adam: Some of those are more designed, but otherwise, like majority of my stuff is only done in like Canva and because it’s, you know, I want it to be very raw, authentic. That’s also a designed image as an example. Yeah.

Finn: Yeah. And what I noticed is you’re playing around with this, like the, you know, boldening and italic thing. I’m still, I’m kind of holding back from that because I feel like it just looks so... We saw a bunch of different types of posts here. There’s obviously more personal stuff like this with a picture with your daughter. I think this is announcing a launch about a new thing that you guys are going to do inside of the product. This is also more personal, Founder, a little funny, Workout, LinkedIn ad structure. This is very much thought leadership. Do you have a sense of what kind of post drives the most signups for Fibbler?

Adam: I would say like typically with everything I post, I try to never or very rarely at least talk about the product specifically, but be more adjacent to the topic. So for attribution, as an example, I will talk about attribution and my point of view of that. And then I might mention in the end, Fibbler is one way we do this. But I try to generally not talk about it, but obviously attribution is one that Not necessarily, it doesn’t drive the most engagement, but it does drive a lot of impact on signups for sure. LinkedIn Ads is the same. Whenever I tie LinkedIn Ads structure like that to some sort of measurement also and talk about that, it’s definitely a good Good angle. I mean, everything personal and all of those things are not a good signup driver in general.

Finn: Why do you think you do them? I mean, I do them too sometimes, but like in your head, why not just always talk about attribution and LinkedIn ads that you can tie it directly to?

Adam: Good question. I mean, I think it’s more to Try and create this relationship with people. I mean, obviously, in the end, I would love if they buy from us, but it’s like if they have more trust in me and kind of get a feeling behind the scenes who I am, I think it’s more trustworthy. And especially as a small player in this sea of like larger enterprises, I think That is what we have to play with. We can create that trust with our personality rather than spend, distribution, massiveness. And I think that’s why I’ve been doing it a lot.

Finn: I think it’s that and it also increases surface area. Signups obviously really matters and you want to grow the company, but it’s not that only signups matter. To you guys, there might be a potential co-founder, there might be a potential investor, there might be a potential partner, there might be a potential reseller, there might be an employee. You can go very specifically after those people too. If you decide, hey, I want to attract investors, then you could build a constant strategy around that. But I think just having some amount of this kind of Personal, that’s not just random, like here’s a random selfie for no reason, but you also talk a little bit about your life and what you’re interested in. It just gives people something to latch onto that could lead to things that you are not yet sure that you need or want.

Adam: No, it’s true. And I think those posts, they do give me a lot of followers. So that’s also like a long term, obviously they will see a continuation of my post hopefully over time. So I think that is also a good value or has been for me at least.

Finn: So, okay. So you batch write all of your content on Sunday. It sounds like you do not schedule them out at that point.

Adam: I do. I do. I do schedule a rough draft like of when I want them to go dependent on-

Finn: Like inside of the actual LinkedIn scheduler?

Adam: Yes, yes.

Finn: What time do you post always?

Adam: Yeah, no, I don’t have a, I’m still experimenting a bit, but I typically, my typical poll, like schedule is like 2 p.m. CET. So that’s like,

Finn: Morning US.

Adam: Yeah, exactly. Morning US, okay for us. And then sometimes I do earlier 10 a.m., which usually works fine as well, but I try to stick to the kind of 2 p.m. I schedule only because I want to have a good mix of talking about heavy subjects, not the day after each other. I don’t know if it matters, but in my mind it does. So I try to have a post like that, then maybe it’s something more personal, then going to LinkedIn ads, then something about building the company. And then it changes, of course, but that’s the...

Finn: Yeah. And then do you have a structure around how and when you engage on LinkedIn? Like, you know, okay, my post on... Tomorrow is Wednesday. Tomorrow my post is scheduled for, let’s say, 2 p.m., your default time. What are you going to do before or after that?

Adam: In general, I don’t do anything. The only thing I do is after it goes live, I hassle my co-founder to engage with it. That’s the only thing I do. And since I often tag Fibbler, I engage with Fibbler. But otherwise, I don’t do anything. I don’t think about being active right before. I don’t do anything of that.

Finn: You don’t make sure that you can be active Around like after it so that it doesn’t go live at 2 p.m. and then you’re on calls for the next four hours.

Adam: Yes. I typically always, of course, try to answer comments and so on as fast as possible, at least in the beginning. But it’s not something I plan out. It’s more that I tend to do it.

Finn: Got it. Okay. Any non-negotiables that you’re like, I do this every day on LinkedIn. I always check these creators. I always do inbox zero. I always, you know, comment on at least five posts or anything of that sort.

Adam: But I definitely always do inbox zero. It’s the same for my email. I get really stressed if I have a lot of things to answer. Sometimes I just, you know, I might not answer it, but I just decide that this is not something I’m not going to answer. So that is something I have to do every day, for sure, for both the email and LinkedIn, which is hard sometimes.

Finn: Any other unnegotiables?

Adam: No, I’m a scroller. I just like to go on there, scroll. I don’t have any people I go into and follow, but you have your typical algorithm of who you’re seeing, and that’s who you’re engaging with and so on.

Finn: Besides that you started using images, Anything else where you felt like you had to adjust recently, where something that used to work doesn’t work anymore or anything of that sort?

Adam: No, but I think definitely imagery is one of the biggest things I’ve changed, but also that I have very clear content pillars now. I didn’t have that before, like trying to be known for these very clear topics. I think it’s helped. My growth and kind of or continuing that growth because in the beginning, I think I started posting maybe four years ago and it was much easier the beginning and maybe not in the beginning, but at least after a little while when I started getting, you know, getting started. But then I feel like it changed maybe two years ago or something like that. It became much harder. So I think that has helped me at least to kind of continue along the same path. And then it also helps when you’re like, it’s way easier to post when you’re now, you know, running your own company. You can talk about so many different things related to that. It was much harder when I was in house to have something to say every weekday. And now it’s also more business critical, right? Compared to maybe how the company felt about me posting at the time, right?

Finn: Sure. Yeah. And now when you... You’re posting five times a week, you batch write them on Sunday, you have your three content pillars, attribution, founder story, and LinkedIn ads, and sometimes a fourth pillar for personal. How do you think about, and a lot of that is probably at this point subconscious and kind of intuitive, but if you had to explain to someone Here’s what a good topic is. Here’s how you write about it. Here’s what a good post is, how it should be structured, what should be in it, what should not be in it, how you write your hook. Like if you had to tell someone, here’s how you write a good post. What are those things that you look for and try to do?

Adam: I think in general, I want the post to give some sort of value, not necessarily that you need to learn something, but at least give some sort of knowledge maybe that they didn’t know before. And that could be just You know, oh, I succeeded with this thing or we reached a million dollars of ARR. This is what we did to, you know, this is what we focused on to do that. That is one, you know, we could do the same for 800K in MRR. So it’s like those are topics that are great. And I feel like You can still live and die with your hook, right? Which is why I think it’s so important to create interest there, but still be very authentic. I’m very opposed to... Too many, you know, numbers, big things. I’m more of a like, this is what happened and here I’ll share what we did. It’s more like trying to be very clear about what it’s about. And then I’m a big fan of these very structured posts of like, this is the... Campaign structure we use. This is the code layer. This is the retargeting layer. This is what’s in it. This is because I feel like that’s what a lot of people in my audience are looking for and kind of what I’m looking for as well, to be honest, when I’m reading. So I do think there’s some importance in how you structure a post and not necessarily just write whatever. Yeah, I think that’s the most, but value always. Like if I feel like something is too producty and talking too much about, you know, we’re launching this. I often, if we’re launching something, I often want to tie it to something else and then talk about launch. Like we launched something the other week and I talked about, you know, I’m getting called out publicly over Things in our platform that people didn’t like. And then we did the launch. I think there’s a way to package things in a more authentic way that brings out you and not necessarily the product.

Finn: How often or how much do you end up changing things when you write something on Sunday, you schedule it out your Monday through Friday, and then it’s Wednesday? How often and how much do you end up changing still on the day?

Adam: Yeah, quite a lot of them. Yeah, I typically sometimes I’m more bold when I sit there on a Sunday and like, oh, I’m going to have this aggressive take on something and then come the day and I realize that I’m a Swedish person and we are not that aggressive. So I’m toning it down a bit. So that happens all the time. And I restructure the days all the time as well, like which post should go out when. I have a much better performance on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays as an example. So I might want to have my attribution and LinkedIn ads post in there, kind of do the more personal stuff on Mondays or Friday. So that is something I constantly change. And maybe the hook is as well something I typically maybe the meat of the post, I won’t touch that much, but the hook I might feel better or worse about.

Finn: I’ll just point out three things that I think Are helping you here. I think one is you just have a lot of reps. I mean, you post five times a week, every week. You’ve been doing this four years, maybe not the five posts every week, but you’ve been active for a long time. So just doing that helps one kind of build up your intuition around What might work, what might not work, what are people interested in, as well as kind of developing your style, understanding how you want to show up, what kind of hooks you want to write that you don’t want to pack them with the numbers. And I think you can only really arrive by that by just doing it a lot. You can’t just think that up in an empty box.

The second thing is... When you think about, hey, I want to provide value to my audience in every post, it helps that you are your audience, you are a B2B marketer. And so, again, that’s what we talked about previously with the CFO. That’s a little tougher, right? Like if you’re selling to CFOs, like it’s much easier to get into the product marketer mindset, you know, or the demand gen marketer and just create something that serves your company’s benefits, but you Forget about will the CFO actually find this interesting and valuable. And even if you think about it, it’s often hard because you’re not a CFO.

And so I think the third thing that might help you is just you have some space between when you write something and when it actually goes out. And I think that additional space between also helps Because I think often the first version of something we write is oftentimes a little bit more marketing-y, is a little bit more self-motivated, like, hey, I want to inform the world about this thing that we’re launching. And then if you take a step back and then you have two or three days between that when it actually goes live, you’re like, wait a second, now that I read the hook again, I’m like, I’m a little too, you know... Just shoving my product into people’s face here.

Okay. We talked about organic. You have your five posts going out every week. Talk to me about your LinkedIn ad strategy. What do you amplify? What do you not amplify? What if this is thought leader ads versus company ads? How do you think about it at this point in time?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, obviously, when we started, I mean, a little over two years ago now, we did or I did only like organic posts, that was the start of it. And I think we had maybe our first 50 customers at least came from that. But it became very clear that, you know, my network was very European heavy. And we had to grow in the US because the ad business is so much larger in the US. And that was kind of Maybe that was even month two or three when we started thinking in that direction and started running ads already. We did it already when we had almost zero revenue, but I felt like we had to. We didn’t take salaries because we did it on the side, so we could put it all into ads. Was a really great strategy. And then we obviously did.

Finn: How much are you guys spending right now? I mean, I’m assuming given that you guys are doing a million in ARR, it’s not a ton of money. I’m just curious.

Adam: Now I think we’re spending between 10 to 15 K a month.

Finn: Okay. That’s a good chunk.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, that’s, yeah. Just for the sole reason that we really see that as the big driver and big distribution of our entire business at this point. And it also helps that we’re advertising only

Finn: What do you think is your estimation of incremental increase? So like what percentage of the million in ARR is attributed to LinkedIn ads? And obviously both matter, both touch people. So it’s the combination of both that works really well. If you would just turn off ads and you would stop spending the $10k to $15k a month, what would be the drop in new signups?

Adam: Good question. I think in the beginning, none, because we have a strong amount now, but I think over time, at least half, 100%.

Finn: At least half?

Adam: Yeah.

Finn: I’m surprised by that number.

Adam: For sure. Because I mean, that’s the way we reach out to the most people, right? If that stopped, we would just reach my small bubble of people and that That would be massively. And that’s also something that is so funny, right? We run this attribution platform now. I care zero about attribution for our own advertising. I just want to reach as many people as possible. I want to engage with them as much as possible. And if we do that, I’m so certain it will lead to good results. And so far, it has really proven that.

Finn: So how do you think about the difference between what you’re posting on your LinkedIn and what you’re running as ads? Is it the exact same content or what’s the difference?

Adam: It is. I think now when I’ve been running Thought Leader ads for so long, it’s still a big portion of the structure. I think about it already when I’m writing a post or at least I’m thinking like, oh, This could become a really good dot leader ad as well. And then I get really disappointed if it doesn’t work out organically that well. But it’s definitely in the part of my mind. And I tend to like going into the structure, I keep it very simple. Generally, I have this code layer where we target people that probably don’t know about us. And then we have this retargeting layer where we target all the people that, you know, visited our website or our company page or engage with other ads. So I try to Have similar content, but a slight difference, like in the cold layer towards completely new people, it tends to be more high level. I tend to have posts about my journey as a marketeer coming into building my own company, talking about going into a million dollars of ARR with only two people. And then I tend to also talk about LinkedIn ads.

Finn: So do you almost just add any posts across your, you know, three to four content pillars that you have into that code layer?

Adam: Yeah.

Finn: And just anyone, or do you have like a threshold and you need to get at least 50 likes?

Adam: No, it needs to get at least 100 likes. That’s my general threshold. And then, you know, obviously you have a feeling for what works at this point. I know these posts are about, you know, The company growing well and how we’re driving distribution. Those will work well in cold. I know that some LinkedIn ads posts will work well in cold. So that’s a lot of what I’m running there. And then in retargeting, I turn a bit more to the attribution side of this. Still not talking so much about the product, but more about lifting these attribution issues that I’ve been in these dialogues with the CEOs and so on that people can relate to. And that was literally everything we did after those first two months and for one more year. We put in as much money we could at the time, it wasn’t much, we didn’t have much, but we could really grow it over time also because we got a huge distribution compared to what we would have otherwise.

Finn: For the code layer, do you use LinkedIn’s targeting? Do you upload an account list? How do you build the...

Adam: I mean, for most, I would recommend using like an account list, but for us, we can sell very broadly. So we are using LinkedIn’s Kind of native targeting. It doesn’t matter really if it’s not perfect. So we’re using like company size, company industry, and then kind of title targeting. And for the title targeting, we are way more narrow though, I should say. So that’s kind of where we try to be as narrow as possible.

Finn: Meaning just head off and VP marketing.

Adam: Not even that.

Finn: Demand-chan.

Adam: Exactly. More demand-chan marketeers, growth marketing managers, heads of growth. Because some of LinkedIn’s titles are these kind of super titles, right? So if you write a head of marketing, you will pull in hundreds of different titles. I see that in your audience size. I’m trying to pick titles that are narrow enough so I see that it doesn’t increase the audience size too much in essence.

Finn: So I think I saw a LinkedIn post where you said you guys put about

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Finn: Do you have a frequency target? How do you think about audience size, et cetera?

Adam: Yeah, for sure. I’m trying to keep the frequency very low in cold. So between one and two, I would say.

Finn: For a 30-day frequency of one and two?

Adam: Yeah. And then the whole purpose of that layer for me is to push them towards the retargeting layer because that’s where we increase frequency quite a lot. I would say we’re probably at five to six maybe in the Retargeting layer, maybe even more sometimes. And we reach most of those people, right? So we have like an audience penetration of maybe 80% plus there and just hammer those people with as much as possible for a longer duration. That’s my entire take on LinkedIn that I really believe in.

Finn: And then for the cold layer, low frequency, so you can have a pretty big audience in there.

Adam: Yeah.

Finn: And you said you add posts that have 100 likes or more. How do you rotate posts? Do you take them out after a certain period? Do you do the rotate evenly or maximize performance? How do you think about it?

Adam: I do the rotate evenly, but I will remove a post if it drops very much in performance. So I typically always look at CTR because I think it’s a good proxy for engagement. So that’s what I use to look at it. And I want it to be about 10% in the annual. When I see something for me that is dropping below 10%, if it continues to drop, I will remove it for something else.

Finn: How many posts do you have generally in that code layer at any given time? Is there 10 in there or 100 in there?

Adam: No, no. Three or four, I would say, active.

Finn: Oh, interesting. So not more than that.

Adam: And then some of them have been running for a really long time without ever going down. So it’s not like I don’t change if I don’t have to in that sense.

Finn: Only once the CTR drops.

Adam: Yes, exactly.

Finn: What’s your, do you know your longest running post that you’re running in cold that has kept this 10% CTR the longest?

Adam: I think it’s that I started doing this full time was my, it’s my longest run.

Finn: Are you able to pull up the link quickly or send me the link here so we can.

Adam: It’s this post with like me talking about we spent $100,000 on LinkedIn ads over the last 12 months. I have this picture of the ad spend.

Finn: Interesting.

Adam: And this is though, like this is a second variation. I ran an exact same post for like a year and then I rewrote it slightly and just did it again. And then now I’m running that one. What kind of brand people think of? This is what our engagement benchmarks about everything. This is obviously what I talked about, about being very like structured in a way, like this is strategy. This is one, two, three, four. And here’s the results that have happened. And then I obviously for like add this at the end of these thought leader ads for all my posts, like they have some sort of call to action for Fibbler. And you can also, of course, track then whoever, how many people clicks on this link. Yeah, so this is definitely one of my longest time running.

Finn: Interesting. And then, but that almost looks like something that I would have assumed to see in the retargeting layer.

Adam: Yes, it’s often there as well. Because it’s not always I am... I sometimes run the same creatives in both Code and Retargeting. Because for me it’s like... For a lot of these things, I think we’re trying to create this mental availability of us, right? That the people know who we are or who our brand is. And I think it’s very strong to continue to run, maybe not the same always, but similar creatives. I do this for images as well. Over time, we also started running a lot of image ads, like specifically meme creatives with our kind of-

Finn: Let me share my screen here. I pulled up your ad library.

Adam: Yep, exactly. And most of these memes, they are running, the same ones are running in cold and retargeting because they’re just such a great way of us. It’s a good way for them to remember us. So we’re running typically those, the exact same ones, say in the cold, the retargeting, and then the thought leader ads structure is more different, I would say. But the meme creatives are exactly the same.

Finn: If I were to ask you right now, you could, you had to turn off all ads except one, like you could only run one of these creatives. Would you know which one you would keep?

Adam: Yeah. I think I would take the one on the red carpet with the, that’s also one I’ve been running for longest.

Finn: This one, the image ad with the CEO,

Adam: no, the other one, the other one on the bottom.

Finn: Yeah. Prove that our paid ads are working B2B. Well, it’s complicated.

Adam: That’s also one we’ve been running for like the longest.

Finn: Also like the CTA, don’t click unless this conversation feels familiar. Yeah.

Adam: And that’s like my take on advertising in general is trying to make people feel that like the situation they have been in this exact situation. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to portray with every kind of creative we were doing. Yeah.

Finn: I’m curious, are the results already in for this video that you guys did?

Adam: Not yet, but some results, of course. We started running it in CTV now. I’ve never run CTV before, so I was very interested in running that. The good thing about CTV is that people have to watch it, right? It’s not something you can skip. So you get 100% of people that watch the video. But I realized pretty quickly that CTV, you get very weird placements also because it’s the same as LinkedIn Audience Network. So I had to constrain it very much. So now I’m only visible in Like Hulu and all of these, HBO Max and those kind of platforms, because I believe that it might have a bigger impact there. But then it’s very hard to save. But I think it’s, you know, specifically in retargeting, I already know those people are good. And if we can just have another touchpoint with them in a channel we didn’t before, I think that’s value.

Finn: Sure.

Adam: But yeah, I’ve only had one person tell me that they saw the video on HBO. So I want more.

Finn: So if anyone’s listening and they saw this ad somewhere, they should let you know. Okay, so 30% is retargeting. You use a lot of the similar posts. Are you still running conversation ads? I think we recently chatted.

Adam: I’m not doing that now. I might do it again. It felt too pushy for me, I think. It’s more about if you have a good offer or something like that, I think it could be really valuable. We don’t right now. We could maybe Fix one because I think it makes sense. Like we do all of these thought leader ads and then we could have an offer that came from my head again. Like it makes sense to me, but I haven’t really figured it out.

Finn: Like a lead magnet type thing.

Adam: Yeah, but something like that. We have this report or whatever it could be. So I think it could be strong. But I’d rather put the money on these more engaging things.

Finn: You guys should build a Vibe-coded LinkedIn ad account audit.

Adam: That is actually a very good idea. Excited. Those things would work, right? If they have seen me for a long time and then I come into their inbox with like, audit your ad account in 10 minutes with me or something.

Finn: Yeah. Or like a robot version. And the takeaway is always, by the way, the takeaway is always, you need Fiblur. Hey, we ran this audit. Here’s the data. It’s a lot of data, but really the takeaway here is that you should buy Fibro. This is terrible.

Adam: It’s an independent review said that you would benefit from Fibbler.

Finn: How do you guys use Fibbler yourself? Feel free to share your screen. Do you actively use it every day? Is it something you check once a month?

Adam: It’s more once a week, once a month thing. I really just believe so much in our advertising, so I don’t feel like I have to look at the companies we’re reaching that much. It’s more that I will look at like at least that we’re reaching the right kind of titles that we are, you know, it is companies that are actually could buy from us, but I’m not so obsessed about, you know, seeing If we’re reaching the right companies that end up in the pipeline and so on, because I’m 100% confident that that will happen. So I would say we’re a bad user of Fibbler, but we also use the engagement data. But more manually, I would say, I tend to sometimes go on these sprees where I want to reach out to people working at these companies to manually kind of semi-pitch Fibbler because I feel like that has been... It has been pretty successful. Like it’s of course, very low volumes because when you type it manually, but it’s very easy to get people to answer. I feel like when, when it feels real. Um, and many of these people I already kind of, or we follow each other. So then it’s also easier.

Finn: Yeah, I think it’s one of the most undertapped things still for companies who sell into enterprise because I think this matters much more the bigger your deal size is. It’s like I’m in ad accounts that spend 50K a month and they sell 200K deals into the enterprise and the idea is still that basically what we want is that these companies come inbound to us and book a demo and And that’s the only thing that we look at and measure and track and care about. And it’s like, if you actually look at the companies and you can look at that in your ad manager or your Fibbler account, and you just filter by most engaged. And if you’re running an ABM list, you know that all of these companies are relevant to you. You will see that there’s a bunch of dream customers of yours who just spent the last 30 days clicking and engaging With a bunch of your ads, and it’s criminal. If you sell large deals, like you guys are a PLG Motion and it’s much smaller ACVs, but if you sell a large ACV, it’s criminal to then not go reach out to these companies, all of the four, five, or seven different potential stakeholders at that company.

Adam: There’s also an obsession of automating this outbound, right? That’s what we see. All the time on LinkedIn. But I feel like there’s a lot of strength in actually doing it manually. It takes a lot of time, of course. It’s maybe not scalable, but it’s very impactful.

Finn: I think it should all be dependent on how large your deal sizes are. True PLG, you might not want to touch it in any way. If you’re selling these like weird middle where you sell like a 5 to 15k ACV, you probably want to automate a large part of it. But if you’re selling 50k plus deals, you want an actual human to look at those companies and then just reach out to the people at that company.

Adam: Yeah, because it’s also very, like you get so many bad reach outs on LinkedIn, right? So whenever you get someone that actually genuinely feels like a normal person, it stands out to me.

Finn: And the assumption is that that person is already to some extent familiar or at least one of the five potential people is already familiar because you could see that they’ve been engaging with your ads.

Adam: Exactly.

Finn: Okay. Okay. Anything that you’re seeing currently with LinkedIn ads, anything that you guys changed over the last three or six months that’s new, that’s additional, that’s changing, something that used to work but didn’t anymore?

Adam: But I think in general, what I can mention, what I’m seeing, like what companies are doing bad on LinkedIn or on LinkedIn ads is that they are just not engaging with their audience, right? I think that’s the biggest thing that people are not succeeding with because it’s hard. Like the people are not engaging with their stuff. And if you’re not engaging, like I think that’s a pretty good proxy for if people are going to remember you, if people are going to I think that’s the biggest thing I really see from a lot of companies. They are targeting pretty much the right people, they are reaching them well, and that correlates obviously with people coming into the pipeline, but when it comes to engagement, they are Yeah, it’s not landing. Is it bad creative? Is it bad messaging? I don’t know. But it is very clear to me that the ones who win, they are very good at that. They obviously know their persona.

Finn: And you would evaluate that based on CTR?

Adam: Partly yes. It depends a little bit on what kind of objectives you run, but otherwise it’s a good metric to kind of compare against each other, I think. Yeah. And then it’s, of course, like, do you run video? You, of course, have to look at other things, like if they’re looking at the video and so on. But I still think that’s the biggest issue I’m seeing because it’s so competitive. So that plays a part, of course. But also, like, that’s why, you know, I’m such a big advocate for Thought Leader Ads and I know you are as well, right? Because those are much easier to succeed with when it comes to engagement, I think, than Generic ads because those are harder. Yeah.

Finn: Well, I think it’s easier to succeed with just because it comes from a person and not a brand. But I think the other one is just if you combine it, I mean, you’re posting five times a week every week. So that’s 12 goals on shot every month. And so just that volume helps you to figure out what’s actually resonating for free.

Adam: Yeah.

Finn: And then you just take your winners and you amplify that with ad budget. In terms of campaign objective, I assume in the cold, given that you have a very low frequency target, it’s just brand awareness?

Adam: For thought leader ads, I’m always running engagement because I feel like that’s, I haven’t tested them thoroughly enough, but I feel like that really gives me the highest Engagement that I’m looking for. I’m still reaching enough. I have maybe, I don’t know, maybe 70,000 people in my audience right now. So I’m still reaching a good chunk of that. And then for some of the other, for like the image campaigns and so on, I’m running Brand Awareness. And then in retargeting, a lot of it is kind of website visits.

Finn: Website visits.

Adam: Yeah.

Finn: Okay. Yeah. And then I was just the, the mascot. What’s the story with the mascot? I mean, how did you come up with the pink lion and how would you describe the value of having that?

Adam: I mean, it’s all by coincidence, really. I think we, I started with trying to come up with a name. I had these terrible names in the beginning, you know, all of these addify, this is terrible. And then I just realized I wanted a name that didn’t mean anything. And that, you know, I did all of these name generators and I don’t know, somehow Fibler came up there. So that’s kind of how that got started. And then I worked with my friend who is a designer and I told her that I wanted to have an animal as a logo and I wanted it to be pink because I really wanted it to stand out. And then she made the lion. That was kind of the start of the lion thing in the logo. The mascot came to be when we started designing our first ads. I did it with another designer. We did our first ads and she just randomly put in a bunch of different animals in there and one was this. Pink Lion, like a 3D version of our logo essentially. And I mean, it has been the best thing we’ve ever done. Like mostly because like we put so much effort into our kind of thought leader ads and all of that. And that’s something you can add to that as well. Right. And today we try to add it to as much as possible. As I said before, we have like 500 different variants in different posts that we can add to organic posts. We can add to ads. We can add it. It’s just a great way people remember us. It’s pink. It’s a lion. I don’t think anyone has it. Like people have similar stuff, of course, but not that exact one. So I think it’s just Such a good kind of tool for helping people remember who Fibbler is. Now we also have that at events, right? We have these plushies. We have customized that look exactly the same that we give out on events to people because everyone has kids and can take home to their kids. So that’s my long-term game that when the kids grow up, they have seen this plushie throughout the years. And then we’re there.

Finn: 20 years later, attribution. How did you hear about us?

Adam: Exactly. My mom.

Finn: Gave me your plushie 20 years ago and it was my favorite plushie.

Adam: Exactly.

Finn: I feel like you guys should do like rare ones, you know? Like if you go to an event, you have 20 lions and only 20 and they are specifically for that event. So maybe they have like, I don’t know, a logo or the... They’re slightly different, maybe they have a shirt on that’s relevant to the conference, and there’s only 20, and once you give out those 20, they never come back anymore, and then at the next event, I think that would be so cool because you would get some superfans who will want All of them. And it’s going to be like a trophy that because it’s like I got one of the 20 and here’s my collection. I think it works because they’re also just cute. I think you could come up like I would want one for my daughter because a lion, it’s pink, it’s super cute. It works if you just have some random ass.

Adam: No, that’s a good point. Add a bit of scarcity to it. So people don’t, yeah, I like that.

Finn: And then your real business is going to be like a collector’s rarity merchandise. Search-type business. You’re going to outgrow the SaaS. All right. We’re basically at time here. Adam, this was awesome. Thank you so much for opening the books here, talking about your approach to organic, your approach to paid. Obviously, if people want to check you out or want to check out Fibbler, links to all of that will be in the description. Anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask?

Adam: No, I think it’s all good. And I mean, I have a bit of a cold, so I think we managed pretty good anyways.

Finn: I think you managed pretty good. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much. All right. This podcast is brought to you by Project 33. Project 33 is the leading executive thought leadership agency for LinkedIn. If you’re looking to activate your founder, your CEO, your executives, or any of your internal subject matter experts. And create thought leadership content for them to build trust and credibility for your brand. Reach out at project33.io.

Before Scrunch AI, Kevin was Head of Marketing & GTM Strategy at Common Room, Head of Marketing at Retool, and Head of Growth Marketing at Segment, which was acquired by Twilio.

In this episode, we talk about how to market when AI agents are your PRIMARY website visitor, the 8,000-token site Scrunch serves to bots, becoming AI’s default recommendation, how Kevin automated his weekly reporting with Claude Code, and more.

We discuss:

• The average website now gets 60-70% of its’ traffic from bots (source: Cloudflare) - and what that means for you

• How to market when your PRIMARY website visitor becomes AI agents

• The 8,000-token version of Scrunch’s website they serve to AI agents vs the 300,000-token version they serve to humans

• Does the llms.txt file matter?

• The next moat is becoming AI’s default recommendation and what to learn from products like Neon & Supabase

• Is marketing’s new job writing clean and clear documentation?

• Defining “LLM-led growth”

Connect with Kevin:

Kevin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevbosaurus/

Scrunch AI: https://scrunch.com/

Sitecore: https://www.sitecore.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Mentioned in the episode:

Vector: https://vector.co/

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

Granola: https://www.granola.ai/

Claude Code: https://claude.com/claude-code

TBPN: https://www.tbpn.com/

Marketing Against the Grain: https://marketingagainstthegrain.com/podcast

Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast

PostHog: https://posthog.com/

Torq: https://torq.io/

Hope you enjoy!!

Since the first time I had him on the show about 3 years ago in Oct 2023, he has been extremely consistent on Linkedin, building his CEO brand.

He recently posted about a Claude Skill he built that streamlined how he writes his Linkedin posts, cutting his time spent by 75% while improving his average post performance. So I brought him back on the show to break it down for us.

Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify

We discuss:

1. Should every B2B CEO still be active on Linkedin?

2. Breaking down his Claude Skill

3. How he built the skill

4. Every tool / connector the skill calls to pull in data

5. Running through it using a real Linkedin post example

6. The “charges” framework for writing hooks

7. AI writing vs AI slop

Connect with Peter:

Peter’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pc4media/

Databox: https://databox.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Show notes / mentioned in the episode:

Databox MCP: https://databox.com/mcp

Peter’s post about his Claude skill: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pc4media_writing-a-linkedin-post-used-to-take-me-2-share-7448480446147051521-IvYE/

Download Peter’s Claude skill: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15ldmkbyvOI0F13joRRvjPd9UQ71M3kb3/view

Peter’s entire Linkedin performance history: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18c4tt8EjYOjxqCJylJ6Kigichv-57YdoqQ3-KrrKcUM/edit?usp=sharing

AuthoredUp: https://authoredup.com/

Avoma: https://www.avoma.com/

Asana: https://asana.com/

TypeRacer: https://play.typeracer.com/

10FastFingers: https://10fastfingers.com/

Hope you enjoy!! Let me know your thoughts / feedback

In this episode, I have Tom show and explain how he runs marketing from inside Claude Code, his “agency agent” that builds Linkedin campaigns autonomously, why engineers are taking over GTM, and his top advice to CMOs in 2026.

We discuss:

1. How he runs his day-to-day as CMO now vs 3 years ago

2. Why 30% of his time goes into bug fixing

3. How he builds agents & Claude skills

4. Claude Code vs Cowork vs Clay

5. incident’s “Applied AI” team and why the next GTM engineer is a real engineer sitting inside the CTO’s org

6. The most impactful agents/skills/workflows his team built and ACTUALLY use

7. The one - and only - thing Tom would still hire an agency for

8. Don Jeter’s monster trucks vs Tom’s agents: comparing two playbooks

9. His top 10 pieces of advice for CMOs in 2026

10. Why the CMO role might actually go away

Connect with Tom:

Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/twentworth/

Tom’s blog: https://tomwentworth.com/

incident.io: https://incident.io/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Mentioned in the episode:

Clay: https://www.clay.com/

Granola: https://www.granola.ai/

Linear: https://linear.app/

Fibbler: https://www.fibbler.co/

Torq: https://torq.io/

Blog post from 2016: https://tomwentworth.com/2016/02/18/some-practical-advice-for-aspiring-tech-cmos-c4f2a69a09f2/

Hope you enjoy!!

We discuss:

• The complete breakdown of UserGems’ ABX program that converted 12% of 6,000 target accounts into opps - 30% of net new revenue

• How to build your TAM/SAM

• Why they pick exactly 500 accounts every month

• Why Clay is great for testing 3 signals and a trap once you’re running 40

• Why Trinity ran cold outbound herself - and tells every marketer to do the same for at least a month

• Outbound vs ads for breaking into an account

• Role of events in your ABX strategy

• Why the SDR function HAS to sit under the CMO if you’re running ABX

• The Chrome extension that 3x their meetings booked from cold calls

• How to correctly do attribution for your ABX program

Connect with Trinity:

Trinity’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinitynguyen/

UserGems: https://www.usergems.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Mentioned in the episode:

Clay: https://www.clay.com/

Outreach: https://www.outreach.io/

Pavilion: https://www.joinpavilion.com/

Hope you enjoy!!

In the 3 months since she launched State of Brand, they’ve hit roughly 1.5M monthly readers, and her own Linkedin went from 100k impressions per month to 4 million per week at the peak.

In this episode, we talk about how she’s building her own newsroom, publishing 3-5 news stories every day, leveraging it to go consistently viral on Linkedin, her “media listening machine” behind every story, where AI fits into her workflow, and more.

We discuss:

• The complete behind-the-scenes of how she runs her two newsrooms for State of Brand & State of AI, to publish 5-6 news stories every single day

• How it took Melissa’s Linkedin from 100k impressions/month to 4 million/WEEK

• How to write viral B2B stories

• Why she posts at 7pm and thinks “everything people say about how LinkedIn works is a lie”

• Her media listening machine that surfaces news stories with viral potential in real-time

• Where AI / Claude fits into all of this

• The three legs of the stool of her media machine: news, interviews, and internal thought leadership

• Why you should never aim to build a media company

Connect with Melissa:

Melissa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissarosenthal5/

State of Brand: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/

State of AI: https://www.thestateofai.com/

Outlever: https://outlever.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Hope you enjoy!!

Their stunts include a 40-foot inflatable skeleton with pterodactyls firing lasers and a monster truck parked at their conference booth, a tattoo bus at RSA (99 ACTUAL tattoos done), CISO karaoke, hiring former pro-wrestling analyst Joel Gertner to name Torq the winner of the “Gertner Mystical Quartile”, Torq-branded urinal liners that their CRO carries in his pocket and deploys at will, and much more.

Don has spent 13 years in cybersecurity marketing, at Symantec, Veritas Technologies and Pax8, where he went from Sr. Director of Marketing to SVP Global Marketing, helping the company grow from $5m to $1B in ARR, before joining Torq in 2023.

We discuss:

• How Don got his CEO to sign off on Torq’s crazy, MASSIVE rebrand (skeletons, monster trucks and all)

• What it means to stop marketing, and start world-building

• The Liquid Death thesis

• What B2B marketers should learn from A24 (the movie studio behind Marty Supreme & Everything Everywhere All at Once)

• Don’s test for good marketing: will this get our salespeople excited?

• How he scaled field marketing from 3 → 90 → 150 → 400 events per year, and why Don is betting so heavily on in-person

• Why brand and demand are the same motion

• Where Don draws the line on AI use for his marketing team

• What he’d do in his first 30 days as a new CMO

• If Don could only watch one movie for the rest of his life, and he had to rewatch it anytime he wanted to watch a movie, which one it would be (he’s really into movies)

• And, actually, more

Connect with Don:

Don’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goodmarketing/

Torq: https://torq.io/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Mentioned in the episode:

Liquid Death: https://liquiddeath.com/

Vanta: https://www.vanta.com/

A24: https://a24films.com/

Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act”: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717356/the-creative-act-by-rick-rubin/

Hope you enjoy!!

Since then, they’ve cracked the code of going viral on Linkedin, and published many other skits, including:

• Pulp Fiction… but then it’s B2B Marketing.

• Suits... but then it’s B2B marketing.

• What do you do for a living? B2B Marketer Edition.

• And most recently, LinkedIn’s Next Thought Leader

And in this episode, we’re breaking down their process.

We discuss:

• How the “Wolf of Wall Street” video came to be

• The exact process behind producing one viral skit every 2 weeks

• Why they do 1 “hero video” and 1 “lean and mean” video every month

• How Tycho and Steven brainstorm and decide on ideas (and why they limit it to exactly 20min)

• Criteria for picking the right people (aka employees) to feature in your videos

• How much revenue & pipeline the viral videos generate

• The separate process Tycho uses for his educational videos

• Tycho’s rule for using/working with AI

Connect with Tycho:

Tycho’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tycholuijten/

Dapper: https://www.dapper.agency/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Mentioned in the episode:

Steven van Marle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-van-marle-19039a242/

AuthoredUp: https://authoredup.com/

Corporate Bro: https://www.instagram.com/corporate.bro/

ClickUp on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clickup/

MyTechCEO: https://www.instagram.com/mytechceo/

Here’s their process behind producing one viral skit every 2 weeks:

1. Every two weeks, Tycho and his collegue Steven van Marle block off a 2.5h slot during the morning to brainstorm and flesh out a video idea

2. The meeting is just between Tycho and Steven, no one else

3. They usually go to a new coffee shop every time to get outside of their usual environment

4. The first thing they do is set a timer for 20min. During that time, in silence, they each brainstorm a bunch of ideas. They might come into it with some ideas in mind already, but now they need to write them down

5. After the 20min timer goes off, they each pitch each other their ideas. There’s a bit of back and forth

6. They now need to PICK an idea. That’s the one, no going back. They usually pick the one that they BOTH get excited about and where it feels like there’s an immediate back-and-forth of what could be done with it

7. Now there’s about 2 hours left in the meeting. The rest is spent on two things

8. First, writing the script. The script is everything. A good idea with a bad script is a bad video. They write it together, having rapport with the other person matters a lot

9. Second, they plan the shoot. They do two videos every month. One is a “hero video” with higher production and involvement of other people, and one is a “lean and mean” video with lower production and usually no other people involved

10. For the “lean and mean” video, which is often just recorded on a phone, they either do it right there, or they block off another 1-2h slot some time later in the week to get it done

11. For the “hero video”, they plan a proper shoot. Get a location, get other people involved and briefed, get props or costumes, etc. They make a list and an employee organizes everything. Then they block time to get the shoot done. For this type of video, they usually need to block off half a day or even a full day

Here’s what they DON’T do:

Wake up in the morning and hope they have a funny idea. Or go with any random idea that pops into their head. Or improvise. They block off time, they’re disciplined, they set timers, they force themselves to PICK an idea and run with it, they go through the effort of writing down the script word-for-word, the dedicate separate time to shoot and record each video

Tycho has a similar process for his educational videos. He blocks off 2 hours every second Sunday to record 4 videos. He writes the scripts for those 4 videos the Saturday before. Records it with his videographer, which gives him two educational posts to schedule out every week

Watch the episode for additional tips, an example script they wrote, and more.

Lmk what you think!

In this episode, we talk about how to get developers to care about your product, the right way to do evangelism, and Jeff’s biggest lessons from writing 3,000 blog posts, traveling to hundreds of cities, and working directly with Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy.

We discuss:

• The correct way to evangelize software

• How he got developers to care about AWS in the early days

• How to pick the right audience to speak to

• The “long chain of highly improbable events” that made him AWS’s first evangelist

• Lessons from starting the AWS blog in 2004, writing it for 20 years and publishing 3,000 posts

• The single most impactful “piece of evangelism” he ever did

• The moment Jeff realized AWS would be big

• The one thing Jeff Bezos could do that nobody else was capable of

Connect with Jeff:

Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbarr/

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Some takeaways:

• Jeff turned web services into a business the moment Amazon let developers embed their Associates ID and earn money from the traffic they sent back. A protocol becomes a movement when there’s money in it for the person adopting it. If you’re evangelizing software, find the line where using your thing pays the user back.

• Audience size is the wrong filter. Jeff flew around the world to speak to 20-40 people at the first Japan AWS user grop in 2010. He thinks like a forester planting seedlings for a forest he won’t see for 15 years. Jeff’s actual line: “They were the right 40 people.”

• You can’t fake the excitement. Jeff’s whole point is that developers smell inauthenticity in seconds - they see marketing-speak and decide this person is just repeating what he was told. So the job has a hard prerequisite: you have to be genuinely connected to the thing and actually believe it’s useful.

• The payoff is on a delay you can’t predict. Jeff calls it the world’s slowest-moving earthquake - someone heard him speak at a 2013 road-trip stop, reorganized his whole career around the cloud, and years later showed up as an AWS employee. Most evangelism shows nothing for five or ten years. If you need it to move the number this quarter, you’ll quit before it works - which is the same trap CEOs fall into on Linkedin.

• Watching Bezos taught him that intuition only earns respect once you do the work behind it. Walk in with “I had an interesting thought” and you get a “so? we all have those.” Walk in with the thought plus the data and the analysis, and you get attention. Jeff’s actual line on Bezos: “you couldn’t BS him.” The instinct is allowed - it just doesn’t count until you’ve gone and proven it.

Let me know what you think!