If you ever wondered if you can have fun on Linkedin AND still make it a major revenue channel for your startup, the answer is, surprisingly… yes.
Hendrik Ojamaa is the co-founder of Jungler, a GTM tool that tracks signals. He started posting in February, but it’s almost all parody content and shitposts. Today, about 8 months later, he added 10k followers, gets about 1.2m impressions a month, and drives roughly 200 free trial signups for his product from it every month.
In this episode, we we break it all down, how he does it, why he does it, why it works, so you can hopefully take a piece from it and make your own Linkedin a bit less serious and a bit more fun.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
The viral cold email post that drove 100 signups over night and inspired Hendrik to get started with parody content
How to go viral more often
How to tie parody content to the product AFTER you’ve figured out virality *within your ICP*
Why not all virality is created equal
Why tagging your company is weak for driving signups, and the “PS” line that works instead
How to be more funny
Lessons from Matt Firestone, James Hawkins, Renée Shaw, and The Onion
How to write 5 Linkedin posts in 2 hours: Hendrik’s process and the 50-line Google Doc behind it
Example posts that drove the most signups
Coping with: Will parody make your buyers & investors not take you seriously?
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Show Notes:
Connect with Hendrik Ojamaa:
Hendrik Ojamaa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junglerhendrik/
Jungler: https://www.jungler.ai/
Connect with Finn Thormeier:
Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/
Mentioned in the episode:
Matt Firestone’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mfirestone1/
James Hawkins’ LinkedIn (PostHog CEO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-hawkins
How to Write Funny by Scott Dikkers: https://howtowritefunny.com/
The Onion: https://theonion.com/
Renée Shaw’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeeshaw/
Torq (Don Jeter, CMO): https://torq.io/
Full Transcript:
Finn Thormeier: All right, my guest today is Hendrik Ojamaa. He’s the Founder and CEO at Jungler AI, which is a tool that helps you track ICP engagements on LinkedIn and turn that into pipeline, funnel it into Clay and all of that fun stuff. I wanted to have him on the show because Let’s say you have a very unorthodox approach to LinkedIn, which I mean, I’m going to share my screen here in a minute, but basically most of your content, not quite all of your content, but most of your content is basically parody, comedy, shitposting, trolling, and you’ve been able to somehow turn that Content into actual demand for your SaaS product. So that’s what we’re going to look into and dive into today. But before that, thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Perfect. I’m glad to be on. Glad to be on.
Finn Thormeier: Cool. All right. Let me share my screen first because I feel like people first need to understand what I’m even talking about.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: Okay, so if you go through Hendrik’s posts, The most recent one from a day ago. I joined an engagement pod. 38 founders like and comment. Every member’s post in 10 minutes. No exceptions. Last week I posted that my girlfriend dumped me. Six minutes later. Love this. Great perspective. Following for more. This is the way. Rules are ruled. With a nice little made-up screenshot. Love this. P.S. Run any profile through Jungler AI to see if its engagement is your ICP or a pod. I also pulled out one post that I particularly liked. I don’t normally post wins, but this one feels different. Today at 9.47 a.m. I followed up with a prospect for the hundredth time. No new information of any kind. Just checking in. That’s when you finally caved in. Imagine if I had stopped at 99 follow-ups. Hard work pays off. And then you’re kind of, again, made up screenshot. Re, re, re, re, just checking in. Hendrik, I appreciate your audacity and effort here following up a hundred times in five weeks. The reason I didn’t respond to your previous 99 emails was simply because I was busy. I was actually very interested in your tool, Jungler. I just purchased a subscription. So it’s basically that all the time. I wasn’t even sure, is this another troll or is this an actual thing? This post from a day ago.
Hendrik Ojamaa: It all might be true. It’s up to you as the reader to decide and not many know what to make up of it.
Finn Thormeier: Maybe you don’t even know. I feel like this could actually be real but then I’m like... It’s like the person who cried wolf too many times. At this point, you can’t believe anything you say.
Hendrik Ojamaa: I can just tell you that that post that you looked at, there were dozens of comments. No, the dream client subject line post. There were dozens of comments saying that I need to try that out.
Finn Thormeier: I think one of the most hilarious parts is how many people just don’t understand that this is humor. Like under this, A bunch of people get it.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure how... You’re born and bred in Germany, right?
Finn Thormeier: Uh-huh.
Hendrik Ojamaa: I’m not sure how common sarcasm is in Germany, but in the U.S. it’s definitely less common than it is over here in Europe. So I feel like there’s a tendency that folks in the U.S. in a bigger share don’t get it. Many still do, but...
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, it’s a cultural thing as well. It’s crazy. I don’t think this is real. Wow, Dominic. So how did you arrive at this approach? Like, did you, I don’t know, see James Hawkins from PostHog or something? Or like, when did it occur to you that I should be shitposting and trolling on LinkedIn full time?
Hendrik Ojamaa: You know, it... Me getting my attention to it was both an accident, but at the same time, me starting to post this way was not incidental at all. So it all actually started with a viral post by Matt Firestone. Probably, you know, the guy, a big sales influencer, sales content influencer on LinkedIn. Lovely guy, by the way. Who made a post about my cold email to him. Actually, I can show you the post myself.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, yeah, pull it up.
Hendrik Ojamaa: So, yeah, I’m going to my LinkedIn just now. So, that post blew up.
Finn Thormeier: How long ago was that? Like, less than a year ago, right?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Around seven months ago. Matt Firestone made this post here. And I mean, it gained quite a bit of traction, right? Matt said that it was close to 100K impressions, nothing huge, but decent.
Finn Thormeier: That’s pretty viral.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Pretty viral in LinkedIn terms. And that drove us around 100 free trial signups overnight to our startup.
Finn Thormeier: Wow. And it was just from a cold email to Matt, right?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Sure. We made a post about it and then it became like this huge organic ad on LinkedIn for us. So when we saw that could drive a hundred signups overnight, We thought that, shit, we need to replicate this. We need to have this asset ourselves.
Finn Thormeier: But I mean, that’s not parody. That’s an actual person giving you an actual shout out for what they felt like was a good cold email. There’s zero kind of parody or comedy or trolling in here.
Hendrik Ojamaa: That’s the second part. Like, how did I settle on my LinkedIn persona? So that was kind of the first push we can say to start posting on LinkedIn at all for me. So the persona selection that was your initial question came after. And I remember I took like A week or two weeks to study the content of many creators on LinkedIn before writing content. Because truth be told, I didn’t want to post on LinkedIn at all.
Finn Thormeier: I mean, it feels like kind of an obvious thing to do given the product that you built.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, like that’s the thing. It was obvious, especially with the post that had gone viral. I’ll show you also that as a fact, I never did post. Like this is my impressions from past 365 days.
Finn Thormeier: Wow.
Hendrik Ojamaa: And as you can see, I didn’t. Nothing.
Finn Thormeier: So you started basically in January.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, like seven months ago in February-ish.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. So you got eight million impressions in the last eight months, a million impressions a month. How many followers did you add?
Hendrik Ojamaa: I had around 3k. Now I have like 13k. I think you can show it there on the analytics. Go to...
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, let’s see. I think it’s just impressions drop down. Oh no, this is engagement.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, fair. Yeah, I’m not sure.
Finn Thormeier: So 10,000 followers in the last nine months, that’s pretty impressive.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, and going to your question, right? So how did I settle on my persona that I have? That’s rather unusual. So I spent some time around two weeks studying the content out there. And again, considering the startup that I run, it makes so much sense to utilize organic LinkedIn. The decision to settle on the persona I have, which is that hyper satirical persona, parody, comedy, there were two main reasons. First and foremost, the more important one was actually me realizing that, which applies to all personas, you know that better than I do, that it really needs to cut through.
Finn Thormeier: Mm-hmm.
Hendrik Ojamaa: You can cut through in multiple ways. This is really your domain. Authority is a huge thing. If you’re an NFL or an NBA player starting to post on LinkedIn that authority gives you huge wings. I didn’t have any of that. I launched the startup just around that time in a space I was new in. Zero authority, early founder. No clout to help me. So I didn’t want to choose a persona that would really rely on those aspects to cut through. Because I knew if I would create that more standard, more orthodox persona around discussing the future of GTM, it would be so hard to break through. Even if my views were spectacular. So I had to think what else could I utilize to break through with my content. And I noticed that there are creators that already utilize this persona, probably better than me. Matt Firestone is actually one of them in sales. He uses comedy quite a bit. Yeah, you mentioned James Hawkins yourself previously. So they did inspire me indeed.
Finn Thormeier: And did it, were you like, was it just a purely rational decision of, okay, I know I won’t be standing out through...
Hendrik Ojamaa: That’s the second part. And yes, it is so. So two things here. If you would know me personally, you wouldn’t be too surprised in the content that I create. Just the jokes that I make. Usually they’re quite similar. So you’re fortunate not to work within the same office with me. And the second thing is... Going back to the fact that I didn’t want to start posting on LinkedIn, there was almost this urge within me to make fun of it. And that really enabled me to enjoy and make it sustainable for myself as well. Those two things really drive me running this engine sustainably.
Finn Thormeier: And you’re basically posting once per day?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Pretty much around like four or five times per week.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And so you got, you’re getting a million impressions on average per month and that’s over the last eight months. I think the last step you shared with me is around 300 K per week, which would be 1.2 million per month, which makes sense that your average is slowly going up. And then you added 10,000, roughly 10,000 new followers in those eight months. So that’s a little over a thousand per month that you’re adding. And then I think you mentioned with me to me that you are measuring and directly attributing roughly 500 free trial signups per week from LinkedIn or that’s 200 per month. Is that the number or is there a different number?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, it’s around 200 per month, although it’s really hard to attribute LinkedIn organic signups. So this is a super rough guess.
Finn Thormeier: So this is not your total free signups per month. This is roughly what you believe the share is that this organic LinkedIn is contributing.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Exactly so.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Um, but I think what is interesting for you is you doing this kind of comedy parody content, but you’re also doing it in a way where it’s super closely attached to the product that you’re building. Because if I’m looking at someone like James Hawkins, I mean he makes jokes about kind of AI in general and data centers but it doesn’t directly tie into and therefore post hoc or I’m using post hoc for this kind of thing. Well for you there’s often a much more natural way to kind of tie Jungler into the conversation. You’re sharing the screenshots of sometimes maybe real cold emails, sometimes made up cold emails. And in those cold emails, there are screenshotted that might be fake or might not be fake. You then mention Jungler. It’s kind of like the pitch that you use in your actual cold emails.
Hendrik Ojamaa: You see right through me.
Finn Thormeier: Did that just happen? Because I feel like that’s actually hard to figure out. Like, okay, I like the humor aspect. I’m naturally kind of sarcastic and funny and want to parody this whole thing. But then being able to actually tie it back to your product, was this a conscious thinking process of what kind of parody you need to do such that it’s possible or did it just happen?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Awesome question, because it’s something I put quite a lot of thought into, and although it not might sound as romantic, and I could be here saying that no, it’s just the humor within me that wants to get out, I’m super pragmatic and analytical in the way that I create content, although you can only be so analytical, but the rationale behind this is that the single Single goal really for us is free trial signups to Jungler, to the startup. And this is just a means to get there. So around May, which is now halfway into my posting career, four months in, I spoke with my co-founder and realized that we could leverage the content to do exactly that what you mentioned. Naturally plug in Jungler its core use case functionality and pitch as much as possible while maintaining the difficult goal of not sacrificing virality. So you would want the content ideally to be as much of an ad as possible and as viral as possible. So as you mentioned, two things that are really hard to max out at the same time. So this is what I’ve tried to do and I did with my content. It’s like since May, it’s been like on an advanced level of ideation to speak about the use cases of my product and do all that in a viral way. So that’s why I do things like screenshot cold emails where it’s a pitch of the company or in any other way, any other narrative that I tell, try to weave that in. As much as possible to have a CTA or just some light on the product.
Finn Thormeier: If you were to teach a class of 20 founders who wanted to produce funny content on LinkedIn, but somehow tie it back to their product. What would be some of the things that you would tell them to think about, think through, mistakes to avoid, resources to look into? I don’t know, like what would be some of the things that you would put into that?
Hendrik Ojamaa: To be honest I think the initial phases I went through I would recommend that to everyone being that first I would only focus on creating viral content for my ICP because I think that first helps you build some Some solid ground under your feet to get more engagement overall and then more efficient.
Finn Thormeier: Meaning before you try to figure out how to tie it back to the product, pick your ICP. It might be founders. This might be VPs of sales. How can you produce anything that VPs of sales will go viral in that niche?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Exactly. So in my case, it was outbound sales, mostly founders and sales functionality folks, GTM folks. So the goal was to go viral among them. And I didn’t worry myself with plugging in Jungler necessarily in the use case.
Finn Thormeier: And I think that’s smart. So you can kind of learn how to do that in the first place.
Hendrik Ojamaa: And for that, To be honest, the same principles apply that I’ve seen many people more focused and smarter on LinkedIn cover. Like it has to cut through, it cannot be generic, so on and so forth. Again, this is something you are an expert in and can adapt across personal brands more.
Finn Thormeier: I’m looking back through your LinkedIn history because I’m trying to find, maybe this is,
Hendrik Ojamaa: Now I’m afraid of what you’re pulling out.
Finn Thormeier: This is still mentioning Jungler. I like that idea. I mean, it’s already super hard to create any kind of viral content. And first you remove the restraint that you need to figure out how to tie it to the product and the only constraint is it needs to go viral within your niche for your ICPs. Okay here five months ago.
Hendrik Ojamaa: And I have to add that tagging a Jungler just on its own is pretty weak for signups. You really ideally to maximize signups, you have to build it in a way that it’s a CTA or a pitch or a functionality description tag by itself.
Finn Thormeier: And with that you mean the PS at the end where you actually have a, like, hey, if you want to do this, use Jungler?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Exactly. So you know what was crazy about this strategy? I started adding this and the posts didn’t lose any reach. Meaning that I didn’t really even sacrifice my virality or reach.
Finn Thormeier: You mean by adding the PS?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yep.
Finn Thormeier: Interesting. Yeah. Because I think so much of the virality is just driven from the picture plus hook. And most people don’t end up, don’t look at the end of the post to see if there’s a pitch to decide whether they’re going to engage with this funny thing they just saw. And if the screenshot plus hook is funny, they’re going to engage with it. That’s my theory. Maybe you have a different theory.
Hendrik Ojamaa: That’s, that’s what I was thinking. That I really don’t know. I’ve tried to make sense of this, the algorithm of virality, not sure. Some of my most viral posts are text only. So I would say it The heuristic still is it has to come together as one to really break through.
Finn Thormeier: Okay, let me maybe share my screen here. I think I found a post that is viral for your ICP, but it’s not tied to the product at all. This one, my girlfriend dumped me last week. Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales, like a well-run client engagement. The warning signs were there the whole time. I just chose to ignore them. And then five reasons, follow for more sales lessons, 475 likes, a bunch of comments. But obviously this went viral and probably got a good amount of impressions, but none here will make anyone go check out jungler.ai.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, it obviously generates some more traffic to your website, but yeah, not nearly as efficient.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, and then further up you have some where you kind of tag Jungler, but it’s otherwise kind of adjacent. I mean, this one didn’t go super viral.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah. Yeah, like this post that you’re looking at now, the Claude Code one.
Finn Thormeier: I replaced my entire sales team with Claude Code. This was in retrospect a huge mistake. The AI token costs more than the salaries. I spend more time maintaining AI agents and then here towards the end. So I finally understood what’s happening. I’m paying Claude to replace Jungler AI sales team. Yeah, so you kind of just tag it as like your company. But again, there’s no tieback to what your product does or it’s not at all related to the kind of thing what you went viral about for.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Exactly so. So not truly huge impact in signups.
Finn Thormeier: Do you know which comedy parody post of yours drove the most signups?
Hendrik Ojamaa: You know, I don’t know really which one specifically, but I can share one that had a noticeable volume. So let me share my screen for this. It was actually last week, one of the posts. And it was this one. Forbes wrote about me yesterday, not the angle I was hoping for, but accurate. Before AI, I was a genuinely terrible salesperson. I had never picked up on a single intent signal. I had never sent a cold outreach that was personalized and deep down. I had no idea why someone would read anything from a stranger. But last night I had AI generated a list of 3,489 warm leads in minutes. With Jungler AI and I was blown away and the Forbes fake headline is founder who sucks at sales. He’s huge potential in AI after sales career failing to connect.
Finn Thormeier: How many scroll down? What’s the engagement on this thing?
Hendrik Ojamaa: So, 164K impressions. So, yeah, with this, it was noticeable that something happened with the signups here.
Finn Thormeier: Interesting. I would have assumed that it would have been one of the screenshots of the cold email because you have a very extensive pitch of the product embedded in there.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Those work well, too. Those work well, too. And if you remember the original Matt Firestone post that we looked at, that was the same thing and worked wonders.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, makes sense. Anything else that you would... Okay, let’s say a founder does that. I mean, how would you teach virality? You say, first, just figure out how to make something viral for your ICP. I mean, that’s clearly super, super difficult. Otherwise, everyone would be going viral all the time. It’s not like people don’t try. If you had to teach someone, here’s how you go viral for your ICP, let’s say it’s VPs of Sales, How do they do it? What are the steps?
Hendrik Ojamaa: I would say the main thing, the main thing I assess and everything else is later. Meaning the way I craft the hooks, the way I craft the closing lines, the way I create any imagery that I have all comes later down the funnel. But the core thing that I, how I think about this when I create content is like the core narrative That you’re saying like really has to be able to stop people. And that doesn’t have to be comedy. There are many ways to do this. And as we discussed, it can be even non-content thing like authority that makes you stop to read. Whatever, I don’t know. Dwayne The Rock Johnson posted on LinkedIn. If you see Obama on your feed, you’ll probably stop just because. So I try to think in that realm. I understand it’s super superficial that I’m saying, or sorry, not superficial, but it’s really abstract that I’m covering here.
Finn Thormeier: Do you think the image or the hook matters more?
Hendrik Ojamaa: I would say that they’re not even that important, again. Though they are important, don’t get me wrong. I do want to craft them as well. I spend some time. But again, the core idea that makes people stop. The hook obviously is important too to lure people in. So I would say, to answer your question now, Whichever makes people stop is great. That’s your goal. You can do it with either.
Finn Thormeier: Yep. And I’m just going to add a few things. I think obviously there’s different types of humor. One of the things that we’re focusing on here is parody. And so if you’re going to parody something, you need to understand what the kind of default standard is. And I think your audience to some extent is very LinkedIn native. They spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. And so some of the things that we shared here, for example, we said my girlfriend broke up with me. Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales. That was in response to a very viral post that happened on LinkedIn where someone posted like, I just got engaged last week and here’s what it taught me about B2B sales. And that was a genuine real post that someone put out and it got mocked by all of LinkedIn. And so you’re kind of riding that trend. And then obviously also the cloud post, there’s this trend where people post these things being very serious where they say, I replaced my whole marketing team with a bunch of agents and people genuinely want to try to pretend that’s what they did. Making fun of that. There’s a book called How to Write Funny by, I forgot the name, but the editor-in-chief of The Onion. I don’t know if you know The Onion.
Hendrik Ojamaa: I do. Huge fan.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, and so he basically tried to write how to write funny. And so one of the things, there’s different ways to do it, but one of the things is taking things to the extreme. And so when someone says like, hey, I replaced my whole marketing team or whatever, like taking that to the extreme or, you know, a standard thing that salespeople say is you got to keep following up. And so your post about I followed up 100 times in 30 days or whatever, that’s like the parody isn’t taking that to its extreme. And it’s kind of funny because of that. So I think there’s ways to learn humor. I guess for you, You’re naturally a funny person. That’s why people wouldn’t be surprised what you said, that they wouldn’t be surprised seeing your content coming from you because that’s how they kind of know you. And so I think a lot of people develop this.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, they suffer every day around me.
Finn Thormeier: Correct.
Hendrik Ojamaa: By the way, I literally just now made a note to my notes about the book because I follow the onion and I’m actually curious to check that out. But I do struggle to give an analytical answer to anyone that asks me about this because many do ask. Because indeed the creation of it itself, the narratives, it’s just so non-analytical in a way. It’s just that gut feeling. Although I’m curious about the book.
Finn Thormeier: How much time do you spend, you think, on a post? Meaning everything included, thinking about the idea, polishing the idea, maybe throwing out two or three ideas before you end up with the actual idea, writing it, creating the screenshot in the right kind of way and Photoshopping it in the right kind of way. If you had to guess per post, what amount of time do you spend?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Oh, it’s been an evolution. Because when I started posting, it was really an issue for me. Meaning that it consumed too much time. You know, I also have a startup to run at the same time. So you have to prioritize things. So it was too much initially. Now it’s...
Finn Thormeier: What’s too much? Like what do you think you were spending?
Hendrik Ojamaa: I think I was creating like two posts per week and they might have took like four hours per post and also ruminating on the post after they were posted, which you don’t care at one point at all anymore. But now I would say a week’s worth of posts, I’ve become really efficient actually. It might be two hours on average, maybe three at most.
Finn Thormeier: For all posts or for one post?
Hendrik Ojamaa: For a week’s worth of posts.
Finn Thormeier: Wow. And you said it’s four to five posts per week?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, four to five per week.
Finn Thormeier: And you batch create them?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, I haven’t even, I set time apart for this, but it’s random, I have to be honest with you. It’s not like it’s every Friday at 5 p.m. It really depends on how much of a backfill of posts I’ve already created when I run out and then I try to separate some time to create posts.
Finn Thormeier: But it’s an actual block on your calendar that you create?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, that’s an actual block and... It really depends on how many posts I get out. Sometimes I can, like the best case scenario would be five, six posts that I’m really happy with, that I’ve concluded. Sometimes I just generate a lot of ideas, those narratives that I spoke about that I think are super prolific. And you know, again, I have to go back to the idea, meaning that how important that is. In the post creation phase, like sometimes I have an idea just in my mind formulate and without writing a single word or creating the image yet, I can already tell that this will be so potent. So now you asking and me rethinking about this, I sent her back to that again. So most of the time goes to trying to find those.
Finn Thormeier: Do you have a backlog of ideas? Like you have your blog where you try to write multiple in one session, but do you have like a notepad or something where right now, if you have a random idea, you’re going to note down there and then you revisit that when you have your blog of time?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, so it’s a Google Docs file. And all of those ideas are literally one line.
Finn Thormeier: How many are in there?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Usually two, three sentences. And I probably have, at any given time, like 50 lines. Now that I think about this, usually the best ones I formulate into posts pretty soon when I pick ideas from that list. Some have stayed there waiting for their term probably for too long.
Finn Thormeier: And then when you do your blog, is it always like a three hour blog? What’s the minimum amount of blog that you need to feel like you can get into it and actually produce something funny?
Hendrik Ojamaa: It’s actually not time bound. I start at a given time that I’ve planned ahead, that tonight in the evening I’ll get into it. But it really depends on the way I’m feeling and the flow
Finn Thormeier: But my question is, I assume you can’t just do that in 30 minute bursts, where you have 30 minutes between two calls and you’re like, okay, I’m going to use these 30 minutes to do a bunch of calls. Usually you need kind of a minimum amount of time and open space to like get your creative juices flowing.
Hendrik Ojamaa: That’s true. That’s true. So when I do have a block, I do have indeed at least two hours of spread time. I just might not use all of it.
Finn Thormeier: Sure. Yeah. And then I assume if you’re in the flow sometimes, especially if you do it in the evening, you might sometimes end up doing four hours or something.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, I probably guess like three hours in max, that more.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And then once you have them, do you just schedule them out with LinkedIn scheduler or how do you go about kind of posting them?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Sometimes I do schedule. More often actually I post live without a scheduler.
Finn Thormeier: Okay. Because you feel like it will hurt Reach?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Actually, no. Not sure. Maybe. Maybe it will. Perhaps you can tell me. No, it’s... Tivan is for no reason, really, at all, of using this. What I do want to try to do is, like... At least for some time, not always be able to respond to comments in the first few minutes. So that’s why also I don’t always want to schedule just because I want to be there when I do post.
Finn Thormeier: Makes sense. Yeah, no, I think that’s, I mean, I’ve heard different things from different people. Some creators are like religious about, I’m not going to ever use the scheduling thing because I’m convinced that it hurts my reach. And other big creators I’ve talked to, they’re like, yeah, I totally use it all the time. And I’ve not seen anything. I think it’s more like the correlation that if you schedule something, you tend to be less likely to actually engage with the comments right away. And I think that does have an impact just because if you respond back to someone, they’re gonna come back to the post and this kind of repeat traffic to the post helps, I think, spread it. But for example, Renee Shaw, I don’t know if you follow her stuff, but she’s also doing this kind of funny, Parody, you know who I’m talking about?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, yeah.
Finn Thormeier: I had her on the pod. She’s in Australia, so very different time zone to most of her audience who’s in the US. So she said she always schedules for like 4 a.m. her time or whatever so that it goes out. And she’s like, it has no impact. Sometimes I wake up and the post completely blew up. And sometimes it just didn’t and it has nothing to do with it. I don’t think it matters, really, on that end either. I do think engagement, early engagement does help.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, side note, Renee’s content is awesomely weird as well. It’s just good not to be the only weirdo.
Finn Thormeier: All right, to recap a couple things and then I have some more questions. So you post four to five times a week. You usually batch write your content in a block of two or three hours where you just focus on writing it. You get about one to 1.2 million impressions a month. Which is driving 200 organic free trial signups per month. Figure out how to create viral content for your ICP first and then later figure out how to tie it back to your product and your use cases. Now obviously you also use Jungler to grow Jungler. How much, I’m just curious in your head, what’s roughly this, if you were just doing the organic posting and you would not try to collect the people who then engage with those posts and reach out to those people and follow up and send them an email letting them know very specifically what Jungler AI does. Basically, what is the reaching out to the engagers adding on top? Is it doubling it? Is it actually the bigger proportion? Is it just adding another 20% on top? I’m just kind of roughly curious directionally.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, it’s really different in its essence, right? Like it uses the same input, the content, the engagement, but how we use this ourselves is really across three content creation types. My own content, our clients’ content that I can speak a bit in a second and relevant industry competitor content. With my own content, honestly, I want to just send an engagement, sorry, a connection request. I feel like if they’ve already engaged with me, if I get them into my network of followers, And since my content is so Jungler ad driven, I’ve completely fulfilled my goal. They’re getting now every day, they’re getting my post into my feed and I already know they like the content, right? So I filter by ICP, only message, only connect with my ICP and yeah, get them in. More interesting is our customer engagement, especially for folks we have case studies with. So one of our huge customers that you can see on our website as well made a case The case study posts about using us and their entire team generates a lot of engagement. So we track their engagers and message the ICP, the case study that they themselves, the customer created with us. So you get the logic, right? It’s almost like a warm intro because they engage with that customer of ours. Potentially they know them personally. So in my outreach, I name drop customer and the case study and it works wonders.
Finn Thormeier: This is super smart. I’m realizing I’m not doing that. Have you gotten permission from them? Do you think that could ever create a problem? I mean, technically it’s publicly available information. Number one, the people who engage with their content and number two, they gave you the case study. So they gave you obviously permission to mention and talk about the fact that they are a customer. So I think the implied assumption should be that it’s fair.
Hendrik Ojamaa: I would say it’s two things. First, yes, you need to have agreement that you can announce publicly that you can name drop them.
Finn Thormeier: Right. So they have to. So that’s obviously.
Hendrik Ojamaa: That’s the first thing out of the way. The second thing is it could hurt if you’re not ethical in your outreach if you follow up ten times in five days and blasting that customer’s name and saying that I saw you engage with them. But if you don’t do that, I really don’t see offering a case study.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, that’s something I wish you... Sorry to interrupt you. If you have a case study with any company that is doing anything on LinkedIn, like let’s say Clay, any product that Clay uses that they have a case study with, you should mine... All of the engagement that any executive at Clay who’s posting does and just send them a message and say, by the way, and obviously filter them for ICP and say, by the way, Clay is using our product. Like it’s such a no brainer.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, and not many do this. So that’s really an awesome, awesome way to do that. And also never mention that you saw them engage. You just don’t need to do that. People don’t like reading that. The fact that they engage is all you need. That’s already perfect.
Finn Thormeier: Yep, that makes sense. And then you said there’s a third layer, which is?
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yes, the third layer, also a bit more tricky and sneaky, is competitors, the third one that I like the most. And there, again, don’t mention you saw them engage with a competitor, but if your solution, product, service is unique in any way, then in your outreach, highlight that. Especially if you’re, let’s say, again, Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you’re a competitor of Clay and you track Clay’s engagement, then you would say the one thing people are unhappy about Clay and say how you are better without mentioning Clay. Because you know they know who Clay are already.
Finn Thormeier: Sure. Right. Those three. The one that I did not here and there that I would have expected was basically people who post about something where they might indicate that they have a problem or pain point to what your product solves.
Hendrik Ojamaa: We do that as well. It’s just that the content is a standard pitch, really. We don’t shape the content through this because you’ve seen probably our cold emails. They’re already super concise. Yeah. Those lists with the same exact copy as a cold static list tends to perform two to three times better just thanks to them engaging with relevant content. So yes, we utilize that as well.
Finn Thormeier: Okay. And then, I mean, the cold email that you send is publicly available. Is that still more or less the winning copy?
Hendrik Ojamaa: It is. We test and try other things, but pretty much that is the winning one.
Finn Thormeier: The one that I’m most interested in, and I think all of these things make sense. You obviously need to adapt it for your company and make sure that you do it in the right way. But there are more kind of cold outreach related, warm outreach related signal based. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make over and over and over again is that they start posting and maybe they even get good traction on their content and they do even get some amount of inbound, but they do not Reach out or combine that with some kind of outbound based on the people who engage. So that’s why I’m curious for just the first part where you reach out to people who, I guess you don’t send them the cold email, you just engage, you just send them a connection request. Because I do think one of the easiest things that almost anyone can do who is posting on LinkedIn is if you’re already posting, look at your posts, look at the people who engage, see who of those is an ICP that you’re not yet connected with. And I would say if you’re not as maybe product forward as you are, Do send them an email and let them know specifically what it is that you do and your product does because most people are leaving a ton of money on the table not doing that and just waiting for the inbound. I’m curious to just...
Hendrik Ojamaa: You mentioned the thing that decides on whether you should message them, email them, or do a connection request as I do. So it is entirely dependent on the deal size. So you know our pricing, it starts from a hundred bucks a month. So we don’t have a human sales process. It’s self-serve. If I would be selling deals that involve human sales cycles, I would 100% Message those executive stakeholders that match my ICP and engage. Decide based on your sales cycle, really.
Finn Thormeier: Maybe last question here. I mean, I’m sure a lot of people will see this and they’re like, this is cool and it clearly works. But I feel like people will just not take me seriously or will take my company seriously if I do this kind of parody, comedy, trolling content. I don’t know. How do you think about it or feel about it?
Hendrik Ojamaa: I don’t really care. No, that’s true, but also a bit of a wrong answer of how...
Finn Thormeier: And to be fair, you guys have investors. You are not just bootstrapped because I think that will also be in the heads of some people where they’re like, well, this works for a bootstrap company, but I have actual investors.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Yeah, we do have investors and I would say that. The only industries where I might be cautious would be something super, super sensitive, where really your brand and persona and company image Has to rely on trust specifically. So that could be something related to fintech, legal tech, anything like that. But even then, I’d say it’s unlikely because really the thing that matters more is how many of your buyers do you reach in total. So the fact that some might see you as silly, some might not understand your comedy, If you bid things into proportion, then the positives far outweigh the negatives. I’m biased. That’s my experience here as well. But I wouldn’t see that really being an issue.
Finn Thormeier: I just know people overall are worried about LinkedIn content creation. And I think, I mean, you should do ethical things and none of the things that you do are unethical. There’s clearly some people who don’t understand that it’s sarcasm or parody, but that’s on them, I would say. And I do think, I mean, I mean, again, James Hawkins of PostHog does very similar content and it’s, I think, a Series D or Series E company valued at over a billion dollars with very, very big name investors. And he’s doing that as the CEO. I recently had the CMO of Torq on my podcast, Don Jeter, and they sell cybersecurity into enterprise buyers. And they don’t do the kind of posts that you do, but it’s a very unserious thing. Silly brand that does have fun. Like they put things in urinals at conferences and stuff where people need to aim, you know, in urinals. And so most people would say that’s probably not very serious, but it’s a very serious company. It’s also a serious team.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Taking notes.
Finn Thormeier: All right, we’re at time here. Hendrik, this was cool. I learned some new things. I hope the audience learned some new things. If people want to check it out, either your LinkedIn or Jungler, I’ll link both of those things in the show notes. And that’s it. Thank you for taking the time.
Hendrik Ojamaa: Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
