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.

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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 compounding the longer you do it.

But if you’re like most technical founders, you don’t enjoy creating content, you’re super busy, so you need a system on how to approach LinkedIn. Below is what I wish I knew if I was starting from zero again today. I call it the minimum viable knowledge to crush on LinkedIn.

Who this is for

Otherwise the advice won’t fully apply.

1. You’re a founder / CEO (or you’re helping a founder/CEO do this)

2. You sell large / high-ACV deals into senior decision makers

3. You have a clearly defined ICP (ideal customer profile) and they are on LinkedIn. They don’t need to be the most active audience on LinkedIn, but they obviously do need to open the app every now and then

4. LinkedIn is a means to an end to drive growth and revenue for your company, that’s it. You’re not interested in becoming an influencer. You don’t want to do “whatever it takes” to grow on LinkedIn, you have values and a reputation to protect, and no amount of likes or impressions is worth making a fool of yourself. There are many different reasons you might want to post on LinkedIn and build your founder brand, I’ll focus on when you want to use LinkedIn to drive revenue

Cool. If that’s you, let’s get into things.

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 to build their LinkedIn system.

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

What you need to know about LinkedIn

I’m breaking these up into categories. This post already became much longer than I thought it would be, and I could infinitely expand on everything further, but I’m trying to stick to the essentials:

The two parts to Linkedin

There are two parts to LinkedIn and any other social platform: posting and engaging. Posting means publishing your own thoughts. Engaging means replying to comments, replying to DMs, commenting on other people’s posts, sending connection requests, messaging people. Both are equally important and need their own time allocation. If you only want to publish your own thoughts, don’t even bother.

Profile

Do not bother posting on your company page at all. Post through your own personal founder profile, you get roughly 8x more reach given the same amount of followers.

Don’t over-optimize your LinkedIn profile, but make sure an ICP can understand what you do and has a clear path of conversion: decent profile picture, banner image with social proof (eg. customer logos), your tagline should include your job title and what your product company does (eg. CEO at Acme. - RLOps Platform for the Enterprise”), properly connect your LinkedIn company page and make sure the main CTA on the company page is “Visit website”. That’s about it. Ask ChatGPT if you need more granular tips

Audience

If you’re on LinkedIn to drive revenue, your audience is your buyer/ICP. That’s it. Not your peers, not colleagues, not other founders or CEOs (unless that’s who you sell to), not investors, and deeeeefinitely not your friends, even if they have an “opinion” on what you do on LinkedIn. There are other reasons why you might want to build an audience, eg. to recruit employees or find investors. In those cases, your audience is those people, but here we’ll focus on what to do if you want to drive revenue from LinkedIn.

And no, it does not matter if you’re starting out with a low amount of followers or with a network that mostly consists of people that are different to your current buyer/ICP. Once you start speaking specifically to that person in your content, LinkedIn will show your content to those people.

Content

How to write posts that drive revenue (MOST IMPORTANT SECTION)

Regardless of what anyone else tells you, quality matters. The quality of the content you put out, the quality of the comments you leave on other people’s content, the quality of the people you engage with and the messages you send. You know your customers best. When you say something, make sure it’s something useful and relevant to them. Just because a meme or a controversial clickbaity statement gets more engagement, does not mean that it pays positively into the trust bank of the people who matter most, your customers and prospects.

There’s only one type of content you need to master. I call these direct response posts. Take your ICP/buyer, make a list of all of their goals and problems, highlight the subset of them where your product/solution/service helps, and then write a piece of content about that goal or problem and provide a solution to it. A solution can take the form of an insight or aha moment or mindset shift, a story of someone else who you know who had that same problem and how they went about solving it, a framework or playbook or step-by-step tutorial, or pointing them towards a larger resource like a book or a podcast they should consume. That’s it. You don’t need to talk about anything personal. You don’t need to learn how to do selfies. You don’t need to figure out how to design a carousel. If you do this over and over and over again, you’ll do well. Important here: Do not, ever, shy away from mentioning your company or product in the places where it makes sense to mention it, either because it makes that solution easier, faster, better, cheaper to accomplish, more streamlined, or more complete. The goal is actually to write as many posts as possible where you can naturally mention and link to your company/website.

Example #1:

• Let’s say you sell to enterprise CTOs

• Let’s say their high-level goals, priorities, and problems for this year and quarter are generating measurable ROI from AI tooling, improving product security and reliability, reducing AI token spend, modernizing legacy systems, and bringing products to market faster.

• Let’s say you sell an AI coding tool

• Therefore, out of all of the goals and problems those CTOs have, your product impacts most directly the first and last priority, and indirectly impacts at least two others

• For your post, pick one of them and help them make some small or big progress on this, either by sharing a framework or strategy on how you’d approach this, pattern-matching across what you’ve seen across your customer base of how people have handled this successfully, any resource you would point them to, a mindset shifts that reframes that problem in a way that you believe is more productive, or by sharing a story that relates to that problem or goal, either from yourself or someone you know (can be anonymized) that might provide some insight.

Example #2:

• Let’s say you’re Gong

• Let’s say you sell into VPs of RevOps

• VPs of RevOps have a mandate to improve revenue predictability. One of your product’s features is forecasting, which helps towards this goal

• Start with that pain point/goal in the hook, eg. (I’m winging this) “A lot of RevOps leaders are pressured to improve revenue predictability, here are the top 3 data points to track that I’ve found have the highest correlation with closed-won revenue (and how to track them):”

• NOW you provide actual value. A solution, a tip, a framework, a strategy, a mindset shift, a detailed diagnosis, etc. etc. - you’re not allowed to jump immediately to “BUY OUR PRODUCT”

• So in this case, list the actual 3 data points, where to find them, and how to extract them (manually, using Claude etc)

• Your goal is, that at the end of the post, there is a NATURAL opportunity for you to tie it all back to your product, something like “You can home-grow this, but we built XYZ (your product/feature) to allow RevOps leaders to track exactly this natively inside of Salesforce. One click and you have this data right in your CRM”

What that can look like:

• Btw, that post above generated somewhere between 25-30 inbound sales calls for me. I think it would’ve done a lot better, but I made the mistake of only including the PS much later. Check out Gal Aga, founder/CEO of Aligned, he nails this style of post.

The only other type of content I believe you should share is big milestones for your company. Don’t force it into some sort of weekly post, you’ll naturally know when you have a big milestone, because you will almost not be able to NOT talk about it. A big funding round, a new feature/product/use case, a big new customer you’re allowed to disclose, a revenue milestone, a new office you’re opening in a new location, etc. Share that news factually, why you’re excited about it, what it means for the future of your company, and what it means to your customers. Then move on and return to talking about customer problems.

Beyond those two types of content, and especially the first one, there’s no other kind of content you need to share if the goal is driving revenue. If you feel like it and you have fun doing it, you can definitely talk about your journey, build in public, share personal stories and experiences, post selfies, but just know that those are recreational things, not value drivers, at least not directly. There are other benefits to those posts, they help build your community or peer relationships, but generally, my POV is that people waaaay overindex on this, partly because it’s the easiest type of content to get likes on (and dopamine addiction is a real thing).

I strongly believe that the best-case scenario is that it’s the founder writing their content themselves. Almost any founder with a big following or brand, that you know of, is probably heavily involved in the actual creation of the content you see. I would always start with this, and only if it really doesn’t work, I would try getting someone on my team to help me write or draft content, working with Claude to help draft content, or hiring an external ghostwriter or agency. All of these options are second or third-best options. You know your company, product, and customers better than anyone else. That’s why it should be you. Writing is thinking, so in the process of writing your content, you come up with better insight. And having a unique or weird writing style (like all lower caps or using swear words liberally) is actually a massive competitive advantage these days because clean, polished writing is now infinitely available through Claude and ChatGPT.

Post format & length

Every content format works on LinkedIn: Videos work, text-only posts work, images work, carousels, infographics, anything. I promise you. For every single content format, I’ve had someone on my podcast who only does that format, and they found success with it. What matters is that you find the one that’s most suitable to you and and comes most naturally to you. For most people, that means focusing on text-only, and attaching an image every now and then when there is one that’s relevant to the thing you talk about. Not some AI-generated thing, not a random stock photo. If you talk about meeting a customer and you happen to have a photo of you meeting that customer, use it. If you talk about doing a team offsite and you have a picture of that, use it. If you talk about an experience you went through and you have a picture of you going through that experience, use it. Otherwise, don’t.

The character limit for a LinkedIn post is 3,000 characters. That’s about 500 words or one regular Google Doc page, assuming some line breaks and paragraphs. That’s the max, but it can be as short as a sentence or two. There’s no correlation between post length and performance (with performance, I always mean revenue/pipeline/leads, not likes). There’s only a correlation between a posts’ usefulness to the prospect and performance. Sometimes it’s more useful to have a short post if you can get a point across with fewer words. Sometimes it’s more useful to have a long post because you need to include details, nuance, or a specific example to make it useful. Some of my best posts in terms of call bookings were maxed out at 3k characters.

Posting time & scheduling

Posting time doesn’t matter. Just post when your prospects are awake and you’re around to answer some of the initial comments and messages, but generally I prefer mornings, so the first half of the day.

Anecdotally, Renee Shaw, who regularly goes viral on Linkedin with comedy content, told me that she schedules most of her posts for 4am her time while she sleeps because she’s based in Australia, and she sees no correlation. Sometimes the posts don’t do well, and sometimes she wakes up hours later to thousands of engagements.

Also, scheduling your post doesn’t really seem to affect reach, even though there’s this running myth that it does. My personal point of view is that it’s correlation, not causation. If you schedule a post, it’s more likely that you end up not being around or answering any of the comments and messages that it generates, and that definitely has an impact on reach

Including links

You can absolutely include links, but only include the link when including it is more useful to the reader, eg. if it links to a resource you mention that people would genuinely be interested in looking at. If you only include the link because you selfishly hope to drive people to some destination that doesn’t have any added value to them, don’t include it. Some of my best posts have included links.

This recent post of mine drove 778 clicks to my website on 26k impressions

Engaging

Almost anyone who’s successful on LinkedIn, unfortunately, spends a ton of time on the platform. It really matters, I can’t emphasize that enough. If all you do is spend time writing great content and then you piss off, I guarantee you, you won’t drive revenue from LinkedIn.

I think the right way to think about LinkedIn is as a 24/7 networking event. The way you get value from a networking event is to be social. Go somewhere where your prospects and customers are, and then shake hands, talk to people, ask them questions, be curious, be helpful, share your own insights and POV, schedule follow-up meetings, ask for intros, give intros. If you treat LinkedIn like that, you’ll be successful.

Daily and weekly routine

If I had to “prescribe” a LinkedIn routine, here’s what I’d start with, based on everything I’ve learned working with over 30 founders:

Posting Routine

Post 3 times per week. That’s enough to build meaningful momentum, and you can always do more later on.

Allocate 1 hour per post. That’s 3 hours total to write those three posts. Time block them on your calendar. Some people do best with one large block every week, others do better with three individual 1h blocks. A lot of founders and CEOs I know have this large time block either on the weekend or in the evening when there’s no day-to-day Slack distraction, etc. The 1h are a starting point. You might realize that you only need 20-30 minutes to write a post, or maybe you need an 2 hours, but I would always lean towards more time to write a proper, thorough, thoughtful post than allocate too little time and end up writing garbage. Quality writing takes time. And when I say 1 hour to write a post, that’s hands on keyboard, typing, editing, maybe some research.

I believe 80% of your posts should focus on the problem/solution-type content we discussed. The remaining 20% can be for those big announcements, milestones, or anything else random you feel like sharing. That’s an unpopular POV. Most people will tell you to split your content more evenly between problem-solution content, founder story/journey, personal content, and company updates. If you personally like that kind of stuff, go for it. But again, we’re focused here on building a hyper-efficient strategy if the goal is not to get likes or props from your founder friends, but to drive revenue.

I would heavily, heavily refrain from using Claude or ChatGPT for this, especially in the beginning. The hard part about the writing is not having some special writing skills, but to actually think through one of those customer problems and coming up with something cohesive. If you outsource that thinking part to the LLM, it’s a race to the bottom. You’ll end up with a generic insight that’s written in a generic voice. Plus, people are more and more allergic to AI tells. Building a LinkedIn copywriting agent that actually sounds like you, that forces you to properly think through an insight or POV, and that doesn’t produce slop is its own hard engineering problem, and you can waste hours and hours trying to build something before even understanding what your voice is or what your audience cares about.

Engaging routine

Beyond the writing block, block off 30 minutes every day to go through the following checklist on LinkedIn, ideally right before or right after posting:

1. Check all your notifications

2. Reply to all your comments (unless they are clearly AI-generated)

3. Answer all your messages/DMs (unless they’re a pitch/ or completely irrelevant)

4. Check all new connection requests, accept relevant ones, and send them a short note asking why they connected. I usually say something like “hey NAME, appreciate the connection request, how come? Saw that you…. “ (something that stood out to me when I checked out their profile: a company they worked at that I know, a shared connection, an interesting hobby or interest they mention, etc)

5. Write at least 5 comments on other people’s posts, if you’re really committed to 10. Prioritize posts by your prospects/customers, and prioritize meaningful, thoughtful comments

6. Now 4 things that almost no one does that drive a disproportionate amount of revenue:

7. Send 3 DMs every day. Not new connection requests, but to your exisiting connections/network. Current customer, old customers, previous collegues, partners, anyone you want to stay in touch with. Come up with a meaningful things to say to them. Could be Congratulating them on a recent life or work event, asking how they’re doing, sharing something with them that you feel like they might find interesting or useful, anything. Sounds like nothing, but I promise you, if you do this every single day, that’s almost 100 people that you stay in touch with, reconnect with, or catch up with every single month. That shit adds up. Don’t forget, for better or for worse, LinkedIn is still a SOCIAL network

8. Check who visited your profile, and if they’re relevant and you’re not yet connected to them, send them a connection request with a conversation starter. And when I say conversation starter, I mean not a pitch, but a question, similar to the one above, adjusted to your voice: hey NAME, saw that you…. [Question about that]“ (something that stood out to me when I checked out their profile: a company they worked at that I know, a shared connection, an interesting hobby or interest they mention, etc). You can find them here: https://www.linkedin.com/analytics/profile-views/

9. Check post engagers: Go to your most recent post, look at every single person who engaged with that post (liked or commented), and same thing there. If they’re a relevant person and you’re not yet connected to them, send them a connect request with a conversation starter

   

10. Check new followers: Same thing here. Go through every new person who started following you, and if you’re not connected to them and they’re relevant, send them a connection request with a conversation starter: “hey NAME, appreciate the follow, what do I owe this to?” You can find them here: https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/network-manager/people-follow/followers/

If you’re as anal about this as me, you can use this basic tracker to keep yourself accountable:

Now you got your routine: a 30min block once a day with a clear set of actions to perform during that time, and one 3h block once a week to write 3 posts. If you do the math, it’s about 5-6 hours per week, which should be roughly 10% of your workweek. If that sounds like too much, don’t bother.

If this was helpful, and you’re a SaaS founder/CEO who needs help figuring out how to grow on LinkedIn or drive more revenue from it, book a call here: Thormeier.co

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 done keynotes or webinars before, they present at our All Hands, etc)

• (c) have credibility or an existing audience/big network (not necessary, but if I can choose between two people and one already has 10k connections on Linkedin or is well-known in our industry, I’d obv prioritize them)

One obvious must-have person for this is our founder/CEO.

(The best case scenario is that the founder and execs write all their content themselves, consistently, at least twice a week. Not always is this actually the reality. If they were that kind of person, they would already be doing it right now at least to some extent and you weren't worrying about "activating" them)

3. Send the list to my CMO to share their own perspective, take out or add anyone

4. Reach out to everyone on my list to ask for a 15min call. On that call, I basically want to find out if they have the bandwidth for it (I need 1-2h of their time per week) and if they want to do this and are excited for it, aka to share their insights and expertise with our audience (no point otherwise)

5. Depending on what I get back, I’d pick 1-2 execs/SMEs to prove it out with them

6. Get a bi-weekly recurring 30-45min call on the calendar with each of them (use Riverside or Descript to record)

7. During that call, I’ll interview them. My goal is to cover at least 4 topics/questions, which would give me 2 posts per week per exec

8. I’d start out using this super simple framework for my 4 questions:

• (a) Industry commentary - take an industry trend everyone’s talking about ask ask them for their POV, 2 cents, and what it means for our customers

• (b) Customer story - ask them to take me back to a recent customer or prospect conversation they had, what it was about, what their takeaway was (can be a case study)

• (c) Company/product related - take a recent announcement/feature release/milestone from our company and ask them to talk about it from THEIR perspective, why it matters, what’s exciting about it to THEM etc

• (d) Personal - something that has "nothing to do with work" (s/o Darren McKee), ideally a story where they felt/learned something

9. Feed the verbatim transcript (one post at a time) into Claude to write a Linkedin post draft. You need to give specific timesstamps, exact instructions on what you want the post to focus on/the angle, and pre-write the hook. Never ask Claude to write a “Linkedin post”, ask it to write a “mini essay” based on the transcript, because Claude has its own (wrong) preconceptions of what makes a “good” Linkedin post. There is a TON of nuance here and you really need to tweak the system. But the same applies to writers. You can’t just hire any random writer and throw them on a task and expect a good outcome. You need to hire a GOOD writer, then train them on what good looks like for you, give them a clear brief for each assignment, iterate, give feedback, etc. Same is true for AI. Most are just lazy, that’s why you get slop.

10. Review and edit the draft. Needs to be someone who understands attention and Linkedin, ideally the same person who runs the interviews with the execs.

11. Media/post format

• For every post, ask yourself if there’s a picture that directly relates to the topic of the post. If you talk about an event, is there a picture of your exec at that event? If you talk about a company milestone, do you have a picture of the team at your last offsite? If yes, use it. If no:

• Review the Riverside recording and see if the exec’s answer can be clipped into a clean 1-7min video. Doesn’t always work, because oftentimes there’s back-and-forth or an answer isn’t the most concise. But if you do, use it

• For everything else, do a text-only post. Don’t bother with carousels or graphics

12. Send the posts to my execs for approval. In the beginning, it might be helpful to review/approve the posts together on a 30min call so it actually happens

13. Once approved, schedule them out at 2 posts/week using Ordinal or any other scheduling tool. Agree on a day and time with my execs, mornings are usually best. Then add cal invites for the posting times to their calendar so they know it and ideally block some time during the day to respond to comments & messages

14. This is the organic motion, but I still need to prove pipeline impact

15. Next up, I’d work with my CMO and/or sales team to build a target account list of our 500-1,000 top dream customers

16. Add that list to Linkedin Ad Manager and build an audience targeting our most relevant decision makers at those target accounts

16. As soon as I have the first few exec/SME Linkedin posts live, I’d run them as Thought Leader Ads towards that audience. Ideally I have a $5k/month starting budget. My goal is a 30-day frequency between 8-12 (imo perfect). I’d adjust budget or audience size to work backwards from there (meaning if I only get approval for a $2k ad budget, I’d reduce the audience to the extent that I still hit my frequency target).

17. Retarget ad engagers with Conversation Ads to book demos (still super underutilized). For a client selling a $100k ACV product into large manufacturer, we're right now booking demos at $2,500 a pop with Director level decision makers)

18. I’d get Fibbler (I’m not affiliated), and connect our CRM and our Linkedin Ad Manager. It’s a cool tool that allows me to track pipeline and revenue influence of my Thought Leader Ads on our active pipeline we have in our CRM

19. Next I’d get a Jungler and Clay account, connect my exec/SME’s profiles to Jungler, push the organic post engagers Jungler tracks via their webhook into a new Clay table (this way I have a view of every single person who engages, meaning likes or comments, on any of my exec/SMEs’ posts)

20. Inside of that Clay table, I’d first enrich every person with more company information, then run them through an ICP filter, then push every ICP engager into a new Slack channel that has my CMO and the participating exec/SMEs in it, and then I’d do a lookup function for every ICP inside of my CRM to identify if any of them are in active pipeline and push their Linkedin engagement history into a custom property (I know that’s a lot, I have separate videos detailing all of this)

21. Use the signals to score and prioritize our target accounts in your CRM and have Sales reach out the most engaged accounts (email, cold call etc)

22. Using this, I can build a report inside of Hubspot (assuming that’s our CRM), that can show me every single person who is in pipeline AND engaged with our organic Linkedin content to give me the equivalent of the Fibbler report for the organic side (Fibbler only shows pipeline influence from my TL ads)

23. I think the proper goal to shoot for here (once the motion is running), is for total influenced pipeline to be at least 12x the program spend (salaries + tools + ad spend etc) after 4-6 months (again, I’ve written separately about why I think this is the right goal and why specifically these numbers, just shoot me a DM if interested). Meaning, if we say fully loaded cost is $15k per month (between 5k ad spend, employee, contractors and tool costs), then that’s $90k over 6 months. That times 12, so I would want to get at little over $1M in influenced pipeline during that time period. Why 12x? Because the industry average close rate on the influence pipeline is 25%, and I want to get at least a 3x ROI on that, so 4 × 3 = 12.

24. Once we can show this pipeline impact, the only logical next step is to roll this out to more execs/SMEs at our company.

If you read this far, let me know if you like this format and this type of newsletter. I’ll be writing more in the coming weeks :)

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!

Before starting MKT1, she was VP Marketing at Carta from their series C through E, VP Marketing at Astro, which was acquired by Slack, and Head of Marketing at Asana, where she built their marketing team from 1 to 25 people.

In this episode, we discuss:

1. Emily’s tips on building & writing a newsletter

2. How to promote your newsletter

3. How to get featured on other big newsletters

4. Where most of her subscribers come from (it wasn’t what I assumed)

5. What topics and formats work today

6. How much work it ACTUALLY takes to write a great newsletter

7. Substack vs beehiiv

8. Her writing and research process + how she uses Claude Code for it

9. The Figma MCP workflow she uses to create graphics

Connect with Emily:

Emily's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilykramer/

MKT1 Newsletter: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/

MKT1 (advising): https://www.mkt1.co/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for B2B execs: https://www.project33.io/

Mentioned in the episode:

Kyle Poyar’s Newsletter: https://www.growthunhinged.com/

Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/

Granola: https://www.granola.ai/

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

Attio: https://attio.com/

Hope you enjoy!

They’re at 100 employees, raised $70M in total ($35M Series B last year), just won a Webby Award for best creative AI, and have cut marketing spend by 90% and CAC by 70% over a period of 18 months using creative, unusual marketing.

Some of their stunts include:

• taking out a full page ad in the New York Times called “AI would never smoke a cigarette with you” handwritten by Shane, with his real, PERSONAL phone number attached

• Partnering with OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue

• Shane traveling to a remote island in Iceland to trap the “best air ever” in a jar and documenting it

• hiring elderly actors to stage a protest outside Adweek’s Commerceweek conference, holding signs like “Dropbox needs botox” and “I was 28 when I started downloading this file,” complete with a fake news crew

• hiring the comedian Kareem Rahma as their Chief Imagination Officer, releasing a series of (fake) podcast clips of him making ridiculous points about creative work, then abruptly “firing” him, then “rehiring” him and making a mockumentary of it

In this episode, we talk about what makes a great marketing campaign, how to go viral, how they operationalize creative work at Air, why "trust" not "budget" is the bottleneck for great campaigns, and the 3-lane marketing team structure they run without a CMO.

We discuss:

1. The aha moment that turned Air into the most creative company in B2B

2. What makes a viral campaign idea

3. How to convince your CEO to take more risks with your marketing

4. How to operationalize creative work

5. Why Air keeps a separation between “state” & “church” within their marketing org

6. Why one (big) campaign per month is the right cadence

7. The only thing that makes a risky idea work

8. Why Air refused to touch AI until Nano Banana dropped in Oct 2024

9. Ariel’s case for “discernment” over “taste”

Connect with Shane and Ari:

Shane’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanehegde/

Ari’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arieljrubin/

Air: https://air.inc/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

Some of my takeaways:

1. When you can’t afford to put media spend behind your creative, you’re forced to make something people actually want to watch organically. Use this constraint wisely

2. If you need to educate your CEO on why marketing matters, run.

3. The signal Ari looks for in a CEO that gets creative or values it: when you bring an idea, do they respond with “yes and how do we make it bigger? / where can it show up? / what if we did it like this? …” or with “let me think about it”?

4. Air splits their marketing org into three lanes:
   - Content (run by Ari as Head of Content, basically their internal agency): community, brand, social, campaigns
   - Marketing (run by Jeffrey Tousignant as Head of Marketing): lifecycle, conferences, product marketing
   - Growth (currently hiring a Head of Growth - this is your chance): paid, AEO/SEO, GTM engineering, deep conversion

   
   The interesting parts (to me):

   - They all sit on the same level and each report to the two co-founders. Usually the Head of Content would report into the Head of Marketing/CMO. Air doesn’t have a CMO.

   - They each cover the full funnel. Even though the teams get scored differently (listen to the pod), the Content Team under Ari does not “just” do top of funnel, they also cover bottom of funnel with their community efforts. Same with Jeff with marketing.

5. My favorite quote from Ari: “We live in a world of takes now and everyone’s just offering takes. It’s easy to have ideas. Show me how you’re going to ship the fucking thing”

They’re bootstrapped, doing mid 8-figures in revenue, added over $10m in net new ARR in 2025, have 180 employees, and recently acquired Claap, an AI meeting notetaker.

In this episode, we talk about how to grow in a massively crowded market, their full marketing budget breakdown, what worked and didn’t, their biggest bet for 2026, why lemlist spends roughly 10x less on ads than competitors at their stage, and more.

We discuss:

1. Tips on growing in an insanely crowded market

2. Their 2025 marketing budget: turning $1.2M total marketing spend into $31M net new ARR, broken down by channel

3. Spending $60k on influencers & lemlist’s Linkedin playbook

4. How to run a proper pilot/experiment for influencer marketing in your own company - and how to frame it to your CEO/CMO

5. Breakdown of lemlist’s approach to AEO (reddit agency, G2, Wikipedia, atyla.io)

6. How lemlist measures and attributes brand

7. Their biggest marketing bet for 2026

Connect with Domitille and Erwan:

Dom’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domitilledesaintexupery/

Erwan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erwanxgrowth/

lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com/

Claap: https://www.claap.io/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

Other links and resources:

My interview with lemlist founder Guillaume Moubeche: https://www.executivebrand.org/p/bootstrapped-to-26m-arr-guillaume-32e

My interview with lemlist CEO Charles Tenot: https://www.executivebrand.org/p/lemlist-ceos-linkedin-playbook-33m-fb7

Some of my personal takeaways:

1. lemlist spends roughly 10x less on ads than competitors at their stage, because they built brand first. Domitille’s actual line: “distribution is the moat today, maybe even more important than your own product and content.” Most of their pipeline still comes from branded SEO and direct traffic, the boring metric nobody wants to hear.

2. “No one is writing any posts for other people at lemlist.” They don’t ghostwrite for employees. If you want to post, post. If you don’t, don’t. But they DO carefully train external influencers on narrative + use cases, and those are the posts they boost with ads.

3. Influencer is a brand channel, not a performance channel and it’s their biggest budget increase in 2026. Their attribution: reach * average conversion rate to estimate revenue per post, then subtract that from the brand bucket so they don’t double count. They treat it as a brand investment with a halo effect they can’t fully track. To test it yourself take 5-15 creators, 3 posts each, ~$50k starting budget.

4. 70% of lemlist’s own users still spray and pray because it’s easier. Their entire 2024-2025 narrative was “stop blasting, send the right message at the right time.” And yet 70% of their own users are ignoring it. This is the gap every B2B SaaS company underestimates: positioning doesn’t change behavior, enablement does. Templates, tutorials, GTM Engineer playbooks, that’s what closes the narrative-to-execution gap, not better positioning.

5. The AEO playbook is already running. For LLM ranking: a Reddit agency posting threads on specific subreddits (LLMs love Reddit because it’s “human advice”), heavy investment in G2 reviews, and a newly created Wikipedia page. They use atyla.io to track LLM mentions

6. “If you don’t have budget and you’re not in a mature market, just abort mission.” The budget x market maturity matrix:

   • Mature market + real budget → sweet spot, do everything

   • Mature market + small budget + a great AI-native product → capture existing demand, kill the competition, skip top-of-funnel entirely

   • Small budget + immature market → don’t bother

We talk about humor, how Renée runs her content strategy, information cascades, Linkedin’s algorithm, coming up with funny ideas, and why she has content scheduled our for 4 (!!!) months ahead.

We discuss:

1. Why there’s no strategy behind tl;dv’s comedy skits - and why that makes it work

2. Renée's content system: Google Keep + Obsidian + Claude

3. What “information cascades” have to do with LinkedIn’s algorithm and why some posts go viral, but not others

4. How to correctly mention your product in comedy content

5. Why AI can’t write jokes - but what it’s good at instead

6. Her guaranteed ways NOT to be funny

7. Andy Kaufman, Rick Rubin, and why the best creators eventually stop caring about the reaction

Connect with Renée:

Renée’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeeshaw/

Renée’s newsletter: unsupervisednewsletter.substack.com

tl;dv: https://tldv.io/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

Some takeaways:

1. Renee’s whole thesis is that people can feel when you want it too much. tl;dv’s content works because she’d be posting on LinkedIn whether or not anyone was paying her and the job didn’t change the energy, it just funded it. The second “being authentic” becomes a strategy, it stops being authentic. You can’t engineer nonchalance.

2. When you mention your product, make it uncomfortably obvious rather than trying to blend it in. tl;dv puts tl;dv as a poll option in polls that have nothing to do with tl;dv, purely because it’s ridiculous. The logic: “If you ever need a meeting recorder, you’re going to think of us.” No faking excitement about features. No disguising it as content.

3. Renee having four months of content scheduled isn’t a batching trick because the queue is her editing process. If she keeps pushing a post to the back, that’s the signal it’s not that funny. Three months in and she hasn’t touched it? It dies. No formal editing pass. The delay does that work automatically.

4. You can’t take a real bet on being funny until you have psychological and financial safety. That’s Renee’s actual answer to “can you teach humor?”. If you’re in compliance or cybersecurity and a joke lands wrong, that’s a career problem. Wanting to be funny but also safe is a contradiction.

5. Threads is Renee’s comedy club because its the equivalent of a small venue where comedians work out new material before the main show. One-liners go there first, no LinkedIn reputation on the line. If something does well, it moves to LinkedIn. Every creator needs a channel where they can safely bomb.

In this episode, we talk about what it looks like to lead a SaaS turnaround after raising at peak valuations, what Abhay made the one single metric he rallied the entire company around, how to build trust with your team, board & founder when the company is walking a tightrope, and much more.

We discuss:

• Why Abhay deliberately delayed focusing on new business growth when he first joined

• The “trust triangle framework” that allowed Sendoso to improve employee NPS by over 50 points in 2.5 years - and why it matters so much

• Managing board & investor expectations after a massive 2021 $100m Series C

• The two ways to position your company in an “AI-only” world

• Abhay’s 3 keys to working with founders (very important when stepping into a C-level role, especially CEO)

• The tension between impatience and patience

Subscribe now

Connect with Abhay:

Abhay’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhayrajaram/

Sendoso: https://sendoso.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

My personal takeaways:

1. Sendoso had product-market fit and $175M raised, but the business was struggling when Abhay joined. Net retention had been masking gross retention issues during the ZIRP years. He made retention the one metric he rallied the entire company around. That meant deliberately delaying focusing on new business growth, at a company that had raised a massive $100M round by Softbank with very high growth expectations. He talks about how he navigated those conversations with the board and investors. Takes courage + discipline + radical candor to pull it off

2. The trust triangle (by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss): authenticity (are you the real you?), empathy (do you care about people’s success?), logic (is your judgment actually sound?). Abhay’s point: the first two are relatively easy. The third is the one that earns or breaks trust. You have to prove that your strategy works before people truly buy-in. One of Sendoso’s longest-tenured employees came to him after a few months and said “I didn’t know if we could pull it off, but I’m starting to believe now.” That’s the logic part kicking in. It kinda applies to exec brands too, authenticity and empathy get you attention, but it’s the logic (results, proof, specifics) that converts attention into trust

3. Abhay’s framework for working with founders:

   1. match their speed, what he calls “scrappy mode” vs “scale mode” (btw scrappy does NOT mean crappy)

   2. understand the why behind the 50 ideas they throw at you

   3. earn credibility by actually being deep in the details - founders sniff out surface-level knowledge instantly

4. They improved employee NPS by 50+ points in 2.5 years. Not by plastering new “values” on their walls, but through boring, good-old consistency over a long period of time: sharing bad news honestly in All-Hands, Abhay personally following up with employees, reaching out for birthdays, giving people shout-outs, celebrating wins HARD while being honest about the current challenges.

5. Off topic, but his was Abhay’s first podcast EVER. Luckily only uphill from here for him. But the fact that the CEO of a $100m+ company hasn’t done a single podcast until now tells you how heads-down he’s been