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

In this episode, we talk about how Ahrefs got to $100M+ ARR while being super scrappy, why the best marketing is built on common sense rather than quarterly plan, and how Tim personally uses Claude Code and Lovable every day to keep Ahrefs lean & mean.

We discuss:

• How Ahrefs got to $100M ARR and the list of things they decided NOT to do to focus

• How Tim went from “AI skeptic” to vibe coding a full LinkedIn engagement tracker in a single afternoon + other vibe coded tools

• Tim’s advice for CMOs who haven’t worked with Claude Code yet

• How to run marketing on intuition instead of quarterly planning and reporting

• The “battle webinar” format Tim created with Glenn Allsopp

• Why every piece of content should be a sales page for your product - and why that sidesteps the “prove ROI on thought leadership” debate

Subscribe now

Connect with Tim:

Tim’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/

Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/

Podcast: https://ahrefs.com/podcast

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

1. Tim didn’t know you were “supposed to” have a sales team, he just assumed people should find your website, sign up, pay (there’s no free trial), and that’s it. Only now, at quite a bit over $100m ARR, are they starting to build out an enterprise sales motion. I think there’s a pattern where ignorance of the “best practices” can often lead to better outcomes

2. Ahrefs runs marketing with no Google Analytics installed, no attribution setup, no A/B testing, no retargeting, no discounting, no free trial (!!!), no quarterly plans, and no formal reporting. The fact that they’ve been able to scale to the point that they have should already be a massive wakeup call for many CMOs and marketers. Tim’s answer for how they make decisions instead? Intuition and common sense. They decide what to do based on what talent they have, what formats they’re comfortable with, what makes sense, and what sounds exciting. I’ve done 140+ episodes with founders and marketing leaders, and consistently, the companies that are doing the best marketing all seem to prioritize things that *seem fun to them*. 37signals, PostHog, Clay… Tim is another data point here

3. Tim’s repurposing framework is the opposite of what everyone teaches. Instead of taking a podcast and chopping it into 15 LinkedIn posts, he starts with a LinkedIn post, tests the hook, reads the comments, then turns it into an article incorporating all the feedback, then combines multiple articles into a conference presentation, then discusses that presentation on a podcast. Small → big, not big → small. The bigger the content piece, the more signal you want, and he builds that signal by layering validated, small ideas. Not sure I agree here, Garyvee and Hormozi seem to be counter examples

4. Tim built a full LinkedIn engagement tracker with Claude Code in one afternoon. It looks at his post engagements, enriches contacts through Apollo, pulls Ahrefs domain data, and shows him which companies are engaging with his content, sorted by ad spend and organic traffic. This is a CMO at a $100M+ company building his own social selling tool after lunch. We discover other vibe coded tools he built

5. Tim believes every piece of content you publish should be a sales page for your product. “Thought leadership” is overrated. If you publish an article, and within that article you mention a relevant feature of your product, and it gets 10k visits, if people don’t convert, that’s a product problem, not a marketing problem. As a marketer, you did your job: you got the attention of relevant people and showed them something relevant. It sidesteps the entire attribution/ROI debate

What we discuss:

• The group interview format one customer pitched us that could change how we create content

• Tobi’s first LinkedIn post goes live

• The Clay + Jungler workflow we’re building to turn organic LinkedIn engagement into pipeline

• Why TL ads with a $5k/month budget can do more for pipeline than most companies realize

• Using Fibbler to connect LinkedIn ad engagement to influenced revenue

• The AI-powered ideation workflow we’re building

• How/why we cut our client onboarding from 3 to 1 week

• The “gold standard” for executive content interviews

Subscribe now

Connect with us:

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

Tobi’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-moelenkamp/

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

In this episode, I talk about how to grow on LinkedIn, what’s good content, how to get ROI from posting, the role of commenting, how I’d start from zero today, and more.

We I talk about:

• Why the people who do well on LinkedIn just do the basics really well - and what “the basics” are

• The 1 thing that will guarantee that your posts will tank

• What a comment I left under someones posts, that hit 130k impressions & 400 likes, actually proves

• Why Adam Robinson spends $20 per month in contractors, freelancers, and equipment on his Linkedin content

• The false idea that “good” and “bad” content is subjective

• Why most successful Linkedin creators are known for one format, not five, and why that matters to you

• How I would grow my LinkedIn from 0 today

Subscribe now

Some things I believe about LinkedIn:

1. Every time I get too busy and stop engaging, answering comments, DMing people, my engagement drops, even when I feel like the content is the same quality. I don’t know if that’s the algorithm or just human reciprocity. I just know it’s true, so I just make it part of my day.

2. If you approach LinkedIn from an ROI standpoint on day 1 and ask how many leads this is going to generate, you’re going to do it wrong. And you’re going to quit before it works. There are people who turned LinkedIn into a legit lead gen channel. Eg. Adam Robinson - but he also spends over $20,000 a month between employees, contractors, and equipment, as well as 10ish hours of his own time every week. But if that’s not you, you should think about LinkedIn as a brand play.

3. On the flip side, the companies that stick with us for 2+ years almost always hit a moment in the first 3-6 months where it becomes obvious it’s worth it. They generate one great demo, two VPs at a conference walk up to the CEO and mention their content, a partner forwards your videos to their sales team. Stuff like that shows you that this is working.

4. There is good and bad content. The false belief that it’s all random, that you just need to find what went viral and make it your own take. That is what makes people produce garbage. Your content is the product. When I write something, I ask: would a real person, like a VP of Marketing at a SaaS company doing 10m ARR, someone whose face I can actually picture, find this valuable enough to forward it? If the answer is no, don’t post it. This kind of content takes real work.

5. Most people who do well are known for one format, not five. There’s almost no one crushing who does a video on Monday, an infographic on Tuesday, text on Wednesday, selfie on Thursday, AND doing all of it well. They’re usually known for one thing and they just get really good at it. Anthony Pierri from Fletch for inforgraphics. Gal Aga for text-only. Chris Walker for video-only back in the day. Everything works. Video, text, infographics, carousels. Everything. But an infographic doesn’t work because it’s an infographic, it works because it’s a great infographic.

6. The people who do really well do the basics really well. What are the basics? (1) Add value, (2) actually engage with others, (3) be yourself, and (4) keep showing up. Do that for 12-24 months and there’s a very small chance you’ll not at least have built a decent audience that actually likes & trusts you. It’s when people think they can shortcut it, copy what went viral, say something controversial they don’t actually believe, make up stuff that isn’t true, that’s when it falls apart.

Connect with me:

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

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

Thanks for interviewing me Austin:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-futers/

Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@AustinFuters

In this episode, we talk about what a real POV actually is (and why 99% of LinkedIn creators don’t have one), why low likes on a post don’t mean what you think they mean, the one marketing truth most companies are completely ignoring in 2026, and much much more.

We discuss:

1. The 4-step Stand the F*ck Out framework

2. Differentiation vs. distinctiveness

3. What a good POV actually is

4. How he closed six-figure contracts from Linkedin posts that got almost zero engagement

5. The “100% intensity” thesis to standing out

6. Marketing truths too many B2B / SaaS companies are forgetting (again)

7. Spending over $10k on a YouTube miniseries - for B2B??

8. Why he stopped his podcast after 2 million downloads, and what he’d do differently if he starting a new one today

Subscribe now

Connect with Louis:

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

Stand The F*ck Out: https://www.stfo.io/

Stand The F*ck Out Book: https://www.amazon.com/Stand-Out-No-Nonsense-Positioning-Business/dp/B0DVH5C8SP

The Roost Community: https://www.stfo.io/roost

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

1. A point of view is not a hot take machine. Louis draws a sharp line between having random opinions and having a point of view, and most people on Linkedin are doing the first and calling it the second. A real POV is a consistent thread baked into everything you put out. His: “What you’ve been taught about marketing is mostly wrong. And it’s not your fault because you’re surrounded by bullshit.” He never names names, but he calls out the culture of the category.

2. Louis has closed six-figure deals from posts with almost no likes. His whole LinkedIn philosophy is that posts are just a signal flare. The real value is the one DM it triggers from the right person, and that DM turns into a real conversation, which turns into a deal. He genuinely doesn’t care about like counts, because he’s watched low-engagement posts lead directly to five- and six-figure contracts.

3. Differentiation vs. distinctiveness are two completely different games. Differentiation is positioning: we solve a problem others don’t.

   Distinctiveness is branding: we get noticed through assets that could be completely arbitrary (orange profile pic, a swear word in the name).
   Louis’s point is that past a certain company size, true differentiation is rare, but distinctiveness is always available. Most large companies are working on a differentiation problem that doesn’t exist for them anymore, when distinctiveness is the actually problem.

4. Nobody buys because they're in pain. They buy when a trigger event causes them to move. Louis's example: back pain for 10 years doesn't get someone to the physio. Grandkids visiting and wanting to walk to the park does. The marketing version: stop obsessing over the pain your customer has and start obsessing over the specific moments in time that make them go from not moving to moving. He believes that a half-page of trigger events beats a 50-page strategy deck every time.

5. Louis’s writing advice: start by posting a lot, because the feedback loops on Linkedin are fast and you learn quickly what lands. Then move to quality, but don’t over-optimize to audience response, because chasing engagement too hard turns you into someone who only says what people already want to hear. “If you optimize the website too much, it turns into a porn site.” Once you’ve built taste, then you can think about systems and volume.

In this episode, we talk about why the brand vs performance marketing distinction is a false dichotomy, how to measure channels that don’t produce a click, the exact experiment framework Pranav is running at Paramark right now, and much more.

We discuss:

1. Why complacency killed brand marketing, and what a book from 1923 about broomstick-selling has to do with it

2. Pranav’s case for why brand marketing is a false concept

3. The two metrics every new CMO should align on with their CEO and CFO in month #1

4. Why he believes that for 90% of companies their win rate wouldn’t change if product marketing, enablement, and customer marketing all stopped tomorrow

5. Pranav’s “10 experiments in year 1” playbook

6. How Paramark is geo-testing Google competitor ads in New York only - at a small scale

7. Pranav’s approach to LinkedIn founder branding

8. Why Pranav’s posts get “only” 20-50 likes but he’s getting inbound from public companies and AI hyperscalers who never liked a single post

9. The signal that your organic LinkedIn has hit its ceiling and it’s time to go paid

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Connect with Pranav

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

Paramark: https://paramark.com/

Mentions

Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (1923): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Advertising-Claude-C-Hopkins/dp/1453821082

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

1. Pranav on why brand is suddenly “back”: it’s not that brand became more important, it’s that digital channels saturated. When Google and Meta were growing from zero to billions of users, you could ride those channels’ growth without great creative. Now user growth is tapped out, CPMs are climbing, and the only differentiator left is - again - creative, storytelling, and emotion.

2. “Brand marketing” as a category is basically just “stuff that’s hard to measure” and Pranav hates that definition. It’s a self-fulfilling vicious cycle, because your measurement framework defines what counts as brand vs. performance, not anything inherent about the channel. A direct mail campaign in the 1920s selling broomsticks through artistic positioning was simultaneously brand AND performance marketing.

3. The two metrics a CMO should report on: search volume (Google + LLMs + everywhere else people type your name into a search bar) and hand raisers (demo requests, sign ups etc). Everything else is noise

4. For a new CMO’s first year: plan 10 real experiments, expect 7-8 to fail, and the 1-2 winners will fuel your growth. But the key detail is what counts as an experiment. It’s not think that could bring a 5% optimization gain, he means bets that could drive 50-100% growth. And where do you get ideas for those bets? Research your audience’s media consumption habits. Literally ask them: what’s on your phone home screen, what’s the last podcast you shared, what TV show are you watching? That tells you where to show up.

5. Pranav’s geo-testing experiment shows you can do incrementality at small scale. They’re launching competitor Google search ads only in New York, keeping every other state as a control. If New York traffic spikes and Texas stays flat, the only variable was the search ads

6. Pranav gets around 20-50 likes on his LinkedIn posts. It’s good, but far from viral. Others in his space get 10x that. He doesn’t care. Why? Public companies are booking demos. Heads of Paid Media are DMing him after his podcast episodes. An AI hyperscaler reached out who had never liked a single post. Views and likes are not the measure of success when you’re selling into enterprise. If your ICP is CMOs spending $20M-$100M+ on marketing, those people are not impressed by fluffy “10 cool ChatGPT prompts” content. They’re trying to improve their conversations with their CFO. It’s obvious when you say it, but you need to match your content to the buyer, not the algorithm. Then use thought leadership ads to amplify reach beyond your organic network.

In this episode, we talk about how they built one of the most entertaining podcasts in B2B marketing, how they’re using LinkedIn holistically as a growth channel, and why the things that work best in marketing are always the hardest to measure.

We discuss:

1. Why their first podcast concept ”Funnel Cake” flopped, and how Jess pivoted the entire show in 24 hours

2. The prep that goes into filming an entire season for their podcast in 2 days

3. Why livestreamers get the most applause, and what that means for your content strategy

4. How Jess uses Claude projects to turn bi-weekly interviews with her founders into LinkedIn posts + how they outgrew that

5. 58% of followers came from comments, not posts, and what LinkedIn is signaling us with that

6. How Vector… uses Vector

7. The micro-events strategy that closed 100% of attendees (yes, actually)

Connect with Jess and Josh:

Jess Cook’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesscook-contentmarketing/

Joshua Perk’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaperk/

Vector: https://www.vector.co/

This Meeting Could Have Been a Podcast: https://vector.transistor.fm/

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

1. When Jess asked marketer friends what they’d want to hear a VP of Marketing and CEO talk about, every answer was basically what was already on their agendas for their 1-on-1s. That has become the show. Some of the best podcast concepts come from what’s already happening, not what sounds good on paper.

2. $4,000 for a studio day that produces a podcast 80% of open opportunities listen to vs $6,000 in Clay credits for 10,000 cold emails that get a 0.1% response rate Founders get perceived value wrong constantly.

3. Attribution is a mechanism of control. As companies grow, they introduce attribution, not because it makes marketing better, but because someone five layers removed from the campaign needs to prove their dollars went somewhere. Actual great marketing takes courage, taste, intuition and, partly, doing the opposite of what everyone else / best practice says is the right approach

4. Jess’s LinkedIn workflow for her founders: interview them every two weeks, run transcripts through AI trained on their voice, hand them posts. Once Josh understood the mechanics, and got addicted to posts doing well, he started writing more of his own content

5. Every single prospect from their first dinner event converted to a closed deal. They mixed in existing customers to have advocates present, kept it small, and made the whole thing feel like a fun night out rather than a networking event. Now they’re scaling it into the “Ghost Tour Tour” (see their mascot) - a dinner plus a walking ghost tour in whatever city they’re in, with concert-style merch listing all the tour stops

6. People should be able to become fans from a single clip (Jess learned this from Devin Reed). It happened a couple times that someone saw one 60-second clip, walked up to them at an event, and said “I love your show.” When they asked what their favorite episode is, they didn’t have one - they’ve only seen clips. Which is ok. Don’t aim for subscribers/followers, but moments that stick.