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I’m trying a new format! I bring on founders who want to take their LinkedIn more seriously, they tell me what they’re already doing / trying, and I coach them through what I’d change to grow faster and drive more revenue. Bear with me as I get better at these!!! First up: Jonathan Bland, co-founder of Omni Lab, a demand gen agency. They’re 14 people, doing over $3m in revenue, and ICP is Heads of Demand Gen at B2B SaaS companies. His LinkedIn stats for the last 12 months: * 190 posts published (4 per week) * 930k impressions (~5,000 per post) * 5 DMs, 10 connection requests and 10-20 comments per week (his activity) * A little over $1M in net new ARR attributed his this * One of the first things I saw: Only maybe 20% of his posts focus on the problem space he solves for clients, and they probably contribute the majority of the revenue generated. Super back of the napkin math, but if you flip that ratio, you could have a have a 4x in net new ARR from Linkedin right there. Highest-leverage changes These are the suggestions I make in the podcast. For some of these to fully make sense, you might need the context of the conversation. Better, not more, not new 4 posts a week is good (five is the max without weekends). Keep the newsletter and podcast as experiments, but LinkedIn is faaaar from tapped out. “Better” means a much higher share of posts aimed at the ICP’s problems. Focus focus focus Pick one buyer. Focus on ONLY Heads of Demand Gen and focus on only the below post type. Second-tier topics (sales and marketing alignment, hiring, compensation) and personal posts are fine if they’re a quick free-flow post you write up in 10 minutes, otherwise not worth the effort. Show you can DO the work, not just THINK the thoughts Examples: * Case studies. Where the client started (spend, leads, pipeline), exactly what you did (channels, budget split, tracking, creative), what it produced, and the biggest learnings. Anonymize when you must (“a Series B health-tech SaaS”), mention the company when you can. * Pseudo case studies. Pick a dream client with a known brand, eg. Clay, and write “If Clay hired me as Head of Demand Gen, here’s what I’d do”: ad library, landing pages, budget split, creative mix, what to change first. * Premise posts. “If I were Head of Demand Gen at a Series B SaaS with $50K a month, selling to mid-market CTOs, here’s the program I’d build” — budget by channel, cold versus retargeting, creative, what to check in month two. No AI can write this; it is your judgment, and it shows how much work the job really is. More credibility Thousands of freelancers talk about paid media, why should people listen to you? State your proof regularly, even to people who already follow you: 40 clients, total ad spend, big client names like Drata, clients who have stayed 4-5 years, and put it in the hook (“We run the full paid media program for brands like Drata…”) or mid-post (“…and I still see this across 45 client accounts, including some big names”). Rebuild the batching habit Every consistently successful creator batches: eg. a Sunday block (4 hours, 4-5 posts) or a fixed daily writing slot (eg. 9-10 AM is for writing, nothing else). “When inspiration strikes” is the worst. The one post to master We discuss the framework on the call, I wrote about it in depth here: Liked this? If you’re a founder and you want to take your LinkedIn more seriously, this is exactly the work I do at my advisory pratice: build a founder’s Linkedin strategy and figure out the few points of leverage to drive the most revenue from it. I’ve now helped 80+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn and build a stronger founder brand. Reach out here → https://thormeier.co/ Show Notes: Connect with Jonathan Bland: Jonathan Bland’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-bland/ Omni Lab: https://www.omnilabconsulting.com/ Omni OS: https://www.omnilabconsulting.com/omni-os Connect with Finn Thormeier: Finn Thormeier’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: How smart Alex Hormozi’s NEW content strategy really is: https://blog.thormeier.co/p/how-smart-alex-hormozis-new-content $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi (more, better, new): https://www.acquisition.com/books How to be weirder on Linkedin (and why you should be) w/ Jillian Richardson: https://blog.thormeier.co/p/how-to-be-weirder-on-linkedin-and Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo on the podcast: https://blog.thormeier.co/p/ahrefs-cmo-being-scrappy-scaling Drata: https://drata.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ --- Full Transcript: Finn Thormeier: I’m here with Jonathan. Jonathan has been very generous with being a guinea pig for a new format that I’m trying. So basically I’m going to have a bunch of B2B founders on my podcast who are already active on LinkedIn, who are already doing stuff on LinkedIn and who are already getting results from LinkedIn. And they’re going to present kind of what they’ve been doing and how it’s working. We’re going to spend some time discussing ways to improve further on it, scale it, and stuff like that. So Jonathan, maybe as an introduction, can you talk about the company that you run, what you guys do, and who your ICP is? Jonathan Bland: Yeah, thanks for having me on. So we’re a demand-gen agency. We work with B2B SaaS brands, anywhere from Series A to PE-backed. And we really own their entire paid media program. So think Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Bing, Reddit, really, you name it. And we also do ad creative for all of them, motion graphics, statics, copy, et cetera. And then we do all the conversion tracking. So that’s OCT, offline conversion tracking, so that the ad platforms actually track against the things that are important to them. And then we do this all through our proprietary AI platform called Omni OS, which was just made public about a month ago. And this is really the software platform that we use internally to really do everything paid media. Finn Thormeier: Who is usually the buyer? Is it the founder, CEO, or is it the head of marketing or someone else? Jonathan Bland: Never the founder and CEO, but usually it’s the VP of marketing, head of demand gen, director of demand gen. You know, usually someone that’s owning marketing. Finn Thormeier: Who would you rather focus on if you had to focus on one of the two? I assume for the slightly larger companies, it’s rather the head of demand gen. Jonathan Bland: Probably the head of demand gen if it’s a larger company, because usually there is someone dedicated to demand gen that is reporting up to the VP of marketing. And usually the VP of marketing at that point is more removed from the day to day from a channel execution perspective. So they end up being our point of contact. Finn Thormeier: And you prefer the larger clients who already have a larger team who have a dedicated demand gen person. Over the smaller team with no dedicated demand gen person. Jonathan Bland: Yeah, definitely. Finn Thormeier: What of those kind of service lines, offers and channels is the bulk of the reason what people come to you for? Jonathan Bland: Paid media management optimization by far, for sure. Finn Thormeier: For which channel? Jonathan Bland: We know that the bias in B2B is we love Google ads and we love LinkedIn ads. Finn Thormeier: Cool. Now talk to me a little bit about your LinkedIn. Let me share my screen. This is obviously your website, agency.com. Makes a lot of sense. You have your case studies, you have your pricing here, depending on your ad budget. People can book a call. Very solid. Jonathan Bland: Okay. Finn Thormeier: LinkedIn. How much are you posting? You know, I sent to you a couple stats to kind of look up if you can share how often you’ve posted in the last year, how many impressions you generated in the last year and what amount of revenue net new you associate to that. Jonathan Bland: So over the last 12 months, posted 190 times for about a million impressions. And then closed-won revenue is such a good question. But when we looked at everything that we can see in our CRM, it’s on the low side, probably a million three and closed-won over the last 12 months. And then on the high side, it’s probably closer to right above two. Finn Thormeier: Is that total net new revenue or is that you generated more than that in the last 12 months and this is just the share of what you roughly attribute to your personal LinkedIn activity? Jonathan Bland: By looking at self-reported attribution and some of the things that we do on sales calls and then aggregating that in AI on the back end, 40 to 50% is what’s coming from LinkedIn Organic if you want to direct source it in that way. But again, like I said, it’s probably not really a fair cut or shake of what LinkedIn Organic is really doing. Probably could be a little bit more. Finn Thormeier: Cool. Okay. What was the goal that you were about to share? Jonathan Bland: We have broad blended goals, but I don’t really look at our organic from a goal perspective. Really for me and for us, it’s my co-founder and I that do most of this activity. One DM per day, 10 connects per week, three to five posts per week. So usually we’re pretty good about doing that. And then 10 to 20 comments per week. So really we’re looking more on just kind of making sure we get the right inputs from an activity perspective in. Finn Thormeier: And then what, what are company goals? I mean, where do you want to take the company? It’s three to 4 million ARR right now. Jonathan Bland: There’s really, I think the initial phase is we just launched the OS about a month ago. It’s been technically active for six months. And so really our vision right now is to continue to use that as a competitive differentiator, which it has been immensely thus far since we’ve launched it

If you ever wondered if you can have fun on Linkedin AND still make it a major revenue channel for your startup, the answer is, surprisingly… yes. Hendrik Ojamaa is the co-founder of Jungler, a GTM tool that tracks signals. He started posting in February, but it’s almost all parody content and shitposts. Today, about 8 months later, he added 10k followers, gets about 1.2m impressions a month, and drives roughly 200 free trial signups for his product from it every month. In this episode, we we break it all down, how he does it, why he does it, why it works, so you can hopefully take a piece from it and make your own Linkedin a bit less serious and a bit more fun. --- We discuss: * The viral cold email post that drove 100 signups over night and inspired Hendrik to get started with parody content * How to go viral more often * How to tie parody content to the product AFTER you’ve figured out virality *within your ICP* * Why not all virality is created equal * Why tagging your company is weak for driving signups, and the “PS” line that works instead * How to be more funny * Lessons from Matt Firestone, James Hawkins, Renée Shaw, and The Onion * How to write 5 Linkedin posts in 2 hours: Hendrik’s process and the 50-line Google Doc behind it * Example posts that drove the most signups * Coping with: Will parody make your buyers & investors not take you seriously? --- SaaS & AI Founders: Want to grow faster on LinkedIn? Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve helped 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it. If you want to get unblocked, book a workshop here. --- Show Notes: Connect with Hendrik Ojamaa: Hendrik Ojamaa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junglerhendrik/ Jungler: https://www.jungler.ai/ Connect with Finn Thormeier: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: Matt Firestone’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mfirestone1/ James Hawkins’ LinkedIn (PostHog CEO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-hawkins How to Write Funny by Scott Dikkers: https://howtowritefunny.com/ The Onion: https://theonion.com/ Renée Shaw’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeeshaw/ Torq (Don Jeter, CMO): https://torq.io/ --- Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Dave Kellogg is a consultant, startup advisor, and founder of Kellblog.com. He built one of the most senior audiences I’ve ever seen, which is why I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a loooong time (thanks for the intro Tom Wentworth). Before starting his consulting career in 2019, Dave spent over 30 years in various executive roles at enterprise software companies: CEO at Planful (then Host Analytics), SVP / GM of the $500m Service Cloud business at Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic, and CMO at Business Objects as they grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. He’s currently an EIR at Balderton Capital and sits on the board of various tech startups Throughout all of this, Dave built one of the most respected executive brands in B2B software, which is what we talk about in this episode: the lessons, mistakes, and stories. --- We discuss: * The story of Kellblog: how it started, how it’s going * The meeting with Ben Horowitz that made Dave never “write for the algorithm” ever again * How to build an audience of very senior executives * Why most thought leadership isn’t * Dave’s definition of branding (as it applies to executive/founder branding) * How he writes: note files, outlines, AI * Lessons on voice using Jack Daniel’s “Postcards from Lynchburg” as an example * How to get the word out in a world of “walled gardens”: blog vs LinkedIn vs X vs newsletter * Why chasing 100k followers would cost him the audience he has (quality vs quantity) --- SaaS & AI Founders: Want to grow faster on LinkedIn? Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve helped 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it. If you want to get unblocked, book a workshop here. --- Show Notes: Connect with Dave Kellogg: Dave Kellogg’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelloggdave/ Kellblog: https://www.kellblog.com/ The Metrics Brothers podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-metrics-brothers/id1687214133 Balderton Capital: https://www.balderton.com/ Connect with Finn: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford: https://www.aprildunford.com/books The Men That Don’t Fit In by Robert Service: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58012/the-men-that-dont-fit-in The GitLab Handbook: https://handbook.gitlab.com/ Planful: https://planful.com/ MarkLogic: https://www.progress.com/marklogic Pigment: https://www.pigment.com/ Ghost: https://ghost.org/ The Diary of a CEO: https://stevenbartlett.com/doac/ --- Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Work with me: https://thormeier.co/ I help SaaS / AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more revenue from it. Track record / why I have the audacity to teach this stuff: 1. Grew my LinkedIn to 43,000 followers 2. Which to date has generated about $3.2m in revenue for myself 3. Built a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency (Project 33) to 7 people and $100k/month, where we worked with over 80 B2B tech companies 4. Closed the agency to advise founders and make the same amount of money with no employees. I advised now over 30 founders on how to grow on LinkedIn, including the CEO of a publicly-traded cybersecurity company 5. I run the biggest podcast and newsletter in this space (founderbrand.org) 6. I've interviewed over 150 of the biggest founder brands about their approach, including Jason Fried, DHH, Henry Schuck, Dave Gerhardt, Guillaume Moubeche, Adam Robinson 7. Spoke on stages about this stuff, eg. at Nathan Latka's SaaSOpen Will be doing more of these in-depth breakdowns on content and founder brand, even installed some new tools to make them more tactical and hopefully useful to you guys. Summary / TLDR: * He changed from doing solo videos of just him teaching business owners how to scale their company (by sharing a tip, strategy, story, lesson) → to bringing on a real business owner, having them present their business (revenue, growth, where they’re stuck) and then basically doing a 1:1 consulting session where Alex gives them very tactical advice on how to scale their company. * His main offer: a $5k in-person group workshop, which his company Acquisition.com hosts once a week with 70-100 business owners, where he upsells about 30% attendees into a $36k/year advisory program. * The math: 70 x $5k = $350k per event for just the workshop tickets, which is $1.4M per month, given that they do it every week. Upsells: 20 x $36k = roughly $700k per event from the upsells, which is $2.8M per month, so $4.2M per month or roughly $50M per year in total for just the advisory business, not including their PE portfolio etc. * His new style of video is hyper optimized to drive workshop ticket sales. Gotta watch the above video why. But a few notes: * It’s just good content because it’s hyper tactical, which is what most business owners want * It’s gamified, because they structure it like a game show, so you get emotionally involved and are more likely to watch the next video because there is continuity * It not only shows that Alex knows how to scale businesses using his own businesses as examples, but that he ALSO knows how to coach other business owner into scaling THEIRS, which is exactly what you want to know before hiring someone as your advisor * The winner of the “game show” is a perfect match for becoming a portfolio company of their PE arm, so all of it combined is also deal flow and filtering for them Full Transcript: [0:00] Alex Hormozi recently changed his content strategy, and I think it’s brilliant, but I think most people will miss it or not really notice how smart this actually is. So I wanted to break it down a little bit. So most of his videos were just like this. It was like a 15-minute, sometimes much longer, video of just him teaching stuff. And then recently they started doing this, basically like a game show. They call it Scale or Fail. The first round of it was basically these videos where he would sit down with a business owner, and they would present their business and what they’re struggling with: revenue, growth, et cetera. And then they would have basically a one-on-one consulting session with Alex, where he would give them very specific technical advice for their business. So there were different kinds of businesses, like a theme park. I think this is a dentist or something. This is a service business, a roofer. And he would basically coach them. [0:58] That was basically phase one. And then the best people moved on to this most recent show that they did a couple of days ago, where they basically all presented how they implemented the advice that he gave them and how much they grew. And then the people who grew the most advanced to the next stage, and from there it would progress. [1:20] I don’t think people realize how much money he’s printing with this content. But if you look at some of the psychology, I think it’s super, super smart. So let me share some things. [1:38] The way that Alex Hormozi makes money: obviously he owns a company called ACQ, and they have a couple of different offers. The first one is an in-person workshop that they sell for 5K. That’s a workshop. Two days. And it’s in person, at their office. That’s kind of the entry offer, right? [2:01] Then from there, the upsell is they sell a 36K, which is basically their advisory, per year. So you pay this upfront for the full year. And this is basically a way you get access to Alex’s team, and you can ask them any question at any point. There’s a community. Alex does, I think, monthly Q&As where you can ask him questions. [2:26] And then, I believe the main thing, and this is how he mainly started, was basically a PE firm, where they would own... I don’t know if this is disclosed. I believe it’s somewhere between 10 to 50% of companies that they own, and that’s the profit share that they get. So for the best, biggest, most profitable, fastest growing companies, they basically act like a PE firm. They get a stake in it, and from that they get a profit share. [2:55] And so this is what he wants to sell, and then from there there’s the upsell, and then from there this basically funnels the absolute best companies, who want to get real one-on-one ongoing access to Alex, right? [3:07] And so his YouTube channel obviously funnels people there. If you look at any of his videos, and this is more like the old style, “What type of content should you make that makes the most money”, him sitting down, sharing some advice, “How to become rich with social media”, the call to action is always to their lead magnet. So it’s basically a lead magnet. You get your free personalized roadmap, you put in your information, and you get it sent to your email. [3:41] From there, once you get that lead magnet, the next pitch is basically: hey, if you like this resource and you want to scale your company, here you can sign up for the workshop. And their landing page is basically... if you go to acquisition.com right now, it’s the workshop landing page, with a little VSL here, “I’m ready to scale”, some testimonials, what you actually get at the workshop, more testimonials, and then a call booking form to attend the workshop. And they’re also explicit here that it’s 5K per seat. I actually attended one of these. So this is their entry monetized offer, right? [4:27] Also, sometimes, I believe, if you look at his podcast, they directly lead you to the workshop landing page as the main CTA. This is the roadmap, roadmap, roadmap, roadmap. Here, you can see for this podcast, instead of it being the free lead magnet, the roadmap, the call to action is directly “book your spot at the two-day interactive scaling workshop”. So they’re experimenting with that. [4:57] And I think what people are also not realizing is how much money they’re printing with this. Because it’s 5K per ticket. It’s a group workshop, right? They have about a hundred business owners there, 100 attendees at each of these workshops, in person. I would say not all of them are paid, because when you’re part of the community of the upsell, you get two of these every year for free. So let’s say 70 of these actually paid. So that is 70 times 5K, they’re making 350K per event. And they do them once per week, which means they make 1.4 million per month from just these workshops. [5:55] But now it gets even better. So they have the 1.4 million per month from the workshops. But then at the workshop they do the upsell to the 36K advisory. And I know that they upsell roughly a third of people, so 25 to 33% of people do the upsell. So of the 70 people, let’s say, who are not yet part of the program and who actually paid at the event, a third of them buy the upsell. So let’s be conservative here and say 20 buy the upsell. 20 times 36K, what is that? That’s [720K]? That is another 700K per event. Again, they do four events every month, one per week. So this times four is, they’re making another 2.8 million per month in upsells. [7:02] So that together is, they’re making 4.2 million per month from the workshop plus upsells, which is what? 48, like roughly 50 million. Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, none of these numbers are confirmed. This is just me doing the math from other numbers that I know and inferring. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less, but this is, I think, a good ballpark number of what they’re making just from this. [7:27] And then obviously here, the upsell is that once someone does the yearly advisory, and the company is doing really, really well, and they’re growing fast, and they’re very profitable, and they want more access to Alex, and they want Alex to sit on their board or get weekly one-on-one calls with Alex, then from there they become part of the portfolio. And then from there they get a profit share, right? And when I was at the workshop two months ago, I think the biggest company that was at the workshop was doing 40 million in revenue. So these are not just tiny, tiny companies. [8:10] So it’s printing money. But back to the content strategy, right? What he’s optimizing for with this YouTube and podcast (they’re very overlapping, he repurposes a lot of content between those two) is how to get more people to buy the 5K workshop, ‘cause that’s the main offer that they sell. And he needs to fill anywhere between 70 to 100 slots every week, which is, let’s say, 400 slots per month he needs to sell. And so that’s what his content strat

David Fallarme is the VP Marketing at Owner.com (Series D, valued at $2.3B), an AI platform for restaurant owners. Before Owner.com, he ran marketing for Asia at HubSpot. Owner.com built one of the most prominent founder brands and Youtube channels in B2B. They invested $1m into brand when they were still doing only $10m in ARR (now doing over $100m), resulting in 27M impressions last year, with organic generating 20% of pipeline every month. In this episode, we talk about their approach to Youtube and leveraging the founder brand early. --- We discuss: * How to crush Youtube as a B2B company * The #1 mistake B2B companies make when they try to leverage Youtube * First order irrational, second order rational: why Owner.com invests so much into brand * How and why Owner.com CEO Adam Guild spent 10 hours every Saturday to produce videos * Variables to success and comparing 2 videos: same title and thumbnail, one with 100k views, the other with 3.4k views (30x less) * Brand strategy into topics into script flow * The 5 stages of building an organic motion from scratch * Why a great Youtube editor is worth 10-100x a good one (they pay $120-150k to people straight out of college) * David’s advice for founders who want to build their founder brand --- Show Notes: --- Connect with David Fallarme: David Fallarme's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dfallarme/ Owner.com: https://www.owner.com/ --- Connect with Finn: Finn's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Owner.com’s Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@owner-com/ Ahrefs’ Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AhrefsCom Owner.com Founder Adam Guild: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamharrisonguild/ In-N-Out video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbx8EG9I0tY Five Guys video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQnNJF79psk NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/ --- Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Jillian Richardson is a Linkedin ghostwriter and runs “Make LinkedIn Weird”. Before degenerating into Linkedin work (I’m allowed to say this because I do Linkedin work), she did standup comedy and 6 years of improv training, which is where she gets her inspiration from. In this episode, we talk about why you should be weirder on Linkedin, how to find your flavor of weird, whether you can say the word F**K on Linkedin, and more. This one’s for you if you feel like your writing is too boring or you’re not able to get your full personality on paper. --- We discuss: * Why “Linkedin is the fakest place on earth” is the best news for anyone willing to be weird * The benefits of allowing yourself to be weirder * How to find your flavor of weird * Jillian’s envy-disgust matrix * The three-pass editing routine (this one was eye-opening to me!!) * Can you say f**k on Linkedin? Should you? * How to become funnier --- This post is sponsored by Thormeier.co Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve worked with 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it. If you want to understand how I work with founders, book a call here. --- Show Notes: Connect with Jillian: Jillian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatjillian/ Make LinkedIn Weird: https://www.makelinkedinweird.com/ Jillian’s website: https://www.thatjillian.com/ Connect with Finn: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual: https://ucbcomedy.com/product/upright-citizens-brigade-comedy-improvisation-manual/ The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron: https://juliacameronlive.com/register/the-artists-way/ The Writing Life by Annie Dillard: https://www.anniedillard.com/books-annie-dillard.html Kait LeDonne: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaitledonne-personalbrandingexpert/ Matt Barker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattjbarker1/ Jasmin Alić: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicjasmin/ --- Full Transcript: Finn Thormeier: All right, my guest today is Jillian Richardson. She is a ghostwriter for solopreneurs and executives, and she helps people be weirdo on LinkedIn, which I love. I think much needed. The platform can use it. Her message resonated with me. I found you like a couple weeks ago on LinkedIn for the first time, stumbled upon my feed. So I wanted to have her on to learn from her and maybe get a free consultation for all of us here. So Jillian, thank you for joining the pod. Jillian Richardson: Thank you so much for having me. Finn Thormeier: Cool. Let’s maybe start with making the case for why people should be weird on LinkedIn. Jillian Richardson: Okay, so I’m someone, I go to a lot of dinner parties, a lot of places where I meet new people, and I say, you know, I’m a ghostwriter for LinkedIn, and the faces... It’s very telling of, I think, what LinkedIn’s brand is in the world. Like people are like, oh, LinkedIn, like LinkedIn is horrible. It’s so fake. It’s everyone just talking about how accomplished they are and their career milestones. And it’s just the fakest place on earth. Finn Thormeier: LinkedIn invented slop before AI slop were the thing. Jillian Richardson: Yes. Like even before AI, it was slop. Why would you ever want to write content for that platform? And so then I get to say to them, well, imagine if you didn’t fit into that mold, how happy people would be to see your content because the bar on LinkedIn is not very high and there’s so much room for creativity and humor and personal stories. And it’s pretty easy to make yourself stand out if you actually have a point of view and you have a little bit of fun with it. So that’s my case for it. Everyone knows LinkedIn doesn’t have the best reputation. And so if you can make it a little bit fun for people who are slogging through LinkedIn, trying to get a job, make a business contact, whatever, they will love you and they will remember you. Finn Thormeier: Is it fair to say that being weirder on LinkedIn is the same thing as showing your personality? Jillian Richardson: Yeah, I would say so. I think being weird, showing your personality, I say because I teach a class on this, it doesn’t mean you have to be posting memes every day or only telling jokes. I think everyone has their own brand of what I call weird, but it’s really just your personality. And so it might be sharing takes in your industry that a lot of people disagree with, sharing stuff about your personal life that you’re comfortable sharing, sharing hard moments in your business. But for whatever reason, the framing of weird seems to help people think about things in a new way. Yeah. Finn Thormeier: And I mean, I would say it comes at a time where it’s most needed for the platform because there is so much AI. I think LinkedIn just won the award of the platform that has the most AI slop Jillian Richardson: on it. Wait, what do you mean? I didn’t hear this. Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I think someone published, I think it was some major publication that did an analysis and it was like 43% of all of LinkedIn posts was categorized as AI slop. However, that was being categorized and it was the highest compared to X and Instagram and Substack and all the other platforms. But I think having a personality, showing your personality, being willing to show up the way that you are, maybe not fully, but more so, has always worked. But now, given that there’s so much AI-generated content, which I think, one, means there’s just a lot more content and a lot of the content just looks and sounds the same, just because everyone basically has the same ghostwriter now. Jillian Richardson: Yep. Finn Thormeier: I guess that’s why it’s even more needed right now versus, I don’t know, two or three years ago. Jillian Richardson: A hundred percent. And the thing on AI, I don’t know if you saw that there’s now a new button on LinkedIn. It sounds like AI slop, which is fascinating that LinkedIn decided to add that to the platform. Like three weeks ago, they had an AI rewrite feature, but, uh, If people are going to use some sort of ghostwriting tool, now that there’s that button, you have even more of a reason to work with a human ghostwriter. Finn Thormeier: It’s almost like signaling to everyone, but just having one weird sentence in there that’s like, this is really me. I actually wrote this. Jillian Richardson: Yes. A person wrote this. Finn Thormeier: Now, um, you also, I think on your website, you list kind of some benefits of being weirder. Jillian Richardson: Yeah. Finn Thormeier: What are some of the benefits of showing up weirder? Jillian Richardson: So honestly, the biggest one I would say is that the more fun you have with your writing, the more you are likely to actually show up because so many people ha it’s kind of like with exercise. If you do a form of exercise that you super, super, super hate. You’re going to be less likely to go to the gym than, you know, if you sign up for a Zumba class and you’re like, oh, I love Zumba and I have all my friends there and it’s my favorite part of the week. So if you can actually see it as a creative writing exercise, a way to get to know yourself, a way to get to know the world, then you’ll show up and you’ll do it more. And consistency is what builds a social media presence. Finn Thormeier: Okay. And I guess it’s, I mean, that’s one of the benefits, consistency. I mean, the other benefit I feel like is, and again, feel free to talk to other ones, but if this is actually you, you just have stronger bonds with people, with your audience, right? Because it’s... Jillian Richardson: I totally agree with that. Because there’s this bizarre thing on LinkedIn where... People will hire a ghostwriter and then they’ll get some sort of AI commenting tool that’s like commenting and also in their DMs. And then I’ve heard this from a lot of people I work with. They have this bizarre experience of feeling like they know a person and then they get on Zoom and they’re like, wait, this person doesn’t seem at all like the person I was interacting with. Was I even interacting with the person at all? And a lot of the times it turns out that they literally weren’t. And what a terrible way to interact with your customer, that their first impression of you is, actually, I don’t know you at all. Finn Thormeier: Yeah. Well, it can also, I mean, it goes both ways. I think oftentimes people will realize if you don’t allow yourself to show that weird or Weird side of you or that personality of yourself that on the call they’ll be like, you’re actually more interesting than I thought. Yes. Jillian Richardson: That’s a great point as well. That’s a good flip side of, oh, actually I enjoyed talking to you more than I thought I would. Finn Thormeier: Yeah. No broetry. You don’t speak in one line sentences. Jillian Richardson: Yeah. Yeah. Finn Thormeier: Okay. I want to show, do you have a favorite example of a weird person? Post or being weird on LinkedIn. I’m going to share my screen here. I’ll just show one here. So like one example, let me make this big. Do you just see my LinkedIn now? Jillian Richardson: Yes, I can see it. This is my like pièce de résistance. Finn Thormeier: Exactly. Yeah. So this is kind of, it’s a good example of a weird post because it’s also your post where you make the case that people should be weird. This is the post how I found you. It started with, I am on my knees begging, be weird on LinkedIn, 10% weird, 100% weird if you had a good breakfast. It’s already clear that this post has personality. This is a hook that no one would use on LinkedIn. It’s a very bold choice to start a sentence like that and no one sees that on LinkedIn. Then

Dan Slagen is the CMO & Chief AI Transformation Officer (CAITO) at Zapier. He joined just over a year ago as SVP Marketing, and recently got promoted to own the company-wide AI transformation mandate. Before Zapier, he was CMO at Tomorrow.io, where he helped grow the company from $2M ARR to a $1B+ valuation, CMO & Chief Culture Officer at ThriveHive, and Head of Global Advertising at HubSpot. In this episode, we talk about the future of the CMO role, why the CMO should (?) own the company-wide AI mandate, his “red alert” for Zapier’s marketing team, strategies to speed up your team’s AI adoption, and much more. --- We discuss: * Why Dan took on Zapier’s company-wide AI transformation mandate as the CMO * Dan’s case for fewer CMOs * The “red alert” he called on Zapier’s marketing team * The first step to making your company (and marketing org) more AI-native * Zapier’s internal AI policy * LLM jail, automation debt, and why only 24% of GTM workflows need AI * Why AI is causing “generation loss” & what it has to do with your approval processes * What every CMO behind on AI should do this weekend ---- Show Notes: Connect with Dan Slagen: Dan Slagen’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-slagen-718675a/ Dan Slagen’s website: https://www.danslagen.com/ Zapier: https://zapier.com/ Connect with Finn: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: ZapConnect (Zapier’s annual conference): https://zapier.com/zapconnect Dan Slagen’s “LLM jail” & “Automation Debt” post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-slagen-718675a_our-team-keeps-hearing-the-same-two-words-activity-7490753511693930499-8NRJ Zapier’s AI Workflow Index (Q2 2026): https://zapier.com/ai/workflow-index/q2-2026-report Tomorrow.io: https://www.tomorrow.io/ Tom Wentworth (CMO at incident.io) episode: https://www.founderbrand.org/p/the-most-ai-pilled-cmo-in-tech-shares Don Jeter (CMO at Torq) episode: https://www.founderbrand.org/p/how-to-radically-stand-out-w-don Torq: https://torq.io/ Paul Roetzer’s SmarterX: https://smarterx.ai/ MAICON: https://www.maicon.ai/ Clay’s AI writing policy: https://www.clay.com/blog/ai-writing-policy Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code Cursor: https://cursor.com/ Codex: https://openai.com/codex/ Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com/ HeyGen: https://www.heygen.com/ --- Full Transcript: Finn Thormeier: All right. My guest today is Dan Slagen. He is the Chief Marketing and Chief AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Zapier, I’m sure given my audience, everyone will know it’s an automation platform, or as they say, it’s the most connected AI orchestration platform. Dan joined Zapier a little Over a year ago as SVP of Marketing and recently was promoted to CMO and CAITO, Chief AI Transformation Officer, which is a very interesting combination and we’ll discuss that. Before joining Zapier, Dan was CMO at Tomorrow.io, where he helped grow the company from $2 million in ARR to $1 billion plus valuation in five years. CMO at ThriveHive, where he led the team through a $1.3 billion acquisition. CMO at Alignable, Head of Global Advertising at HubSpot and many other roles including founder of a video tech company for a year and he was also named one of Forbes top 50 entrepreneurial CMOs of 2024. Dan thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro? Dan Slagen: No, appreciate it. Very, very kind words, but happy to be here. Finn Thormeier: Cool. What’s the story behind the new title and is it disconnected or is there a reason why the company-wide AI transformation chief officer title was given to the CMO? Dan Slagen: Good question. So I joined Zapier about a year ago and it’s a, you know, 13, 14 year old company, a lot of history. And so, you know, first and foremost, I think they want to make sure that someone coming in at this level is not going to stick around for a little while and leave. They want to make sure that someone who’s going to be really invested in the company and all that. And so it’s funny, you know, any Any executive marketing role these days, I feel like it’s a one-year trial, essentially. It’s a test. I’m going to see if I like the company, if I like working for the CEO with the exec team, and they’re going to do the exact same thing back to me. And so as we were nearing the one-year mark, Wade and I... Got together, Wade’s the CEO, co-founder of Zapier, and we sort of had the conversation of is this a one-year deal or do we want to try and sign a multi-year contract? What do we want to do? And we both felt like the relationship was going well and this had been a fruitful experiment so far and it felt like something we both wanted to invest in moving forward. And so as we did that, We also sort of talked about how else could the role expand and what else could you do outside of marketing. And so I’ve been extremely fortunate in the past to work for some smaller startups that went through hyper growth where you own everything. You know, I can remember roles where I owned marketing and sales and CS, BD, like everything, just building those systems from the ground up. Certainly not at the scale that Zapier is at, but I had some good familiarity. The one common factor with all of that was growth and pushing the limits on the technology that we’re using. And so with AI, you mentioned my last company, it was a really, really small marketing team. With a very small budget. And so when AI came out, that was an aha moment for me of being this thing that we can finally compete with the biggest companies in the world. The playing field is finally level. I can do all these things I haven’t even been able to do. I wasn’t so excited about AI at first because it made the things I was doing better. I would tell you because I could literally do things that I couldn’t do before. I just told my CEO, can’t do that, can’t do that, can’t do that unless we, you know, get headcount or budget. So I’ve stayed really close to that. And I’ve also stayed really, really close to the culture. In another previous role, you mentioned ThriveHive, I was the chief culture officer as well as the CMO there. So I started to learn a lot about that. And at my last company, the culture team and I partnered so closely together. So I’ve had all this experience that was sort of building towards something I didn’t quite know what it was. And it fruitfully ended up being this dual role of marketing and AI transformation at Zapier. Finn Thormeier: Do you think marketers are somehow better suited for that type of role or was it just really this unique mix that you personally had that will not apply to other marketers as related to their peer leaders? Dan Slagen: That’s an excellent question. I truly believe that someone sitting in The head of marketing role is in the best position in the company to lead it. However, A lot of the personas that I see within marketing either have not had the experience that I just went through or do not have the mindset to be able to do it. They’re too focused on one thing. They know how to tell a really, really good brand story, but they have no idea how to think about pipeline and demand generation or the inverse of that. And it is hard to find someone that truly can spike across all three areas. Happy to dig more into that. I think if you can find the person with the right background, someone sitting in the marketing and growth department is an incredibly dangerous persona that can help the business immensely. Finn Thormeier: Not to go on too much of a tangent, but you said At Tomorrow.io, you had a very small team. I think I saw you gave a presentation where you had four people reporting into you and that when AI happened, you felt like you could finally do these things that you hadn’t been able to do because of lack of headcount. Are there any specific ones that you can mention here where, again, things that you wanted to do but really couldn’t and now finally you were able to do? Dan Slagen: Sure. One example that I like to tell is, you know, when I was at the company, we got included in an RFP from a major entertainment brand. They own theme parks around the world. They have lots of movies. You can probably guess who I’m talking about. And the RFP was really, really last minute. And we had a week or two to get something to them. And we knew there were 10 other companies all pitching. And we were added late. And they’re like, what are we going to do to stand out? What we ended up doing was we created this video using AI where we went to all of the movies that the entertainment company had created and we saw where all of the characters were impacted by weather. And we’d be like, what if they had had access to our technology? They would know when to leave the dock. They would know when to go fly. They would know when to go outside. They wouldn’t be at risk. Literally use the exact scenes from the movies and the characters and all that. And when we showed it to them, the response was literally, we love how much you just love our brand. You stood out so much compared to everyone else. We’re going to move you guys to the next round. We haven’t even looked at your technology yet. We’ll worry about that in the next round. But just they’re one of those companies that they want to see that people love their brand and get involved in their brand. And so, you know, that’s something that, again, I wouldn’t have even proposed that prior. And, you know, we did this when, you know, Midjourney was really getting good. The video creator was starting to get good. We were using things like HeyGen AI to do all of our product marketing videos. So we were getting good at that really, really quickly. And so, again, it was sort of a new thing we could even offer the sales tea

Patrick Spychalski is the co-founder of The Kiln, a leading GTM engineering agency and one of only six Clay Elite Studios, their highest partnership tier. They recently got acquired by 2X. Before The Kiln, Patrick helped Clay stand up its early social, events and partnership motions, back when Clay had just invented the term “GTM engineer”. In this episode, we talk about the state of GTM engineering 3 years in, whether Claude Code is eating Clay’s lunch, when a startup should hire its first GTM engineer, and more. --- We discuss: * Clay vs Claude Code * Patrick’s top Clay / Claude workflows and agents: what he would keep if he had to delete everything else * The newest tools Patrick is currently experimenting with * When to hire your first GTM engineer and what makes a good one * Into whom should GTM engineering should report into? * Why Patrick sold The Kiln to 2X --- Show Notes: Connect with Patrick: Patrick Spychalski’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickspychalski/ The Kiln: https://thekiln.com/ 2X: https://2x.com/ Connect with Finn: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code n8n: https://n8n.io/ Modal: https://modal.com/ Eric Nowoslawski (Growth Engine X): https://coldoutbound.com/ Deepline: https://deepline.com/ BlitzAPI: https://www.blitz-api.ai/ Tom Wentworth (incident.io) episode: https://www.founderbrand.org/p/the-most-ai-pilled-cmo-in-tech-shares --- Full Transcript: Finn Thormeier: All right. My guest today is Patrick Spychalski. He is the co-founder of The Kiln. The Kiln is one of the leading GTM engineering agencies and clay partners. They recently got acquired by 2X. He also previously helped clay stand up their early social events and partnership motions. I wanted to have him on because I don’t think there’s many people who are deeper in the whole Thank you for coming on the podcast. Patrick Spychalski: I appreciate you having me. Glad to be here. Finn Thormeier: How would you describe the, I mean, you’ve been there since basically the, let’s say the dawn of GTM engineering when kind of Clay coined that term, which I guess has been like three-ish years, something like that. How would you describe the state of GTM engineering as of July, 2026? Patrick Spychalski: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s at an interesting stage right now where it’s evolved to the point where many people, I’d say even a majority in some spaces of people in marketing and sales have heard about it. They know what a GTM engineer is. It’s becoming a lot more in the vogue, a lot more prominent. Even a year ago, I would say it wasn’t a super popular job role. And now most companies, especially tech companies, are prioritizing it as kind of a core role to hire for. It’s also in an interesting state where the tool stack, I think, is shifting a little bit. Clay initially came up with the term GTM engineering. That was kind of their invention. And I’d still say they’re really core to the work that GTM engineers do. But for a while, I would say that it was really one of the only tools that people were using for a GTM engineer, at least the primary one. It’s now evolving to the point where the Claude Codes of the world, obviously N8N has come out probably into the vogue maybe a year ago or so. It’s getting to the point where the tool stack’s changing pretty significantly. And also, it’s starting to come out with sub-niches of the role where initially, let’s say the broad GTM engineer role is what everybody’s looking to hire for, but now they’re realizing that GTM engineers mean something different for every company. There’s different priorities associated with every business. Sometimes I talk to a company and their main priority is outbound, so they need a GTM engineer who’s got a lot of experience with outbound tooling and the tool stack connected to it. Really want more of like a data engineer, like someone who can go into a data warehouse and sequence all the information to something like Salesforce and create these bi-directional syncs. And so I think they’re coming to realize that, you know, different GTM engineers have different skill sets and need to be hired accordingly. So yeah, it’s at a very interesting stage right now. Finn Thormeier: How would you describe what’s the leading edge of GTM engineering right now? I mean, I feel like three years ago, just having a clay account and having any workflow in there, that’s like the leading edge. Where are we now? Patrick Spychalski: Yeah, so I would say like all of the most talented cutting edge UTM engineers I know are building a lot of really interesting infrastructure within Cloud Code. So I think a lot of the really talented ones that I’ve worked with have realized that, you know, you can recreate a lot of the workflows you would build in no code tools in tools like Cloud Code and save yourself a lot of money depending on what the workflow is. But they also realize that these things should not be completely agentic. So for example, if you have an enrichment workflow, the whole thing shouldn’t just be an agent going and finding information and putting it in a document. It’s a big waste of money. You’re using a ton of tokens to do that, and it’ll end up costing you actually more than a tool like Clay would. Clay, I think, is a really good combination of the agentic and the deterministic. So they have to actually rebuild the scaffolding that kind of supports a tool like Clay as well. I would say GTM engineers at a lot of startups I know are starting to try to create their own workflow interfaces and agents. This is a lot more difficult for enterprise companies because of security and compliance reasons. It’s pretty complicated to spin up your own agent and then connect it to Salesforce without there being any problems. But for companies, especially in the Seed and Series A range, I’ve seen a lot of GTMes create their own workflow scaffolding and cloud code and almost become their own host for the workflows that they’re building. Finn Thormeier: What does switching or replicating things that maybe previously you did in Clay instead in Cloud Code, what does that unlock except maybe some cost benefits? Patrick Spychalski: I would say the majority of it is cost benefit. There’s a little bit of added positives. I’d say one thing Clay isn’t very good at so far, and I’m sure they’ll improve this, is the relativity component. Let’s say you source Yeah. You can think when you’re using Excel or Google Sheets, you can reference another cell in a table. Clay can’t really reference another cell. So it’s really tough to do that relativity. And that surfaces in a lot of workflows. So things like that, I think, are nice to build yourself or build in something. So there is some unlocked benefit, but for the most part, I think it’s just that place changed their pricing recently. It’s a lot more enterprise forward. They’re really trying to target these bigger companies. And for people who are at Series A or C companies with pretty tight budgets, they were having a lot of trouble justifying the cost, especially to probably the founders or co-founders or CEOs. And so it’s just easier to build it, something like Cloud Code. And again, we’re not really seeing that shift on enterprise. I think enterprise companies will stick with Clay for quite a while, just due to the security constraints and the fact that it’s like a real tool you can procure. Finn Thormeier: I mean, what is your take on Cloud Code eating Clay’s lunch? Patrick Spychalski: I think it’s a lot more complicated a problem than people say it is. I see all these posts being like, Cloud Code is going to completely destroy Clay. Clay is dead. Clay is dead. And I really just don’t agree with that. I think Clay has built a really good platform for, and I kind of mentioned this a second ago, but combining the agentic and deterministic aspects of enrichment to create a really cost-effective platform, even with them up They still create a pretty cheap way to run enrichment, build workflows, and safely connect them to platforms. And I really think the safety part is important to hammer on because, like, if you create a Claude agent that connects to your Salesforce, there’s really no guarantee it doesn’t just, like, destroy all the data, wipe it out, not use a sandbox. There’s a million things that can go wrong. Clay really is, One of the safer ways to update your CRM or send messages through a sequencing tool or update a data warehouse because you’re able to visualize all of the outputs before sending it over. You’re not letting an agent just run crazy. It’s just a direct integration with data inputs and outputs. Yeah, I don’t see any large businesses moving over to strictly cloud code anytime soon. I still think Clay is probably their go-to, but I can totally see the justification for startups. One other thing I’ll add quickly is that I think there are some use cases There are cases that are great to be replaced with Cloud Code, and then there’s others that aren’t. So a great example of one that I’ve seen a lot of people effectively replace with Cloud Code is enrichment of lead lists. And so if you have a list of 1,000 contacts that you’re planning to reach out You just want to find their LinkedIn and their email and their phone number. You can just plug that list into Cloud Code, use a tool like an API like DeepLine or something or Blitz API and just run the whole thing and enrich the whole list and send outreach. And I’m seeing that being done really well. People like Eric Nowoslowski, who runs a really successful outbound agency, has essentially just built this huge Incredible automated system that does all of

This episode is a bit different. A little over a year ago, I listened to a podcast between Jonathan and Jason Fried, the co-founder of Basecamp/37signals. I had known Jonathan for a while, and I’m a big fan of Jason Fried, but the episode was very different — it was almost like a therapy session. Jonathan had reached out to Jason for some general business and life advice, and instead of keeping it private, he decided to publish it. At the time, I got a ton of value out of it. So in almost a “déjà vu” moment, I’m doing something similar here, but with the roles reversed: Jonathan giving the advice, instead of asking it. We recorded this a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out where to take Project 33. Given that Jonathan had built a large agency but then also pivoted into other, more scalable offers (he’s the CEO of AJ&Smart and facilitator.com), he felt like the perfect person to ask for advice. And if you’ve seen any of my recent stuff on LinkedIn, you might’ve seen that I pivoted the podcast and launched my advisory firm thormeier.co A good chunk of that was kicked off and inspired by this conversation. --- We discuss: * Why I’m the one getting coached this time * Four ways to get a dream out of your system and “the tiniest announceable version” * The agency/offer ladder: from DIY (do it yourself), to DWY (done with you), to DFY (done for you) * 25% close rate: anything higher means you’re too cheap * “If you have to sit down and do 10 hours of work to be successful, then you’re just doing stupid s**t” * How to make a 500-listener podcast worth $100k --- Show Notes: Connect with Jonathan Jonathan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/ AJ&Smart: https://ajsmart.com/ Facilitator.com: https://facilitator.com/ The Unscheduled CEO podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/ --- Connect with Finn: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn advisory: https://thormeier.co/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Nat Eliason’s essay on de-atomization: https://www.nateliason.com/blog/de-atomization-is-the-secret-to-happiness Built to Sell by John Warrillow: https://builttosell.com/ Sprint by Jake Knapp: https://www.character.vc/sprint Skool: https://www.skool.com/ --- Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Kyle Poyar is the founder and writer of the wildly popular Growth Unhinged, a newsletter with over 85,000 subscribers about pricing, monetization and GTM. He also has over 110,000 followers on Linkedin. He started the newsletter in March 2021 as a side project and went all-in about a year ago. Since then, his one-person business is doing over 7-figures a year, between brand partnerships, subscriber revenue, and advisory work. In this episode, we talk about how to build & monetize a newsletter, including how Kyle tests every newsletter idea before writing it, why Kyle’s pulling away from Linkedin, leaving Substack for beehiiv, and more. --- We discuss: * How Kyle started & grew his newsletter from zero to over 85,000 subscribers in 5 years while having a full-time job * How Kyle validates newsletter ideas before writing them up * How he creates his graphics, which are a large part of his success/shareability * Why Kyle is pulling away from Linkedin even though he has 110,000 followers * The math behind running a 7-figure/year solo creator business * Why he left Substack for beehiiv after 5 years on Substack * Why subscribers you get from the recommendation feature are mostly “garbage” --- Show Notes: Connect with Kyle: Kyle’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-poyar/ Growth Unhinged: https://www.growthunhinged.com/ Mostly Growth podcast: https://www.growthunhinged.com/podcast --- Connect with Finn: Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ --- Full Transcript: Finn Thormeier: Alright, my guest today is Kyle Poyar. He is the founder and writer of the Growth Unhinged newsletter where he talks about monetization, pricing, GTM growth and other practical advice for B2B startups. He started it in March 2021 when he was still working full-time at his job and it has since then grown into one of the most popular newsletters in the B2B space with over 85,000 subscribers. He is also a prolific writer on LinkedIn with over 110,000 followers. His background is in Venture Capital where he was an operating partner at OpenView, which invested in companies like Datadog and Calendly, as well as, found this out during research, a company called Project 44. My company is called Project 33, so clearly they have the edge on us. Matter of fact, we’re 25% worse than them. Kyle is also the host of the Mostly Growth podcast and he advises B2B startups on growth and monetization. Kyle, thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro? Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on. No, I think you got it right, but it’s been interesting that I started the newsletter while working full-time in VC, but it’s grown big enough to kind of support an independent solopreneur business, which is pretty cool. Finn Thormeier: Nine months ago, right? Nine months ago, you went kind of fully on this business? Kyle Poyar: Exactly. So it was August of last year, of 2025, that I made the decision and then really went in earnest in September. Finn Thormeier: There you go. Okay, so you started it in March 2021, and then you were full-time at OpenView. In those five years, it’s about five years, you’ve grown it to 85,000 subs. Before we talk about the lessons, I’m just curious about your writing process. What does it look like? How much time do you spend on each thing? How do you pick topics? Just start where you want, walk me through your process. Kyle Poyar: So the starting process I had is probably the most relevant for anyone that’s thinking about starting a writing practice. I began on LinkedIn actually before I ever had a newsletter — wrote long form content around COVID. Very active on LinkedIn. And I would realize I’d have these pieces. I mean, a lot of my posts would fall flat and have no engagement, but I’d have other pieces that would do quite well, but I would run into character limits, or I’d post something and then it was impossible for someone to find a couple of weeks later. I’d also get DMs from people that were smarter on a topic than I was. And so I was like, I feel really constrained by LinkedIn. And so what I decided is not just that I would throw out LinkedIn for a newsletter, but I would test ideas on LinkedIn. I would see what my audience cared about. I would take that as signal to go write a deeper piece on a topic, or sometimes string together multiple LinkedIn posts to turn it into a piece. And then I’d promote that back on LinkedIn. And so it all became a flywheel where for me, it wasn’t like I’m going to have this brilliant idea and write about it and then post. I think about content as a place where writing and distribution need to be on equal footing, and where the best practices create a flywheel where you’re building for and with a community. And I think that’s what can make a newsletter really stand out. Finn Thormeier: And if I remember correctly, back then when you started on LinkedIn, you were an operating partner. So you were working with the portfolio companies at your VC firm on their go-to-market strategy, pricing. And I think you were kind of talking about lessons, takeaways, insights, things that you were seeing with those portfolio companies. Kyle Poyar: Exactly. Exactly. And so for my content calendar, and even for the LinkedIn content calendar, often it was pretty informal. Finn Thormeier: Did you back then have like a, “I’m going to post every single day” or “I’m going to post twice a week,” or was it just completely ad hoc whenever something popped into your head? Kyle Poyar: Back then it was pretty ad hoc. I mean, some of these people post literally daily, including weekends. I don’t know how you have the stamina to do that. I’ve always been long winded and I just don’t have enough good ideas that I want to go that deep about every single day. My cadence over time has been about two to maybe four times a week — almost never publish more frequently than that, unless something is like really wrong with me. And it’s pretty ad hoc. I like to post multiple days a week. And so if I don’t have any ideas, I might find something from my archives and kind of tweak it or tailor it. But generally it’s not super planned far in advance. I try to keep things fresh. There’s one point in my career when I used a scheduling tool, actually the native post scheduling tool within LinkedIn. And then I realized it was either the content was outdated, or maybe it was LinkedIn penalizes you for scheduling content — I don’t exactly know what it was, but I felt like that was actually having way worse results than publishing fresh insights. I almost always post in the morning. I do find that that’s when I have my best ideas, I’m sharpest, but also that’s when people are most engaged. Sundays work surprisingly well. I think there’s just a lot less competition and you get all the LinkedIn diehards on Sunday, but then your post is the first thing people see on Monday too. So I do find that that works quite well. And I will say one thing that works quite well for me is I think about the visual as much as the text. I spent six years in consulting and so I would make decks — I’ve always thought in terms of slides — but I would translate that to LinkedIn infographic style visuals. And that’s become a bit of a signature, a calling card for me. But those visuals perform far better than text only posts. They’re way easier to share. I think it’s partly to do with, it feels save worthy — like, oh, I should save this and maybe bookmark it for a presentation I’m working on, or I can share this with a friend or colleague. I think it’s also something that drives more dwell time. These are generally not super simple infographics. They’re pretty complicated ones, which means people are actually spending real time reading it. And that means they’re spending more time on LinkedIn, which means LinkedIn can get more ad dollars. And so they’re going to push that harder. And so these dense infographics are the starting point for most of my posts. Finn Thormeier: How much time do you spend on an infographic? Kyle Poyar: 30 minutes, maybe. I actually do them all by hand. I have got a Google Slides template that was made by a great designer when I was at OpenView, and I’ve kept that template and made some tweaks. But it has a couple of fonts in it that are out of the box in Google Slides, a couple of colors, nothing fancy. But I literally will make the visuals myself, which feels weird to be doing point and click in 2026. Some people would say, is that really the best use of your time? But honestly, if you get the visual right, that can make the difference between a post being viral or not. I reuse posts in speaking decks when I go out and do public speaking. I’ll put those visuals in my newsletter articles. A great visual is so valuable that it feels very hard for me to give that up. But yeah, I’m not taking hours and hours on it. Finn Thormeier: Do you start with writing the text and then later you find a graphic that works for it? Or do you start with the graphic and then write? Kyle Poyar: Oh no, the graphic is the starting point. And then I write something to go with it. I think of a hook that I think is useful. And then the graphic is so dense, there’s actually a lot of writing in the graphic itself. And so I often copy and paste from what I wrote for the graphic into LinkedIn. It’s kind of like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, people put captions with their posts, but realistically, you scroll through Instagram for the image or for the video. And I think people do similar things on LinkedIn where the hook has to be strong, but the visual also has to be quite strong. Finn Thormeier: Which visual are you very proud of that we can a little bit use here as an example? Kyle Poyar: You can take the pricing one. That’s the one you’

Adam Holmgren is the co-founder & CEO of Fibbler, a paid ads attribution tool that connects your Linkedin and Google ad accounts to your CRM and calculates influenced pipeline and revenue. They are bootstrapped, roughly 2.5 years in, and they just hit $1M ARR with a team of two. Before Fibbler, Adam was Head of Demand Gen at Rillion and GetAccept. In this episode, we talk about how Adam batch writes five posts every Sunday night, his three content pillars, the $10-15k/month Linkedin ads engine behind Fibbler’s growth, the 100-like threshold for turning posts into ads, cold vs retargeting frequency, and the pink lion mascot that became one of their best marketing assets. --- We discuss: * How Adam writes five 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 B2B ads on Hulu & HBO Max through Linkedin CTV --- 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/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ (do we want to switch this alredy to: Thormeier.co: https://thormeier.co/) Hope you enjoy!! Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Kevin White is the Head of Marketing at Scrunch AI, an AI visibility and agent experience platform just acquired by Sitecore. 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!! Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Peter Caputa is the CEO at Databox (analytics platform, doing about $10m ARR) and ex-VP Sales at HubSpot. This is his 4th time on the podcast, which is the record. 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. --- We discuss: * Should every B2B CEO still be active on Linkedin? * Breaking down his Claude skill * How he built the skill * Every tool / connector the skill calls to pull in data * Running through it using a real Linkedin post example * The “charges” framework for writing hooks * 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 Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Tom Wentworth is the CMO at incident.io, and the most AI-pilled marketing leader I’ve talked to. Before incident.io, Tom was CMO at Recorded Future, RapidMiner, Acquia and Optimizely. You can call that quite a track record. 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: * How he runs his day-to-day as CMO now vs 3 years ago * Why 30% of his time goes into bug fixing * How he builds agents & Claude skills * Claude Code vs Cowork vs Clay * incident’s “Applied AI” team and why the next GTM engineer is a real engineer sitting inside the CTO’s org * The most impactful agents/skills/workflows his team built and ACTUALLY use * The one - and only - thing Tom would still hire an agency for * Don Jeter’s monster trucks vs Tom’s agents: comparing two playbooks * His top 10 pieces of advice for CMOs in 2026 * 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!! Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

Trinity Nguyen is the CMO at UserGems, where she also leads their AI GTM function. UserGems is an ABM platform used by companies like Crowdstrike, Gong, Box, and our friends at Sendoso. And… THEY EAT THEIR OWN DOG FOOD (or drink their own champagne). Trinity has been running UserGems’ own ABX program for the last 6 years and iterated and improved on it every year. It now drives over 30% of their overall net new revenue growth.In this episode, we break down their 2025 ABX program that took 6,000 target accounts, converted 12% into Opportunities, and generated multi millions in ARR - and what she’s changing about that approach for 2026. --- 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!! Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe