Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Founder Brand with Finn Thormeier

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.

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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

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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/

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Full Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finn Thormeier: The number one exec.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finn Thormeier: Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finn Thormeier: Where does your marketing OS live?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Slagen: All right. Thank you.

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.

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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

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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

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Full Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finn Thormeier: Researching accounts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finn Thormeier: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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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/

---

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.

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We discuss:

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

* How Kyle validates newsletter ideas before writing them up

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

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

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

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

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

---

Show Notes:

Connect with Kyle:

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

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

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

---

Connect with Finn:

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

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

---

Full Transcript:

Finn Thormeier: Alright, my guest today is Kyle Poyar. He is the founder and writer of the Growth Unhinged newsletter where he talks about monetization, pricing, GTM growth and other practical advice for B2B startups. He started it in March 2021 when he was still working full-time at his job and it has since then grown into one of the most popular newsletters in the B2B space with over 85,000 subscribers. He is also a prolific writer on LinkedIn with over 110,000 followers. His background is in Venture Capital where he was an operating partner at OpenView, which invested in companies like Datadog and Calendly, as well as, found this out during research, a company called Project 44. My company is called Project 33, so clearly they have the edge on us. Matter of fact, we’re 25% worse than them. Kyle is also the host of the Mostly Growth podcast and he advises B2B startups on growth and monetization. Kyle, thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro?

Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on. No, I think you got it right, but it’s been interesting that I started the newsletter while working full-time in VC, but it’s grown big enough to kind of support an independent solopreneur business, which is pretty cool.

Finn Thormeier: Nine months ago, right? Nine months ago, you went kind of fully on this business?

Kyle Poyar: Exactly. So it was August of last year, of 2025, that I made the decision and then really went in earnest in September.

Finn Thormeier: There you go. Okay, so you started it in March 2021, and then you were full-time at OpenView. In those five years, it’s about five years, you’ve grown it to 85,000 subs. Before we talk about the lessons, I’m just curious about your writing process. What does it look like? How much time do you spend on each thing? How do you pick topics? Just start where you want, walk me through your process.

Kyle Poyar: So the starting process I had is probably the most relevant for anyone that’s thinking about starting a writing practice. I began on LinkedIn actually before I ever had a newsletter — wrote long form content around COVID. Very active on LinkedIn. And I would realize I’d have these pieces. I mean, a lot of my posts would fall flat and have no engagement, but I’d have other pieces that would do quite well, but I would run into character limits, or I’d post something and then it was impossible for someone to find a couple of weeks later. I’d also get DMs from people that were smarter on a topic than I was. And so I was like, I feel really constrained by LinkedIn.

And so what I decided is not just that I would throw out LinkedIn for a newsletter, but I would test ideas on LinkedIn. I would see what my audience cared about. I would take that as signal to go write a deeper piece on a topic, or sometimes string together multiple LinkedIn posts to turn it into a piece. And then I’d promote that back on LinkedIn. And so it all became a flywheel where for me, it wasn’t like I’m going to have this brilliant idea and write about it and then post. I think about content as a place where writing and distribution need to be on equal footing, and where the best practices create a flywheel where you’re building for and with a community. And I think that’s what can make a newsletter really stand out.

Finn Thormeier: And if I remember correctly, back then when you started on LinkedIn, you were an operating partner. So you were working with the portfolio companies at your VC firm on their go-to-market strategy, pricing. And I think you were kind of talking about lessons, takeaways, insights, things that you were seeing with those portfolio companies.

Kyle Poyar: Exactly. Exactly. And so for my content calendar, and even for the LinkedIn content calendar, often it was pretty informal.

Finn Thormeier: Did you back then have like a, “I’m going to post every single day” or “I’m going to post twice a week,” or was it just completely ad hoc whenever something popped into your head?

Kyle Poyar: Back then it was pretty ad hoc. I mean, some of these people post literally daily, including weekends. I don’t know how you have the stamina to do that. I’ve always been long winded and I just don’t have enough good ideas that I want to go that deep about every single day. My cadence over time has been about two to maybe four times a week — almost never publish more frequently than that, unless something is like really wrong with me. And it’s pretty ad hoc. I like to post multiple days a week. And so if I don’t have any ideas, I might find something from my archives and kind of tweak it or tailor it. But generally it’s not super planned far in advance. I try to keep things fresh.

There’s one point in my career when I used a scheduling tool, actually the native post scheduling tool within LinkedIn. And then I realized it was either the content was outdated, or maybe it was LinkedIn penalizes you for scheduling content — I don’t exactly know what it was, but I felt like that was actually having way worse results than publishing fresh insights. I almost always post in the morning. I do find that that’s when I have my best ideas, I’m sharpest, but also that’s when people are most engaged. Sundays work surprisingly well. I think there’s just a lot less competition and you get all the LinkedIn diehards on Sunday, but then your post is the first thing people see on Monday too. So I do find that that works quite well.

And I will say one thing that works quite well for me is I think about the visual as much as the text. I spent six years in consulting and so I would make decks — I’ve always thought in terms of slides — but I would translate that to LinkedIn infographic style visuals. And that’s become a bit of a signature, a calling card for me. But those visuals perform far better than text only posts. They’re way easier to share. I think it’s partly to do with, it feels save worthy — like, oh, I should save this and maybe bookmark it for a presentation I’m working on, or I can share this with a friend or colleague. I think it’s also something that drives more dwell time. These are generally not super simple infographics. They’re pretty complicated ones, which means people are actually spending real time reading it. And that means they’re spending more time on LinkedIn, which means LinkedIn can get more ad dollars. And so they’re going to push that harder. And so these dense infographics are the starting point for most of my posts.

Finn Thormeier: How much time do you spend on an infographic?

Kyle Poyar: 30 minutes, maybe. I actually do them all by hand. I have got a Google Slides template that was made by a great designer when I was at OpenView, and I’ve kept that template and made some tweaks. But it has a couple of fonts in it that are out of the box in Google Slides, a couple of colors, nothing fancy. But I literally will make the visuals myself, which feels weird to be doing point and click in 2026. Some people would say, is that really the best use of your time? But honestly, if you get the visual right, that can make the difference between a post being viral or not. I reuse posts in speaking decks when I go out and do public speaking. I’ll put those visuals in my newsletter articles. A great visual is so valuable that it feels very hard for me to give that up. But yeah, I’m not taking hours and hours on it.

Finn Thormeier: Do you start with writing the text and then later you find a graphic that works for it? Or do you start with the graphic and then write?

Kyle Poyar: Oh no, the graphic is the starting point. And then I write something to go with it. I think of a hook that I think is useful. And then the graphic is so dense, there’s actually a lot of writing in the graphic itself. And so I often copy and paste from what I wrote for the graphic into LinkedIn. It’s kind of like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, people put captions with their posts, but realistically, you scroll through Instagram for the image or for the video. And I think people do similar things on LinkedIn where the hook has to be strong, but the visual also has to be quite strong.

Finn Thormeier: Which visual are you very proud of that we can a little bit use here as an example?

Kyle Poyar: You can take the pricing one. That’s the one you’re hovering on right now. This was a pretty basic one, but it’s rare for a pricing LinkedIn post to go viral. Over 3,500 reactions, over 200 shares. And this is something I didn’t pay to boost at all. I just was seeing people really struggle with pricing for AI. And as much as I thought I had some good guidance for people, really the reality is every company was kind of all over the map in what they were doing. And I just wanted to highlight some examples of really interesting pricing models from the big players and from others. It gets almost used as a brainstorming thing probably that a lot of teams can share internally to be like, hey, here’s a bunch of very different examples from a bunch of oftentimes well-known brands on how they do it that can get us started on how we can think about changing our pricing model.

Finn Thormeier: Plus you obviously have quite a few recognizable logos in here. So I think that also helps.

Kyle Poyar: But you can see this is not done by a designer. This is something I literally put together in Google Slides. The resolution could be higher. I actually think that overpolished stuff looks too corporate-y and people actually get turned off by that. So something that feels a little bit more rough works better.

But yeah, I mean, to me, the best content that’s going to do well has to either educate or entertain. And the entertainment is a very high bar. Some people do it extremely well. Like Elena Verna has such amazing memes and, you know, hilarious content. I’m not a standup comedian as much as I would love to be. And so for me, that educate bucket needs to be there. And so I need to fit into: this needs to be a how-to guide or something that a reader can take and immediately do something with what they read. And if I’m not at that bar, if it’s just like information, that’s maybe like, oh, I learned something — that’s not really enough anymore. News isn’t enough. Information isn’t enough. It really needs to educate and teach someone how to do something.

Finn Thormeier: What’s the correlation between — so when your process was, hey, I post something on LinkedIn that I learned working with the portfolio companies or that I kept repeating myself and this resonated, let me make a newsletter out of it and expand on it — how close is the correlation between “this did well on LinkedIn” and now expand on it in a newsletter and it did well too? Is it like 100%? I’m just kind of curious on that.

Kyle Poyar: You know, it’s a positive... I don’t know what the exact correlation would be, the R squared, maybe like 0.6. I don’t know. Don’t hold me to that, but it’s not a perfect correlation. There’s definitely things — I wrote this LinkedIn post about customer success: don’t blame customer success for your churn problem, here’s all the other things that are probably causing your churn problem. That did incredibly well on LinkedIn. I think every customer success person probably liked it so their boss would see it. None of my readers cared about it. I think maybe it was because a lot of that was not necessarily totally new information, or maybe they didn’t have a big churn problem, or they just see me as more marketing and go-to-market focused rather than customer success oriented. I don’t know what it was, but that one fell completely flat when turned into a newsletter.

I do find things that don’t resonate at all. So screening out things that no one cares about, that’s the most useful bit, because then I’m not spending hours and hours writing a full newsletter post about something I already know is not going to do well. And at the very least, even if the newsletter post doesn’t perform as well, I’m going to be able to repost that same kind of idea on LinkedIn to amplify my newsletter. And I know my second LinkedIn post will actually probably do quite well. So that correlation — if it did well on LinkedIn the first time, having it do well on LinkedIn the second time, that’s maybe an R squared of 0.9 or something.

Finn Thormeier: Is that still your process today? You said this was kind of how you got started.

Kyle Poyar: So that was my process for several years. I’m no longer an operating partner. And so I still do that sometimes, but honestly, I’ve been really disillusioned by LinkedIn. And so I’m kind of moving away from LinkedIn right now. And I also just have... I’ve published more than 200 newsletter editions. I think I’m coming up on 250. So at this point I have themes that I know my audience cares about. I try to have a mix of content that touches on different themes.

Finn Thormeier: You said you’re disillusioned by LinkedIn. Tell me more.

Kyle Poyar: I mean, LinkedIn used to be fun in 2020, in COVID times, but that’s when I really started getting active. I did it because I wasn’t going to events. I wasn’t meeting people. And I actually met real life, very smart people on LinkedIn. They would maybe show up as someone commenting on a post, or maybe they’d DM me as a result. We’d hop on a video call. Some of the best networking connections I have came from that period.

And now I’ll write something, no matter how good I think it is, the comments are like 80% garbage LinkedIn slop comments. The engagement on content has fallen a lot compared to what it was before. LinkedIn seems to be prioritizing content that is of mass appeal. I think they’re even piloting showing things like how much of your content is shown to in-network versus out-of-network. But I have over 110,000 followers. My followers don’t consistently see my content. It’s like the content is shown to random people who might or might not care about my stuff. And that means I need to have hooks that are basically bragging about myself or telling people that don’t know me who I am. I like to have 201 level content — I don’t write for a beginner audience — but to do well on LinkedIn these days, you kind of have to be doing 101 level stuff. And that’s just way less fun all around for me. And there’s not a whole lot in it, except for yes, the occasional post does quite well and it drives a lot of newsletter subscribers even still. So I’m kind of forced to be on it. I’ll also scroll it occasionally to get inspired by what’s working for other people. I’ll use that to find some experts that I’ll interview for my newsletter or some case studies to share. But even that’s gone downhill, because my feed just — I rarely see that kind of good rich post on LinkedIn anymore. I see like AI slop stuff.

Finn Thormeier: And do you think that is — I mean, there’s the kind of AI slop automated comments. I definitely see that too. And it just ruins your experience, because I feel like it makes you question every single comment. Some comments are obviously AI. Some comments are obviously not AI. But then there’s a lot in the middle where you’re like, this could be AI, but this could also be an actual person trying to ask me a question right now. And I’m trying to decipher, is this AI or not? Because if it’s a real person who wants to ask me a question, I want to answer them. But if it’s someone who automated this stuff, I don’t want to answer them. But it makes me second guess a lot of comments anyway. So that’s obviously happening. There’s a lot more content happening. And then it sounds like this algorithm change, that it’s less and less of a follower based feed and rather an algorithmically driven feed. When did that shift happen time wise, where you’re like, I’m just not enjoying LinkedIn anymore?

Kyle Poyar: Really, it’s been the last six months. I mean, I’ve always been hot and cold with LinkedIn, because there is a real creator burnout phenomenon where I could have a couple bangers in a row and be feeling on top of the world, even though I’m like, LinkedIn doesn’t matter, LinkedIn doesn’t matter. But really, from a psychological standpoint—

Finn Thormeier: The dopamine is real.

Kyle Poyar: Yeah, it has an ego effect. But then you go a couple posts that are full crickets, no one cares at all. I’m like, I have 110,000 followers, but I got like five likes on something. Did I completely lose it? But the highs and lows are really challenging to deal with. And so that’s been the case for a while, but this slop era has really been since probably January of this year. Everything’s like slop or hype posts, or they just feel — it lost the fun that it used to have. We’ll just say that.

Finn Thormeier: Given that you want to move away from it — I mean, I think I saw a newsletter by you where you talked about growing the newsletter, and I think LinkedIn was your biggest or second biggest kind of growth driver in terms of subscribers. Given that, how do you think about it? Has the newsletter now reached a scale where it’s self sustainable to some extent? Or how does that affect things?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah, you know, as much as I would love for my mental health to be off LinkedIn, it is probably the most powerful growth lever that I can control. And if you think about what options you have available to grow, there’s some platform growth opportunities. So Substack has recommendations and they have Notes, which is kind of their LinkedIn. beehiiv has a recommendations feature as well. And so that’s a core part of growing any newsletter, I think. But it’s a little bit more algorithmic. It’s tied to the platform, tied to your relationships with other authors. So definitely recommend — that’s really low hanging fruit acquisition for anyone growing a newsletter.

Then there’s paid. And so you can pay on beehiiv for boosts, or you can pay on third party platforms like Meta or like LinkedIn. I am doing some paid testing with boosts via beehiiv that are coming in at decent cost per acquisition. I haven’t really scaled that channel.

And then otherwise you’re looking at word of mouth, which is a really fantastic channel, but hard to measure, hard to control. I get a lot of growth through just readers forwarding the newsletter, dropping it in Slack organically, sharing it on LinkedIn. That’s fantastic. But I’d love for every piece I write to be a banger that people organically share, and it’s just hard to fully rely on that as a growth channel either. And so when you look at things that you can control that are not that expensive, LinkedIn is one of the few channels out there. I do think AEO and SEO has some low hanging fruit and that’s something that I neglected for a while. And then my own referral program for readers has been another area. But yeah, LinkedIn is the single largest growth driver in terms of both my direct traffic sort of attribution, and then I now have a survey of new readers when they sign up — I have a “how did you hear about us” field and LinkedIn is number one there too. And so I’m just like, that is so organically tied in with the content I’m writing. These are inherently shareable on LinkedIn. I’ve got a large LinkedIn audience. I’ve got to keep relying on that even if I hate it.

Finn Thormeier: I mean, it is interesting. I had Emily Kramer on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, who has one of the biggest Substacks, the MKT1 newsletter. And I think she said her biggest source right now is recommendations. And for her, LinkedIn is a surprisingly small part. Where she even has more subscribers on Substack than she has followers on LinkedIn.

Kyle Poyar: I would be very careful with recommendations. They’re a great source of growth. And at one point, about half of my new subscribers came that way — I had over 500 publications that were recommending Growth Unhinged. And essentially what this looks like is, in the signup flow, someone goes to sign up for another newsletter and it’s like, hey, this writer recommends these 15 other publications. Do you want to subscribe to these too? And a lot of people click select all, and then all of a sudden they’re auto subscribed to 15 newsletters they know nothing about.

It’s great for growth. Don’t get me wrong. If you care about the vanity metric of your number of subscribers, it does go up. But often deliverability is really bad with those subscribers. Unsubscribes is really high. Substack as a platform doesn’t really let you dig into unsubscribes very well or get much visibility into the subscriber quality by channel. But realistically, a lot of the recommendations oriented subscribers were garbage. And that’s why even Substack started tightening up that growth lever a bit. And that’s why I was seeing less subscribers come from it. But I also just think that was a channel that was fantastic in like 2023. And then like every channel, it kind of got saturated, where instead of you having a handful of other writers you’d maybe swap with, I see some publications that have like 60 publications they recommend, because they’re gaming the algorithm. And then there’s some reciprocity where you’re like, maybe I want to recommend them back. But show me — I want someone to show me what’s the delivery rate and the open rate among the subscribers they got through recommendations, especially for people doing this gaming. It’s a vanity metric. The reality is there’s not a lot of real quality subscribers to that channel. And your own channels — if you get subscribers through LinkedIn or direct to your website or through word of mouth, there’s an affinity to your newsletter. They subscribe purposefully for your content, and that’s going to be a way healthier subscriber.

Finn Thormeier: Now, I have similar feelings around the LinkedIn part and the algorithm, and that it’s less enjoyable. I’m just curious — so I’ve been playing a lot more with this idea of a newsletter. But I’m also aware of this idea of grass is always greener. So I’m just curious, you have the perspective on both, and actually having a big audience on both and kind of keeping the machine fed every week. Is the newsletter a more, I don’t know, sustainable, less up and down journey? Or are there just other downsides that make it net-net just as bad or just as good?

Kyle Poyar: Well, with the newsletter — I think that anyone that is trying to do any sort of creation online, whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is, the algorithms are fantastic for getting some initial reach, but they’re increasingly feast or famine. There’s no guarantee that anyone following you will see your content. Linking someone outside of the platform is really challenging. So you’re stuck within this sort of walled garden. It’s just a really challenging place to have any sort of control over your growth or what people are seeing. And so I encourage people, yeah, sure, use the algorithms, build a following there, but quickly pivot people from the closed social media platforms onto something that you control.

And what I find for the newsletter, with my control audience, views and engagement are extremely consistent. I mean, yeah, do I have some open rates or some subject lines that do better with open rates than others? Yeah, of course. But my open rates range from like 42% to 46%. It’s a pretty tight window. My deliverability is consistent. As much as people talk about inboxes being spammed, I have pretty good confidence that my newsletters are getting delivered to someone’s email, and that a lot of people are opening them. And then my views are pretty consistent from newsletter to newsletter. I mean, we’re looking at within a range of plus or minus like 15 to 20%, right? So you’ve got some good ones, you’ve got some bad ones, but it’s very consistent.

And I get a lot of replies. So one thing that’s great with a newsletter is someone can just reply and end up in your inbox. And so I also just feel a much stronger direct connection, and it’s almost always a positive connection. If someone doesn’t like a post, they’ll just unsubscribe to the newsletter. They’re not going to send me hate mail about it. If they do really like a post, they’ll reply. It’s often a great source of leads for some of the consulting and advisory work I do too. I would encourage just about anyone — a newsletter is one of the best things that you can build. The challenge though is the growth is a little bit more linear. It’s slow and steady growth. You don’t have these algorithmic highs and lows. So you have to be willing to build over the long term. And you need content that stands out, that I think needs to be so good people are willing to pay for it. Otherwise you don’t earn the right to end up in someone’s inbox week after week. And not everyone is willing to invest that much in content.

Finn Thormeier: How do you feel about saturation for people who don’t yet have a newsletter? Because obviously, similar to LinkedIn, which is getting more and more crowded, when you and Emily Kramer started on Substack five years ago, there were a lot fewer newsletters and people on Substack. How do you feel about the opportunity now for someone new starting?

Kyle Poyar: It’s funny. When I started my newsletter, I thought I was late to the game. I thought Substack was already saturated. Lenny had been on Substack for a couple of years at that point. There were already a number of newsletters that had really taken off. I felt like it was cliche in 2021 for someone who worked in VC to have their own Substack. The thing is, it’s just hard to predict with a lot of these channels. Even if something seems saturated, there’s often still room for one more. And just because something in aggregate might be saturated doesn’t mean people aren’t going to care about your content specifically. I think that there’s always space for one more.

And my advice for people though, is niche down. So yes, marketing as a concept might be a pretty saturated space, but do you work in demand gen or product marketing or content marketing or a different part of marketing? Are you an expert in like AI tooling or XYZ channel that most people haven’t really optimized for? What’s that really specific expertise? And if you can find something that maybe a thousand people care about, but those thousand people care about a lot, that gives you permission to expand from that position of strength. In my early days of writing, a lot of my writing was around pricing and product-led growth. I actually don’t have that much on product-led growth anymore. And pricing is maybe one out of five, one out of six newsletters. I’m much broader. I’ve broadened my topics. I’ve added a lot of new content pillars. But I started with a niche — I even had posts that were about pricing for product-led growth companies that were specifically B2B software, like series A through C. I don’t think that there were more than 100 companies that would really care about that content. But if you can write the best content for a hyper-specific niche, that earns you the right to grow with your audience.

Finn Thormeier: And then for people who want to do that and run it as a business, so monetize the newsletter — what’s your recommendation? There’s different levers, obviously. I think you have premium subscribers, which is $15 a month. I think you have some affiliates with companies that you recommend. You obviously have an advising practice. I think you have sponsorships and partnerships. Across these things, what advice do you have for people who want to start writing but then have a path towards actually making that a real income?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. I mean, I pay a lot of attention to monetization. It’s where I started my career. I spent my first six years doing pricing strategy consulting work. And so monetization is near and dear to my heart. Substack will tell you that is the number one way they make money. They take a cut on every transaction from a subscriber. That is their business model. I don’t think that’s the business model for most B2B newsletters. I personally am probably going to make six to seven times as much revenue from ads as I do from paid subscribers this year. And I have a six-figure paid subscriber business. It’s just that the ads are that valuable. And that is with publishing once a week.

Finn Thormeier: And when you say ads, is that when I go to your newsletter, basically in the top, you recommend like...

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. And I’m very careful — I don’t recommend products, but in the top, I have an ad slot that’s up to a hundred words. So there’s a specific offer that I have, and yet the text is in my writing. So some of my partners like to just promote the product, other partners like to promote like, hey, we’ve got a webinar coming up, and so the offer is about attending their webinar. Or they’ve released a new content playbook about a topic and that’s the offer. But really it’s like — if you read The Economist and you read it in print, there’s the inside of the magazine cover, right? What’s that first ad that everyone sees as everyone opens to the next page? That’s how I think about the ads in my newsletter. And so that inventory is very valuable to advertisers.

Finn Thormeier: So you always do two slots per newsletter? Because I think there was beehiiv and then Monday.com.

Kyle Poyar: I do one slot, the monday.com feature. And this is, I think, something I should probably clarify for my readers. I love featuring case studies of interesting things people are doing, and that does help promote their company, but I don’t charge for that. I mean, I think the way I charge is through a lot of their time — these are very time intensive pieces. And I ask for very potentially sensitive information that a lot of brands are not willing to share publicly, but I want them to be able to share some of these next level insights with my readers. And so for people that work on collaborations with me, it’s free to collaborate — bylines, guest posts, some of these case studies. But I monetize that ad slot at the beginning.

Finn Thormeier: And so you said you have a six-figure business just from premium subscribers, which is the 15 bucks per month, and then you’re going to do six to seven times more than that from the ads.

Kyle Poyar: Exactly.

Finn Thormeier: Which, I mean, that means you do minimum 600k a year just from ads. And is it fair for me to say to just divide that by 52, if you’re going to do a weekly newsletter, to get a rough estimate of an ad spot cost?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. People can do the math. It works out to be a little over 10 grand per slot. It’s not totally apples to apples to think of the cost per slot, because when I think about ad packages, I have multiple editions. I have minimum duration. So my minimum buy for most partners is quarterly, but I have a number of partners that actually have annual ad buys. And so there are in some ways volume discounts, but also some of these partnerships also include like I’ll speak at one of their customer events, or we’ll do a couple of webinars together, and then maybe do some LinkedIn posts around that partnership as well. And so these are partnerships that are anchored in the newsletter, but there are different packages to monetize things beyond just the ad slot.

And for my partners, that’s valuable because it’s really about maximizing that exposure over a long period of time. Because if you’re trying to promote an enterprise-grade billing software that might be six figures or maybe even a seven-figure purchase for customers, someone’s not going to see one ad slot and buy your product. That’s just not how it works. You want to stay relevant — you want them to know who your brand is and stay relevant for them, so that when that customer has the purchase need, they already trust your brand and that brand is front and center in their consideration set. And that’s where I find quarterly actually gives more time for attribution, for marketers to actually see that these ads are generating a return for them. And it also gives more time for some of the early pipeline to either close or not close, so they can ideally attribute deals. Because at the end of the day, for ad revenue, the ad business models have been about cost per impression or cost per thousand impressions. I think that is total BS in B2B, because it’s really about influence on purchasing within really target customers.

Finn Thormeier: Right. And who is your audience, right? I mean, you have a very specific audience and probably quite a few senior leaders in there. So that’s very different.

Kyle Poyar: Exactly. I think about the ceiling on how much you can charge for ads is based on what ROI you generate for your advertisers.

Finn Thormeier: Right. What part of the business is the advising, consulting? Is it a meaningful part of how you monetize having this audience, or is it something you do on the side that’s nice but not super meaningful?

Kyle Poyar: So the advising, consulting is about a third of my overall revenue. So still fairly healthy. And for that, I devote probably about half of my time to advising and consulting work. And the way I think about that — so it is healthy from a monetization perspective, I do a good business there, but realistically, it helps me stay fresh to what’s top of mind for high growth companies. And it holds me accountable to real life problems and trying to be helpful to an individual person and company on something that is hard for them to solve. And by doing that, I think that it gives me a lot better insight into what topics I should write about and how to write in a way that’s really going to speak to what people care about. And so, yes, I do monetize on the advising, consulting side, but honestly, a lot of it is picking the right companies to work with and problems to solve with them. And if I can do that, it really makes this whole thing a stronger flywheel.

Finn Thormeier: How do you think about — I’m just curious. So I have a Substack. I have 3,000 subscribers. It’s basically just my podcast. I have a podcast where I interview mostly around executive brand and LinkedIn and audience growth. It’s not monetized at all. The only way that I kind of monetize it is that I run an agency that does executive brand, but it’s very indirect. Because I oftentimes talk about things that are not at all LinkedIn or executive brand related. How should I think about — is this worth trying to turn it into its own thing that I monetize, by trying to grow it more aggressively, by trying to charge premium subscribers, which I don’t do, but trying to find advertisers, which I don’t do, but trying to monetize it in different ways? Or should I just keep it as the podcast, the Substack, that every now and then sends a person to my agency? How would you consult me through this?

Kyle Poyar: Well, so yeah, 3,000 is on the smaller side for monetization, but it’s not too small for monetization by any means, especially if it’s a very hyper-targeted audience that is at an executive level. And so if you could run your subscribers through an enrichment, or if you have a reader survey where you get a sense of who these people are — if these are executives at interesting companies, I think there could be some monetization opportunity.

A few thoughts I have for you. One is, podcasts are worth a lot more in terms of cost per impression than a newsletter ad. And I think part of that’s like, it’s a host read in your voice. Maybe people can double dip where they get promoted in your newsletter and your podcast. I think it’s also a longer ad slot usually, and so it can convey a lot more nuance and information about the company. So having ads that run in your newsletter and your podcast — I think that you could do that. And I think you could start charging — I don’t know exactly how much for them, but I think you can start charging a handful of partners.

And my personal view is that your readers and your listeners will not be fazed by it. I went five years before having a single ad in my newsletter. I was really nervous about what happened when I ran my first ad. There was zero change in terms of click-through, open rates, anything. When I partner with great brands, I actually get good feedback from a lot of my readers, because they all work in tech. They’re working in go-to-market. They’re getting exposed to tools and offers that they had not heard of before, that are going to help them do better at their job. And so for a lot of readers, if you partner with great companies and the offers are valuable, they see it as a win-win. And so in your space, if there are products that you’re regularly partnering with on your consulting work with companies and finding yourself recommending frequently — these are products you already trust, you think your readers and listeners are going to get value using — I don’t think people would be that turned off by the ad slot.

And by having the ad slot, that’s actually going to give you money that you can invest in acquisition. It’s going to give you more reason to keep doing it. You’re going to be on the hook to keep publishing. When you get busy with the consulting work, you’re not going to fall off an episode — you’re going to have a reason to do the episode. And so I would start there. I don’t think that the paid subscriber model makes as much sense for a podcast newsletter combo, but there are some things if you wanted to go paid from a subscriber standpoint. There are things that you could do, like publish somewhat regular in-depth reports, or take some of the consulting work.

That kind of has a monetization ladder to more effectively monetize different folks. And honestly, that’s how I think of paid subscribers for my newsletter. I’m not actually gating almost any newsletter post. They see the full edition. What I do is I produce these in-depth reports that are like 60 page PDF reports. And I do that once or twice a quarter, on topics that I think are really valuable to readers. And every report has a summary in the newsletter. That summary is fine for 95% of people. Maybe 5% want to read the full 60-page report. That’s worth a lot, I think. And that has a lot of my kind of proprietary expertise, that are the things that I work on on a consulting basis too. And so I charge for that. And I don’t think it hurts the free reader experience that I charge for it.

Finn Thormeier: beehiiv versus Substack. You switched to beehiiv a couple months ago after using Substack for many years. Obviously, I think you’re now a beehiiv partner, so that’s important to disclose here, I guess. But I’m curious about how you would compare them, what you like more of which, which one you think in the end is the better platform for whom?

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. So I went about five years on Substack. And then it was when I started getting serious with things like wanting to have advertising, wanting to have paid subscriptions — that’s when I started realizing all the limitations in the platform. So if you have a free newsletter, Substack has great free tools. They don’t charge a subscription fee. It’s really intuitive. There’s some built-in growth through recommendations and Notes. It’s a really simple platform to start using. But if your ambitions are much more advanced with your newsletter, I think you’re going to find a lot of limitations.

Things that I ran into with Substack that people should be aware of before getting locked into the ecosystem were: for a while, your website had very little customization abilities. I think that’s changed a little bit. It’s hard to produce ad slots that feel kind of carved out from the content, because there’s not a whole lot of customization in the editor. It’s kind of meant to look more like Substack. The emails get delivered via Substack deliverability, and so their deliverability health impacts yours. On beehiiv, you can send from your own domain.

Finn Thormeier: Have you seen a big change in your deliverability?

Kyle Poyar: So yeah, my deliverability rates were trending down to low, like 91, 92% on Substack. And when I moved to beehiiv, they’ve been at 98, 99% pretty consistently. Open rates have gone from low to mid-30s to mid-40s. So my emails are getting delivered and read at much higher rates.

Finn Thormeier: What’s the theory on the — I mean, that’s a much higher open rate, right? What’s the theory on why is that?

Kyle Poyar: So I think some of it is just the deliverability tools that beehiiv has, and also being able to deliver from your own domain. I think that actually lands in people’s inbox at a higher rate. I did a one-time cleaning of a few thousand people that had not gotten any emails in months via Substack. But that cleaning is not nearly enough to account for how big of a jump I did have and how consistent it’s been. Other things I did — I did a staged rollout. So I actually did a couple of sends to a smaller, more engaged audience before ramping up the sends to the full list. And I think that staging did really help warm up the domain and get the emails landing in the primary inbox. I’m not a deliverability expert though. That’s the kind of thing that I’m really happy for a platform to manage. I just want the emails to be in people’s inbox.

Finn Thormeier: Sure.

Kyle Poyar: But other things — analytics are totally different. So you can actually see things like unsubscribes. You can see much better analytics on the website and on the subscriber behavior via beehiiv. You also see a lot better click based analytics, where they have a distinction between all clicks and verified clicks, which is really important for advertisers, because you get a lot of clicks that are just spam platforms, even like checking your links. And so on Substack, I think it consistently misreports click behavior versus what the advertiser would see as valuable clicks. Just my opinion — I mean, I’m not an expert at all of these things. But then they have an API and an MCP, so you can access everything through Claude, which is my preferred AI tool. I connect my beehiiv with Zapier and also have a lot of automations I run within beehiiv. They also have things like digital products, and they don’t take a cut on your ad revenue.

I could go on about this stuff because I’m a nerd about it. These things are not things that you probably care about if you don’t have big aspirations to build a business, or you’re not building a really serious newsletter. And so if you just want something basic out of the box, I do think Substack is okay. But these things — I mention them both because I’m a nerd, and because I think that people that do have those ambitions, they should know about these before they maybe get locked into a platform too early.

Finn Thormeier: Do you think — Substack has this home feed with Notes and stuff. Do you think the fact that beehiiv doesn’t have that, is that a benefit or a downside?

Kyle Poyar: Oh, this is a tough question. So to me, I’ll be honest, I was a beneficiary of some of that social media feed. You do get some growth on it through Substack, through Notes, and through just your posts popping up algorithmically via the app. But what I found is that Substack kept pushing following as opposed to subscribing. And following was great for their ecosystem, not so great for you as a publisher. It had a lot of junk and noise on it and just was not super valuable. It was a lot of people posting about like, if you put your newsletter in the comments, I’ll go subscribe to it. And then those would go viral. And you’re like, I don’t need another social media platform.

The other thing that stood out to me was that I kept noticing that Substack was promoting the app. And so my readers would sometimes get automated notifications to download the Substack app. And I also would notice — I think they’ve stopped this — but they would have some tests where if your posts were going to be cut off by the email provider because they were too long, Substack was going to push you to go read the rest of it in their app. A lot of Substack’s growth is built on this idea of, the audience is Substack’s and they’re kind of locked into the Substack app and algorithm ecosystem. And that is great right now for writers, because you’re going to benefit from those readers that are locked into the ecosystem. I got worried about this being another algorithm that had control over my audience and my data that would hurt me long term. And so I did not want to be locked into another one. And that audience control was really important to me. But, you know, you do sacrifice some growth in the short term for that.

Finn Thormeier: Because of the recommendations and the notes.

Kyle Poyar: Yep, exactly.

Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I mean, one of the big reasons why I decided to go with Substack — I was overthinking it way too long — is because beehiiv at the time didn’t have the podcast hosting thing. Which seems to be a solved problem now.

Kyle Poyar: Yeah. So man, maybe you’re going to give it another look?

Finn Thormeier: How painful is the migration?

Kyle Poyar: I am a beehiiv partner. They’re great. I actually have known Tyler, their CEO, for like three years. He’d been trying to convince me to move to beehiiv for a while. And I didn’t move because of the partnership. I have plenty of other ad partners. You’re not going to switch your entire platform just because there’s an advertiser who wants to advertise. But it is very helpful that I have that direct relationship with them. I was given a white glove treatment, and I don’t know if everyone gets that treatment. I hope that they do, but it’s been amazing for me.

Finn Thormeier: I guess with 3K subscribers, I got to do some work. Cool. No, this makes sense. All right, we’re at time. Kyle, thank you so much for all of your insights. Obviously, if people want to check you out, either your LinkedIn or your newsletter, both will be linked up in the show notes. And that’s it. Thank you for your time.

Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on.

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.

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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

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Connect with Adam:

Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-holmgren/

Fibbler: https://fibbler.co/

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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!!

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.

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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”

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Connect with Kevin:

Kevin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevbosaurus/

Scrunch AI: https://scrunch.com/

Sitecore: https://www.sitecore.com/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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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!!

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.

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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

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Connect with Peter:

Peter’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pc4media/

Databox: https://databox.com/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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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

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.

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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

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Connect with Tom:

Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/twentworth/

Tom’s blog: https://tomwentworth.com/

incident.io: https://incident.io/

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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!!

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.

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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

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Connect with Trinity:

Trinity’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinitynguyen/

UserGems: https://www.usergems.com/

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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!!

Melissa Rosenthal is the co-founder of Outlever, where she’s Editor-in-Chief of its two publications: State of Brand and State of AI. Before Outlever, she was Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, EVP of Creative Strategy at Cheddar, and Global VP of Creative at BuzzFeed.

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

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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/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

Hope you enjoy!!

Don Jeter is the CMO at Torq, a series D enterprise cybersecurity company (valued at $1.2B) that’s notorious for its “out there” brand, unusual visual identity, and bold marketing stunts.

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

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Connect with Don:

Don’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goodmarketing/

Torq: https://torq.io/

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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!!

Tycho Luijten is one of the most viral people on LinkedIn right now. He rose to LinkedIn fame on April 15th 2025 when him and Steven van Marle published a video called “The Wolf of Wall Street… but then it’s B2B marketing.” - which went absolutely bonkers. I now sits at over 11,000 likes and a total of over 5 million impressions.

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.

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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

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Connect with Tycho:

Tycho’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tycholuijten/

Dapper: https://www.dapper.agency/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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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/

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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!

Jeff Barr is the VP & Chief Evangelist at AWS. He joined Amazon in 2002 and wrote the very first post on the AWS blog in 2004. Over the next 20 years, he published more than 3,000 blog posts and helped turn AWS into the behemoth it is today. In 2003, he was part of a brainstorming session at Jeff Bezos’ house with Jeff and Andy Jassy to come up with the ideas that became the foundational building blocks of AWS: S3, EC2 & RDS.

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.

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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

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Connect with Jeff:

Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbarr/

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/

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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!

Emily Kramer is the founder of the wildly popular MKT1 newsletter with over 80k subscribers, where she writes long-form essays on marketing trends, strategies, and tactics for B2B startups.

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.

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In this episode, we discuss:

* Emily’s tips on building & writing a newsletter

* How to promote your newsletter

* How to get featured on other big newsletters

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

* What topics and formats work today

* How much work it ACTUALLY takes to write a great newsletter

* Substack vs beehiiv

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

* The Figma MCP workflow she uses to create graphics

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Connect with Emily:

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

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

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

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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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!

Shane Hedge and Ariel Rubin are the CEO and Head of Content of Air respectively. Air is a Creative Ops Platform used by enterprise creative teams at companies like Google, Warby Parker, Perplexity, Ramp, and the Denver Broncos.

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.

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We discuss:

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

* What makes a viral campaign idea

* How to convince your CEO to take more risks with your marketing

* How to operationalize creative work

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

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

* The only thing that makes a risky idea work

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

* Ariel’s case for “discernment” over “taste”

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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/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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Some of my takeaways:

* 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

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

* 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”?

* 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.

* 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 f*****g thing”

Domitille de Saint-Exupéry is the CMO and Erwan Gauthier is the VP Growth at lemlist, the multi-channel outreach platform founded by Guillaume Moubeche.

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.

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Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify

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We discuss:

* Tips on growing in an insanely crowded market

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

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

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

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

* How lemlist measures and attributes brand

* Their biggest marketing bet for 2026

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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/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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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

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Some of my personal takeaways:

* 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.

* “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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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

* “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

Renée Shaw runs brand & social at tl;dv - an AI meeting assistant. She’s also one of the funniest people on LinkedIn. Her official job title is your mom @ tl;dv…

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.

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We discuss:

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

* Renée's content system: Google Keep + Obsidian + Claude

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

* How to correctly mention your product in comedy content

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

* Her guaranteed ways NOT to be funny

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

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Connect with Renée:

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

Renée’s newsletter: unsupervisednewsletter.substack.com

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

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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Some takeaways:

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

Abhay Rajaram is the co-CEO at Sendoso, a Direct Mail and Gifting Platform doing over $100M in annual revenue with 250 employees. They raised a total of $175M, including a $100M Series C led by SoftBank in 2021 during peak ZIRP. Abhay joined in 2023 when the business was struggling, first as Chief Business Officer, then stepping into the co-CEO role to lead a full turnaround.

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.

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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

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Connect with Abhay:

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

Sendoso: https://sendoso.com/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

---

My personal takeaways:

* 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

* 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

* Abhay’s framework for working with founders:

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

* understand the why behind the 50 ideas they throw at you

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

* 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.

* 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

Tim Soulo is the CMO at Ahrefs. Over the last 10 years, he helped bootstrap them to now well over $100M ARR - with only 160 employees, no sales team, no outbound, and zero marketing attribution.

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.

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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

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Connect with Tim:

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

Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/

Podcast: https://ahrefs.com/podcast

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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My personal takeaways:

* 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

* 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

* 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

* 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

* 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

I’m trying something new. This week, instead of interviewing a founder or executive, I took my Content Director Tobi and we’re going behind the scenes at Project 33 to talk about what we’re currently building, seeing, and experimenting with - across our own content and 15+ executive clients. Thinking of making this a recurring series.

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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

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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/

I was recently a guest on the SteadyRev podcast by Austin Futers. I rarely share my own perspectives on my podcast, and I want to change that.

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.

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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

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Some things I believe about LinkedIn:

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

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Connect with me:

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

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

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Thanks for interviewing me Austin:

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

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

Louis Grenier is the founder of Stand The F*ck Out, and one of my recent favorite new follows on LinkedIn.

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.

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We discuss:

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

* Differentiation vs. distinctiveness

* What a good POV actually is

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

* The “100% intensity” thesis to standing out

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

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

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

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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

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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My personal takeaways:

* 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 b******t.” He never names names, but he calls out the culture of the category.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

Pranav Piyush is the CEO of Paramark, a marketing measurement platform. Prior to founding Paramark, he was VP Marketing at BILL, VP Growth at Pilot.com and VP Growth at Magento during its acquisition by Adobe. After 10+ years in marketing and growth, he has strong opinions on why most marketers are getting measurement wrong.

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.

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We discuss:

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

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

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

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

* Pranav’s “10 experiments in year 1” playbook

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

* Pranav’s approach to LinkedIn founder branding

* 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

* 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/

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Mentions

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

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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My personal takeaways:

* 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.

* “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.

* 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

* 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.

* 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

* 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.

Jess Cook and Joshua Perk are the VP of Marketing and CEO of Vector respectively, which is a marketing signal platform. They also host “This Meeting Could Have Been a Podcast”, have a combined 50,000 LinkedIn followers, and actually have fun with their marketing.

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.

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We discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

* How Vector… uses Vector

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

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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/

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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My personal takeaways:

* 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.

* $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.

* 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

* 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

* 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

* 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.

Jack Newton is the founder and CEO of Clio. He started the company in 2008 in Canada, and has since grown it to over 400,000 customers, 2,000 employees, and $400M+ in ARR. They raised a $500M Series G in 2025.

In this episode, we talk about applying lessons from having navigated the Cloud Era to the AI Era, why the best SaaS companies are moving from selling software to selling work, what 17 years of building in legal tech teaches you about selling technology to skeptical buyers, and much more.

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We discuss:

* Jacks learnings from cloud adoption in 2008 and how they translate to AI adoption today

* The Slack message Jack sent his CTO the day ChatGPT launched

* Why “cool technology is less than half the battle” - and why education and movement-building are the rest

* The Steve Jobs approach to product launches

* How Clio went from a system of record to a system of action, and why every vertical SaaS founder should be thinking about this

* The “Sell Work, Not Software” thesis and how it expanded Clio’s TAM from $20B to $1T

* Why your MAUs dropping might actually be a good sign in the AI era

* Jack’s advice for first-time SaaS / AI founders

* Bonus - How he never missed a single day of running in over 20 years (that’s over 7,000 days in a row)

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Connect with Jack:

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

Clio: https://www.clio.com/

The Client-Centered Law Firm by Jack Newton: https://a.co/d/0hrcAvfA

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz: https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205

The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507

Sell Work, Not Software by Sarah Tavel: https://www.sarahtavel.com/p/ai-startups-sell-work-not-software

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Connect with Finn:

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

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

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My personal takeaways:

* AI is compressing a decade into a year: What took cloud adoption 10 years to achieve in legal is happening in 12 months with AI. And the impact is at least an order of magnitude bigger.

* “Sell work, not software” is the new SaaS playbook: Clio’s TAM went from $20B (software + payments) to $1T (global legal services spend) by shifting from helping manage work to actually doing the work. Every vertical SaaS founder should be asking: what does my “sell work” version look like?

* Education was Clio’s real moat, not the technology. When no one else in legal tech was publishing research or running events, Jack invested in white papers, a conference (ClioCon), keynotes - basically a full-blown education movement to get lawyers comfortable with change. The AI chapter is following the same playbook. He’s touring the country doing live demos of AI features in front of lawyer audiences and showing them what’s possible

* Only talk about what’s shipping today: Jack’s approach (inspired by Steve Jobs) is to never announce future products, only demo what customers can use starting today. Very different to most AI startups who overpromise and underdeliver. He believes, long-term, his approach builds lasting trust when everyone else leans on hype

* Five of Clio’s six acquisitions started as integrations in their app ecosystem. It’s a brilliant acquisition pipeline because you get to see real usage data, real product-market fit, and how well the team integrates before you ever write a check. Hadn’t thought about an app marketplace as a sourcing strategy for M&A, but it makes a lot of sense

* Lower engagement can be a feature, not a bug. If your AI agents are automating work for customers, they might spend LESS time in your app. That breaks every SaaS engagement metric we’ve been taught to optimize for. Jack is actively rethinking what “good” usage looks like when the product’s job is to make itself invisible

Tony Scott is the CEO of Intrusion, a publicly traded cybersecurity company. Before joining Intrusion in 2021, he served as the Federal CIO of the United States under President Obama, as CIO at VMWare, CIO at Microsoft, CIO at Disney, and as CTO at General Motors. Yes, let that sink in.

In this episode, we talk about what Tony learned from working with Bill Gates, Obama, and other world leaders, what it actually takes to land a C-level role at a Fortune 5 company, and why he predicts a major AI disaster is coming in 2026.

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We discuss:

* The three most stressful weeks of his career (and there were many)

* Why he chose to become CEO of a struggling cybersecurity company after serving as the Federal CIO

* What Bill Gates really meant when he said “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” in meetings

* How to actually get a C-level role at a Fortune 5 company

* Tips for founders trying to sell into the enterprise or government and the phrases that immediately kill deals

* Why he predicts a major AI disaster in 2026

* What flying taught him about business

* Why someone who’s already “made it” still invests in LinkedIn

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Connect with Tony:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-scott-intrusion/

Intrusion: https://www.intrusion.com/

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Connect with Finn:

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

Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* What gets you a meeting with a CIO at a Fortune 100 company is doing your homework & finding a top 3 organizational problem they're trying to solve. If you come to pitch on innovative tech, you won't get far. And if you start the conversation with "what keeps you up at night?" you've already lost. It shows you did zero research. Tony had a secret signal with his assistants to get rescued from bed vendor meetings. That question was usually the trigger.

* Tony's prediction for 2026: there's going to be a very big disaster as a result of the abuse, misuse, or accidental use of AI. Something attention-grabbing. And people are going to go "oh my god, we didn't know that could happen." We're building so much on top of AI without understanding all the points of failure, so when that failure occurs, it'll bring on a bunch of governance and regulatory inspections. It happened with every big invention we've ever had.

* What impressed Tony most about interacting with Obama: his questions. He’d ask surprisingly deep questions about technical topics. When Tony’s team would send in a draft white paper (about something cybersecurity related), they’d often overnight get back a markup from the president with all kinds of notes & questions in his handwriting in the margins.

* At Microsoft, Tony interfaced with Bill Gates, who would often say "that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard” in meetings. Tony saw it as a test to see if the person had done their homework on their idea/proposal/opinion, and were able to stand their ground. Problems happened when other executives tried to copy that style without context and without being Bill (Tony decided not to emulate it)

* None of the things Tony did in his career were direct predictors of the thing he was gonna do next. He went from Sun Microsystems to startups to being the CIO at Microsoft, Disney, VMware, then Federal CIO under President Obama, and finally, CEO of a public cybersecurity company navigating headwinds. Recruiters kept finding him because he had an unusual combination of tech experience + a law degree. That made him stand out. His advice if you want unique opportunities: build a unique skill stack.

Kacie Jenkins is the new Head of Marketing for Claude Code (she joined a couple weeks after this recording). Before joining Anthropic, she was SVP Marketing at Sendoso, VP Marketing at Sourcegraph, and VP Marketing at Fastly, where she helped take the company from Series A to $200M ARR and an IPO.

In this episode, we talk about how she built executive brand programs before it was a thing, what actually drives pipeline from LinkedIn, and why anything that sounds corporate is dead on arrival.

We discuss:

- Why she felt like she had to perform a “TV version” of an executive when she first got promoted

- How Fastly built their brand around their CEO’s personality and why they let him swear in F1000 meetings

- How to turn LinkedIn DMs into pipeline

- Where ghostwriting works & where it breaks

- Anything that sounds corporate is dead on arrival

- The organic content playbook that made her paid ads perform 50% better

- Why developer marketing starts with credibility

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Connect with Kacie:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaciejenkins/Claude Code (Anthropic): https://www.anthropic.com/

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Connect with me:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

1. Corporate is dead upon arrival. Anything that sounds or feels corporate, developers will write off immediately

2. The worst thing you can do with a CEO who doesn’t naturally want to do founder brand: try to make them sound more formal or executive-y. Everyone will know because that’s not how they show up in person. At Fastly, their CEO swore all the time. He’d roll into Fortune 1000 meetings and drop an F-bomb when he really meant something. People found it endearing because he was exactly the same in every room.

3. She spent way too long performing a version of herself she thought should be at the table without emotion, very serious, and didn’t ask for help. People told her no one wanted to be around her anymore. What got her there was that she was different than everyone else. She was a writer, a singer, understood how to build communities and scale human connection.

4. Building trust is now more important than it even was 10 years ago. No one will listen to you if they don’t think you’re credible and trustworthy, and they can learn from you. You start with great documentation, technical writing, your subject matter experts sharing in public, and building in public

5. Kacie tracks how many connections each exec has with their ICP in target accounts. She puts it on a dashboard. Most CEOs are competitive and they don’t want to be the lowest on the board in front of the whole company. It had a rising tide effect on all other channels.

6. Her two tools for mining content ideas: Granola to record & transcribe every meeting, then use AI to surface patterns across calls. And a weekly brain dump call: “What pissed you off this week? What do you think needs to change? What are we hearing in customer calls that shouldn’t be happening to them?”

7. Asking for help brings people closer to you. It doesn’t make them think you’re incompetent. Lean into what got you there. You don’t have to have all the answers.

Sydney Sloan was previously the CMO at G2, Drata, and Salesloft, prior to which she spent 16 years at Adobe in a variety of marketing leadership roles. She is currently an advisor at G2 and Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners, working with early-stage founders on go-to-market strategy.

In this episode, we talk about her biggest lessons, how buyer behavior has fundamentally changed, why brand matters more than ever, and what the 2026 marketing playbook actually looks like.

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We discuss:

* Why this is the biggest transformation in 30 years of B2B marketing

* Buyer research shifted from 29% to 50% on AI chatbots in 4 months, and what that means for you AEO strategy

* Why you probably don't need marketing automation the way you used to

* “Human in the loop” vs “human in the lead”

* How to build brand in 2026 - and why it matters more than ever

* The Show-Up-Bigger-Than-You-Are playbook

* Reorganizing GTM teams around outcomes, not functions

* The advice Sydney would give herself before her first CMO role

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Connect with Sydney:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/

* G2: https://www.g2.com/

* Scale Venture Partners: https://www.scalevp.com/

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Connect with Finn:

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

* Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

1. The shift to AI search is happening faster than we think. Internal G2 data showed that in April 2025, 29% of buyers said they started their research in of of the AI chatbots. By August that number hit 50%, just four months later. In 2026, every company needs to focus on their AEO strategy making sure their brand is the citation source LLMs use.

2. Marketing automation as we know it is dead. Companies need to capture high-intent signals using tools like Clay or Common Room, and immediately deploy AI agents to act on them. Speed is the new currency.

3. Show up bigger than you are. Sydney got this advice from the CMOs of Okta and Snyk, and used it to scale Drata and Salesloft. You don’t need a massive budget, you need one anchor event or one bold move. At Drata, they bought out every ad space for two blocks around Moscone Center for RSA Conference so attendees couldn’t miss them. At Salesloft, they bought a billboard on Highway 101, but the ROI didn’t come from the traffic driving by, it came from leveraging photos of it online. Big one-off events, if properly leveraged, signal momentum to investors, customers and potential employees.

4. We’re entering the “Rick Rubin Economy”, because AI lowers the barrier to entry for content and code, so the only differentiator is taste. You can’t prompt your way to good taste. We need to hire for context and judgment, or leverage advisory boards of influencers who actually understand the market. AI provides the speed, but humans provide the creative direction that determines if anyone actually cares.

5. Do we need GTM Architects? Everyone is rushing to hire GTM Engineers and build AI workflows, but in software development, you need engineers and architects. They work at different levels of abstraction. Software Engineers build and maintain software, Software Architects design the system as a whole. We need this for GTM. You need someone to map the strategy, choose the agentic platforms, and decide *what* to automate before you build it. Sydney said she sees this as a separate role, likely sitting in RevOps, not something for the CMO.

6. The biggest mistake new CMOs make is obsessing over their domain of the marketing department. Sydney’s advice for someone stepping into a C-level role for the first time: Spend your first 90 days building deep relationships with your peers - the CFO, CRO, CEO. If you don’t understand the business context and have alignment with your peers, the best marketing strategy in the world won’t save you.

Jessica Gilmartin was previously the CMO and CRO at Calendly, Head of Revenue Marketing at Asana, and Head of Product Marketing for Wildfire at Google. Today, she works closely with founders and first-time CMOs from pre-revenue through $100M ARR, advising them on everything from hiring, org design to GTM focus and executive communication.

In this episode, we talk about how AI is changing the CMO role and marketing org, where it’s wildly overhyped vs working, and many other topics.

Listen on: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcast

We discuss:

* Why CMO + CRO combo roles usually fail

* Why companies now hire CMOs from smaller, scrappier startups

* Where AI is truly useful vs pure hype

* Why random acts of marketing kill momentum

* How Calendly moved from viral PLG to focused enterprise ABM

* The real reason CMOs only last 18 months

* Why taste, courage, and focus still matter more than tools

Connect with Jessica:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicagilmartin/

Connect with Finn:

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

* Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

My personal takeaways:

* We’re overvaluing AI right now: Jessica believes we’ll replace most of our day-to-day work with AI in 5-10 years. But right now board members are mandating AI adoption without specific use cases. The reality is AI is making teams 10-20% more efficient and that it works as an enabler, but not as a replacement. The best use cases she’s seeing are data enrichment for lead prioritization, competitive research for product marketing, and using LLMs as synthetic customer panels.

* There are three paths to CMO and CEOs keep hiring wrong. 50% of B2B CMOs come from product marketing, 50% from demand gen, brand CMOs are rare in B2B. CEOs want a unicorn who’s great at both strategic messaging and technical growth. Jessica’s advice: “It’s like asking a backend engineer why they can’t code mobile apps.” Hire for your actual problem right now, not the one you’ll have at $100M.

* The only mistake with bad hires is keeping them. Jessica repeats this constantly to clients, that you will always make bad hires. Or you hire people who were good then but aren’t right now. The mistake afterwards is keeping them too long. When you bring the right person on board, your life gets 10-100x easier.

* Attribution is broken and that’s okay. You’re getting 70-80% accuracy at best. Jessica’s approach is to use the 80-20 rule. Get directionally correct data so teams understand where they can make impact and then work from there. The bigger issue is that companies wait too long to implement basic data and reporting infrastructure.

* Random acts of marketing kill focus. At Calendly, Jessica pivoted the entire team to one thing: repositioning for enterprise customers. Because their CAC was zero for casual users due to viral growth. Marketers hate focus and they want to sprinkle seeds everywhere. But the winning strategy is making big bets, being explicit about trade-offs, and ensuring no one does random acts of marketing.

Ashley Faus is the Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian and author of Human-Centered Marketing. Besides helping build Atlassian’s thought leadership playbook, over the last year, she built her own executive presence on LinkedIn with now over 22,000 followers.

In this podcast, we cover her thought leadership framework.

We discuss:

1. Ashley’s approach to LinkedIn

2. The 4 pillars of thought leadership

3. SMEs vs. influencers vs. thought leaders

4. The “Internal Influencer” strategy

5. How to operationalize employee advocacy

6. Understanding trust intent vs buying intent

7. And much more

Connect with Ashley:

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

Human-Centered Marketing book: https://a.co/d/bbd8nV2

Atlassian: https://atlassian.com/

Connect with Finn:

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

Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

Some key takeaways:

1. Ashley’s content idea generation prompts: Write about “One question I asked today” and “One question I answered today”. It anchors your content in real experiences rather than generic advice.

2. The 4 Pillars Framework: Thought leadership requires credibility (being the source), profile (audience size), prolificness (showing up often), and depth of ideas (saying new things)

3. SME vs. thought leader: Subject-matter experts solve gnarly internal problems but lack profile. Thought leaders are disruptive and forward-looking

4. A CEO’s job is often to show the market they are steady and predictable. Thought leadership is naturally disruptive, so it can actually be better to have non-C-suite experts as your primary visionaries.

5. Build up your internal influencers. Laura Erdem at Dreamdata is a good example. She built an audience of now 50k+ LinkedIn followers by talking about how she actually uses the product in her own deals.

6. Don’t fear employees leaving with their audience. Careers are long and the Valley is small. Investing in them creates lifelong partners, customers, and advocates.

7. The first thing to NOT do is buy an advocacy platform and force people to register. Focus on the small handful of people who are “willing and able” and pair them with a marketer to help slice and dice their ideas.

8. Revenue vs. thought leadership: Revenue belongs with “buy intent”. Thought leadership is about “trust intent” and “learn intent”. If you force it to drive short-term sales, you end up with a thinly veiled sales pitch that breaks trust.

9. What “human-centered” marketing means: Most marketers talk about “capturing” leads and “converting” an MQL. Human-centered marketing means solving a problem for an actual person behind the screen, even if it doesn’t fit perfectly into a dashboard. Which is a fundamental mindset shift for most marketers.

Peter Kang runs social at Clay, the GTM Engineering Platform valued at $3.1B. Peter turned LinkedIn into one of Clay’s strongest growth channels, without paid ads, without corporate content, and with a team of one. In 69 weeks, he posted 961 times and grew the Clay company page from ~14K to 120K+ followers.

This episode is a deep, tactical breakdown of what actually works on LinkedIn in 2025, and why most B2B advice completely misses the point.

What we cover:

- Why company pages still matter and what they’re actually good for

- How Peter posted 961 times in a year as a team of one (and what broke)

- Why video works even when it breaks every rule

- Why “taste” is the real moat in modern marketing & how to hire for it

- How Clay is activating their founders on LinkedIn and the playbook they’re following

- Why LinkedIn runs on ACV, not CPM

- How Clay connects social engagement to pipeline

- Why optimization advice creates noise, not signal

- The authenticity test most content fails

Connect with Peter:

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

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

Connect with Finn:

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

Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters:

00:00 — Posting 961 times in 69 weeks

02:00 — Why company pages still matter

04:15 — Founder profiles vs company pages

06:00 — Why long-form video works on LinkedIn

08:45 — Followers are a vanity metric

10:25 — Running social as a team of one

13:00 — Clay’s real content portfolio

15:00 — How Clay films executive videos

18:45 — When to activate founders (and when not to)

20:05 — What “taste” actually means

23:00 — Hiring creatives with taste

26:45 — Why product success drives social success

29:00 — Why most LinkedIn copy fails

31:00 — LinkedIn vs TikTok vs YouTube

35:00 — LinkedIn as scaled ABM

36:00 — How to test for authenticity

38:30 — Why optimization advice is noise

39:00 — Designed-by-committee content

40:20 — Clay’s internal prompts and style guides

42:00 — Claude vs ChatGPT

42:30 — Closing

Olga Andrienko spent 12 years helping build Semrush from $5M in revenue to IPO. She led social, brand, global marketing, and eventually operations at scale. Now she’s joining a pre-seed startup as CMO to build everything from scratch:

- A new product category (AI-driven corporate learning)

- A founder brand- An employee advocacy system

- A modern AI-powered marketing engine

We discuss:

* Why Olga left Semrush after 12 years

* Why enterprise marketers feel stuck right now and how AI restrictions slow innovation

* What marketers should actually do in a scary job market to stay employable

* The #1 skill marketers need in 2025: experimenting with AI + no-code on their own

* The departments where AI creates the biggest leverage (hint: not marketing)

* How Semrush cut reporting time from 10 hours down to hours using automation

* The automated workflows Semrush shipped: SOV tracking, reporting, content QA

* The dream content engine Olga couldn’t build and why AI quality still isn’t there

* How AI will reshape marketing orgs and which roles will (and won’t) survive

* Why social media managers now have more strategic leverage than ever

* Why brand pages on LinkedIn are basically dead and how to fix it

* How Semrush scaled employee advocacy to 10M+ impressions a year

* Employee advocacy vs executive thought leadership: the real difference

* The exact system Olga is using to build her founder’s brand at Foxtory

* How she scrapes top founders, analyzes formats, and recreates winning post types

* The outbound → founder-brand → content loop that drives traction

* Why a founder brand is a multi-year compounding asset and not a 3-month project

Perfect For You If

* You’re a founder building your personal brand from zero

* You lead marketing inside a startup and need leverage fast

* You work in enterprise and feel slowed down by approvals, rules & legacy systems

* You want to build an employee advocacy program that actually scales

* You want to understand how top marketers think about org design & team structure

* You want a behind-the-scenes look at how a former Semrush exec builds in public

Connect with Olga:

Olga’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olgandrienko/

Foxtery: https://www.foxtery.com/

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 — Why Olga left Semrush after 12 years

02:00 — The gap in her career: building from zero

03:30 — Solo vs team: why she chose a startup

06:00 — How AI restrictions slow down enterprise marketers

08:30 — What marketers should do when the job market feels unsafe

10:50 — The biggest AI opportunities inside large organizations

13:00 — Semrush’s 10h → 2h reporting automation

14:30 — How they automated share-of-voice tracking

16:45 — The content engine Olga couldn’t get approved

20:15 — How AI changes team structure & role definitions

22:00 — Why social media managers now have disproportionate leverage

24:00 — Why most brand pages are a graveyard

27:00 — How Sem rush scaled employee advocacy to 10M+ impressions

30:30 — Advocacy vs executive thought leadership

33:00 — Why Olga never touched executive accounts at Semrush

36:00 — How she’s activating her new founder’s brand at Foxtery

38:30 — Scraping top creators and rebuilding winning formats

44:00 — Why she refuses AI-generated infographics

47:30 — How she’s measuring success before product launch

49:40 — Founder brand as a long-term compounding asset

51:00 — What’s next for Foxtery

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Justin Levy is the Director of Social Media & Influencer Marketing at ZoomInfo, a $1.2B ARR company with 4,000+ employees. He built their first executive social program, scaled employee advocacy from 100 to 1,800 people, and grew ZoomInfo’s creator program to 40+ creators across LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Substack, newsletters, and podcasts.

That program alone drove thousands of webinar registrants and millions influenced in revenue.

We break it all down in this episode.

What You’ll Learn

• The real reason LinkedIn reach is collapsing and why the algorithm now behaves more like TikTok

• Why B2B brands should stop overextending on LinkedIn and where to diversify instead

• The truth about vertical video on LinkedIn and why the returns are shrinking

• How ZoomInfo uses YouTube Shorts & Reddit to influence AI Overviews and search

• The 5 pillars of ZoomInfo’s social + creator ecosystem and which one outperforms everything

• Why ZoomInfo’s creator program drives millions in revenue with a full attribution breakdown

• How to launch an influencer program with a small budget

• Paid vs. earned influencer content: how B2B brands should think about it

• What B2B creators get wrong: over-monetizing, low authenticity, and trust decay

• How ZoomInfo built a 12-hour/day social SWAT team to handle brand attacks in under an hour

Perfect For You If

• You lead marketing or brand at a B2B company

• You're experimenting with creator or influencer marketing

• You want to diversify beyond LinkedIn

• You’re building an executive social program or employee advocacy motion

• You want to understand how a $1.2B ARR company runs modern social at scale

Connect with Justin:

Justin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinlevy/

ZoomInfo: https://www.zoominfo.com/

Connect with me:

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 — Why Justin’s creator program outperforms everything else

02:00 — ZoomInfo’s 5,000-registrant virtual event (and 2,000 from creators)

03:07 — The biggest gap in B2B social today

04:30 — How LinkedIn’s algorithm actually works in 2025

06:00 — Vertical video fatigue and diminishing returns

06:58 — YouTube Shorts, TikTok & Reddit: new frontiers for B2B

10:26 — Why LinkedIn is still #1 but shouldn’t be your only channel

12:44 — ZoomInfo’s top 3 social channels

14:13 — Breaking down ZoomInfo’s creator program

15:57 — Why creator-driven demos outperform branded demos

17:50 — Earned vs. paid: how to classify influencer marketing

19:47 — Why you should combine logo placements + integrated creator content

21:36 — How ZoomInfo measures millions in influenced revenue

23:21 — Why every creator post gets a UTM

24:55 — Why Justin ignores “the link kills reach” myth

25:45 — First-touch, influenced pipeline, and attribution modeling

27:34 — How smaller companies should start creator marketing

29:53 — The “Top 50” organic play that gets creators on your radar

33:13 — How many creators to pick for a 3-month test

35:26 — Why you should always pair creator campaigns with a lead magnet

37:07 — How Justin evaluates ROI when enterprise cycles are long

39:35 — Why SMB-heavy leads aren’t good enough

41:32 — One-to-one pipeline attribution explained

43:37 — How to pick the right creators

45:25 — The hidden metric Justin cares about

47:18 — The authenticity problem with full-time creators

50:22 — FTC rules, disclosure, and trust

52:16 — Inside ZoomInfo’s 12-hour/day social SWAT team

56:33 — Why consumers are shifting complaints from public to private

59:00 — Closing

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

David Walsh, Founder & CEO of Limelight, is one of the few people who actually knows how B2B influencer marketing actually works.

His marketplace powers creator campaigns for Clay, Webflow, HubSpot, ZoomInfo, Bill.com, and dozens of high-growth B2B companies.

In this episode, we break down exactly how to collaborate with creators as a repeatable growth channel and not a one-off experiment.

What You’ll Learn

- The stage where influencer marketing actually works

- Creator-Market Fit: the only metric that matters

- The campaign structure Limelight recommends to every brand

- What a good budget looks like

- How to measure influencer marketing without guessing

- Why organic posts are step one and paid ads are step two

- How Clay built the best creator program in B2B

- Why employee advocacy and creators is the real cheat code

- The flywheel effect that happens when executives, employees, and influencers amplify each other

- Why now is the moment to start creating content

- David shares how his own content now drives 90% of Limelight’s revenue

Perfect For

- Founders who want real distribution, not just paid impressions

- Marketing leaders tired of rising CAC and declining ad performance

- Teams considering influencer marketing but unsure where to start

- Anyone curious how B2B creators actually drive pipeline

Connect with David:

- David’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dw1232/

- Limelight: https://www.limelighthq.com/

Connect with me:

- Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

- Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 — The 2012-Instagram moment for LinkedIn

02:05 — When a company is actually ready for influencer marketing

03:44 — Does ACV matter?

05:33 — Why LinkedIn creators are the hardest to find

06:59 — Solving the creator cold-start problem

09:13 — Employees vs full-time creators

11:21 — Why creator partnerships are suddenly normalized

13:19 — How often creators should post

15:07 — The ideal campaign structure and why going wide wins

17:30 — Why niche creators outperform big ones

19:01 — Budget ranges for 60-post campaigns

20:32 — How to measure success the honest version

22:55 — The 80/20 of engagement quality

25:14 — Turning creator posts into paid ads

27:30 — Why creator budgets will explode over the next 5 years

31:06 — Creator-Market Fit

33:10 — The campaigns David points companies to

35:02 — How Clay built the new standard

37:10 — How brands should think about creative control

40:38 — Why over-controlling the creator kills performance

42:22 — How to think about creator fatigue + competitive overlap

44:28 — The transparency rules creators follow

46:12 — Employee advocacy + creators = distribution

48:33 — How creators help employees grow, and vice versa

50:48 — Why every company will have “personality-led marketing”

52:54 — Why employee content must become measurable

54:34 — David’s closing message: start creating now

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Kyle Lacy is the CMO of Docebo, a publicly traded enterprise learning platform used by companies like Zoom, OpenTable, Dior, and Denny’s.

Before Docebo, he led marketing at Lessonly, Seismic, Salesforce, and Jellyfish, and he’s been publishing online since MySpace.

In this episode, Kyle breaks down what’s still true about personal branding in 2025, how executives should think about posting online, the mistakes leaders make when they worry too much about reach, and why story is the only thing that differentiates you.

We also talk about publishing as a discipline, how to turn meetings into content, the realities of being an exec at a public company, and why Ramp and Liquid Death are raising the bar for brand in B2B.

What You’ll Learn
- The one thing about personal branding that hasn’t changed since 2010
- How to create content as a busy executive
- Why reach doesn’t matter as much as people think
- The biggest mistakes executives make on LinkedIn
- How to use LinkedIn for internal communication
- When executive thought leadership becomes a marketing motion
- The best way to pick content topics

Perfect for founders, CMOs, and B2B leaders who want to:
- Build a real executive brand
- Understand how to post confidently without fear
- Turn daily work into high-performing content
- Enable your leadership team to publish consistently
- Use LinkedIn for recruiting, culture, and storytelling

Connect with Kyle:
Kyle’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy/
Docebo: https://www.docebo.com/
Revenue Diaries: https://www.therevenuediaries.com/

Connect with Me:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Website: https://www.project33.io/
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH


Chapters
00:00 Who is Kyle Lacy?
01:22 Writing one of the first personal branding books (in 2010)
03:30 What’s still true about personal branding
05:00 Story vs. generic content
07:00 How personal to get online
08:58 Why specific details make you relatable
10:22 How Kyle sees LinkedIn compared to other platforms
12:05 The truth about reach and algorithm changes
13:42 Kyle’s workflow: how he actually creates content
15:38 Posting daily as an executive
17:44 The Delta incident: how a single tweet almost got him fired
20:37 How executives should think about posting
22:38 Why building a network matters for every leader
23:58 Dealing with imposter syndrome vs. publishing fear
25:39 Do people assume you’re not working?
27:36 Evergreen vs. timely content
29:49 Using LinkedIn for internal communication
31:41 When executive thought leadership becomes a real marketing motion
33:54 Using audience trust for hiring
35:48 Which executives should post (and why some shouldn’t)
37:58 Themes and sub-themes: Kyle’s writing strategy
39:22 Hooks, structure, and intuition
40:49 Framework content vs. story content
42:00 Commenting, community, and consistency
44:38 Why Kyle wishes he started his newsletter earlier
46:15 Substack vs. Beehiiv
48:04 Kyle’s current tool stack
49:10 Brands inspiring him: Ramp, Liquid Death
50:37 Why good taste still wins

Melissa Rosenthal is the Co-Founder of Outlever, the company helping B2B brands build their own media properties, full newsrooms, daily publishing, real interviews, and journalism that companies actually own.

Before Outlever, Melissa scaled BuzzFeed’s creative team, helped build Cheddar into a modern media brand, and later became Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, where she helped turn the company into one of the most recognizable names in SaaS.

In this episode, Melissa gives a behind-the-scenes look at how company-owned newsrooms work, why traditional PR is broken, how Outlever produces journalism at scale, and why the future belongs to brands that control their own distribution.

We also talk about B2B storytelling that people actually want to read, the new rules of thought leadership, and how AI is reshaping content creation from the inside.


What You’ll Learn

• Why traditional PR doesn’t work anymore

• How to build a company-owned newsroom

• The system Outlever uses to create journalism at scale

• Why founders should own their audience, not rent it

• How AI fits into modern editorial workflows

• The ClickUp lessons: brand, creative, and B2C thinking in B2B

• How to use interviews to build trust at scale

• What happens when every company becomes a media company

Perfect for founders, CMOs, and B2B marketers who want to:

• Build a real moat around their brand

• Escape the limitations of traditional PR

• Use interviews to drive trust, authority, and distribution

• Understand the future of B2B media

• Blend AI + human storytelling effectively
  

Connect with Melissa:

Melissa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissarosenthal5/

Outlever: https://www.outlever.com/

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters
00:00 Who is Melissa Rosenthal? From BuzzFeed to ClickUp to Outlever
02:00 Why traditional PR is broken (and what replaces it)
05:06 The reality behind earned media and pay-to-play
06:46 Why companies should build their own newsroom
08:37 What it takes to launch a media entity from scratch
10:47 How Outlever produces journalism at scale
12:50 The companies doing this best today
14:14 Should every company build a newsroom?
16:07 AI search, AEO, and why third-party content wins
17:25 How Outlever does its own marketing
19:20 How direct the brand to newsroom link should be
20:40 Why this model is a moat for companies
22:20 Will new “gatekeepers” emerge?
24:30 How Melissa explains this to CMOs
26:20 Distribution: LinkedIn, newsletters, and peer networks
28:21 Quality vs. quantity in content publishing
29:55 How AI assists interviews and drafting
31:18 Why humans will always run the interview
34:07 AI-assisted interviewer workflow, explained
35:38 The rise of thought leadership and personal brand building
37:46 The hardest part: going from 0 to 1
39:23 Why POV comes from your ICP, not your boardroom
41:06 What media companies can’t do anymore
44:35 Forbes 30 Under 30, and what it meant at 25
46:28 What makes a truly great interview

Alex Josephson is the VP of Brand and Content Strategy for Advertisers at LinkedIn, helping brands tell better stories and run smarter campaigns on the world’s largest B2B platform.

In this episode, Alex gives a behind-the-scenes look at how LinkedIn thinks about vertical video, thought-leader ads, creative strategy, and what’s next for the platform.

We also talk about B2B storytelling that actually entertains, why executives should stop over-engineering their content, and how brands like Ramp and Amex are setting a new bar for creativity in B2B.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why LinkedIn is going all-in on vertical video

• How to make executives feel natural on camera

• The three principles LinkedIn teaches top advertisers

• Why “cheap reach” is the wrong metric and what actually drives ROI

• How to combine brand and demand in one strategy

• The rise of Thought Leader Ads and what makes them work

• Real examples from Ramp, Amex, ServiceNow, and Microsoft

• What’s coming next for LinkedIn: creators, brand-link video, and original programming

Perfect for founders, CMOs, and B2B marketers who want to:

• Turn executives into trusted voices

• Combine brand and demand effectively

• Understand how LinkedIn’s ad ecosystem really work

Connect with Alex:

• Alex’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexjosephson/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/

• Thought Leader Ads: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/native-advertising/thought-leader-ads

• Enhanced Discovery for Thought Leader Ads: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boost-reach-build-influence-enhanced-discovery-thought-m5alc/

• BrandLink: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/native-advertising/brandlink

• ServiceNow Video Case Study: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/case-studies/servicenow-kantar-ctv

• American Express Together We Grow Campaign: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/linkedin_in-business-trust-is-key-which-is-why-american-activity-7350539632754704384-xmEo/

• Ramp’s “Brian's First Day As CFO” Campaign: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ramp/posts/?feedView=videos

Connect with me:

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

• Website: https://www.project33.io

• Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters

00:00 Introducing Alex Josephson, from Twitter to LinkedIn
02:00 Why LinkedIn is betting big on vertical video
07:00 Stories, executives, and authentic B2B content
09:30 How Blackstone’s president built a following with 60-second videos
11:30 The psychology behind “show vs. tell” marketing
13:00 The 3 core principles for winning on LinkedIn ads
17:00 Thought Leader Ads and persona-based storytelling
21:00 Video vs. static and what actually performs
23:00 Using video to warm audiences before retargeting
26:00 How to structure your LinkedIn ad funnel like a pro
30:00 Should you promote thought leadership content?
32:00 Debunking the “LinkedIn reduced reach” myth
34:00 The shift from SEO to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
36:00 Ramp’s live-streamed “expense office” campaign and why it worked
38:00 American Express: co-creating with real customers
40:00 Why creative still wins in a world of automation
41:00 The rise of executive content at LinkedIn
42:00 How companies can actually enable their people to post
44:00 Corporate Natalie, Rob Mayhew, and the B2B comedy era
46:00 What’s next for LinkedIn → creators, shows, and premium media
48:30 Closing thoughts

Joe Ciarallo led comms at Salesforce, Toast (through IPO), and now Wellhub (formerly Gympass), a $2.4 billion corporate-wellness company.He’s seen what happens when scrappy startup PR turns into an IPO-ready machine.

In this episode, Joe breaks down exactly how to build that engine. From category creation at Salesforce to crisis playbooks at Toast, and how to make your founder’s voice a real strategic asset. What you’ll learn:- How Salesforce invented the “Marketing Cloud.”- The shift from scrappy PR to strategic comms.- The new PR mix: owned + earned.- Where AI fits in comms, and why thought leadership will become more valuable, not less.- How companies like Ryanair earned trust by explaining the logic behind unpopular choices.- Why separating those functions is already outdated.- How Salesforce and Toast decide who shows up, what to say, and why empathy is non-negotiable.- Joe’s rule: just start. Post, iterate, learn, repeat.Perfect for founders who:- Want to look public-ready long before the IPO- Need to balance credibility with control- Are scaling fast and can’t afford to “wing comms” anymore- Believe the founder’s voice is part of the brand- Want to build real authority on LinkedIn without sounding corporate

Connect with Joe:- Joe’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeciarallo/- Wellhub: https://wellhub.com/

Connect with me: - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/- Website: https://www.project33.io/- Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters00:00 – “Dress for the job you want, even as a startup.”01:20 – The Salesforce Marketing Cloud story05:50 – How owned + earned media play off each other08:30 – The rise of podcasts as the new PR11:40 – Turning scrappy PR into an IPO-ready function14:00 – How Toast prepped for IPO16:15 – AI, content, and speed18:20 – Why AI can’t create thought leadership20:30 – The new transparency: explaining the why22:00 – When journalists check your LinkedIn25:50 – Internal vs external comms is outdated30:00 – The rise of the Chief Comms Officer32:00 – Coaching founders to lead industries, not just products34:00 – Crisis playbooks and empathy36:00 – Why comms leaders should post too38:10 – CEO visibility and leading by example40:00 – Wrap-up

Udi Ledergor joined Gong as their first marketer in 2016, back when “revenue intelligence” wasn’t even a thing.

Nine years later, Gong is one of the most recognizable B2B brands in the world, doing well over $300M ARR and followed by 300,000+ people on LinkedIn.

In this episode, Udi breaks down the marketing playbook that made that possible, and why best practices are just boring practices.

We talk about:

• Why best practices are boring practices and how to replace them with a sharp POV

• The 3 levels of content that actually earn attention (data, surveys, opinions)

• Inside Gong’s Content Council and how 21 employees drive organic reach

• How to safely build a “courageous” marketing culture that rewards risk-taking

• Udi’s biggest lessons from Gong’s Super Bowl ad (what worked, what didn’t)

• Balancing personal brands vs. company brands — and how Gong grew both

• What founders should do first when building brand at $5M ARR

• How Gong adapted its LinkedIn strategy as it moved upmarket

• The “Punch Above Your Weight” principle that’s inspiring campaigns worldwide
  

Perfect For:

• Founders building an early-stage marketing motion

• CMOs creating brand differentiation in crowded categories

• Marketing leaders trying to activate their team on LinkedIn
  

Connect with Udi:

• Udi’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/udiledergor/

• Gong: https://www.gong.io/

• Udi’s new book: https://a.co/d/djoOhWR

Connect with Finn:

• Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

• Website: https://www.project33.io/

00:00 — Intro: from Gong’s first marketer to $300M+ ARR
02:00 — Why best practices lead to boring marketing
03:40 — How courage creates differentiation
05:00 — Examples of bold B2B marketing done right
06:20 — Dreaming of product placement for B2B
07:40 — The truth about ROI from Gong’s Super Bowl ads
09:40 — “Show the damn product” what Udi learned the hard way
11:00 — Building internal influencers: Chris Orlob & Devin Reed
13:00 — Personal brands vs. company brand: how Gong balanced both
15:00 — Why Gong lets employees post freely on LinkedIn
17:00 — The structure and role of Gong’s “Content Council”
20:00 — How onboarding includes LinkedIn training for every employee
23:00 — Turning customers into advocates: Gong Love Week
25:00 — Why celebration fuels consistency
27:30 — How Gong’s LinkedIn content evolved as the company scaled
30:00 — How to build brand at $5M ARR (Udi’s playbook)
33:00 — Why paid ads don’t work for early-stage startups
35:00 — The 3 levels of content: data, surveys, and opinions
38:00 — Why being polarizing beats being agreeable
42:00 — How strong opinions build categories
44:00 — The story behind Gong’s viral “group therapy” CEO post
46:00 — Building a courageous team: psychological safety in practice
50:00 — Why boldness is Gong’s real competitive advantage
52:00 — Writing Courageous Marketing — and what surprised Udi most
54:00 — “Punch Above Your Weight”: the framework inspiring global campaigns

Bryan Law is the CMO at SentinelOne, an AI-powered cybersecurity company that just crossed $1B ARR.

Before joining SentinelOne, Bryan led marketing at Salesforce and ZoomInfo, where he learned the power of distinctive brands and founder-led storytelling.

In this episode, Bryan breaks down how he helped SentinelOne become the fastest-growing cybersecurity brand on LinkedIn (up 61% YoY) — and how he’s rethinking executive content, AI, and brand-building in enterprise SaaS.

What you’ll learn

• The difference between being different and being distinct and why it matters more for B2B brands

• How SentinelOne doubled its LinkedIn followers in 12 months

• Why follower growth isn’t vanity when it drives top-of-funnel awareness

• How to get executives posting consistently without forcing it

• Bryan’s 4 stages of adopting AI in marketing teams

• How synthetic audiences and agentic AI are changing customer research

• The “Day 1 Buyer List” every marketer needs to understand

• Why every brand investment should have a measurable impact on demand

  
  

Perfect for Founders, CMOs, and marketing leaders who want to:

• Build distinctive brands that dominate the buyer’s “Day 1” list

• Turn executive teams into LinkedIn thought leaders

• Blend AI, content, and brand for measurable pipeline impact

Connect with Bryan

Bryan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanbasdenlaw/

SentinelOne: https://www.sentinelone.com/

Connect with me

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 Distinct vs Different
02:00 Why distinctiveness beats differentiation
05:30 Brand assets that make you recognizable
08:30 Using AI and synthetic audiences for messaging
10:45 Why SentinelOne made LinkedIn a top priority
13:00 Metrics that actually matter beyond follower count
16:00 The 3 levers that drove 100K+ new followers
18:00 Getting executives active on LinkedIn
19:45 The Henry Schuck story on building a personal brand
21:30 How executives should approach LinkedIn posting
25:00 Balancing personal content vs company relevance
27:00 Why CEOs should post on LinkedIn (and how to convince them)
30:00 The CEO as a distinctive brand asset
32:00 Inside SentinelOne’s internal brand ambassador program
35:00 The “Day 1 Buyer List” and marketing to the 95%
38:45 Brand investments that actually drive demand
42:30 What every CMO should still do in the AI era
46:00 How SentinelOne uses GenAI operationally
47:30 Favorite AI tools in Bryan’s stack
49:00 Closing thoughts

Owner.com powers 10,000+ restaurants with tools to grow sales, from online ordering and loyalty programs, to marketing automation.

Behind that growth is Kyle Norton, CRO and former Shopify revenue leader, who’s helped rebuild the business from zero to multi-millions ARR, twice.

In this episode, Kyle opens up about the habits, frameworks, and trade-offs that drive long-term success as a leader, parent, and athlete.

From rebuilding after failure to finding balance with two kids and a hyper-intense founder, this one’s packed with real talk on what high performance actually looks like.

What You’ll Learn

- How Owner.com rebuilt from $0 to $1M ARR in a year, twice

- Why Adam Guild’s intensity sets the bar for what “founder-led” really means

- How martial arts shaped Kyle’s approach to sales, discipline, and resilience

- The real trade-offs between startup growth, family, and health

- What separates great CROs from good ones and why “bar raising” matters

- How Kyle uses AI in his revenue org (and what actually delivers ROI)

- Why he doesn’t chase AI hype and how Owner’s mission keeps him grounded

- Lessons from Jason Lemkin on board trust, transparency, and tough feedback

Founders, sales leaders, and executives who want to:

-Scale teams without burning out

- Lead with discipline, not chaos

- Build brand trust that compounds

- Stay grounded while chasing growth

Connect with Kyle:

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

- Revenue Leadership Podcast: https://www.therevenueleadershippodcast.com/

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

Connect with me:

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 Owner.com’s story and rebuilding from $0 to $1M ARR

03:00 Lessons from martial arts and disciplined practice

07:00 Physical fitness as a superpower for startup leaders

09:30 What makes founder-led intensity different

13:00 Investing early in brand and why it paid off long-term

17:30 Balancing family, health, and high performance

24:00 The truth about kids, work, and “having it all”

26:00 What separates elite CROs from good ones

31:00 Company culture, ownership, and “the numbers too high”

34:00 Why building a personal brand matters as a leader

39:00 Kyle’s favorite podcasts and why he started his own

42:00 AI in sales and what actually works

51:00 Lessons from Jason Lemkin on trust and board management

53:30 Closing thoughts and reflections

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Charles Tenot is the CEO of Lemlist, the $33M bootstrapped B2B SaaS company behind LinkedIn favorites like Lemwarm, Taplio, and TweetHunter.

In this episode, he walks us through the transition from COO to CEO, what it’s like to follow a founder like Guillaume Moubeche, and how Lemlist builds brand without performance marketing.

He also unpacks his personal LinkedIn writing system (including how he gets post ideas on his motorbike), why repurposing content is underrated, and why shipping features again was key to breaking their $15M ARR plateau.

This one’s packed with stories and tactics from internal growth challenges to building a content-first culture that attracts top hires and drives 10:1 LTV to CAC.

What we cover:

- Charles’ transition from COO to CEO

- The honest truth about why Lemlist stopped growing and how they broke through

- How they restarted product velocity after 12 months of “tech debt”

- The Lemlist brand playbook: what it actually means to build trust

- Why Charles doesn’t believe in performance marketing (and what works instead)

- How he writes LinkedIn posts in 10 minutes

- His system for idea capture (Slack voice notes + ChatGPT for hook ideation)

- Why clickbait kills audience quality

- Internal content pods, incentives, and how Lemlist encourages employee posting

- Why he killed their SEO blog and what they replaced it with

Perfect for:

- B2B founders stuck at a revenue plateau

- CEOs looking to activate their teams on LinkedIn

- Marketing and brand leaders scaling a bootstrapped company

- Anyone trying to build trust in a noisy category

Connect with Charles:

- Charles’ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlestenot/

- lemlist: https://lemlist.com/

Connect with me:

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters:

00:00 – LinkedIn is a game. Play it.

01:16 – Lemlist, Lempire, and $33M ARR

03:05 – What it’s like to take over as CEO

04:45 – The power of a “clear contract” when transitioning leadership

06:40 – Biggest lesson: trust your gut (even if the founder’s still around)

08:37 – Why Charles started posting on LinkedIn (and what pissed him off)

10:44 – Why personal branding helps attract top hires

12:38 – Can you track LinkedIn ROI? Not really. Here’s what to measure instead.

13:55 – Charles’ full posting system: ideation, hooks, writing, time spent

16:15 – The difference between engagement and quality (and how to balance)

18:37 – How he gets ideas on a motorbike (and his Slack system for saving them)

20:54 – “Done is better than perfect” The mindset for scaling content

23:00 – Why Charles doesn’t repurpose content (but why you probably should)

24:23 – Guillaume’s advice, and why you need your own voice

26:40 – “Why should anyone care what you write?” (Especially if you're early)

28:40 – Why every company should think like a niche content brand

30:55 – Internal pods, incentives, and how Lemlist encourages posting

34:33 – How Guillaume helps team members write—and why some say no

36:57 – Why they stopped paying employees for impressions

38:13 – 10:1 LTV to CAC – How Lemlist drives growth with brand

40:32 – Why they killed their SEO content

42:45 – What actually builds a trustworthy brand (from sales to product)

44:48 – Breaking through the ARR plateau: what finally worked

46:47 – Why complex orgs have lagging feedback loops

48:32 – “Ship something every month that excites the customer”

50:34 – How to build a personal brand when you’re just getting started

52:38 – Use your lack of experience as your brand

54:45 – “Do cool s**t and talk about it”—Content advice for students and juniors

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the co-founder & CTO of 37signals (Basecamp, HEY) and the creator of Ruby on Rails.

In this episode, DHH breaks down how he built real wealth without playing the Silicon Valley game, why “f**k you money” is misunderstood, and what it really takes to stay independent for 20+ years.

We talk about effort, writing, grit, parenting, and how the most meaningful success doesn’t always look like a unicorn.

Topics we cover in this episode:

- How Basecamp started as a side project and became a 20-year business

- What most people get wrong about building “f**k you money”

- Why DHH bet on Ruby when no one else cared

- The 2% rule: how David outworked luck

- The real cost of deferred living and why it’s not worth it

- Why content creation is a byproduct, not a goal

- What Europe gets wrong (and right) about work and family

- Why blogging and replying to people still matters

Perfect for:

- Founders who don’t want to raise $100M to be successful

- Indie hackers and devs building side projects

- Creators who actually ship things

- Anyone tired of the same recycled startup advice

Connect with DHH:

- DHH’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221/

- DHH’s X: https://x.com/dhh

- DHH’s blog: https://world.hey.com/dhh

- DHH’s personal website: https://dhh.dk/

- 37signals: https://37signals.com/

- Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/

- HEY: https://www.hey.com/

- Once: https://once.com/

- Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/

Connect with Finn:

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 – Intro: Why wisdom becomes platitude

01:58 – The watch blog that changed lives

03:20 – What “f**k you” money really means

06:31 – Betting on Ruby when it made no sense

09:50 – Why Building for yourself means long-term leverage

11:45 – Don’t wait to live your dream

14:20 – DHH’s 2% mindset (via David Goggins)

16:45 – How one helpful email led to 37signals

18:20 – Redrawing patterns: giving gifts with no ask

20:40 – Standing out: The 0.1% effort rule

23:55 – “Content creator” is an insult. Here’s why

25:40 – Share your ideas *after* taking action

27:15 – Marketing without ads or attribution

29:40 – Gary Vee and the power of retail scale

32:00 – Jim Rohn, Stoicism, and seasons of life

35:10 – How to survive the storm

37:05 – Platitudes only work when they land

38:30 – Authenticity means being maskless

41:20 – On “f**k Apple” and reputation caveats

42:40 – Why compliments should be clean

44:30 – Balaji, network states, and philosophy

47:00 – Europe and ambition shame

50:40 – Cultural change is possible (but slow)

53:00 – Bringing success back home

55:30 – Final thoughts: Be the 2%. Always.

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Ted Merz spent 32 years at Bloomberg. He started as reporter #15 and ended as Global Head of News Product.

In this episode, Ted breaks down how storytelling became his next career. He shares the turning point after getting fired, the content habits he developed, and how that turned into Principals Media, a company helping executives build real audiences through honest stories.

We talk about founder content, comms vs. brand, what most ghostwriters get wrong, and the difference between vulnerability and clarity.

Topics we cover in this episode:

- The truth about getting laid off at 57 (and what came next)

- How LinkedIn became a proving ground for executive content

- Why most founder content sounds like it was written by ChatGPT

- What Bloomberg taught Ted about voice, clarity, and leadership

- The difference between being vulnerable and being honest

- Why memorability is more important than engagement as metric

- How ghostwriters can help execs find their POV (not just polish)

- The real ROI of storytelling is reputation, not reach

Perfect for:

- Founders and execs trying to grow on LinkedIn

- Comms teams turning leadership into creators

- Ghostwriters building long-term client relationships

- Anyone starting over and using content to get back in the game

Connect with Ted:

- Ted’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-merz-cfa-b711257/

- Principals Media: https://www.principalsmedia.com/

Connect with me:

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 From Bloomberg to LinkedIn: how storytelling became the next chapter

02:30 Getting laid off at 57 with no plan

05:00 Going viral with real stories (and no strategy)

07:45 Why so much founder content feels generic

09:30 What ghostwriters should be doing for execs

12:15 The Bloomberg comms lessons that stuck

14:45 The danger of over-polished “vulnerability”

17:10 What metrics Ted cares about (and what he ignores)

20:20 Starting Principals Media: from DMs to clients

23:00 Helping execs write without dumbing it down

25:30 Why founder content is just good leadership in public

27:40 How writing helped Ted clarify what came next

30:00 If you want to start posting this is what you should start with

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Amanda Zhu is the co-founder of Recall.ai, the API that lets SaaS tools access data from Zoom, Meet, Teams, and more.

In just 8 months, Amanda grew her LinkedIn following to 40,000+ and turned content into a serious GTM channel, helping Recall land customers like HubSpot, Calendly, Apollo, and Datadog, while scaling past $20M ARR.

In this episode, Amanda walks through her full playbook, from getting lucky with her first viral post, to building a structured, repeatable system for consistent growth.

We also break down Recall’s content ops, audience targeting, and why Amanda believes credibility is earned in public, not in your pitch deck.

Topics that we will cover in this episode:

- The 2-week LinkedIn experiment that changed Recall’s GTM strategy

- How Amanda and her marketer co-write 6 posts every week

- Building a Notion database of content ideas, voice notes & pillars

- Why “hook + value” is still the core formula for going viral

- How to keep content fresh by varying tone, depth, and topic

- What they’ve learned about the LinkedIn algorithm (and how it’s changing)

- The real ROI: 20M+ impressions and customers that “already know her”

- Why Amanda briefly added PS product pitches and why she removed them again

Connect with Amanda:

- Amanda’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhu-amanda/

- Recall.ai: https://www.recall.ai/

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters

00:00 Amanda’s Background & What Recall.ai Does

02:10 Why LinkedIn Became Their Top GTM Channel

04:00 The First Posts: No Framework, Just Instinct

06:15 Going Viral Early - Luck or Strategy?

08:00 Reverse-Engineering What Works (And Building a System)

10:00 Notion Board, Weekly Content Meetings, Hands-on Writing

13:00 Voice Notes, Pillars, and Getting Granular

16:00 Scheduling Posts vs. Posting Live

17:45 Daily LinkedIn Routine & Why They Avoid Automation

19:20 The Target Account List Strategy (Manual, Not Automated)

20:45 What They Track Instead of Attribution

22:00 The Unquantifiable ROI (Conferences, Familiarity, Warm Leads)

24:30 Why Hooks Matter More Than Anything Else

25:30 The Role of Founder Stories, Frameworks, and Granular Value

27:30 Tradeoffs: Building for Founders vs. Selling to Product Leaders

29:00 Why Content Only Works if You’ve Lived the Story

30:30 Should Her Co-founder Post Too? Why Timing Matters

32:00 Advice to YC Founders: Just Start Posting (Even If It Sucks)

34:20 How to Build Your Own System

36:15 The “PS Buy Our Product” Era (Why It Worked & Why They Paused It)

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

#founderledmarketing #b2bmarketing #linkedin #saas #founderbranding #executivebranding #pr

Sylvia LePoidevin is the CMO at Kandji, where she helped grow the Apple device management company from employee #4 to 300+, scaling from the zero-to-one phase to a mid eight figure business valued at $850M.

In this episode, Sylvia breaks down what it really takes to market to technical buyers, why her team now invests in the 95% of prospects who aren’t yet in-market, and how she’s scaling brand, community, and content without losing the human touch.

We talk podcast flywheels, internal marketing, enabling sales reps on LinkedIn, and building a culture of experimentation even at scale.

Topics we cover in this episode:

- Sylvia’s journey from employee #4 to CMO at an $850M company

- Why Kandji bets on the 95% of buyers who aren’t yet in market

- How to earn trust with technical buyers (and why community matters)

- Their content system: podcast → blog → video → flywheel

- Launching The Sequence as a separate media brand (and why it works)

- Empowering internal voices: from sales reps to podcast hosts

- Social selling: how Kandji is doing it

- Measuring brand without relying on attribution dashboards

- Marketing’s new job: internal clarity and executive storytelling

- How Sylvia helps her team become future CMOs

Connect with Sylvia:

- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvialepoidevin/

- Kandji: https://www.kandji.io/

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters

00:00 From employee #4 to CMO at an $850M company

01:50 The biggest lesson: Don’t wait to build brand

04:00 Who Kandji sells to and how they market to them

06:10 Why community works with technical audiences

08:30 How they balance messaging across the buying committee

10:15 Measuring brand when attribution falls short

12:00 Using podcast content to power the flywheel

14:30 Launching The Sequence as a standalone media brand

17:10 Why “people posts” outperform company posts on LinkedIn

19:40 Building a studio and enabling internal creators

21:20 LinkedIn for recruiting, not just lead gen

23:10 Social selling for sales reps: early wins

25:45 The zero-to-one content that blew up for Sylvia

28:00 How content shaped her leadership

30:50 Leading a large team: what matters now

33:15 Internal marketing and storytelling for executives

35:00 Shark Tank pitch day + being bold in brand

37:00 Giving your team space to experiment in the AI era

#founderledmarketing

#b2bmarketing #linkedin #saas #founderbranding #executivebranding #pr

Adam Frankl was the first VP Marketing at JFrog, Neo4j, and Sourcegraph, all three dev-first unicorns.

He’s helped dozens of early-stage DevTool startups go from “cool idea” to credible company. And now he’s written the book on it.

In this episode, Adam breaks down the biggest mistakes technical founders make when they try to grow. He shares the exact process he’s used to validate real problems, build developer trust, and create go-to-market clarity, before spending a single dollar on ads or content.

This is the DevTool marketing blueprint.

Topics we cover in this episode:

- Why the best DevTools start with a real problem, not a cool idea

- How to recruit a “Technical Advisory Board” to guide your strategy

- The 3 best questions to ask in early-stage user interviews

- Why GitHub stars ≠ validation

- What your first dev-focused marketer should actually do

- How to earn developer trust without hype or paid media

- The difference between a founder brand and a founder POV

- How to become the go-to expert in your space, even if nobody knows you yet

Perfect for:

- DevTool founders figuring out go-to-market

- Early-stage marketers building developer credibility

- Technical leaders turning product into motion

Connect with Adam:

- Adam’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamfrankl/

- Adam’s book - The Developer Facing Startup: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Developer-Facing-Startup-market-developer-facing/dp/B0D4KGHQML

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters

00:00 The real DevTool go-to-market playbook

02:10 Why the best companies solve old problems, not invent new ones

04:25 How to validate with 50+ real conversations (not downloads)

06:45 What most founders get wrong about early traction

08:20 GitHub stars ≠ signal

10:00 The “Technical Advisory Board” strategy explained

13:00 How to ask better questions in early interviews

15:10 Why cold outreach work if you lead with value

17:45 The biggest red flags in early-stage feedback

20:30 Turning developer insight into content that actually works

22:50 What your first marketing hire should focus on (it’s not leads)

26:00 Founder POV vs. Founder Brand

28:30 Why developers follow people—not companies

30:15 Adam’s content hierarchy: 1. research, 2. insight, 3. distribution

33:00 The social proof flywheel and when to start turning it

35:45 Picking the right distribution channel for your audience

37:20 Why forced content formats always fail

40:00 Do you need a new category or just a better story?

42:10 Final advice: what early DevTool teams should obsess over

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Meghan Barr helped build one of the most powerful CEO brands on LinkedIn.

As VP of Brand, Content & Comms at ZoomInfo, she’s spent the last 5 years helping turn Henry Schuck (CEO of ZoomInfo, $1.2B ARR) into a storytelling machine, without losing authenticity.

In this episode, we go behind the scenes of that process:

- How Meghan transitioned from journalism to tech

- The content pillars behind ZoomInfo’s CEO brand

- How their “in your corner” videos are made

- What happened when they took out apology billboards

- Why Henry’s posts outperform ZoomInfo’s 240K-follower brand page

- How she’s scaling the strategy to other executives (and what she looks for)

- The playbook for brand leaders, comms teams, and CEOs who actually want their voice to cut through.

- Topics we cover in this episode:

- Going from Boston Globe journalist to ZoomInfo’s VP of Brand

- The origin story of ZoomInfo’s LinkedIn strategy

- Why they prioritize LinkedIn over blogs and press releases

- How to turn a CEO’s voice into a repeatable content system

- Managing risk, pushback, and post-performance conversations

The “personal + product” content blend that works best

Perfect for:

- Comms leaders building their CEO's Brand

- Founders building their LinkedIn voice

- Brand and content teams scaling thought leadership content

Connect with Meghan:

- Meghan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghan-barr-3211865/

- ZoomInfo: https://www.zoominfo.com/

LinkedIn

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters

00:00 Meghan’s journey from newsroom to ZoomInfo

02:00 Why Henry Schuck hired a journalist, not a marketer

04:00 Making the jump during COVID and overcoming imposter syndrome

06:30 How newsroom skills transfer to startup brand leadership

08:20 Building trust with a high-expectation founder CEO

10:15 When LinkedIn replaced blogs (and why)

12:00 Henry’s viral obituary post: how it came together

14:30 The sausage-making behind every post

16:10 Content goals: Product, People, and Personal

18:00 Metrics: From 100K+ impressions to today’s new benchmarks

20:45 Dealing with performance pressure and pushback

23:00 Risk-taking: The billboard apology stunt that paid off

26:15 Turning ZoomInfo’s sentiment from negative to positive

28:30 Why LinkedIn is also internal comms now

30:00 Activating the rest of the executive team

32:00 Why safe content doesn’t work anymore

34:00 Aligning CEO messaging with company brand strategy

36:00 How Henry’s scrappy product demos are made

38:30 Why founder-led video works at scale

40:15 The no “leaders of leaders” mindset inside ZoomInfo

42:00 KPIs for executive content (followers, media, reach)

44:15 The new role of PR in an AI-dominated world

46:00 Why thought leader ads are a missed opportunity

49:00 Inspiration from John Gray, Daniel Ek, and McDonald’s CEO

51:00 What’s next: Vertical earnings videos and employee advocacy

53:00 How much time Henry actually spends on content

55:00 Final thoughts: Building trust and a strong internal rhythm

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Alec Paul is the CEO and Founder of SalesBrand, and behind some of the most successful CEO brands on LinkedIn.

He’s helped founders like Adam Robinson (Retention.com), Gal Aga (Aligned), and Sam Jacobs (Pavilion) generate millions of views, without sounding like everyone else.

In this episode, Alec shares his full playbook for building a breakout founder brand: from narrative structure and viral storytelling to POV development, content systems, and how to win on LinkedIn in 2025.

If you want to build your founder's brand presence on LinkedIn this is required.

Topics we cover in this episode:

- What makes a founder’s POV stand out

- How to build trust without “sounding like LinkedIn”

- The frameworks Alec uses to structure posts that perform

- Why most ghostwriting sounds like AI (and how to fix it)

- The 3 post types every CEO brand needs

- How to balance virality with long-term positioning

- Why story + structure are more important than hooks + hacks

- What Gal Aga, Adam Robinson, and Sam Jacobs are doing differently

- Why most CEOs fail to commit to content (and how to change that)

- The truth about engagement drops and why LinkedIn still works

Perfect for:

- Heads of Brand and Coms trying to grow their CEO's brand

- Ghostwriters building POV-led content systems

- Content marketers helping executives show up authentically

- Anyone who wants to scale founder-led marketing the right way

Connect with Alec:

- Alec’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecjpaul/

- SalesBrand: https://forms.gle/2SgtaT31pHDgccDM8

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters:

00:00 Alec’s background and the rise of Arch Public

02:00 What makes a CEO brand break out on LinkedIn

04:45 The difference between viral content and thought leadership

06:30 Why Gal Aga’s content strategy works

08:30 Narrative design vs. “just write a hook”

11:10 Storytelling frameworks that actually perform

14:20 Why “pillar content” isn’t enough to scale a brand

17:15 The problem with AI-generated posts

19:40 How Alec thinks about trust, tone, and differentiation

22:30 When founders should outsource (and when they shouldn’t)

25:20 Helping execs find their voice without sounding forced

28:10 The 3 formats that every executive brand needs

30:45 What LinkedIn is rewarding right now

34:00 What most ghostwriters miss about long-term POV

36:30 Building content systems vs. chasing engagement

38:15 Why LinkedIn reach is down but still worth it

40:10 The power of comment DMs and mid-funnel plays

42:00 Measuring success beyond vanity metrics

44:15 Final advice for founders and ghostwriters in 2025

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

Philippe Léhoux is the co-founder of Missive, a collaborative email app bootstrapped to $7.5M ARR with no sales team, no paid marketing, and no funding.

It took six years to reach $1M ARR. Today, Missive is used by thousands of teams, and still run by just 15 people.

In this episode, Philippe breaks down the journey behind one of SaaS’s quietest success stories.

He shares how he ran two companies in parallel, got rejected by YC three times, and why building slow (and staying small) was the right call.

Topics we cover in this episode:

- Running two startups at once (and why it worked for years)

- Why Missive was never a “rocketship”—and why that was okay

- The moment they stopped chasing growth hacks

- Reaching $1M ARR after 6 years (and $7.5M today with 15 people)

- How COVID wiped out their first business overnight

- Building the AI features users actually need

- The emotional cost of founder life and how he managed it

- Why staying small is a competitive advantage

- How Missive turned email into a multiplayer product

Perfect for:

- SaaS founders building without outside funding

- Founders trying to avoid the “VC treadmill”

Connect with Philippe:

Philippe’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/plehoux/

Missive: https://missiveapp.com/

Connect with me:

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

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/03CXzsZp7wdqIRVDcqPTFH

Chapters

00:00 Why Philippe prefers calm SaaS growth

01:40 Rejected by YC (3 times)

03:20 Building ConferenceBadge and Missive in parallel

05:45 What happened when COVID hit

07:10 Why they built Missive with no product-market fit

09:30 Growing to $1M ARR in six years

11:15 Staying small on purpose

13:20 The mental toll of long-term building

15:50 Hiring lessons from a 15-person team

18:00 Where Missive is at today ($7.5M ARR)

19:45 Why he creates content after 10 years of silence

21:00 Launching with the help of Jason Fried

23:10 Why email is still the ultimate workspace

26:30 Their approach to AI (and what they won’t build)

28:10 Final advice for calm SaaS builders

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding