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

We discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

• The tension between impatience and patience

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Connect with Abhay:

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

Sendoso: https://sendoso.com/

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

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

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

3. Abhay’s framework for working with founders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

We discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

What we discuss:

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

• Tobi’s first LinkedIn post goes live

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

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

• Using Fibbler to connect LinkedIn ad engagement to influenced revenue

• The AI-powered ideation workflow we’re building

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

• The “gold standard” for executive content interviews

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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/

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

We I talk about:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How I would grow my LinkedIn from 0 today

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Some things I believe about LinkedIn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with me:

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

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

Thanks for interviewing me Austin:

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

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

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

We discuss:

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

2. Differentiation vs. distinctiveness

3. What a good POV actually is

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

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

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

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

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

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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

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Pranav’s approach to LinkedIn founder branding

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

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

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Connect with Pranav

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

Paramark: https://paramark.com/

Mentions

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

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

6. How Vector… uses Vector

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

Connect with Jess and Josh:

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

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

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

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

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We discuss:

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

2. The Slack message Jack sent his CTO the day ChatGPT launched

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

4. The Steve Jobs approach to product launches

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

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

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

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

9. 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

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

1. 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.

2. “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?

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

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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.

We discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

6. Why he predicts a major AI disaster in 2026

7. What flying taught him about business

8. 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/

Connect with Finn:

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

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

My personal takeaways:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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)

5. 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.

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:

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

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

3. How to turn LinkedIn DMs into pipeline

4. Where ghostwriting works & where it breaks

5. Anything that sounds corporate is dead on arrival

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

7. Why developer marketing starts with credibility

Subscribe now

Connect with Kacie:

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

Claude Code (Anthropic): https://www.anthropic.com/

Connect with me:

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

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

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. They didn’t tune that down. 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. They could trust him

3. I asked Kacie what she’d tell her younger self when she first became a marketing leader. Her answer: There’s a reason you’re in the room. 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. But she thought she had to get perfect at everything she wasn’t great at, instead of bringing in people to complement her

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?” Arter (her CEO at Fastly) was very passionate and very opinionated, she’d just write down what was annoying him.

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.

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.

We discuss:

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

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

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

4. “Human in the loop” vs “human in the lead”

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

6. The Show-Up-Bigger-Than-You-Are playbook

7. Reorganizing GTM teams around outcomes, not functions

8. The advice Sydney would give herself before her first CMO role

Subscribe now

Connect with Sydney:

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

• G2: https://www.g2.com/

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

Connect with Finn:

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

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

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.

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.

We discuss:

1. Why CMO + CRO combo roles usually fail

2. Why companies now hire CMOs from smaller, scrappier startups

3. Where AI is truly useful vs pure hype

4. Why random acts of marketing kill momentum

5. How Calendly moved from viral PLG to focused enterprise ABM

6. The real reason CMOs only last 18 months

7. Why taste, courage, and focus still matter more than tools

Subscribe now

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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:

• 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.

• 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)

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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:

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

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

3. Why video works even when it breaks every rule

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

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

6. Why LinkedIn runs on ACV, not CPM

7. How Clay connects social engagement to pipeline

8. Why optimization advice creates noise, not signal

9. 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/

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

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

There’s one thread throughout his career: Sharing his lessons and insights publicly, aka building his executive brand.

Last week, I sat down with him to interview him about his biggest lessons growing to 60,000 followers on LinkedIn.

What we cover:

- The one thing about personal branding that hasn’t changed since 2010
- How to create content as a busy exec
- Why reach doesn’t matter as much as people think
- Kyle’s biggest lessons growing from 0 to 60k followers
- The biggest mistakes execs make on LinkedIn
- The 3-comments-per-day rule
- How to use LinkedIn for internal communication
- When executive thought leadership becomes a marketing motion
- The best way to pick content topics

You can listen to it here:

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Apple Podcast

Here are my own biggest takeaways:

1. Kyle published a book called “Branding Yourself” in 2010 (!!!!!). Here’s what changed about executive branding over those 15 years: AI, video, and micro moments. You gotta be well-versed with AI, which includes knowing its limits. You gotta find a way to let video find its way into your strategy. And you gotta think in micro moments - recording a podcast and finding the 1 minute clip that will do well on Linkedin, writing a newsletter and creating a stand-alone TLDR version of it for the promo post, etc.

2. Here’s what IS still the same: The only thing that makes you unique is your story. Kyle’s story at a high level (his words): “I’m a CMO at a publicly-traded software company and I talk about attribution, team health, and revenue – at that level, I sound like every other CMO.” But once you get deeper and include things like his day-to-day, publishing books, living in Indianapolis, father of two boys, owner of too many books on World War II, his journey of getting to CMO, that’s when his story becomes unique. You gotta incorporate & lean into some of those elements for yourself (applies to people AND companies).

3. Kyle never looks at his impression or engagement numbers. Is reach down on Linkedin? Yeah. Is that a reason for him not to publish or change who he is and how he talks? No. His main reason for publishing on Linkedin: To learn. By writing down his thoughts, he learns about himself. By reading and engaging with others, he learns what other marketers are up to. Besides learnings, it’s become a massively helpful recruiting tool for when he needs to hire.

4. His two “hacks” for coming up with content ideas:

   1. Meeting Recordings: He records his 1-on-1s with Granola, and imports the transcripts into GPT with a simple prompt: “Review these conversations. Based on what you know about me and the topics we’ve discussed, pull out any themes that would make a strong LinkedIn post.” It surfaces the stuff he’s already talking about in real conversations every day.

   2. Mid-day GPT Jam Sesh: When something hits him, after a call, in the car, mid-thought, he’ll immediately voice record the idea in GPT so he can come back to it later. When it’s time to write, he never starts from zero. AI helps with structure and a rough first draft, but 9/10 times, he rewrites it.

5. Besides those two tricks, what stood out to me is that Kyle mainly just focuses on the fundamentals: try to add value, engage with others, be yourself, and keep showing up. He tries to post every day and comment on at least 2-3 posts by others every day. He doesn’t use any tools besides Asana, ChatGPT and the Google Suite.

6. Kyle has published a newsletter on beehiiv every week for a year now. He wishes he had started sooner: to have an audience he owns (Linkedin can delete your account), and because writing long-form (1,800+ words) helps him evaluate what he’s doing.

7. When to invest into executive thought leadership. Kyle’s take: Always. Whether you’re a series A startup or a publicly-traded company, leveraging your internal leaders to create content in the places your ICP spends time is always something you should be thinking about.

P.S.

If you enjoyed this, I’m hosting a live webinar with Kacie Jenkins on Monday. We’ll talk about her biggest lessons leading marketing (3x VP Marketing) at Sendoso, Sourcegraph and Fastly, where she helped grow the company from series A to $200M ARR and an IPO.

Plus, why she’s been going hard on her Executive Brand recently, going from zero to 12,000 followers on LinkedIn in what feels like no time.

Join us here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/53UOqNm2S0ypgdmru6qqyA

You are receiving this email because at some point over the last 12 months, you either signed up for my old newsletter or one of my live events/interviews with a B2B SaaS founders or exec.

I decided to move to Substack and give it a new name - The Executive Brand - under which both the podcast and the newsletter now live.

What you’ll see me talk about:
- Founder and CEO Branding
- Executive Thought Leadership
- LinkedIn Playbooks
- Audience Growth
- Interviews with some of the top founders, CEOs and execs in B2B tech

New name, same topics.

BUT, I do appreciate that you might not have wanted to end up on this list, so if you would like to NOT receive any further emails, you can unsubscribe below:

Unsubscribe now

If you’re one of the people who didn’t, I appreciate it. I’ll do my best to publish the best possible content.

Next up is Kyle Lacy’s executive brand playbook, CMO at Docebo - a publicly-traded B2B SaaS company: How he built an audience of 60,000+ followers on LinkedIn without any hacks.

Stay tuned. Welcome to The Executive Brand.

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

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