Founder Brand with Finn Thormeier

I’m trying a new format! I bring on founders who want to take their LinkedIn more seriously, they tell me what they’re already doing / trying, and I coach them through what I’d change to grow faster and drive more revenue. Bear with me as I get better at these!!! First up: Jonathan Bland, co-founder of Omni Lab, a demand gen agency. They’re 14 people, doing over $3m in revenue, and ICP is Heads of Demand Gen at B2B SaaS companies. His LinkedIn stats for the last 12 months: * 190 posts published (4 per week) * 930k impressions (~5,000 per post) * 5 DMs, 10 connection requests and 10-20 comments per week (his activity) * A little over $1M in net new ARR attributed his this * One of the first things I saw: Only maybe 20% of his posts focus on the problem space he solves for clients, and they probably contribute the majority of the revenue generated. Super back of the napkin math, but if you flip that ratio, you could have a have a 4x in net new ARR from Linkedin right there. Highest-leverage changes These are the suggestions I make in the podcast. For some of these to fully make sense, you might need the context of the conversation. Better, not more, not new 4 posts a week is good (five is the max without weekends). Keep the newsletter and podcast as experiments, but LinkedIn is faaaar from tapped out. “Better” means a much higher share of posts aimed at the ICP’s problems. Focus focus focus Pick one buyer. Focus on ONLY Heads of Demand Gen and focus on only the below post type. Second-tier topics (sales and marketing alignment, hiring, compensation) and personal posts are fine if they’re a quick free-flow post you write up in 10 minutes, otherwise not worth the effort. Show you can DO the work, not just THINK the thoughts Examples: * Case studies. Where the client started (spend, leads, pipeline), exactly what you did (channels, budget split, tracking, creative), what it produced, and the biggest learnings. Anonymize when you must (“a Series B health-tech SaaS”), mention the company when you can. * Pseudo case studies. Pick a dream client with a known brand, eg. Clay, and write “If Clay hired me as Head of Demand Gen, here’s what I’d do”: ad library, landing pages, budget split, creative mix, what to change first. * Premise posts. “If I were Head of Demand Gen at a Series B SaaS with $50K a month, selling to mid-market CTOs, here’s the program I’d build” — budget by channel, cold versus retargeting, creative, what to check in month two. No AI can write this; it is your judgment, and it shows how much work the job really is. More credibility Thousands of freelancers talk about paid media, why should people listen to you? State your proof regularly, even to people who already follow you: 40 clients, total ad spend, big client names like Drata, clients who have stayed 4-5 years, and put it in the hook (“We run the full paid media program for brands like Drata…”) or mid-post (“…and I still see this across 45 client accounts, including some big names”). Rebuild the batching habit Every consistently successful creator batches: eg. a Sunday block (4 hours, 4-5 posts) or a fixed daily writing slot (eg. 9-10 AM is for writing, nothing else). “When inspiration strikes” is the worst. The one post to master We discuss the framework on the call, I wrote about it in depth here: Liked this? If you’re a founder and you want to take your LinkedIn more seriously, this is exactly the work I do at my advisory pratice: build a founder’s Linkedin strategy and figure out the few points of leverage to drive the most revenue from it. I’ve now helped 80+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn and build a stronger founder brand. Reach out here → https://thormeier.co/ Show Notes: Connect with Jonathan Bland: Jonathan Bland’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-bland/ Omni Lab: https://www.omnilabconsulting.com/ Omni OS: https://www.omnilabconsulting.com/omni-os Connect with Finn Thormeier: Finn Thormeier’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/ Mentioned in the episode: How smart Alex Hormozi’s NEW content strategy really is: https://blog.thormeier.co/p/how-smart-alex-hormozis-new-content $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi (more, better, new): https://www.acquisition.com/books How to be weirder on Linkedin (and why you should be) w/ Jillian Richardson: https://blog.thormeier.co/p/how-to-be-weirder-on-linkedin-and Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo on the podcast: https://blog.thormeier.co/p/ahrefs-cmo-being-scrappy-scaling Drata: https://drata.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ --- Full Transcript: Finn Thormeier: I’m here with Jonathan. Jonathan has been very generous with being a guinea pig for a new format that I’m trying. So basically I’m going to have a bunch of B2B founders on my podcast who are already active on LinkedIn, who are already doing stuff on LinkedIn and who are already getting results from LinkedIn. And they’re going to present kind of what they’ve been doing and how it’s working. We’re going to spend some time discussing ways to improve further on it, scale it, and stuff like that. So Jonathan, maybe as an introduction, can you talk about the company that you run, what you guys do, and who your ICP is? Jonathan Bland: Yeah, thanks for having me on. So we’re a demand-gen agency. We work with B2B SaaS brands, anywhere from Series A to PE-backed. And we really own their entire paid media program. So think Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Bing, Reddit, really, you name it. And we also do ad creative for all of them, motion graphics, statics, copy, et cetera. And then we do all the conversion tracking. So that’s OCT, offline conversion tracking, so that the ad platforms actually track against the things that are important to them. And then we do this all through our proprietary AI platform called Omni OS, which was just made public about a month ago. And this is really the software platform that we use internally to really do everything paid media. Finn Thormeier: Who is usually the buyer? Is it the founder, CEO, or is it the head of marketing or someone else? Jonathan Bland: Never the founder and CEO, but usually it’s the VP of marketing, head of demand gen, director of demand gen. You know, usually someone that’s owning marketing. Finn Thormeier: Who would you rather focus on if you had to focus on one of the two? I assume for the slightly larger companies, it’s rather the head of demand gen. Jonathan Bland: Probably the head of demand gen if it’s a larger company, because usually there is someone dedicated to demand gen that is reporting up to the VP of marketing. And usually the VP of marketing at that point is more removed from the day to day from a channel execution perspective. So they end up being our point of contact. Finn Thormeier: And you prefer the larger clients who already have a larger team who have a dedicated demand gen person. Over the smaller team with no dedicated demand gen person. Jonathan Bland: Yeah, definitely. Finn Thormeier: What of those kind of service lines, offers and channels is the bulk of the reason what people come to you for? Jonathan Bland: Paid media management optimization by far, for sure. Finn Thormeier: For which channel? Jonathan Bland: We know that the bias in B2B is we love Google ads and we love LinkedIn ads. Finn Thormeier: Cool. Now talk to me a little bit about your LinkedIn. Let me share my screen. This is obviously your website, agency.com. Makes a lot of sense. You have your case studies, you have your pricing here, depending on your ad budget. People can book a call. Very solid. Jonathan Bland: Okay. Finn Thormeier: LinkedIn. How much are you posting? You know, I sent to you a couple stats to kind of look up if you can share how often you’ve posted in the last year, how many impressions you generated in the last year and what amount of revenue net new you associate to that. Jonathan Bland: So over the last 12 months, posted 190 times for about a million impressions. And then closed-won revenue is such a good question. But when we looked at everything that we can see in our CRM, it’s on the low side, probably a million three and closed-won over the last 12 months. And then on the high side, it’s probably closer to right above two. Finn Thormeier: Is that total net new revenue or is that you generated more than that in the last 12 months and this is just the share of what you roughly attribute to your personal LinkedIn activity? Jonathan Bland: By looking at self-reported attribution and some of the things that we do on sales calls and then aggregating that in AI on the back end, 40 to 50% is what’s coming from LinkedIn Organic if you want to direct source it in that way. But again, like I said, it’s probably not really a fair cut or shake of what LinkedIn Organic is really doing. Probably could be a little bit more. Finn Thormeier: Cool. Okay. What was the goal that you were about to share? Jonathan Bland: We have broad blended goals, but I don’t really look at our organic from a goal perspective. Really for me and for us, it’s my co-founder and I that do most of this activity. One DM per day, 10 connects per week, three to five posts per week. So usually we’re pretty good about doing that. And then 10 to 20 comments per week. So really we’re looking more on just kind of making sure we get the right inputs from an activity perspective in. Finn Thormeier: And then what, what are company goals? I mean, where do you want to take the company? It’s three to 4 million ARR right now. Jonathan Bland: There’s really, I think the initial phase is we just launched the OS about a month ago. It’s been technically active for six months. And so really our vision right now is to continue to use that as a competitive differentiator, which it has been immensely thus far since we’ve launched it and made this public. Finn Thormeier: So I’ll just recap a couple things. So 190 posts in the last 365 days, that comes down to roughly four posts a week on average. You did 930k impressions. Let’s just round that up to a million. A million divided by 200k. That’s roughly 5k impressions per post on average. And then you said you’d roughly generated 1.3 million in closed-won in the last year that you associate to organic LinkedIn, which is roughly 50% of your overall net new. Let’s assume that 80% of that is through your LinkedIn, taking out of it your co-founder’s account. So let’s just round it down to a million in net new revenue on the conservative side. You said it might be more depending on how you calculate it. One million in net new ARR from your LinkedIn. That’s really solid, obviously. So I don’t see a reason why you can’t be adding 5 million in net new ARR if you can scale the backend fast enough from your LinkedIn. Because it’s clearly working and now it’s just a matter of how can we 5x it or 10x it. Okay. You said you do 4 posts a week. You do 10 connection requests a week. You send 5 DMs per week. You do 15 to 20 comments a week. That’s in terms of activity. How much time would you say you’re spending on all of this between writing the 4 posts every week, Engaging, being active, doing the commenting, doing the liking, engaging, DMing, all of it combined, what do you say? Jonathan Bland: Probably an hour every morning, so I block out my calendar from 9 a.m. to about 10 a.m., so that’s just for predominantly time on LinkedIn. I also post on Substack a little bit too, so there’s some activity there as well. But yeah, between posting, commenting, maybe a DM or two, sometimes it’s more, honestly, but one DM is generally the kind of minimum goal. But yeah, definitely an hour, hour a day. So it’s five hours a week. Finn Thormeier: And in that one hour block every morning from nine to 10, that’s when you will write your LinkedIn posts right there and then you’ll hit publish and then you’ll do a couple comments, one DM, couple connection requests, that type of thing. Jonathan Bland: No, usually I have everything scheduled out already. Usually I have at least a week or two of content that’s kind of staged up. The thing that I do around 9 a.m. is I review what content is going out that day and how relevant it is to what’s going on. So it’s more of like an instinct gut feel. So I may make final edits to it, add to it, make the post a little bit better. So it’s more just a little bit of refining. But the post is already technically teed up. And then, um, and then it goes out. Finn Thormeier: And so that teeing up and creation happens in those 10 to 20 hours that you mentioned are separate per month on content creation. Jonathan Bland: Exactly. Yeah. The real backend of it is that between the OS, we have a huge amount of data on impact tests, case studies, things that are working that are not working. So I can pull from that pretty instantaneously through our AI system. And then two, then there’s conversations I have throughout the week, things that are going on in my head, things that I’ve read, articles that are interesting. And so I just do it, honestly, a pretty old school way. Got a notepad digitally on my MacBook. Finn Thormeier: So you write these yourself and you write them in your notebook. You write them when you think of something. You schedule them out and then they’re more or less ready to go. And then in your morning hour block, you kind of pick a post, make maybe a few edits, make sure that the one that’s scheduled for today is one that you still want to send out. And then you do your engaging on top of that in the hour. Jonathan Bland: Pretty much. Finn Thormeier: So all in all, I would say that adds up to 40 hours a month or 10 hours a week, roughly two hours a day. We take all of it together, including the content creation, which I think is a normal, solid amount. And you’re clearly generating money off of What’s your goal? Jonathan Bland: I think the end goal for everyone, if you ask them, is to generate leads, pipeline, and then money at the end of the day. I mean, no one’s doing this for charity, even though they might say they are. The reality though, if I had to say it and add to it, maybe I’m one of those just, I don’t know, rare people or something, but I actually do enjoy learning. I do enjoy connecting with people and meeting new folks. I’ve met a ton of people on LinkedIn over the last, I don’t know, four or five years. So I actually have some kind of genuine interest. Finn Thormeier: I’m asking this question because I think there is ways to get a lot more out of your LinkedIn, but it might mean changing your routine and or changing the way how you write or what you write. Jonathan Bland: Yeah, totally open to your thoughts. What are you thinking? Finn Thormeier: There’s a couple things that I think Hormozi talks about. More, better, new. More would be you just do more posts. Better would be you do better posts that generate more inbound pipeline revenue per post. And then new would be let’s open up a completely new channel, which is your newsletter or podcast or something completely else. I think I would focus on better for you. The reason is more, you’re already doing four posts a week. You said you don’t want to post on the weekend. So we can, we can do one post a day. That’s five per week and be really consistent with that. But that does only gives you a little bit of a lift plus every now and then you’re going to miss a day because you run a company. So I think four per week already sounds like a good amount to me. And then you, given that you generated at least a million in net new ARR from your LinkedIn, it’s clearly working. And I don’t think we need to And you’re already experimenting with other channels. You have the podcast going a little bit. You mentioned you have the newsletter going. So I think it’s fine to have experiments there, but I wouldn’t conclude a LinkedIn is tapped out. Let’s open up a new thing. The way that I think about it is I think you only need to master one piece of content. And I think every single person overcomplicates this and they want to be smart and cute and feel good about what they’re putting out on LinkedIn. And they’re thinking about their peers and they’re thinking about their colleagues and they’re thinking about the industry, the one type of posts you need. Who is my ICP or buyer? What problems, goals and priorities do they have? Which of these priorities, goals and problems do I connect with in the sense that my service or product is related to that problem space? And now let me provide them with a solution or a goal or an insight to that problem, goal, priority. So in your case, given what you told me, we’re going to focus on the head of demand gen at this kind of mid-market company. So not the super small startup that has 10 people, but you know the range. There might be 10 people on the marketing team. There’s a dedicated demand gen marketer, maybe they’re a paid media performance marketer, whatever they’re called. That’s our persona. What are their top priorities this year, this quarter? You know them best because you talk to these people. They might have an MQL goal. They might have a pipeline influence goal. They might have a certain output goal. They might need to add another channel. They might need to drive down their CPC. They might have their budget cut in half and now they need to drive the same amount of pipeline as before with half the budget. You know what these things are. In the end, it’s all going to come down to, in your case, I assume, driving revenue or pipeline from paid media. That’s the whole mandate. And so every single post that will actually contribute to you getting inbound leads or pipeline is, hey, head of demand gen at this company, you’re dealing with this. Here’s an insight, a playbook, a framework, a tip, a strategy, a story that will help you make progress on this. I believe, and I played this game because I also ran an agency. The biggest thing right now, and we’re going to go into this, LinkedIn has become super saturated. Everyone is talking. So you need to be hyper-focused about the persona and you need to show people that you can do the work, not just think the thoughts. What I mean by that is It’s super easy to have a take on paid media. It’s super easy to have a take on nitty gritty stuff. Should you have audience expansion when you run ads on LinkedIn ad manager? Should you have 70% of your ad budget allocated to Google or to LinkedIn or in which way? Hot take, I believe every B2B company should run Reddit ads. Like you can post hot takes. All day, right? Takes about attribution and how people like overthink it. But those are a dime a dozen. Everyone can say those things. What people actually want to see when they hire an agency is can you do the work? And you demonstrate that you can do the work by doing the work, which means I believe the highest impact piece of content that you can create is one case studies always work. So taking a client that you have and talking about what you did and the results you got. For some clients, you’re allowed to talk about who they are. For a lot of them, you’re not. That’s fine. You can anonymize it. You can talk about it. We’re working with a series B, B2B SaaS company in the health tech space. The head of demand gen came to us. They were spending this much on ads. They were getting these many. Leads, Revenue, Pipeline before. Here’s exactly what we did over the next six months. We installed our backend system that allowed us to track these things. We activated these new additional ad channels that they had not spent any money on before. Here’s our exact budget split. Here’s the exact kind of tracking that we see on our end. We generated this much influence pipeline, influence revenue, whatever leads, MQLs, however you are measuring it on the backend. In month two, one of the biggest learnings was we’re running too many static ads. And we started creating motion graphic ads and they doubled our CTR and just walk through it. Ideally, obviously showing the exact brand and the exact ad account and just walking through it. The other, if you tap that out, because that’s the highest impact, the second highest impact is to do pseudo case study, which is You take an actual company that is your dream client. And obviously in this case, you want to just pick someone who fits your ideal, perfect ICP, right? You pick a mid-market company that has a well-known brand. Maybe that’s Clay. I don’t know. Someone that a lot of people know. And you basically say, if Clay hired me as the head of demand gen, here’s what I would do. Here’s what I would look at. Here’s how I would evaluate things. Here’s how I would audit And then you can do this in different levels of depth. On your newsletter, you could do the complete breakdown and you actually look at their ad library and the ads that they’re running. Look at their company page. You could look at their landing page. We’ve seen that adding in a mix of conversation retargeting ads really improves conversion. So this is what I would run. I would allocate this percent of budget to that to experiment with and basically show people that you can do the work. That’s the highest lift. That’s a lot of work. That’s actually you sitting down for an hour or two or three or maybe even four and doing that analysis. You can maybe get some people of your team to supply parts of it. You probably have some people on your team who are the specialist on, I don’t know, the landing page part or on the analytics part, and they’ll do some research and they’ll send you the ER takeaway. And then you kind of combine it and you present the whole thing. But I think either way, it doesn’t always need to be a complete thing. But when you take our persona ICP, the only person that we care about is the head of demand gen at these mid-market B2B SaaS companies. I don’t care about the other LinkedIn ad consultants who follow me and my peers who will maybe comment on whatever I post. I don’t care about these people. The only person I care about is this person and trying to add value in every single thing that I post, which is always related to an insight. Sometimes it can just be mindset shift, right? You can say, Hey, I talked to head of demand gen last week. Who has never ran Reddit ads because he doesn’t understand it. I told him this thing, which completely changed his point of view. And he understood the importance of Reddit ads. That could be super short points. You’re still providing a solution. The solution in this case is a mindset or frame shift that unlocked something in that person’s head. Jonathan Bland: With a story, with an insight, with something that’s real. With a story, with a story. Yeah, exactly. Finn Thormeier: It could be a quick tip. Right. It could be also like if you’re a head of demand gen and you’re already running LinkedIn ads and you’re spending more than 30K a month on LinkedIn ads, make sure you turn on manual bidding. We still see it in over two thirds of the ad accounts of the clients that we work with that they don’t run manual. That simple shift already drives a 30% reduction in cost per click or whatever, right? Quick insight, quick thing. It’s still useful. It’s not this whole full breakdown because if I look at your LinkedIn right now, right? There’s no excuse for sales to be targeting different accounts and marketing. You’re basically saying marketing and sales should target the same accounts. And then your call to action is basically, you know, hey, listen to the full podcast. We’ll break this down. I could have Claude write 365 posts this afternoon and be done with writing content for the next year. But right now I get meaning from writing. This is cool. It’s just, it’s not targeted a head of demand gen. It’s not solving any of their problems. So like from a revenue perspective, you can skip this post. I think it’s completely overvalued these kinds of posts. Look, I do those too, right? I did a post about breaking my arm. I got 50,000 impressions on that post. It drove zero interest in what I do. There’s two things. One is you might just enjoy this. You enjoy writing this and you just do it because you enjoy it. It’s like a recreational thing that can have value on its own. Maybe you say, actually, I would like to, beyond driving interest and pipeline with these heads of demand gen, beyond that, I would like to build my founder community and get to know other founders and Learn from them. That’s fine. I’m just saying that’s a different goal to a different audience. I think you can, for example, say that, hey, actually we get a lot of our clients not from a head of demand gen seeing my content and being like, I should hire these guys, but rather from other agency owners who maybe run other kinds of agencies who refer us business. But in that case, that’s the partnership strategy. And then you can focus on that and you can say my actual ICP, It’s not head of demand gen. It’s agency owners with whom I’m going to set up a partnership agreement that we refer each other separate business. But then I would just give you the same recommendation and just focus on that new ICP. That’s now your ICP, other agency owners. And then you’re going to focus on their pain points, which is like they would like to have more upsell opportunities. And you give them that upsell opportunity by positioning yourself as the perfect solution to Having an upsell opportunity, right? Or because they run an organic agency like I did, and a lot of their clients would benefit from running ads because if they’re already doing the organic content, if they had someone who would push some of that stuff paid, then their clients would be happier because overall they get better results and you can focus on that. You run ads, right? It’s like running ads, you know, your buyer heads of demand gen, but you run your ads towards everyone. Because heads of demand gen are part of that audience. And maybe there’s going to be like a founder here and there who knows a head of demand gen and they’re going to forward it to them. So like might as well include a founder in the targeting because it’s just like, let’s just focus on our actual audience, right? And so I think the real thing that is kind of the 201 version of this, and this is, for example, when you look at people like Alex Hormozi, every single piece of his audience is business owners. That’s a broad category, right? But he doesn’t talk to employees. He talks to business owners. And every single piece of content is a solution to how do I grow? He inserts this personality into the solution by, first of all, the way that he shows up. He looks a certain way. He has the beard. He has the muscles. He has the wife beater shirt. So that just stands out. That’s just him. People recognize him for that. The way that he tells the stories and gives the examples, it’s very straightforward, very analytical, very no BS. And then he uses examples and stories from his life where he then tells the story about when he ran gyms back in the day or how his wife Leila told him something. And so you learn about him and his personal life. By virtue of him sharing an insider story. So it’s not like, hey, I just got engaged or, you know, whatever with Leila. And that’s the post. It’s like the post is like, here’s an insight that helps you grow as a business owner. And by, you know, at some point he mentions because it’s somehow relevant that, you know, he ran gyms or that he, you know, works out every morning or that. You know, he got engaged to Leila or whatever the thing is, right? Or that he lives in Vegas and why? Like it’s just related to that thing, that style. And I actually think that’s becoming more and more important because of AI, because everyone can now create good content that sounds very generic. And you always almost want to have proof of humanity and you do proof of humanity By sounding and looking differently. Jonathan Bland: What does that look like to you? Let me stop you there a second. I mean, let’s talk about, I mean, clearly we know that written posts, text-based posts are the most easy to generate at scale right now. Anyone can do it. Everyone can do it. You can create stories. You can create grammatical errors. You can do lowercase, uppercase, whatever you want to do. You can do it all. It’s all possible. So then it becomes really, from a written post perspective, really the taste of the person behind the post in terms of deciding what they want to put in the box. Yeah. But how do you kind of see text-based and video? Finn Thormeier: I’m still a big fan of text. I don’t think you need to do video at all, unless you’re good at video or you love with video. I think two things. If the information is good enough, people don’t care whether there’s personality in the post. I asked you earlier today, what’s your best performing post in the last 12 months in terms of kind of leads and pipeline that are generated for you. And that’s this post. Jonathan Bland: Mm-hmm. Finn Thormeier: Which by the way, this is kind of the exact type of post we discussed, which is you focus on the persona, which is in this case, the person running the ads and you provide a solution to their problem, which is how do I run ads on LinkedIn? In this case, it’s like a super long in-depth guide. Jonathan Bland: Yeah. This, this one took some time to get together. Finn Thormeier: Right. But it also had, but anyway, like there’s no personality here. Jonathan Bland: Yeah, it’s matter-of-fact, black and white. Finn Thormeier: It’s just f*****g good information. That’s why it did well. So I think my first point is if the information is good enough, people don’t care. People don’t even care if you use AI or there’s an em dash or an It’s This Not That sentence in there. It’s just that generally when people use AI, they use it because they’re lazy and they don’t want to do the hard thinking. And then naturally, it’s more a correlation. The content is just... Not so good. It’s just relatively meh, average, not obvious. So I think that’s point one. I think point two is I had Jillian on the podcast. She basically talks about how to do non-boring LinkedIn. And what I liked about it is that she teaches people To do two rounds of edits. The first, you just write the information, write the playbook, the step-by-step, the insight, the recommendation, whatever the thing is. Your second pass is just regular editing. You make sure that it’s tight, that it’s concise, that you use the right language, good wording, good spacing. But then the second edit is to insert personality. That’s when you capitalize certain words, or you do four exclamation marks after a certain point, or you use a swear word. Because that’s how you naturally speak and you added it in. I’ll tell you right now, if you sat down and you give yourself an hour and you give yourself a premise and the premise is if I was the head of demand gen, At a B2B SaaS company that just raised their Series B, I have a 50K per month ad budget and we sell to, give yourself some criteria, right? Like we sell into mid-market CTOs. Here is the paid media strategy I would set up. But, and you just talk about like out of this 50K, I would put this much into Google ads. I would put this much into LinkedIn ads. I would put this much into an experimental Reddit ads. For the LinkedIn ads, I would split it into cold and retargeting coldest, this much of my split. And retargeting this much of my split. I would focus heavily on static ads or video ads because those are performing best on LinkedIn right now. For Google, I would focus on this part because that’s where we see the most conversions happening right now. In month two, I would look at these statistics because I know that that’s where I’m going to get the most insights out of. And based on what I find there, I’m going to tweak these three points in this way. You’ll write stuff and I’ll tell you it will be different from whatever Claude will generate for you right now. And that’s the actual useful stuff that people pay you for. And that’s also where, especially in an agency context, because I run this business, That’s where people wake up to like, holy s**t, this is so much work. Like there are so many moving pieces and individual parts that I wasn’t aware of because I’m not that deep in the material that like now he gave me all the insights, but there’s no way I’m going to set this up. I think the alpha in content is still focus. Like, it’s crazy the amount of people who just are not willing to do the discipline of, this is my ICP, these are their problems, this is what we solve, let me just talk to these things. Because every single person gets tired of their own insights and they feel like people will judge them if they just talk about these things every single day. Jonathan Bland: It’s so true. Yeah. Finn Thormeier: Now, let’s say a head of demand gen doesn’t just need to run the paid media campaigns and create, they need to hire a team. They need to build a team. If you talk about like, hey, if I was a head of demand gen, here’s the first and second person I would hire onto my team. It’s fine, but there’s no tie back to, and therefore Omni Lab, because you don’t help recruit people. If you were a recruiting agency for paid media teams, this would be a great post, but you don’t. So like if you really fully ran out of anything you could say to the actual problem space that you solve, then move on to the next level up. But I think there’s infinite amount of content for you to do that. Jonathan Bland: No. Yeah. Yeah. Finn Thormeier: Um, so I think it’s just a distraction. I wouldn’t dedicate, like, let me spend 45 minutes crafting this post. If instead I could dedicate those 45 minutes to writing a different kind of post. Jonathan Bland: No. Yeah, completely. I agree. Finn Thormeier: I think the other thing that you are not doing enough is credibility. Jonathan Bland: What do you mean? Finn Thormeier: Cause there’s, there’s so many people talking about paid media and it’s like, why should I listen to you? Right. And you have some good things to back you up. I mean, you have some notable clients that you work with or have worked with, as you said, you have some clients with who’ve been with you for four years. That’s pretty amazing. Maybe you can talk to, you know, the, how much ad budget you guys are managing across all clients. So like you have pattern matching that other people don’t have because you see 35 to 45 brands doing different things at any given point that gives you a like bird’s eye view that any individual brand just doesn’t have who only sees their ad account. I mean, you’ve spent a ton of time just researching this. I mean, this research report that we discussed, right? That’s hours of work that you put into studying this type of thing versus someone else. So I think spending a little bit more time to think about what are these biggest points of credibility that you can mention more regularly so that in people’s mind, you’re not just another person talking about LinkedIn ads and ad management and paid media and whatnot, but you’re a credible source with a real clear, verifiable track record. That’s worth paying attention to that alone. Will help you. Like, again, I come back to Hormozi because I think he’s one of the most thoughtful people and just being super disciplined about this stuff. Every single YouTube video in the intro, what he says is, I run acquisition.com. Our portfolio of company does X hundred millions in revenue every single year. I exited two companies, the last one for 36 million. His existing audience already knows this. He says it still because for every single video, he obviously wants to reach a cold audience who does not yet know that. And they need to know these things to be like, why should I listen to this hairy, bulky dude who’s going to tell me how I’m going to grow my company? It’s like, you better have a track record there. But then even for the people who do follow him, it just reinforces, ah, yeah, right, that’s why he’s worth paying attention to. And so you might not need to do this for every single LinkedIn post, but you can do this in subtle ways, right? You can do it in the hook and you can say, we help clients like Drata, blah, blah, blah, run their ad account and we’ve managed so much. Here’s everything I wish I had known if I was starting a new demand gen role tomorrow. And then you list everything. And it’s just a little credibility. Or you can throw it in mid-post, right? If you talk about, you know, your point about ABX and how sales and marketing need to be aligned. Again, I think that post is suboptimal because it’s not tied to the specific thing that you guys saw. But if you’re going to post it, you can still say, and I still see this being the problem working with 45 brands, including some big names like Drata, where this is still the problem, right? Like drop it in there. So that you’re not one of the million people because there’s so many freelancers and solo consultants and like random people on LinkedIn who talk about LinkedIn ads who have never run any LinkedIn ads. And it’s very easy to verify for you. Like people go to your website once and they’re like, oh s**t, there’s like real testimonials and case studies and logos and all of those things. And they have a real team of 14 people. And so I would be more front and center about your credibility when you post. I think you can work more with call-outs. I’m a big fan of call-outs. People cringe on LinkedIn a little bit because I think it’s just in our bubble. People think it’s a little overused. What’s an example of a call-out? If I was running demand gen at a Series B SaaS company, here’s how, here’s what. Jonathan Bland: Yeah. Finn Thormeier: Like just calling them out specifically. You can also do the, if my CMO cut my ad budget in half while expecting the same results, here’s the biggest things I would be looking at to try to achieve that. Right. I do think people are way too scared for CTAs. I think it cross everything. I think it’s such a wrong best practice where people are like, you shouldn’t have CTAs. No, if you, we’re not doing this for fun. We’re not on LinkedIn because we want to like feel good and get a couple, like we’re on LinkedIn for a goal and that goal is to drive revenue. And so if you run a company and you are convinced and you know that you’re able to help people, you should let people know that you exist and what you do so that you can help people, right? And so if you talk about, if you’re a head of demand gen and here’s how I would set up my LinkedIn ad account, if I had a 30,000 per month ad budget, you know, and selling into enterprise, here’s how I would run it. Talk about it. And then at the end, by the way, if you need help with this, shoot me a DM or check out Omni Lab. I do think you need to let people know that you help people with that. Like I’ve had this, Tim Soulo, the CMO of Ahrefs. I had him on my podcast. We’ve been talking in the DM back and forth. I’ve engaged with a lot of his content. He engaged with a lot of my content. Like literally months after that, he was like, oh, I never realized you run it like a LinkedIn agency. I thought you were like a podcaster. And so there’s a surprising amount of people who will read your post, get value out of it, and will think maybe you’re a head of demand gen. Maybe you’re just a generous soul and you posted your insights and not realize that you actually help people with that. So I don’t think you need to include a link. I do think you need to let people know explicitly, by the way, This is what I do. This is what we do. This is what my company does. We can help with this. Check us out. I think there is another misconception that people have where it’s like, if I’m going to say that I have a company that has a service that somehow will turn people off. It’s like, no. And if it turns people off, it’s probably not your audience. It’s probably like your peers or other agencies who roll their eyes and they’re like, Oh, look at him pitching again. It’s like, but that’s not your audience. Jonathan Bland: Yep. Yep. Exactly. No, I’m with you. I’m with you. I think it’s a good, I think it’s a good call out. I like it. I wrote down a bunch of stuff. My takeaways are credibility, mentioning either ad spend or management, clients, years working with us, you know, other third party things and kind of call outs. Staying focused on the pain points, clear lineback, Omni Lab, and stories, data, basically injecting things that can’t be done directly with Claude Clearly. Finn Thormeier: Well, I hope it was useful. I’d love to see in a month or two if any of this were implemented Jonathan Bland: No, no, you’re saying good stuff. I’d be curious on the sidebar if you’ve ever done anything more structured things like Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, there’s a specific type of post so that you can just create incredible consistency around it. Finn Thormeier: I think it’s super helpful. What I would do there is focus on the angle of how to talk about it. I would always, again, head of demand gen, what are their problems, goals, priorities? Let me provide a solution in the space that we work with so that I can tie it back. That’s every single post. But then you can do that from a, here’s a case study, right? We work with Drata. We did these things. Here’s how it worked. Here are the results. That’s one. Two is story. Talk to a head of demand gen. I ran an ad campaign last year that was doing super well and then suddenly CPCs dropped off a cliff and I had to figure out why. Tell a story. That teaches some sort of insight, right? Then it could be like from your tool, some sort of analytics breakdown of like, okay, on Wednesdays, you always go into your tool and you find some interesting statistics or numbers where you talk about, you know, CPC rising or, you know, a trend. And the fourth one could be quote, where you pick a quote from some other respected person in the paid media, you know, So I would rather use that for picking angles rather than Mondays, I share a personal story on Tuesday, I do a company update on Wednesday, because again, I think those are just way less impactful than people think they are. Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

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

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

Work with me: https://thormeier.co/ I help SaaS / AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more revenue from it. Track record / why I have the audacity to teach this stuff: 1. Grew my LinkedIn to 43,000 followers 2. Which to date has generated about $3.2m in revenue for myself 3. Built a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency (Project 33) to 7 people and $100k/month, where we worked with over 80 B2B tech companies 4. Closed the agency to advise founders and make the same amount of money with no employees. I advised now over 30 founders on how to grow on LinkedIn, including the CEO of a publicly-traded cybersecurity company 5. I run the biggest podcast and newsletter in this space (founderbrand.org) 6. I've interviewed over 150 of the biggest founder brands about their approach, including Jason Fried, DHH, Henry Schuck, Dave Gerhardt, Guillaume Moubeche, Adam Robinson 7. Spoke on stages about this stuff, eg. at Nathan Latka's SaaSOpen Will be doing more of these in-depth breakdowns on content and founder brand, even installed some new tools to make them more tactical and hopefully useful to you guys. Summary / TLDR: * He changed from doing solo videos of just him teaching business owners how to scale their company (by sharing a tip, strategy, story, lesson) → to bringing on a real business owner, having them present their business (revenue, growth, where they’re stuck) and then basically doing a 1:1 consulting session where Alex gives them very tactical advice on how to scale their company. * His main offer: a $5k in-person group workshop, which his company Acquisition.com hosts once a week with 70-100 business owners, where he upsells about 30% attendees into a $36k/year advisory program. * The math: 70 x $5k = $350k per event for just the workshop tickets, which is $1.4M per month, given that they do it every week. Upsells: 20 x $36k = roughly $700k per event from the upsells, which is $2.8M per month, so $4.2M per month or roughly $50M per year in total for just the advisory business, not including their PE portfolio etc. * His new style of video is hyper optimized to drive workshop ticket sales. Gotta watch the above video why. But a few notes: * It’s just good content because it’s hyper tactical, which is what most business owners want * It’s gamified, because they structure it like a game show, so you get emotionally involved and are more likely to watch the next video because there is continuity * It not only shows that Alex knows how to scale businesses using his own businesses as examples, but that he ALSO knows how to coach other business owner into scaling THEIRS, which is exactly what you want to know before hiring someone as your advisor * The winner of the “game show” is a perfect match for becoming a portfolio company of their PE arm, so all of it combined is also deal flow and filtering for them Full Transcript: [0:00] Alex Hormozi recently changed his content strategy, and I think it’s brilliant, but I think most people will miss it or not really notice how smart this actually is. So I wanted to break it down a little bit. So most of his videos were just like this. It was like a 15-minute, sometimes much longer, video of just him teaching stuff. And then recently they started doing this, basically like a game show. They call it Scale or Fail. The first round of it was basically these videos where he would sit down with a business owner, and they would present their business and what they’re struggling with: revenue, growth, et cetera. And then they would have basically a one-on-one consulting session with Alex, where he would give them very specific technical advice for their business. So there were different kinds of businesses, like a theme park. I think this is a dentist or something. This is a service business, a roofer. And he would basically coach them. [0:58] That was basically phase one. And then the best people moved on to this most recent show that they did a couple of days ago, where they basically all presented how they implemented the advice that he gave them and how much they grew. And then the people who grew the most advanced to the next stage, and from there it would progress. [1:20] I don’t think people realize how much money he’s printing with this content. But if you look at some of the psychology, I think it’s super, super smart. So let me share some things. [1:38] The way that Alex Hormozi makes money: obviously he owns a company called ACQ, and they have a couple of different offers. The first one is an in-person workshop that they sell for 5K. That’s a workshop. Two days. And it’s in person, at their office. That’s kind of the entry offer, right? [2:01] Then from there, the upsell is they sell a 36K, which is basically their advisory, per year. So you pay this upfront for the full year. And this is basically a way you get access to Alex’s team, and you can ask them any question at any point. There’s a community. Alex does, I think, monthly Q&As where you can ask him questions. [2:26] And then, I believe the main thing, and this is how he mainly started, was basically a PE firm, where they would own... I don’t know if this is disclosed. I believe it’s somewhere between 10 to 50% of companies that they own, and that’s the profit share that they get. So for the best, biggest, most profitable, fastest growing companies, they basically act like a PE firm. They get a stake in it, and from that they get a profit share. [2:55] And so this is what he wants to sell, and then from there there’s the upsell, and then from there this basically funnels the absolute best companies, who want to get real one-on-one ongoing access to Alex, right? [3:07] And so his YouTube channel obviously funnels people there. If you look at any of his videos, and this is more like the old style, “What type of content should you make that makes the most money”, him sitting down, sharing some advice, “How to become rich with social media”, the call to action is always to their lead magnet. So it’s basically a lead magnet. You get your free personalized roadmap, you put in your information, and you get it sent to your email. [3:41] From there, once you get that lead magnet, the next pitch is basically: hey, if you like this resource and you want to scale your company, here you can sign up for the workshop. And their landing page is basically... if you go to acquisition.com right now, it’s the workshop landing page, with a little VSL here, “I’m ready to scale”, some testimonials, what you actually get at the workshop, more testimonials, and then a call booking form to attend the workshop. And they’re also explicit here that it’s 5K per seat. I actually attended one of these. So this is their entry monetized offer, right? [4:27] Also, sometimes, I believe, if you look at his podcast, they directly lead you to the workshop landing page as the main CTA. This is the roadmap, roadmap, roadmap, roadmap. Here, you can see for this podcast, instead of it being the free lead magnet, the roadmap, the call to action is directly “book your spot at the two-day interactive scaling workshop”. So they’re experimenting with that. [4:57] And I think what people are also not realizing is how much money they’re printing with this. Because it’s 5K per ticket. It’s a group workshop, right? They have about a hundred business owners there, 100 attendees at each of these workshops, in person. I would say not all of them are paid, because when you’re part of the community of the upsell, you get two of these every year for free. So let’s say 70 of these actually paid. So that is 70 times 5K, they’re making 350K per event. And they do them once per week, which means they make 1.4 million per month from just these workshops. [5:55] But now it gets even better. So they have the 1.4 million per month from the workshops. But then at the workshop they do the upsell to the 36K advisory. And I know that they upsell roughly a third of people, so 25 to 33% of people do the upsell. So of the 70 people, let’s say, who are not yet part of the program and who actually paid at the event, a third of them buy the upsell. So let’s be conservative here and say 20 buy the upsell. 20 times 36K, what is that? That’s [720K]? That is another 700K per event. Again, they do four events every month, one per week. So this times four is, they’re making another 2.8 million per month in upsells. [7:02] So that together is, they’re making 4.2 million per month from the workshop plus upsells, which is what? 48, like roughly 50 million. Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, none of these numbers are confirmed. This is just me doing the math from other numbers that I know and inferring. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less, but this is, I think, a good ballpark number of what they’re making just from this. [7:27] And then obviously here, the upsell is that once someone does the yearly advisory, and the company is doing really, really well, and they’re growing fast, and they’re very profitable, and they want more access to Alex, and they want Alex to sit on their board or get weekly one-on-one calls with Alex, then from there they become part of the portfolio. And then from there they get a profit share, right? And when I was at the workshop two months ago, I think the biggest company that was at the workshop was doing 40 million in revenue. So these are not just tiny, tiny companies. [8:10] So it’s printing money. But back to the content strategy, right? What he’s optimizing for with this YouTube and podcast (they’re very overlapping, he repurposes a lot of content between those two) is how to get more people to buy the 5K workshop, ‘cause that’s the main offer that they sell. And he needs to fill anywhere between 70 to 100 slots every week, which is, let’s say, 400 slots per month he needs to sell. And so that’s what his content strategy is laid out for. [8:50] So if we go back to his YouTube channel, here it is. If you think about the psychology of the videos that he’s putting out: the workshop is essentially a scaling workshop, right? That’s how it’s positioned. Like, hey, you’re a business owner, you’re stuck somewhere, you want to double your revenue. Come and attend the workshop, work with my team, and we’ll help you get unstuck and figure out where your bottleneck is and how you can scale your company more. [9:17] All of his content always, even previously, these sit-down videos with just him, they’re aimed at business owners. And they’re always aimed at helping them grow their company in some way, by sharing some framework, some tips, some roadmaps, some lesson that he learned: how to sell better, how to build better offers, how to do marketing better, how to run better ads. All of that is to serve their goal of growing their company. And so you get a business owner to watch the video, and then at the end the call to action is basically: hey, you now learned some small way of how to grow your company. If you want to grow your company even more, and, you know, trust me, because you watched the video and you saw that I have smart things to say, go and attend a workshop with us, right? [9:55] Now, this new format is, I think, that on steroids. He’s basically sitting down with a business owner and advising him or her one-on-one on exactly how they grow their company. And I think it’s so good for multiple reasons. [10:14] The first reason is that it’s just good content. If you’re a business owner, you actually want hyper tactical stuff. I think tactical especially, the better and bigger you get as a company. You don’t need this kind of generic, like, “oh, cold email is dead, you need to do organic content”, or here’s some philosophical take on how you need to approach your company. You want hyper tactical insights on the exact little things that you need to adjust in your business. So it’s super, super tactical, and it’s essentially a game show. [10:56] So not only is it super interesting and relevant content for exactly his audience that he’s looking to attract, but you have this kind of gamification in there. Because instead of just hearing Alex Hormozi speak and share his advice, there’s also this element of, you know, you get involved a little bit. Some of these episodes are quite emotional. Like, if I go to some of these, like this guy here, he runs a theme park [clip from the episode plays], he gave up his 401k and poured it into the business to try to save it. You know, he gets emotional here. So with some of these business owners, you get really emotionally involved. [11:44] But this is also the game show aspect. So you have emotional involvement. But then you also start rooting for people. You have your kind of favorites who you want to advance in the game, who you want to get to the next round, and who you maybe want to not get to the next round because you don’t like them. And so you have this kind of involvement, and you also have an ongoing series, which helps with retention, right? Because instead of just having a good video, that was good, and so you subscribe to the channel because you want to get more good videos, there’s an element of, like, oh, I want to see what happens next, because I want to follow along the journey of whether this person progresses or not, and who gets eliminated in the next show, et cetera, right? [12:27] So it’s just good content. That’s number one, and that’s the good reason why it’s just working. But I think it’s better for more reasons than that, because I think this is the kind of relatively obvious stuff. [12:42] If you think about the psychology of the thing that he’s selling, which is the workshop and then the advisory, which is essentially a coach, right? If you’re gonna hire an advisor or coach, you wanna know two things. Number one, they know their stuff. But number two, you wanna know that they’re a good coach. Because if you’re going to play football, of course it’s going to help if the person who’s training you, and who you go to for advice, was a good football player who played in a big league and who had success, right? That builds credibility, and you’re like, oh, I want to learn from that person. But not every single football player who is a good football player is also a good coach, right? That’s a separate skill, to be able to teach people and pinpoint their exact weaknesses, et cetera. [13:36] And so his previous videos were basically just him demonstrating that he knows how to scale businesses, right? Because he talks about his lessons, his advice, his insights, what he’s done before, stories from his past. So you’re like, okay, this guy actually knows business and has done good things. But if you’re gonna hire his firm and his company and him to advise you, you also wanna know: is he actually able to help me specifically, and sit down with me and figure out my specifics for my specific business, and then give me technical advice that I can use, and not just do this for his own companies, right? And so this new format demonstrates this very, very clearly. So I think it drives even more interest for the specific offer that they run, which is a workshop slash advisory. [14:22] Because he essentially does that in the video, right? What you’re watching is a one-on-one advisory coaching session that he does with a business owner, and that’s the exact thing that you would want to buy. So it’s the best possible thing to advertise the thing that you’re selling. So, again, I don’t have access to any of the backend numbers, but I’m very confident that the conversion rate of views to workshop bookings is much higher, because it’s a much more natural conversion path, right? You have a business owner, which is your audience. You have a video that is super relevant and interesting to them, which is tactical advice for another business owner on how to scale their company. It’s also gamified, so you’re more engaged and more likely to come back. But then what you sell is advisory and basically coaching. So it’s a direct conversion path. [15:11] But I think where it gets even more brilliant is... and this already is the less obvious part that I think many people don’t think about when they create their content, which is that you don’t just need content that is relevant to your audience, right? If you create content, you have your ICP, and obviously your content needs to be relevant and interesting to your ICP, because otherwise you’re not going to attract your ICP. And how are you going to sell anything if the people who watch your content are not the same people who buy your product or service, right? So this needs to align, and you do that by talking about their problems, goals, desires. And that’s how you attract them, which is what Alex does, right? His ICP is business owners. What do they care about? They want to scale their business. What are their desires? They want to make a ton of money. They want to double their revenue. They don’t know what ads to run or how to scale a sales team. So all of his content addresses all of these things, and that’s how he attracts people. [16:19] Beyond that, what you need to do is that the problems and goals and desires that you speak to need to also be the ones that your product actually solves, right? Which seems obvious, but so many people don’t do that. Let’s say, again, my ICP is SaaS founders. So if I want to attract them with my content, I need to talk about their goals, problems, desires. But what are SaaS founders’ goals, problems and desires? There’s a ton of stuff, right? Fundraising: how do I raise my next round? There’s sales: how do I hire a sales team, how do I train my sales team, how do I do outbound? There’s marketing: how do I get awareness, or grow pipeline, or get more leads? There’s obviously HR and hiring: how do I hire and find great people and retain them? There’s operations, which is: how do I reduce my costs and improve margins, how do I build better processes, how do I leverage AI? There’s a ton of stuff. So I could speak to any of these, and it would help me attract these people with my content. But I only do one thing, which is LinkedIn and founder brand advisory. That’s the only thing I do. [17:41] And so if I create a piece of content around “how do you leverage AI to optimize your processes and improve margins”, that might be interesting to them, but then there is no natural path to be like, “and by the way, I help people with LinkedIn and their founder brand”, because it’s not what they signed up for, it’s not what they watch me for. But where it does help is marketing, right? So if they’re struggling with how to get awareness, or how to get leads, or how to drive more pipeline with enterprise buyers, this is directly what this impacts. And so if I create content that speaks to this problem, and then presents it in a way that has to do with founder brand or LinkedIn or both, then that’s a much more natural path to then be like: “and by the way, if you found this piece of content interesting and the solution makes sense for you, then you might wanna check out what I do, because I can help you do it better and faster.” [18:31] Which is probably what this video is, right? I speak to founders, I talk about the marketing aspect, and it’s very connected to founder brand, because it’s Alex, it’s him running it as a founder. It’s definitely not LinkedIn, this is mainly YouTube, but it’s very much organic content related. So there’s a much more natural path for me to say in this video: hey, and if this resonated with you and you want to figure out how to apply all of this to your business and your founder brand and your content, go reach out to me so I can help you. [18:59] But I think there’s more. Because, yes, he’s creating good content that is relevant to his audience, and it’s super tactical, and there’s this game show aspect. But as I started thinking about it [a few words unclear]. There’s another super brilliant aspect of this, because they run it as a game show, right? So they now have eight of these contestants who he did the advisory session with first, and now they basically show off what they implemented and how much they grew. At some point they actually go over how much revenue they added in the 90 days after they had their one-on-one session with Alex, right? This person added 920,000 in top-line revenue. This person added 500K. This person added 1.6 million in top-line revenue in the 90 days since the advisory session. [19:54] And so this is a prediction, because this is their most recent video, from five days ago. But my prediction is that at the end of this thing they’re obviously going to have a winner of the show, of the Scale or Fail show, which is why it’s a game show. That’s part of it, that’s why you start rooting for people. And that winner wins a golden ticket, they say, to work with Alex’s firm, which seems like a perk to the viewers, right? It’s like a promise: if you win, then you get to work with me. I’m pretty sure that whoever’s the winner, the golden ticket means you become a portfolio company, where they probably invest some amount of money into you, and then Acquisition.com and Alex get a profit share. [20:50] And why is this so brilliant? Because it’s basically deal flow that they’re generating here, right? It’s a funnel. They get applications from people who want to participate in this game, who are all business owners, and they want to scale their business, and they look up to Alex Hormozi and they wanna learn from him. That’s why they apply. Then they pick the best ones of them, do the YouTube video with them, which creates this incredible content. And then, as people go through this process, they see how well they execute, how coachable they are, and they get an inside look into the company metrics, right? Because part of this is them sharing how much revenue they’re making, and how much profit they’re making, and how quickly they’re growing. [21:50] And so whoever wins at the end is the winner of the show, but they’re also the most perfect fit for the portfolio. They want to learn from Alex. They’ve demonstrated that they can execute well, that they’re coachable, and they’ve demonstrated that the company is doing super well, that they’ve been able to grow it super fast, that it’s super profitable. And so this is what they want for a portfolio company, right? And so it’s a win-win at the end for both: the business owner gets even more access to Alex and gets this continuous coaching and advice, and they found a perfect portfolio company here, that is growing fast, with a founder that listens to advice and implements it quickly and is demonstrably growing revenue by a lot through it. [22:39] Just think about what that would mean for your company, right? That would mean that you invite your ICPs. Let’s say you sell to enterprise VPs of engineering. Imagine you would be able to invite VPs of engineering who are not yet your customers, and create content with them that they find valuable, that other enterprise VPs of engineering find interesting. So it’s great content that helps you with your awareness and top of funnel, that generates leads for your company that sells to VPs of engineering. But through the process of creating this content with them, you end up with people who become direct buyers of your product by winning the show. [23:24] And I don’t think this is random, right? I think this is an evolution of how they arrived at that. And if I had to guess how they arrived at this strategy, because it’s a lot of planning and production and getting this right, you can see gradually how they learned that this is the best format for them right now, right? They were doing these just-Alex sit-down videos, what he teaches. And then at some point they did a lot of these videos, I think it’s on this other channel, where basically they would do these Q&A clips of people who attended the workshop. Right, this is at the workshop. This is Alex at the workshop, and then this is a person who is attending the workshop, and they do a Q&A, and they would just record the Q&A and put up that video. And that content did really well. [24:24] And then they said, okay, how can we do this better and scale it? Increase the production. So they started experimenting with this format seven months ago. You can see this is the same format. This is another video like that, eight months ago, where they had the same format: business owners come, present their business, and get a one-on-one advisory session with Alex. But it was just one-off things. And I’m pretty sure they learned that, oh my God, this... And so they’re like, first of all, how can we do this way more, instead of once a month sporadically, and make it an actual thing that we do? And then they figured out this kind of gamification, to not just do a one-off advisory session with a business owner and then peace out and never see them again, but rather make this like a progression, like a game show, where the best people progress into the next round. Here’s another one: progress into the next round. And then the winner wins the golden ticket to become a portfolio company. [25:19] Lots of good things here. I think if I try to summarize the lessons here: you need to create content for your ICP (this is obvious) that you can tie directly to what you sell. Meaning your product or service should be a natural progression from the piece of content. So if Alex talks to a business owner about how to scale their company, it’s a natural progression to say: and if you want to scale your company more and even better, and work with us directly, attend the workshop. So you want to tie it directly to what you sell. [26:04] I mean, if you can somehow gamify it, obviously that is amazing, and have a kind of game show continuity in there, like a progression. And they basically engineered it so that the winner of the game show is also the best-match enterprise deal. Because a portfolio company is basically like an enterprise deal for them. It’s a super long process, it’s a super low probability that someone is a fit, but if someone is a fit, it’s a very high upside. [26:50] And so I think it’s just brilliant, and there’s a lot to learn from it, and from the constant iteration and progression that you can see in this content. Hope it was useful. If it was, you know, unsurprisingly, as I said, I do this sort of stuff. For SaaS and AI founders, I have an advisory. It’s mostly LinkedIn stuff, and how I help people do similar stuff, but on their LinkedIn: how to create better content and how to drive more revenue from it. So if that’s relevant, book a call with me. If not, I hope this piece of content was valuable. Get full access to The Founder Brand at blog.thormeier.co/subscribe

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