The Transaction

Matt, you're gonna love this, okay?

So this is how I met Adam.

We were on the Andy Paul podcast, and we had Robert on, who's like using AOL dial-up modem.

Yeah, yeah.

And remember this, Adam, dude?

It was insane.

He couldn't get anything out, but here's the thing, you weren't getting mad at us.

We're watching him, we can't include him in anything because like he's not coming in.

And so like, he's, we see him, he's like not only like losing his internet, he's throwing his hands in the air.

He's getting so pissed off.

I see Andy is just giggling.

I'm just going, oh my God, Robert, man.

It was a fiasco.

It was so awesome.

It was classic Robert.

So I'm just, you know, we both, Robert works with me at scale and like he worked with Matt too.

He's just an amazing dude.

He's just like, but he's old school.

So I can't even imagine what internet the dude was using, number one.

And number two is that he was just flying off the handle.

It was amazing.

He was like, Matt, we couldn't include him.

There was nothing to do, man.

And I just look over and he's throwing papers in the air.

And he's like, well, I'd like to, you know, get a word in Edgewise.

Then his internet goes out.

I mean, it was unreal at first.

It's almost as if it were, cause it was like right when you get peak pissed off, it would just cut off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Big shout out to Robert Kaler.

You're one of one, baby.

From ABM to PLG, from Meddic to med pic, the world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get The Transaction.

I'm Matt Amundsen and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

I was just, we were just telling, you know, Adam, this, which is like one of the, there's a lot of reasons for Matt and I to start the podcast.

Or one of them was like, we're just seeking new answers to go to market.

And there are a lot of really cool, interesting things that people are doing.

And we're trying to find those people and bring them on the show so we can learn from them.

And so that is why today we've brought Adam Robinson.

And here's the fun fact I want to give out.

I believe you're over six foot six.

How tall are you?

I'm like six, five, something like that.

Oh, but it is funny, dude, his company pictures are amazing.

There's all these people that just Adam's I just hire a bunch of short people to make myself feel good.

But, but here's the thing about Adam.

And we'll get into sort of his things.

He is like in full social media transparency mode.

So like, even though I've only met him once, I feel like I'm a part of this dude's life.

And it's because of how he shares on LinkedIn and what he shares on LinkedIn and probably a bunch of, you know, other sort of amazing techniques.

Like there literally might not be anybody better in terms of sort of, you know, figuring out a market with, you know, I'm assuming like minimal budget in this crazy sort of very confusing, very difficult buying environment or just attention environment.

So it's like, it's, you know, asymmetrical warfare, asymmetrical marketing at its finest when I think of Adam.

And so that's why we wanted to have you on the show.

And so Adam, just welcome to The Transaction, man.

Thank you for that very flattering intro.

I'm getting better at it.

I'm getting better at it.

Assuming I don't get assassinated at some point for my tactics, I'm happy to come on the show in the future as they evolve.

It'll be good for the show.

Yeah.

So here's the question we like to start everything off with, which is what's something that the, you know, the market thinks they're doing right today, okay?

Or it's a best practice or a way of doing things.

And they're actually wrong.

And what should be, they'd be doing differently.

That's the question we like to start with.

You've got a lot that you do differently.

So feel free to answer it however you want.

We'll go from there.

Yeah.

So like what we talked about on the last podcast, well, what I contributed was I had this experience in 2023 as the founder of what is now a 20 million ARR bootstrapped SaaS.

It was kind of like we had a couple BDRs that were doing outbound and that worked.

And so we grew the team and the bigger team was booking, like we grew from like two to 10 and it was booking the same amount of demos as the two people were, right?

So call it what you want, blame it on whatever you want.

There's like a demand creation versus demand capture thing that I think I made the mistake on.

I think a lot of other people following the Andrew Ross or Aaron Ross predictable revenue playbook, I've made that mistake over the years.

So I think the fundamental problem, right?

So meanwhile, I explained this and like the people who sell million dollar deals and the people who run outbound agencies are like, you're an idiot.

You don't know what you're talking about.

I understand both those cases.

If you're selling million dollar deals, I'm sure outbound still works.

If you run an outbound agency, you're basically going around saying, I know how to crush outbound and you run a super high turn operation and you're probably crushing it because no one else can make outbound work.

And I think the core problem in my opinion, which like, so it's response rates, right?

They're just half of what they were two years ago.

So one of the arguments is like, you never should have been selling a 20, 25K deal using North American outbounders anyway.

HubSpot made you think you could that never should have existed.

Automation tools made it possible that never should have existed.

My answer is like, okay, fine.

But to me, all of the trends that made response rates go down in the last two years will continue to make response rates go down over the next few years.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

It's just more automation, more email, more...

There is no question that in 2025, we'll send double the email at least that we do now, maybe triple, maybe five times.

Same thing in 2026.

What do you think?

You know what I mean?

To me, for people...

So it's like, let's say we moved the bar up from 25 to 50K, which is the floor for a North American rep.

What about two years from now?

Then it's 100K.

What about two years from then?

Then it's 200K.

Let me ask you, who does outbound sales on deals under 200K?

Almost everyone.

Yep.

Right?

So this discussion of whether I'm right or wrong about this, I just view it as a very similar thing to...

I had a really smart friend who worked at Goldman Sachs, was really in to shopping malls in 2017-18.

He thought they got smoked and it was wrong.

It wasn't wrong.

Jeff Bezos leveled shopping malls.

All of the companies that he bought equity in are now bankrupt.

This is a mega trend in sales that is not getting better.

It's getting worse.

I was talking to Scott Lease a couple of weeks ago.

Do you guys know who he is?

Yeah, surfing sales, baby.

Yeah, so my thing is...

He's like, I don't even know what I'm going to be doing in three or four years.

Hopefully it goes longer than that, but I don't know.

He's like, I look at my kids.

They haven't logged into email accounts in five years.

I text on my phone, but my parents think it's weird and they call me, right?

My kids do not use iMessage, period.

They only communicate through, you know, Insta, DMs and on Snap.

They will never go to an office.

And he's like, when you combine this channel problem with what will very likely be a generational shift where this entire sales infrastructure has been set up, there is just a real risk that like none of this works, right?

So, but that's not now.

You can sit a US rep and have them do all the stuff, and if you're selling something for $100K, sure, that still works.

And it's like your personalization is hard because there's so much other stuff that blocks it.

I'm just talking about however many years down the line, it's very difficult for me to imagine it's not a Jeff Bezos versus shopping malls scenario.

Yeah.

So then what do you do?

So I kind of got into this organic social media, and now I want to say one thing first.

I have the perfect situation because I am my ICP and my ICP lives on LinkedIn, which is unbelievably powerful to make a marketing channel out of.

There's other benefits to having, I think there's like, you know, your team is everything.

And if you can have your profile, sort of let your CEO, you know, talking about what it's like, you know, the why, right?

Like what it's like to work at your company or whatever, it helps getting opt-in employees basically, right?

Rather than doing the push action, which is super important.

But like, it's not this, if you're selling to, you know, elementary schools, it's not a dream scenario like I have.

And you shouldn't just go all in, giving your life to like trying to be the best at LinkedIn content.

But I have this incredible situation where I happen to be in that situation.

Right.

That doesn't mean that I don't think organic social media in some way is probably the future of sales.

It's just, you got to know where your audience lives.

Yeah.

And you need to know how to create content contextualized for that medium.

So, but like, you know, I have this crazy set of circumstances where I got this bootstrap company.

It's going to throw off six or seven million bucks.

I don't have any investors.

And I'm sitting here trying to build this personal profile up, and I'm like, how do I stand out?

And basically to me, it's like, well, I shared an office with the Jasper guys for two years before Jasper happened and then watched that and I'm like, well, the amount of B minus crap that's going to start coming out as a result of this is going to be a thousand X.

And then any way you can do something that ChatGPT doesn't do, try to do.

So what is that?

And it's like, kind of like, what can I do that ChatGPT can't do?

And then what can I say and do that other people either cannot say or are unwilling to say?

So when I started building my profile, I had a really unique situation.

I had 12 million ARR SaaS with six people.

It was super high returns, but that's what it was.

Yeah.

So like, I could just say that and then like throw my financials up.

And of course it's printing dough because there's only six people.

And then you get that effect.

Everybody always wants to know how much money you're making.

So that kind of like that combined with, you know, I was stuck.

My first SaaS was stuck at three million for four years.

I was dying for content from people like where I am now, dying for it.

Like, what are you doing and why?

You know, like not even like, how are you thinking about the world?

Right.

So that's kind of another.

That's why I know that if I do this work in public stuff, or that's why I have a sense for if I do this work in public stuff, the early stage founder community is probably going to eat it up.

Because like, I kind of know the game.

And like, there's a reason I'm doing this stuff in this crazy way, and it's a result of my experience, right?

Like, so that's kind of like another motivating factor.

And then, you know, I have noticed that exactly what you said, it's like, so I give this, the marketers want to know how I built the LinkedIn presence in 18 months.

It's like the founders want to know how I bootstrapped 20 million ARR.

The marketers want to know, for my CEO, like, how do I do that, right?

So I give this whole talk about it.

And, you know, I think there, like, there's like being well known and there's being known well.

And you can do them both.

There's like competing models for audience building.

Well known is like, I don't, I'm just using LinkedIn as a, as an attention platform on posting clickbait.

And I'm trying to get people to a newsletter where I talk about real shit.

Or like driving to a podcast or whatever.

And the people that I started making content with, they thought about the world that way.

Nine months in, I switched because I didn't think that, I saw other thought leadership stuff out of like Chris Walker and Sam Jacobs and like whatever else.

I switched to Sam's guy, Alec Paul.

And now I think I come across a lot closer to what I would want to.

And I'm being, I'm creating something where it makes, it's the known well, right?

Like the way that I share what I'm going through, the vulnerability that I'm willing to express, which by the way, people walk up and ask me, how do you do that?

Right?

Like my last monthly update was the fourth down month in a row and I was down 2.3% down more than ever.

And I'm like, I don't know when this is going to end because the competitive dynamic in the market is so horrible.

Right?

Like I wildly underestimated how much of a moat our product was.

There is none.

And the buyer is just terrible, quite frankly.

There's no brand loyalty.

They're super price sensitive.

And like, they don't give a shit.

And like people can find our built with script and just hit them up and be like, we'll do more for less.

What do you do?

Like I got the best brand.

It's easier for me to acquire customers, but then they get hit up by seven people.

Like some of whom are just like dudes in a garage who want to make 10K a month or something.

And they're like, we'll do the same thing for nothing basically.

So that was really hard to write.

I didn't want to write it.

Had I not been super committed to this monthly work in public, I never would have.

But like I did a keynote at an event, two in a row actually, and like people literally walk up and they're just like, it's so amazing that you were able to share what people are actually experiencing because no one else can.

So like just the essence of that statement, I think it says two things.

It's like, you got to think about what you can give the world that no one else is giving because that's what, it's always been that way.

It's not just content, that's marketing, right?

Like how can you be as different as possible in a way that people care about, right?

And then also sharing the L's, right?

Like people love W's, but like, man, they love the L's even more.

And even if the L's don't get quite the reach, it's like building this type, it's building the super fans.

Like...

And I can see, it's like, I...

So I wrote this post, I haven't put it out yet for a few reasons, but the hook is, are you Adam Robinson?

Because like three months ago, it just started, like people just started walking up to me on the street and it's not, it's gotta be kind of like environments where there would be professional people.

It's not like walking around.

Yeah, no, of course.

Some weird, but like I was having a coffee with Amit, the founder of ClearBit, and he's talking to me about this LinkedIn stuff because everybody's curious about it.

He's like, what are you getting out of it?

So I'm explaining to him all this stuff and this dude walks up and he's like, are you Adam Robinson?

No.

And I'm like, look, that is exactly what he's doing.

And he's like, I set RB2B up yesterday.

I booked five demos through a VA, it was incredible.

And then, you know, this other time it was at South by Southwest, I went to three events in one night.

First two events, somebody who didn't live in Austin, didn't know me, walked up to me, they're like, I love your shit, read it every week.

I'm like, oh, that's really nice.

The third guy puts his hand on my shoulder and he's like, dude.

And I was like, I think I know where this is going, but like, but like, proceed.

He's like, I'm sure you get this like all the time.

And this dude's like clearly like super starstruck.

And I was like, I do not, but thanks.

He's like, I'm a one millionaire founder in New York.

Every post you put out, I forward it to my team.

I just have so much respect that you're like not a VC guy.

You're sharing how it really is, whatever.

He goes, you are the most inspirational person in my life.

So that will keep you going for a long time.

So like for the, here's what's wild to me, right?

For the primary marketing vehicle of my company to also be creating a type of affinity that for some people is that level, right?

Like they're like waking up and like, I'm like encouraging them along in their journey just by like sharing how I'm getting my nuts kicked in or whatever, right?

It's just an amazing thing.

But again, all of the stars are aligned and like, I really, really try hard at it.

Like it's the thing that I, that is prioritized above everything else in my job, right?

Like, yeah.

Yeah.

And when, but when you say that, do you mean, LinkedIn is the priority and your, you know, your ability, you know, I don't really, we got to talk about sort of how you think about production levels, but you mean the number one priority to speak to your audience is LinkedIn.

So the number one priority of my job is creating the founder.

We're in content, which is two things.

One, it's LinkedIn and I can go into what that whole operation is.

And the other is I try to get on every single podcast possible because I have the luxury now where people actually want my audience, which is great.

So my idea is if I can do that, if I can get on three to five podcasts a week, then eventually it will seem like I am just everywhere.

And then this gets into the new go to market motion that I think that I'm doing.

It's like, be everywhere, have everyone listening to you.

And then they go back to your website and they're like, what does the guy do?

And then the other part of it is, you know, I'm experimenting with this, like this offer that has embedded virality in it, right?

So it's like, people like it more than the product that is ubiquitous in the market, dot, dot, dot, and it's free.

It's like, excuse me?

What?

So in the two work together in this interesting way, in the way I sort of think about that part of it is it's like, not only is the outbound channel expensive to create, ads are expensive, everything's expensive.

If I'm going to burn the money that I'm making with my other business, a thousand times more people are going to use a free product than if I'm trying to sell them in market deal and do marketing and sales.

So I just learned yesterday that Rippling, Snowflake, MongoDB, we have seven of the best enterprise logos.

We're through legal with Rippling.

I'm like, what?

In a million years, would you have thought that an eight-week-old company with a freemium model would have eight tier one enterprise deals in pipeline?

No way.

I mean, I wouldn't have, but it's all kind of working together.

So it's like, if you ask me what didn't work for me last year, I was so torched by that internally.

I'm like, what is the total opposite of every single thing that was the problem with that motion?

And let me just try that and see what happens.

You know?

Amazing.

So let's start with...

Well, just there's a couple of things...

Yeah.

No, well, I mean, I was trying to learn, right?

So I was just trying to lock in.

So there's a couple of things that really strike me about what you're doing and what you're talking about.

One is, like, everybody strives to create content that is authentic and that is transparent.

But in order to do that, you have to be willing to share the dark side of what you're doing, which I think you've done a real amazing job of doing, which is to say, like, you know, you talked about it.

You're like, I share the L's.

Most people are just not comfortable with that.

Even if they're coached to be like, look, you got to share some of the stuff that's not working out, they'll be like, yeah, okay, so, like, we were trying to do 150% of our number and we did 148.

It's like, that's not an L, man.

That is not an L.

Like, you know, we got a 9.1 on our NPS score or something.

It's like, not an L.

Not an L.

So that's what I love is, like, you're just like, hey, look, this is me, this is the raw feed.

And I think to Craig's point, and I can't remember if we're recording on this early or not, but I feel like I know you.

Like, I feel like I know who you are.

And I think if I was a CEO, I'd feel probably even more ingratiated to you because although I've never been a CEO and don't aspire to be one, I am aware that it is the loneliest job on the planet.

And so for someone to be out there talking about how hard it is to do that job, where most people are, you know, they're going to have that conversation behind closed doors at a bar or whatever, like to be so publicly facing talking about that, I think just ingratiates all those CEOs right to you.

And I mean, all your examples speak to that.

Yeah.

And like, I can see it.

Like when people walk up to me at one of these events, they don't even say what their name is.

Isn't that so weird?

They forget to introduce themselves.

I'm like, I just play along.

So yeah, totally.

All right.

So I want to dig in.

This is like an unproduced piece here.

I just want to read you guys from who I mentioned before.

Scott Alvar was writing about his LinkedIn and he wrote, you know, this is that's why I brought up the asymmetric.

He talks about LinkedIn action as asymmetrical marketing.

Right.

So, you know, this is based on the principle.

He wrote, based on the principle of the asymmetric warfare, asymmetric marketing offers a proven way to do more with less and outmaneuver even the largest competitors.

Right.

And that he makes the point that the Internet and social platforms like LinkedIn are perfect for asymmetrical marketing.

I'm not sure you could do what you do today.

20 years ago, right?

And it provides startups in particular with an opportunity to level the playing field and LinkedIn for him is one of the he's similar to you where his ideal customer profile is all over LinkedIn and that provides him with that platform and that, you know, and so I work with a lot of founders today.

And so I want to lock in there for, you know, first, I want to, you know, everything that matches that.

I feel like I know you.

My favorite, let's see, truth, keeping it real post was when you're reading the Glassdoor reviews.

Yeah, dude, I love that word.

And the problem with LinkedIn is it just gets buried.

So I'm actually, we're Anthony Kaneda, who's like the game site.

Audience plus.

He's got, yeah, we're buying that now so that like it can actually sort of go somewhere after it dies on LinkedIn and you could go see the cause like there's some, there's some like gym stuff in there that's just gone, you know?

Yeah.

Like who does that?

Right.

Like, yeah, that was crazy.

I want to say one more thing about that, by the way, like the, so I mentioned that it's good for recruiting regardless of whether your ICP is there.

Like my glass door rating personally is like two out of five.

Our company is two out of five.

I didn't even know that because I just knew it was bad because we like had to do a layoff and we only, we like laid off more employees than we had like five months before or whatever.

And we didn't, we sort of rehired slowly.

My people, people don't want to like manipulate it or whatever, which I'm fine with because it plays in the authenticity narrative.

But I got people hurling themselves at me every day to work here, despite that platform, which is supposed to be, everybody knows it's bullshit because it's an online review platform.

But like, despite the fact that our rating is two stars out of five.

Right.

You know, amazing.

So that that is key to founders, right?

Is you have all of these things and your ability to play well.

If you know, if your particular ideal customer profile is on LinkedIn, like yours is, then it's like it is the platform that you need to tackle.

So let me ask you a couple of things.

So one is how many times a week do you post?

So like I was doing three.

I want to up it just to get the impressions up because I do see a direct correlation between impressions and the amount of people we have signing up for our B2B.

So yeah, it's cool.

So I was doing three posts.

I'm trying to add.

We haven't recycled anything yet.

We've only recycled like two posts.

And there's been I really got what Devin Reed calls content market fit, like Labor Day of last year.

So it's been what, you know, eight months or something.

Haven't recycled a single post.

So I'm doing three times a week.

I'm going to add a fourth in order.

So I think the game is this unmeasurable thing of trying to make more people feel like they know me better rather than just like followers or like whatever.

And it's very it's a leap of faith.

What I think my move is to do this this year is I'm trying to add one post a week that's like one of my crazy entrepreneur stories.

Like, for instance, I was about to sell my first company for $10 million in two weeks before we were going to get the check.

One of the engineers deleted the code base, and we did not have a backup.

Yeah, dude, like, it's the most insane thing I've ever heard of my life.

I was like walking around Austin with my dog losing my mind.

My CTO got on the phone with the founder of the backup company, and he's like, what do you mean you didn't have a second backup when you were writing the other one and you were like deleting it as you were writing it?

He's like, I was trying to save money.

He's like, you're an idiot.

And then they spent 12 hours trying to go through this unfinished, corrupt backup file to see if they could find the code base.

Twelve hours later, they found the first file.

The next four hours, they found all of it.

And we got like 99% back.

But for that 12 hours, I was in total shock.

I felt like I was getting gaslit by people because they're like, your CTO is trying to...

Someone is doing this to you.

That doesn't happen.

So anyway, I got all sorts of stories like this.

So I'm trying to do one of those a week.

You're definitely opening up to us.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, so I'm trying to add on...

My whole thing is a soft goal.

If I can get other people telling each other my stories...

But in this game, I've sort of won the game.

Everyone, there's a collective parasocial thing going on.

So yeah, I'm not even sure what the question was there.

How many times do I post a week?

I got other people at our company posting too.

Santos gets pretty good reach, and the new guys kind of don't, but we're working with them.

So let me ask you a question.

Once you get to posting seven days a week, will you lobby the Texas state government to add an eighth day of the week?

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

You know, when Craig and I were thinking of starting this podcast, we had all the ideas in the world.

But you know, all the ideas in the world won't get you a great podcast.

That's where Ringmaster comes in.

They handle the creative, book guests, and do all the production for the podcast so we can focus on what we do best, talk to one another and our amazing guests.

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I think that's a good idea.

Craig hates the joke.

He's just looking down.

Wait, what just happened?

My kids are getting picked up at school.

This is unbelievable.

They're making a huge catastrophe.

What?

What is he lobbing into Texas?

No, Craig, the moment's over.

But I appreciate your transparency.

Craig, you can hear it on the recording.

I've got kids too.

I had the thing all planned that I'm getting.

So, okay.

And then, so one thing I think on, so are you like a, were you always a share?

Are you like a extrovert?

Man, I was like never on, this is a weird thing about this.

I was never on social media personally.

You know, I did one like kind of wild Facebook ad campaign to get my last company off the ground, but it was ads.

But it was like they were funny and they were personable or whatever.

And I really, they were, they were inflammatory.

Like, you know, this product is somewhat gray area.

I would basically rile up a bunch of privacy people to like write mean comments about how it was a scumbag.

And then I'd personally insult them from the brand account.

You know, the brand you start up, there's no brand.

Yeah, I'd be like, nice sweater, Phil, or like whatever.

And it would just, it would, it would, it would, they'd be mind blown.

They'd be like, write another novel.

And it just like really helped the ad.

And then I would take what people were saying, like how I was such a scumbag in one ad, and I would make another ad about it.

Like specifically, you know?

But they were also funny.

Like I was like, dressing up in costumes and stuff.

And anyway, aside from that, I am not, yeah.

This sharing thing was literally just like, originally it was like, I knew I would want it, and I didn't see it.

I just knew it was differentiated, you know?

And then I think I've gotten better at sharing kind of like the right kind of thing that is, you know, that people deem worthy of being shared or whatever.

Yeah.

But I mean, dude, you basically just, you're willing, clearly willing to take risks.

Are you a skydiver, dude?

Not, I've done it, not all the time.

Yeah, that is what Santos said.

Yeah, that's what Santos said.

He's like, man, I just can't believe how much like risk you are willing to take.

But like, I don't know, man, like, why else are we here?

You know, like, how else are you going to do it?

It's like the game does not get won playing conservatively in like, sass, right?

Like, you just have to be doing stuff that no one else is doing.

And the sort of more you go to the conservative side of the spectrum, the more competition there is in that space, right?

Yeah, probably.

So we got, you're on a, just sort of recapping everything.

One thing Matt honed in on that I think is really important is your authenticity because that is one of my favorite funny things about content people is faux authenticity.

So like, sure.

I remember, you know, like I, you know, I used to, I mean, people finally figured me out a long time ago, but like early they'd be hacking my thing.

You can't say that you can't say that.

And then I wouldn't do it.

I just say it because like it wasn't me and like, um, and that, but a lot of times, you know, there's two things that happen.

One is, you know, it's overly sanitized to the point.

Like my favorite are the customer story videos.

Like that.

I mean, come on guys.

I was looking at it, you know, and it's just like so fake.

Um, and then, uh, the second one though, Matt brought up, which I think is also really important is you were actually laying yourself out.

You called it the dark side.

I would just, you know, I would just say you're bringing up your else.

Uh, a lot.

That's like, there's so many people that are so afraid of showing that vulnerability.

And so those are two lessons as we sort of work with founders on these things.

Now, what about inspiration for things to write?

Cause I mean, there's somewhere I can imagine where you got it, but you know, like you just sort of drawing from personal experience.

Is that kind of a deal or what, what do you do there so I can help people think about them the right way?

So as I mentioned, I worked with a coach who works with 10 other B2B SaaS guys.

He's expensive.

He's probably the most expensive coach, but he's working with four or five of our guys.

He's like 10 or 12 grand a month or something.

And he doesn't even write.

He just helps you with idea generation.

He actually manages the content calendar and does the posts.

And he makes sure the post is perfect.

Like he makes sure the hook is perfect.

The sort of editing is perfect.

And like I can like, I'm getting much better at writing now, but like he'll take a really long, like a really long narrative rant and get it down to where it like fits in.

So anyway, I do one hour a week of idea generation meetings with him.

And it's kind of like what happened last week-ish.

And then that makes you kind of like work with looking over your own shoulder, thinking about what good content might be.

That's like a habit you kind of have to get into.

And then we come up with three or four ideas, and I go try to sit down in one sitting and write them all.

That's how I've always done it.

This guy, Chris Walker, who if you're on LinkedIn, you probably have seen him.

He does it in a different way, which I think totally works for him, and it's super novel, and it's a lot.

I'm actually spending a lot of money on this because I'm getting super ambitious with the story part of it.

I made a docu-series last year, then I hired the girl who made that full-time.

We're going to make another season of it later in the year, but she's actually making video assets for these standalone LinkedIn posts.

Because the problem with the docu-series is if your audience is on LinkedIn, it's not a sequential platform, and someone can get dropped episode 12, and they haven't seen episode one, or what is it?

So that's the idea with this narrative.

It's like, how do you give a narrative that's like Black Mirror?

It's a standalone thing, and you could see it before or after something else.

I'm like, whatever.

So I'm actually spending a lot of money on it.

You don't need to spend a lot of money on it.

Chris barely spends anything.

He does a weekly event.

It gets filmed.

He has, they're like in a stony or something.

People chop up these short form videos.

They put the short form video with what the idea is in a Google folder.

He comes in every morning in his first 60 minutes, are going through the folder, picking a video with an idea, writing the text post, and he posted himself.

Three man team, barely cost him anything.

He's been doing it for five years.

He's much better at it than he was five years ago.

I sort of leapfrogged by copying a lot of him and by just paying these people who are really, really good at the game.

But point is, you can do it with a lot less expense than me.

I don't know if you can do it with a lot less effort, if that makes sense.

It's almost like I'm spending unnecessary money because I'm trying to do something crazy.

But no matter what you do, I don't think there's a way around this sort of commitment to doing this.

If you're really going to go for it, you got to go for it, or it's not going to work.

It's just like anything else.

But what's interesting, because we had another guest a couple weeks back, also a CEO, a gentleman by the name of Mac Redden, who's the CEO of ComSore.

He had a very similar background to yours in that he was not on social media whatsoever, but he made the conscious decision and he worked really, really hard at it.

It took a lot of time away from his day to day, but he was focused on, hey, I'm going to deliver really great storytelling on LinkedIn.

And then they built some campaigns around that and extended that sort of horizontally.

And it was a huge success for him.

So one of the things that I hope people take away from this is like, in order to be successful at this, you don't have to start off by, hey, I've had 10 years of runway of cultivating an audience and building my voice on LinkedIn in order to make this happen.

It does take hard work.

It does take dedication.

You do have to be intentional about it.

And you've got to pick your lane in terms of what you want to talk about.

But if you're willing to dedicate the time and if you find that which, I mean, the concept of content market fit is amazing, by the way.

I just, I know that's Devin's term, but like, golly, golly.

Yeah, but this can be done and it can be done starting from zero.

It's just you have to dedicate yourself to it.

Totally.

So, this is amazing.

I'm going to throw this to you.

Then I have a specific question about the show.

I still love, in fact, he did it.

So, I mean, now that I know it's so you, Adam.

But let me ask you this.

I'm going to start with Matt.

I wonder if there's like data where we look at 100 of the most successful software companies and whether you could equate people buying from the founder as much as buying from the brand.

So, like many often obvious example.

But like Aaron Lee, I mean, Aaron was amazing on so sure, right?

Still is, yeah.

Because you and I have talked about it.

You're like, we got to get the founder on like Adam.

I mean, that's why I want an animal show.

They were going to buy from the founder and the founder just has this, like Mac was talking about, sort of overcoming his own sort of, he did not have the predisposition to be out there to be speaking.

He wasn't even on social.

But like it might be like statistically, I'm just trying to think.

I mean, the only one I can think of where I don't know the founder's service now, like everything else, like the founder was like, was part of the brand from the ground up.

So, well, first of all, I mean, Adam's example in this era, which is a crazy, busy, competitive, attention competitive era.

That's really interesting.

But like, what's your reaction to that, Matt, what I just said?

I mean, there's so much truth to it.

I think it is going to be especially true now, right?

Like the companies that are going to go from like small with like a good amount of buzz to like, holy shit, these guys are raising good rounds.

They're, you know, 10Xing their install base, et cetera.

You're going to look back and be like, what is the tie that binds them?

And I think it'll be work like this.

And what's incredible about it is, of course, like you're making investments, whether it's in video production, whether it's in copywriting, whether it's in, you know, like coaches to help you out with this process.

But like all that being said, that is still significantly less than the amount of money that you'd have to spend on digital, on third party content, on things like analyst relations that will have a longer term payoff maybe down the road.

But like you want to get attention on your brand right now.

What I would say is since we started this podcast, have we heard of a different strategy that will get you there faster than what we're talking about today?

And the answer is no.

It is no.

Yeah.

And since Adam is so transparent, he's even given us his ARR numbers.

So like we think it's like real ROI.

All right.

But Adam, what would you say about like, I mean, you did it.

So I'm assuming, you know, like it sounds like you gravitated to it after you tried the predictable revenue thing.

But like, I mean, how should we think about the point about founders getting out there?

They don't have to go to the level you have, but they can learn a lot from the bits and pieces of the things you've done.

But is this like table stakes now?

Like you got to do it?

I mean, I don't know if you have to do anything.

I'm trying to create a wildly efficient, yeah, like rash generate.

You know, I just have these goals, right?

Like for what I'm trying to do, there is no other way.

It's just, you know, trying to get something.

Yeah.

And Adam spoke to this earlier.

He is selling the type of product.

He is the type of person.

He exists on a specific platform.

And like, this is an awesome fit for his business.

It won't be the awesome fit for every business.

But for his business, this is a perfect fit.

That being said, like the tie that binds the two CEOs that we've had on this podcast have had a ton of success on social is that they do sell into sales tech.

So it's worth acknowledging that.

Yeah.

Like there's a correlate.

So in security, as you know, Matt, from the game, they have these, all the good ones have this iconic security guy on the team that everyone wants to talk to.

Yeah, they don't write on LinkedIn, but they, you know, they, we have like a council of like secret CSOs that come on.

And it's like, when we bring on these iconic guys, they're all associated with brands.

These guys just, I mean, there's so much respect.

So like this, this thought leadership thing, I think is at its core, like mandatory.

And then if you're on, you have the platform is obvious.

Yeah.

The third part, though, is the lead in on the video, like format.

So like, you know, so you've done a show and you're going to do enough, only you hired people.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, this is crazy, though.

I wouldn't recommend doing that.

I mean, I just, you know, like, so like the reason that I hired her was because I made this show in the video.

So like, here's my two cents on LinkedIn video, as far as I can tell.

People are not on LinkedIn to commit to 10 minutes of beautiful video that they need to watch.

They will look at a talking head and listen to you drone on for 10 minutes and do something else.

But they're not on LinkedIn to like watch a Netflix episode.

But what I would see when I would post it on LinkedIn is like people, like, the comments would be like, I've never seen business content like this before.

Like, this is incredible.

You know, because it was like, actually, it was just like I was trying to build a unicorn and I failed and I, you know, it was my life and my family and shit.

And like, it was just like, she did a really good job.

So I was like, if people are saying things like that, like, this is a superpower and I just need to figure out what to do with it.

So this is like currently what we're trying to do.

It's, you know, I always try to have some like crazy stuff going on.

It's really weird experiments, you know.

Definitely wouldn't like, I would do the, like I copied Chris's style of video, Chris Walker's, like I would do that type of video if you're good on video because it did not really go any farther because you can do it inexpensively and it's all linked in once anyway.

They just want to learn your facial expressions and gestures and that's enough.

It's crazy.

It's like that super expensive, amazing episode, like, you know, that costs five grand or whatever.

It gets watched, one-tenth of what a talking head gets watched.

That would deliver the same message, right, on LinkedIn.

And I know that and like, you know, I'm kind of just going to make the episodes because I have her on staff and I think we'll be at a position by the end of the year where there will be some interesting episodes to be made.

Another thing about these episodes is like, this is unrelated to our conversation, but like, we were doing a one on one hour Zoom for 14 months and then this guy would follow me around everywhere I traveled.

And then every other week we do like an hour shoot to just fill in the gaps.

And that led to 18, 10 minute episodes, 14 months of fucking filming.

So like, my point is, your life, your life is actually very boring.

Oh yeah.

Trying to pull, so it wasn't sequential, right?

She was pulling story arcs that made sense in a line, but like something in episode one could have happened in March and July and in episode two, it could have happened in February and April.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So yeah, it's a whole weird thing, but like video on LinkedIn is powerful.

I think going beyond talking head, not worth it.

Yeah.

Even though I'm doing it.

Yeah, no, no, of course.

Yeah, no, that that's actually awesome, man.

So let me just go through other things.

Do you go to live?

Does your team go to live events or do any have any event strategy?

So with the Shopify Plus market that we were selling into, that we're selling to with transaction.com, that is very much an in-person motion.

And what I would say about this whole LinkedIn effort is I started it because a year and a half ago, we had almost zero penetration into that market and it seemed to be working for everybody and we had no competitors.

And it was like, what's the quickest way?

I thought it was just an awareness problem.

Everybody will use it if they know about it.

I just need to spread awareness.

It was like, okay, I'm a focus guy.

So it's like, what platform am I going to start on?

Well, these guys are on Twitter, but Twitter is super competitive.

I bought into this argument that build your initial audience on LinkedIn, get good at creating content, then go over to Twitter next.

And what ended up happening was it really did create some good ecosystem level awareness for me and for us, but it wasn't booking demos.

You know what I mean?

Like it was not bringing in deals, but it was doing cool partnership things.

Like it was allowing me to have credibility with like this influencer crew who you like use to meet all the vendors and stuff.

It just did a lot for status that really helped the business and helped us get deals, but it did not, you could not attribute book demos to LinkedIn.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

And then the pivot to B2B, it's very obvious that it's coming from this, right?

So that's kind of an example.

It's like, you know, if I had to do it over again, and I wasn't going to do a B2B company, I'm not sure that I would have gone quite as hard on LinkedIn.

I might've just like, just like been Twitter's harder, but I'm just going to try harder than everybody else to figure it out, you know, and just work harder at it or whatever.

Yeah.

So, so that's kind of like, I am in a perfect situation that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be on social media in some regard.

Dave Gerhart's book, Founder Brand, is excellent.

Definitely check it out.

It articulates the argument for telling, his basic premise is like, most companies are started for a reason, and the founder started them for that reason.

Yeah.

So, and so that guy telling the story resonates in a lot of cases.

In most cases, the objection, I read that book early, the objection is always like, well, for me, the objections were like, well, I don't want to be famous.

Now I realize that's stupid because being famous within this, you're not really famous.

You're not Gary Vee or whatever.

Being famous within your target audience is the most valuable thing you could ever have as a founder, ever.

It makes everything easier.

Yeah.

And then the other objections have to do with sort of like, time, which I think when you're starting, you should outsource anyway, because these ghost writers actually kind of know how to play the LinkedIn game a little bit.

So you can see how they're writing stuff and sort of see what kind of works and who you should be watching and stuff.

So I would say when you're starting out, use a ghost writer for a few months.

Worst case scenario, it costs you 15 grand and you decide you don't like it.

So you stop.

Yeah, right.

Best case scenario, so a lot of people who start making themselves alive on LinkedIn specifically, I hear this statement, I don't know what this is doing for me, but it's doing something and I like it.

And I think the essence of that statement means you start getting inbound that is not necessarily deals, but it's inbound for weird shit that you weren't getting before.

Whether it be investors or people are like, dude, I like the stuff you're putting out, let me know if you have any open roles, or it's just making partnership conversations easier, like whatever.

And then if you get the bug after a few months, I would recommend possibly working with some type of a consultant like I am in learning how to write yourself, because I don't think there's anything like feeling with your own hands how to manipulate the machine.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

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