Episode 4: Ex-Buzz Feed & Cheddar Exec breaks down how she generates 100% of her new business from LinkedIn

Here is the transcript so ChatGPT and other AI tools can scrape this episode to give us more SEO/GEO :)

Melissa Rosenthal (00:00)
We dogfood our own

okay, I treat my LinkedIn kind of like a personal CNBC, like that's how I imagine

everyone says to do that. And that's just not the way that my mind works.

it takes a lot of sparring with AI to actually get it

there's no way we could have done it without AI.

So the investor thing is interesting because I think to get attention and to make noise, you have to be slightly

I'm so glad you brought that up.

well, trick question, because I don't believe in that. If you're going to advertise on one billboard, you shouldn't buy billboards at all. That's not the strategy.

Like, ⁓ I mean, just, it's just, you know, all of our business at OutLover comes through my LinkedIn and through, you know, know,

LinkedIn flew out to me like six months ago to do like a profile on my career.

Matt Huang (00:42)
wow.

Welcome to the Connection Accepted pod. Today, I'm really excited to have Melissa Rosenthal. Melissa, thanks so much for being here.

Melissa Rosenthal (00:51)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Really looking forward to chatting.

Matt Huang (00:54)
Awesome. So Melissa, you have a really impressive background and something that I do with every guest though, that we bring onto the podcast is I look at the first LinkedIn post that they ever made. for you, and maybe I'll just share my screen here so you can kind of throw back here. This I believe was the first post that you ever put out on LinkedIn eight years ago when you were still at Cheddar. And so you said,

Melissa Rosenthal (01:17)
Wow. Very cool.

Matt Huang (01:20)
You you can't be successful without a strong mission and vision. Proud of the Cheddar core values hanging in our office and inspired every time I walk by them. take that all in. And then I'd love to ask you like what has changed since you made this post?

Melissa Rosenthal (01:33)
⁓ so two things. One, I think LinkedIn might cut you off because I was posting when I was at Buzzfeed as well. So I think, I think maybe the cutoff dates eight years, but when I look at my records, my first post was probably like 12 or 13 years ago. yeah, so long time I've been posting on there. I definitely saw value in it like immediately, like kind of.

Matt Huang (01:43)
wow.

Melissa Rosenthal (01:55)
there was a lot there that was really interesting to me and it's evolved in many ways. What would you like, should we shape the conversation on what's evolved in my career or what's involved on LinkedIn? I mean, like there's so much there. ⁓ So happy to take it.

Matt Huang (02:08)
Yeah, let's

for the audience's benefit, why don't we start with your career and just give them like the high level overview of all the events that have led you to founding Outlever today.

Melissa Rosenthal (02:20)
Sounds good, yeah. So my early days, I was at a company called Buzzfeed. I ran their global creative department and...

I started out actually as an intern. my, was pretty interesting. when I was in college, I wanted to go into the music industry and I was interning from kind of freshman year and I was interning a very cool magazines and record labels. And I saw this writing on the wall that like the internet was going to kind of change everything. Like it really was like.

Like the internet was an experiment at that point, it just was. And people were trying to figure it out. And the one thing I did notice was that it was changing everything. There's a lot of speculation on how it would change things, but it was one of those moments where for me, I was like, if I take a job at a traditional record label or publishing company or someone that's like legacy, it just felt old. And like everything I believed in was about disruption. So I kind of...

looked inside myself and said, what am I spending my time doing when I'm not at school or working? And it was on BuzzFeed. And I was ⁓ just like a huge fan of this really cool technology they had built, which was a viral predictor and a viral measurement system that showed you effectively for every time you made a post where that post had taken off, who had viewed that post, and how the virality was actually tracking your post across the web.

And I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. So I could create a post and in real time see who was picking it up, how many viral views it was getting and where it was cited. So you could click on any piece of that and see, it was cited on Reddit. it was on Yahoo. And I was just like, this is amazing. So I looked at it, was like, I'm spending 24 hours a day on this one. I'm not at school. So I applied for an internship and the rest is kind of history. The company really started to take off and

It was a really amazing time for digital media. And I think it was pretty cool to be at the forefront of that. Flash forward a few years after that, my boss at BuzzFeed John started Cheddar and I joined him to do that.

we kind of had this contrarian view at the time, which is a very wild contrarian view to like even say it's a contrarian view. But our contrarian view is that people would cut the cord with cable and that streaming services would be the primary way that people would watch their content. It was on demand viewing an appointment, what we called appointment viewing rather than through a cable subscription. And that turned out to be very right. So we built Cheddar and we sold Cheddar in 2019 and then

I was told to a cable company, ironically. then I went to decide, I was like, okay, I really like digital media. I don't know if that's the future for me. I see the decline in a lot of what's happening here. What it was 10 years ago isn't what it is today. Where do I wanna be? know, tech was on the forefront of that. And I was like, I need to...

Matt Huang (04:55)
Hehe.

Melissa Rosenthal (05:12)
I need to be working at a company that I believe in. And I looked at the tools that I was using and I was like, okay, if any of these companies are good fit, I would love to do that. Because if I'm not a user, I'm not a believer. That has treated me very well in my career. So I wanted to stick with that. And ClickUp just happened and it was perfect timing. was series A. The company had big aspirations to go up against Atlassian. My consumer and digital media background was a really good marriage to...

Zev the founder and kind of what he believed in his brand and how to grow ClickUp because it's such a, you know, your ICP is one to thousands and it's every ICP kind of across the board. know, every, team can use it of any size across any industry. So it worked really well to align that to a more consumer focused strategy than B2B. So I ended up at ClickUp, honestly, like.

life-changing for me. That was kind of like, I learned so much so fast and saw the company, know, hyperscale to four billion in valuation and you know now they're looking to go public which is super exciting and then after that I was like, all right, I think it's time to take all the things that I've learned over the course of my interesting career and build something that I believe is the future of go-to-market and that's where you find me at OutLover.

Matt Huang (06:27)
That's awesome. And man, so many thoughts just going through my head right now. Even looking back at your BuzzFeed experience, I read an article somewhere, you were what, 25 at the time when you were leading a team of 30, 40 people in the creative department. That's super impressive. I mean, I'm 26 right now and I can't imagine doing something like that. And it's cool that it...

Melissa Rosenthal (06:45)
Yeah.

Matt Huang (06:50)
I feel like you were at the company at such an interesting time in digital media and like you were saying, cable, shifting over to streaming services, that was another trend that was happening. And so you kind of got to see all of that firsthand. And then of course at ClickUp, that company continues to be a rocket ship. So I feel like you've had a set of really unique and really interesting experiences that now almost like uniquely positions you.

Melissa Rosenthal (07:02)
Yeah.

Matt Huang (07:15)
to launch this new venture with Outlever. But let's talk a little bit more about Outlever now. Where did that idea sort of come from? And when were you like, okay, this is what I want to do after ClickUp. I want to help businesses become the number one new source in their industry.

Melissa Rosenthal (07:32)
like this productization of my brain over the past 15 years or so. And what it really is is when I was at BuzzFeed and Cheddar, we were predominantly making money through advertising, through partnerships with B2B companies, especially at Cheddar. And I was always thinking in the back, back, back of my mind, like,

why can't these companies build their own authority through kind of the same motion that we're doing to build these media companies? Like, why would they not do that when they're spending millions of dollars with us a year to advertise? Why wouldn't they just invest that in building this themselves? And I think that was like a wild thought at the time because like media was such a, it was its own model, right? Like you're building this authority, but really you're doing it at the end of the day, you're doing it to sell ads. Like there's no ARR, it's not for.

You're not building, you're building viewers, but you have to earn their attention every day. The model translates actually really nicely to a company that doesn't want to make advertising revenue from it, but wants to build relationships and trust with an audience. And I was always thinking about that. Obviously it wasn't the time to think about that because the companies were doing really well. Advertising was going really well, but fast forward and then click up. Click up, I had a really healthy marketing budget and

problem I had was that it was really hard to have the amount of conversations that we needed to have to be able to reach our ICP 24-7, even when they're not in the consideration phase, right? Like, you want to be top of mind. You want to have like a Geico billboard strategy. You want to be able to then funnel them down. But like, if you're trying to reach everyone, it's really hard to do that. without lever, it was like, what is the solution for the challenge that I was facing at ClickUp? And then the, the, the

opportunity that I saw when I was in digital media. And that was, wait, why don't we productize this? Also with AI, there are things that we can do today and why we've been able to build that lever that we would have never been able to do 10 years ago. So it's kind of that mix of the thing that's been eating at you across your career and across your experience, the right place, right time, and then the ability to build this. And all of those things just kind of made sense. And it was like, let's go for it.

even if this funnels into something else, which now, like, I mean, we've been in market for a little over a year and we have like 40 industry agnostic customers and a lot of them are in enterprise and like the things that we are learning on a daily basis, I mean, it's just like, it's gold to ship out, to be able to shape our product moving forward. So that's a little bit about why I kind of started OutLever and I don't know if I stated this, but basically what we do at OutLever is we create a hybrid newsroom approach.

We built companies into standalone media organizations and build them a ⁓ credible basically news motion that then also connects to their on-site motion. So we're creating this kind of hybrid network approach to building them authority in their space, but it's also a lot of other things. It's really great for building relationships with prospects. It's really great for creating ton of noise on LinkedIn. Using your ICP and your customers basically is your own megaphone.

And that's what we felt.

Matt Huang (10:38)
That is fascinating. And I have a few questions, but let's start with just

LinkedIn, you post a lot on LinkedIn and I'm assuming for your aunts, you're probably helping them to produce content on LinkedIn as well. Was it always clear to you that this was gonna be like the main platform we wanted to focus on or did you look at other platforms?

Melissa Rosenthal (10:57)
It is and it isn't. So the media companies that we're building them or the newsrooms that we're building them are not on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is the predominant way that people, there's two ways that people are sharing the content and the distribution vehicle for the stuff that we're producing. One of those is LinkedIn and the other is direct, which is really what I believe in. It's like, where do people find content? They're not going to xdomain.com.

That's just like not a reality anymore. ⁓ Even for those media organizations that are left, like no one's doing that. So how does content find the person? And that's through people in your like network sharing it to you, like seeing it on LinkedIn, right? And then the other pieces through Slack, through dark social, through email, through people you're connected to, through WhatsApp. And those were the ways that we were like, okay, when we build the distribution vehicle for this motion that we're creating in this product,

we have to incorporate LinkedIn, so how do we do that? So effectively, LinkedIn, I also I made a post about dogfooding your own product.

We dogfood our own

we have our own publication, but the entire, a lot of what, a lot of where our lead's in come in right now are predominantly both our motion and LinkedIn. So we're like, okay, well we have to tap into the two things that are working for us for our customers, and one of those is definitely LinkedIn.

Matt Huang (12:13)
100 % that makes a lot of sense. And so what if I were to come to Outlever and say I'm like a brand and I want to turn my brand, I really want to amp up my presence on all these platforms and really create my own newsroom with Outlever. How what's the process? How do you guys go about it? Yeah, tell us a little bit more.

Melissa Rosenthal (12:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we built a really amazing product and media listening algorithm. So we're listening to hundreds of millions of signals every day or every month rather. And those signals are their everything. Their companies websites, press releases, newsletters, product updates, changes they're making on their site, things they're saying on LinkedIn. Like it's this kind of like all encompassing listening algorithm. So what we do is we align with our customers, hey, like

where do you see yourself headed? Like what do you want to own? Do you want to be the agentic call center company? Like where can we like place you that can capture and be kind of like that net for everything that you want to own within that space and all the conversations happening in that space where it's a catchall for the ICP that you want to attract.

It's a catch-all for your current customers and any partners that you might be working with, and also influencers in that space. So we align on that. We build out a brand new domain. It's a gorgeous news site. It's super legitimate. It's real news site. And then we go out the door and we do interviews with folks in that specific vertical or ICP set. And we talk to them about the things that are happening in that industry. We publish those articles on the news site.

We've also published pieces of those in a new content format on our customer sites. And then there's an amazing distribution network that we have where we see a lot of people sharing out their articles because they're really proud of what we've written with them. And it's all on a megaphone on behalf of our customer. So we've created this very interesting network effect of using our customers' platform as a megaphone for what these people care about, but it also ties very closely back to what our customers care about. So it's a really nice loop within that kind of space.

⁓ Our team, have journalists internally, but our product has really made them more efficient. Like we've productized journalism effectively. We've built a ton of tools internally that allow us to do this. It's a mix of task management, a CRM. We've rebuilt Fireflies to effectively learn and be trained off of interviews so that when journalists are on the call with subjects.

kind of it makes them smarter. It understands what they're going to ask, how to discuss certain things. So we can make people really great interviewers. We can speed up the editing process. So it's really like, it is, when I talk about like my view of AI, it is kind of that perfect marriage between like utilizing AI to do the things to make them faster. But the core piece of this is that these pieces are journalistic and the sources of the interview also have to be thrilled.

because our customer is basically twofold. It's the people that we're speaking to on their behalf and also our customer. So it has to kind of like, you couldn't do this with like AI slop, you know? So it really is like utilizing AI to make our journalists more efficient, more effective. And yeah,

there's no way we could have done it without AI.

would not exist. This would be like a very unprofitable thousand person company, ⁓ but we're able to do it with the tech.

Matt Huang (15:32)
Yeah, the AI slop comment, man, there's a lot we could go into there. Clearly, you know, there is more and more AI generated content these days, especially on written platforms like LinkedIn. And I think there's people on both sides of the spectrum. Of course, there's going to be people that are saying things about how AI is ruining content and there's so much AI slop that's being churned out on a daily basis. But then there's also people that.

are on the completely other side of spectrum. And they're like, we shouldn't use AI at all. Or sorry, we should use AI. And these are like the people that are very on board with it. Now, I personally fall somewhere in the middle. I think it can be a very excellent enabler and similar to what you guys are doing. It's helping the journalists. It's helping people to be smarter and to be more productive. But I want to dive into that a little bit more actually, because I know you've also posted a little bit about it on LinkedIn before.

Tell me your thoughts around AI slop and as inevitably people are using AI more and more for their content. Where do you think things are headed?

Melissa Rosenthal (16:29)
Yeah,

yeah, mean, like AI, it's getting smarter every day, right? ⁓ But it still has tropes and it still has things that it goes back to that are just not human, way of speaking and articulating. And it doesn't form its own perspectives. So our take on that is that how do we get the human perspective out of the person and shape that using journalism and AI? So like there is a really interesting thing in which like there are really great people that we speak with.

And their initial, let's just call it, their initial touch point for us or their initial signal is really not great. It's like they've written something using AI completely. And you're like, wait a second, this is a great person. Maybe it's a CISO at a company. But it's completely AI generated. we're like, well, they have a good thought. It's just not written correctly. It's not bringing out their true version of what this is.

What we'll do is we'll speak to them. We'll have a 30 minute interview with them and we'll spin that into a really great article. And now all of a sudden they're posting about that article for a week because it really showcases their actual views. They just couldn't articulate it themselves and they used AI and leaned on it too heavy. So I think it's interesting. think there's a little bit of that dead internet thing going on where people are...

treating it like a brain, but it's just a database and it's utilizing and being trained off of all the other now, know, repetition of what's happening and what other people are posting that's also AI generated. And you see that like chains start to happen and it's not good. So like, I'm definitely very fearful of that. Like I think our motion is like the complete opposite. Like I'm betting on people, I'm betting on human perspective, I'm betting on journalism mixed with that. I'm you know, betting on a lot of things in that area, but

I see it happen all the time where like we're getting dangerously close to like, it's just regurgitating old things and like AI content. Cause there's nothing new that it's being trained off of that's human instead of AI.

Matt Huang (18:26)
Yeah, that's a really interesting thought there. And yeah, as they train it on more and more, or as they almost like run out of human content to train it on, then what is it?

Melissa Rosenthal (18:35)
Yeah, that's the

entire theory of dead internet. It's that you've run out of the models to be able to train it off of. So what are you training it off of? You're training it off of AI content. But if that AI content hasn't gotten to a place where it's like, that content has evolved, then all of a sudden it takes a giant step backwards, which is like, where are we? Like, we don't really fully know where we are in that progression ladder, but you can see it start to happen, which is kind of the red alarm.

Like, one's really, like, everyone's talking about it as a theory, but not something that's happening in practice, but I think it's already starting to happen in practice.

Matt Huang (19:10)
Yeah. I'm curious when you say, and I know you had posted about this, like the real challenge is humanizing AI written content. How, how do you go about humanizing a piece of content? Like I've thought about this personally a lot because I post also on LinkedIn and trying to think about what makes a piece of content human versus like something an AI generated.

Melissa Rosenthal (19:32)
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely,

Matt Huang (19:33)
⁓ but yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Melissa Rosenthal (19:35)
yeah, I mean, I think like, first of all, you kind of just have to understand, I think you said the tells of like what AI is, like there's tells, like it's pretty clear like what it's adding, that it's adding to everything else. ⁓ I mean, my like, let's just, I can take it back to like my own individual posting strategy, right? I come up with a headline or an idea or a framework of what I want to write. I create a note, like an Evernote or a click up task of like,

Okay, this is like the kind of what I want to go for. Like maybe I'll write two sentences and then later on I'll try to like write in the rest as like the thought comes to me. And then I use AI to shape it into a post, but like an actually well thought out piece, but

it takes a lot of sparring with AI to actually get it

And a lot of removing of things that I wouldn't say because it still has to be my unique perspective. AI is just the thing that's like cleaning it up a little bit and maybe adding some me to it, but it.

it certainly takes a lot. it's not like one and done, throw it in there and it's perfect. Even if I have a pretty well thought out framework of what I want to write about, still takes a lot of massaging right now.

Matt Huang (20:41)
Yeah, 100%. I can relate as well. For me, it's, I try to start with the idea. And usually the idea for me comes from maybe a conversation I had with someone or something I read something else, someone else posted something I saw and I liked it. And then I tried to put my own take on it. And then I try to use AI as kind of like a, not a thought partner, but someone to sort of bounce it off of and be like, Hey,

Melissa Rosenthal (20:50)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah, like

a sparring partner, exactly.

Matt Huang (21:05)
Yeah, I think you put that perfectly. I'm going to use that going forward sparring partner. Because you're not totally dependent on it, but you're kind of still using it and pushing back and it takes, I think a level of nuance. And of course, attention, and not just taking exactly what

Melissa Rosenthal (21:19)
and taste and understanding of

what you're, there's nothing more cringe worthy to me when then someone is making an announcement and it's just like, you can tell, it's like, I saw someone do this a few months ago and it was like, the cat's out of the bag. Would you really say that? You're not really saying that. You don't speak like that. Most people don't speak in cliches and tropes. They speak in actual thought. So how do you distill it down to thought and not just,

tropes.

Matt Huang (21:45)
Yeah. Melissa, I'm also curious. know you kind of have started talking a little bit about the process, but how do you come up with your ideas for your own LinkedIn account? And then when you do have an idea, what, takes place from idea to post?

Melissa Rosenthal (21:57)
Yeah,

yeah, it's kind of what I mentioned. The way that I come up with ideas is really like I'm talking to marketing leaders and executives across every single vertical, every single role every week. So and also I'm reading LinkedIn and I'm reading likes I'm ingesting so much. I'm my own media listening algorithm too. Like we all are. And some of these things like really resonate or they're things that are very close to my own experience. I feel like the best way that I can write and when

my post do the best and when it's more, the most authentic is when I can relate it back to a real lesson or something that I've experienced and make a statement about that and like things that I actually am passionate about and believe in. Like I don't believe in writing for writing's sake. So some things that I'm like, this might be an interesting topic, but then I'm like, I don't really have any real world experience with it and maybe I'll pose it as a question or a poll, but I can't really write a piece about it because it just doesn't make sense to me yet. So I park it.

But some of the ideas, it's kind of this free flowing mood board in my mind of things that are like, all right, I'll write a headline here, and then I come back to it and flesh it out. And then I rework it with AI, and I try to queue things up. The best thing I can do in my LinkedIn capacity is queue things up for the next two weeks so that I have the free enough mind to not worry about having to post content every day, but so that the content just kind of builds in its own library.

Matt Huang (23:17)
That's impressive. Cueing things up for the next two weeks. was going to also ask you if you follow any sort of framework or structure. If you're, posting five days a week, do you try to get two of those to be thought leadership and then maybe one is like a case study? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Melissa Rosenthal (23:32)
Yeah, I,

everyone says to do that. And that's just not the way that my mind works.

I need to lean into, also I'm running a company. So like, this is a part of what I do, but it's like 99 % not what I'm doing. So it has to be like really easy for me to do it. And I don't want to stress out about it. So following like a framework of like how, like I would never be able to do that right now, which is like, Oh, I'll do three case studies a week and this and that.

I try to strike a balance between things that are self-promotional and things that are just like my own thoughts and like authentic observations about the things that I care about and I'm passionate about. So I think it's like a balance between being like overly self-promotional and shouting from the rooftops the things you believe in and trying to do that in like a non, like just a very authentic way, I would say. So I do try to balance that, but in terms of like every Wednesday I post to this, I can't do that right now.

but my brain isn't really working that way. So I want to lean into what makes it easier for me.

Matt Huang (24:28)
Yeah, authenticity has been crushing it on LinkedIn lately.

Melissa Rosenthal (24:31)
Although

sometimes people are a little too much.

Matt Huang (24:35)
Yeah, it takes a little too much of anything, I think is not good.

Melissa Rosenthal (24:39)
Yeah,

I mean, the other thing I'll say is like, I think I was talking to someone about this on another podcast, actually, it was Anthony, Canada, and it was like, what level of yourself, like how much of yourself do you share? And I was saying,

okay, I treat my LinkedIn kind of like a personal CNBC, like that's how I imagine

And it's like, if I'm gonna go on CNBC, would I speak about this thing? am I comfortable enough talking about it? Is it,

Does it make sense in a forum for business? And if the answer is yes, I will do that. A part of that can be a part of my story, sure, but I think there is definitely boundaries that I have in which I don't think things are appropriate to post on LinkedIn. This is not your close friends network on Instagram, and I don't love when people use it that way. I think it's a little much. This is still a business platform.

but to each their own, but that is definitely kind of the way that I think about it for myself.

Matt Huang (25:32)
Yeah,

I was talking, I mean, I've talked with a number of founders recently. And I tell them like, hey, if you wouldn't want your investors seeing this, then don't post it. Right. And yeah, I think there's

Melissa Rosenthal (25:41)
Yeah.

Well, there's about, there's also, ⁓

that's actually an interesting point because there's, there's also a balance of like overthinking that because like what will actually get traction or things that like are a little bit controversial a hundred percent. Like you have to have some sort of take that like people are going to want to create a dialogue around. also, I didn't say this earlier, but I think if you're not creating content that people want to have a dialogue around in any capacity, like

Matt Huang (25:57)
100%.

Melissa Rosenthal (26:09)
from a content marketing strategy to your own LinkedIn strategy to what we're producing, don't create it. Why would you create content that people don't have a perspective on? Or that could be a little divisive. I think that's very important.

So the investor thing is interesting because I think to get attention and to make noise, you have to be slightly

With BuzzFeed, learned this is 101 in how do you create social viral content.

it's creating something that sparks dialogue. And some of those things are slightly divisive. So I don't know about the investor thing. mean, luckily we don't have investors, we're self-funded, so I don't have to worry about that. But I certainly do think that way. Obviously I wouldn't do anything that would completely turn our customers off. I'm not gonna say crazy things, but do I wanna be a little controversial sometimes? Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Huang (26:56)
Yeah, no, I agree with you. think like, and maybe there's more of this in B2C marketing and only B2B marketing is starting to see more of this. But, and B2C, we see people doing all sorts of controversial stuff to get attention and it works, right? Like it works. I agree on that. But in B2B, think historically it's been kind of seen as more boring, you know, more logical. You're appealing to other businesses. So not as like

Melissa Rosenthal (27:08)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Matt Huang (27:21)
emotional, but then the thing is you are trying to reach people. So I think more and more people are realizing that and there is a space, maybe not to the extent of some of the B2C marketing tactics we see out there today, but there is room for B2B marketers.

Melissa Rosenthal (27:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean,

the reality, like, this is a funny thing, but like, when you think about, like, not that you can repeat this or that you'd want to repeat this or that it's good for you necessarily, but like the astronomer scandal, that's the best thing that could have ever happened to that company. Like, I dare someone to tell me otherwise. It was the perfect layup for them to be able to say, okay, we're going to do something about this. It's easy enough to like,

Matt Huang (27:51)
Great.

Melissa Rosenthal (27:58)
you know, crisis columns, it's easy enough to be like, all right, we're gonna fire the CEO, we're gonna make a statement that we did it. Now we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of eyeballs on our company. We can do something funny, which they did with Gwyneth Paltrow, whether you like it or you hate it, they did something. And now everyone, astronomers are household name. So, you know, it's like, and I mean, companies, like V2C companies do stunts all the time. Of course, it's not this level of a, you know, an execution or what this is, but it's,

If it's not detrimental to your business, it's good. Attention is good. Brand awareness is good.

Matt Huang (28:31)
100%. And I'm so glad you brought that up because that's such a great case study of like marketers today need to be opportunistic as well. And when events happen like that, yeah, it could be seen as a negative, but clearly someone at the company was smart enough to think, hey, we should take advantage of the one simple moon.

Melissa Rosenthal (28:48)
100 % yeah, yeah, yeah,

brilliant, brilliant. Like rather than not just say anything, the entire world had their eyes on this company. Like you got to do something with that. And they did. And yeah, I mean, definitely impressive that they were to pull that off in like a week.

Matt Huang (29:02)
Yeah, that person deserves a raise.

Melissa Rosenthal (29:04)
Yeah,

yeah. Also, I can't imagine what those meetings were like, but yeah.

Matt Huang (29:09)
for sure. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall there.

Melissa Rosenthal (29:11)
⁓

Matt Huang (29:12)
Shifting gears a little bit though, I want to talk LinkedIn metrics. how do you, for you or for your clients, how do you kind of measure success? Are you looking at impressions? Are you looking at like, did people actually engage in the dialogue? You know, are calls being booked, things like that? How do you think about success metrics on LinkedIn and more broadly?

Melissa Rosenthal (29:33)
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's like, I know I can write a post that does well. Like I know kind of what that formula is and that doesn't necessarily get me in bounds for leads for my own company, you know? So I don't think impressions are equivalent with metrics that I care about personally. You know, I think, can I hit the right people and can I say the right thing? And even if my post gets only a few thousand views or impressions, but I'm...

you know, booking 10 demos out of that and 10 people have contacted me because they're interested in what we do at OutLover, that's way more valuable for me. So I think it's more, it's more like, I believe the most important metrics are, are you getting the right people to engage with your content versus like how many impressions did you get? But of course people love vanity metrics. They all want to look at how many impressions something got, but I don't believe in that. I believe in like, are the right people sharing it, engaging in dialogue with you?

like questioning it, like are you building a relationship with them? Like that to me is the number one thing you should be focused on. Impressions are just vanity metrics.

Matt Huang (30:34)
I completely agree with you there. think obviously getting impressions is great for reach. And if the post is meant to be kind of like just a pure awareness, let's reach as many people as possible play then yes, that's useful to look at, but is it reaching the right people?

Melissa Rosenthal (30:47)
Yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example. I wrote a post, which I didn't want it to go viral, but it was about our hiring practices at OutLover. And ⁓ the second line was like, I don't like to BS people. There's no seven rounds of internal interviews here. We ask you to do a short project and that's it. It's like an hour and it's a thought piece. It's like an exercise. And a lot of people had a big problem with that. It was like,

A lot of the, I don't know, it's like a crowd on LinkedIn that I think like doesn't like that type of way of, I don't know, exactly. But I ended up on like LinkedIn lunatics on Reddit and the post got like 500,000 views, but it was really bad. Like people were sending me like pretty nasty messages and you know, like I would have taken like, I don't like, who cares about that reach? Like that reach is like absolutely meaningless to me. It's all the wrong people. So 500,000 of the wrong.

Matt Huang (31:24)
wow.

Melissa Rosenthal (31:41)
eyeballs. You know, it's like, great, sure, like people will see me in the feed, but like, it's just not that's not like valuable.

Matt Huang (31:48)
That's, that's fascinating. I think I may have seen that post as well. It didn't trigger me in the way that I think it triggered other people, but yeah, it's interesting. Virality is a double edged sword for sure. And I feel like for most businesses that are posting primarily because they want to attract the right kind of customer to them, then virality is not really as.

necessarily as effective. I don't want to say it's not effective because look at the astronomer thing, that shouldn't be the priority.

Melissa Rosenthal (32:15)
Yeah, for sure. mean, I don't really know that many, like I've never seen a B2B company that's really outside of like ClickUp, what we were doing and like what Chris is doing at ClickUp now, like that's optimizing for virality. Like no other B2B company is really doing that. So, I mean, there's also like, there's kind of this in between, right? There's like optimizing for pure virality, which is like the ClickUp model of like how they advertise. And they also have like, obviously ClickUp has a very well-oiled go to market function where they're creating

All types of content. So I don't want to just say they're optimizing for virality, but that is one of the plays. Then you have companies that I'm being very honest. They're creating like really bizarre, very, like inner circle, inner monologue content that might sound good between like the two co-founders of the company, but it lacks the self-awareness that no one else cares.

And I think like there's like a level of like, you have to have awareness about like what you're putting out there because it, it, a lot of it just falls flat. Like content, like content isn't created equal, like all content isn't created equal. And they kind of know that, but like there's an, like just because you're creating a video doesn't mean it's a good video. So I think there's like an element and people are all like talking about this term these days, but tastes, like there is an element of taste and like, why are you creating this? And what is it doing? Like you're creating like.

What, like a game show about something and hoping like people tune into it? Like maybe, maybe, maybe. But I mean, I really see it as like our approach at ClickUp was much more like, do we, and OutLever too a bit is like, how do we tap into, like the, the water cooler content that people within the industries and verticals care about enough to reference us when they're speaking about it. Like how do we trend Jack?

How do we think about the really, the things that like they are going to want to bring up within like their like meetings because they saw it and it was funny or it had an emotional impact on them in some way, right? That's how we thought about the frameworks of like what we created a click up and also making noise for sure. But it was never like so like, wow, did those guys just sit in a room and like.

all laugh and thought it was a good idea. Cause that's a lot of what I think like I see on LinkedIn is a lot of B2B companies putting out content that like no one else is going to find valuable. It's just like good to them.

Matt Huang (34:34)
Yeah, and taste is tough because it's like something that it's hard to teach. It's sort of acquired.

Melissa Rosenthal (34:39)
It's hard to teach.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely like my thinking on that is like a lot of that, like, and why it feels like kind of innate to me is the BuzzFeed like growth, right? Like I grew up with BuzzFeed. So my way of thinking about how people communicate and why they share and engage with content was kind of built on this framework of like different emotional pillars and how you actually reach people and like what makes sense and like how to connect with people. And this is like,

Matt Huang (34:41)
So.

Melissa Rosenthal (35:05)
I feel like I've trained my own brain models on hundreds and hundreds of thousands of viral posts that we've created at BuzzFeed. And that's been the layer of my thinking. And I've carried that through to every other career, to everything that I do, how I write, how I think. And not everyone has that background. But the background is insanely valuable in understanding why things work and how they work.

Matt Huang (35:30)
Yeah. 100%. Melissa, I know you also post on LinkedIn video content occasionally. I'm curious your thoughts on where LinkedIn is headed with video versus text. It feels like they're pushing it video a lot. And I think it was the, I don't know if it was the VP of product or someone else recently posted something about how creators that post video

on LinkedIn are seeing three times the amount of growth. I personally don't really know that many people in my personal life who engage with the video feed on LinkedIn. you know, occasionally you'll see like a viral startup video launch. But besides that, do you think video actually gets that much more engagement?

Melissa Rosenthal (36:10)
I think it's probably on par with or below slightly below text in aggregate. Like I think if you were looking at like a web of like everything that's posted, I'm sure that it would come in and fall probably pretty far below text based posts. That's definitely my personal like observation on like the, you know, I don't like to look at like anomalies unless it's like statistically significant. So it's the same way of like.

When people are like, well, look at how Harvey and cursor grew. They grew to a hundred million in revenue in like two weeks. And that's like, that's an anomaly. It's not a repeatable thing. And there's not a ton you can learn from it to any other company. It's not like that applicable. Same thing here. It's like, if there's a viral video or a viral startup video or liquid death post something, and they're using that as like the statistical significance, it actually isn't that accurate. the answer, the short answer is no, I actually don't think video content.

as well as text-based content does. Mostly I just post clips of podcasts that I'm on, and I find that that actually does really well. It's really the quick videos. I find that I drive a lot of people to the longer podcasts through those clips, and it's just more content for me. It's mutually beneficial. It's good because I'm on this podcast, but then I get the clips and I get to share it out. It kind of just works very well. no, I'm not like, I think video is the future of LinkedIn.

Don't think it is.

Matt Huang (37:28)
Yeah, that's really interesting. And of course, we'll, we'll definitely get you lots of clips for from this podcast. ⁓ I want to really quickly also get your thoughts on commenting. So on LinkedIn comments are almost like mini posts. You can get thousands of comments from just commenting. How do you think about that? And when you're commenting from your account, what's going through your head? Are you like, I need to comment this amount.

Melissa Rosenthal (37:35)
Shit.

Yeah. yeah.

yeah.

I'm so glad you brought that up.

don't have a full strategy, but what I do do is like when I'm in my feed looking at posts, if I find something that I have a unique perspective on where I can do a response, I'll do it. The other hack, which is you're very right, they are mini posts. Some of my comments have more impressions than my actual posts. Like I post commented something on someone's the other day and it has a hundred thousand impressions on that comment. So,

Matt Huang (38:18)
That's crazy.

Melissa Rosenthal (38:19)
It's crazy, but there's a way to tell when it's gonna happen. When the post itself is going viral, I always comment on it because I know that I will at least get a pretty good amount of impressions. So even if I really don't wanna comment on that post, I'll comment on it because I know the visibility is gonna be super high. So yeah, I optimize my commenting for the things that I can actually uniquely add a perspective on and then anything that's going viral I tap into, because I like to hijack that for myself.

Matt Huang (38:45)
That is, that's huge. I'm gonna definitely start doing that.

Melissa Rosenthal (38:48)
Yeah, you should do

it. Yeah, why not? It's shared hack.

Matt Huang (38:50)
Yeah, that's awesome. And I definitely for some of the clients that I ghostwrite for as well, I tell them, hey, LinkedIn isn't all about just posting, you have to engage, you have to talk to people, you know, it's a social media platform. It's not just

Melissa Rosenthal (39:03)
yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's again,

it's about dialogue. your people are adding dialogue to your comments. You should also contribute that back to the community. So I believe in like almost like, yeah, it's a good thing to do that anyway. But yeah, I mean, I come across people all the time that have inbounded me from a comment that they saw too. And it's like, I saw you, I think I saw you post this comment on this person's post. And I'm like, I don't know who that is. But like, I definitely did it, you know, I'm like, but.

It's not even like a stream of consciousness because I'm just doing it and I know that I'm gonna reap the rewards of being able to do that and you know, obviously it compounds over time.

Matt Huang (39:38)
100%.

one more thing I wanted to talk to you about is billboards. And this is less focused on LinkedIn, but I, I know you love billboards. So if you could only, if you could only, I guess if you could

Melissa Rosenthal (39:46)
If I'm full of words,

Matt Huang (39:51)
If you could only advertise on one billboard for the rest of your life, which one would you choose? And I guess what would you put on it?

Melissa Rosenthal (40:00)
well, trick question, because I don't believe in that. If you're going to advertise on one billboard, you shouldn't buy billboards at all. That's not the strategy.

it's like, I know you weren't expecting that, but that's what I will say. The only other thing I'll say is that airport billboards are insanely, insanely effective. Like airports, like by and far, like business travelers, you know, a guest depends on who your ICP is, but valuable real estate. But yeah, you can't just buy one. It doesn't work. What would I?

put on it, something really controversial or something that would make people mad. Not offensive, but controversial. You're not going to make people mad with a billboard, then don't put the billboard up. I don't know if I believe in this company, but artisans' billboards are perfect. Yeah, talk about replacing people and get people really angry about it. That is a great strategy. Whether they hate it or they love it, they're going to talk about it and you win. That's it.

Matt Huang (40:35)
Haha.

I love that. It's thought provoking and it sparks conversations.

Melissa Rosenthal (40:54)
Yeah, it sparks conversations.

Again, you're spending all this money to put yourself on this, largest stage that people are gonna have to drop what they're doing to look at this. If it's not forcing you to take an action, whether it's making a post about it or commenting on it when you see it or referencing it or going to the site to check it out, then don't do it.

Matt Huang (41:14)
Yeah. I have one other question as well, before we get into our last segment, which is measurement. Do you guys track the ROI on the work that you're doing for your clients? If so, how do you do it? Because one of the things I think that marketers kind of struggle with is like with content, it can be a little bit off sometimes to track the attribution.

Melissa Rosenthal (41:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We, I mean, we do like ROI is also like in the eye of the beholder a little bit. Like ROI across every single company we work with, like is sort of different and they don't all understand how they look at it. And they all look at it very differently. So we track very specific metrics and then we're like, make, make them out to be what you want to be. Like in many instances we are like companies are selling deals, right? So there's like actual

dollar for dollar ROI. And if you sell one deal, most of these companies, this pays for itself. But everything else, we are sharing impressions, of course. We're sharing engagement data on everything. We're sharing how many C-level executives within your ICPs that we're speaking to, the quality of the content, how many shares, who's actually looking at these articles, what they're doing. We're tracking a lot. And I think there's so much data that ⁓ we're continually refining how to

how to enable the data to tell the better story and actually make it really actionable for our customers. Like that's the toughest thing. Like it's not like tracking metrics. Tracking metrics is easy, but it's outcomes and stories that enable them to do what they need to do to sell deals. Like at the end of the day, that's the best way that we can operate. So we're continually evolving ourselves towards that, but we track a ton of different metrics, a ton of different things that.

ROI is different for different people. Some people just want us to show up in search. They don't care about selling deals as a result of this. Some people really care about that. So kind of just depends. It's really interesting. I think when you're in your own world within a company, you live in that company's world. And now that I have customers in every single, effectively like every single industry and across a lot of different ICP sets,

Everyone thinks about things so differently and I didn't realize that. think I expected like what we did and how we thought about things that click up to be kind of uniform across like most companies and it's very not. So I don't know, it's just been a very interesting learning for me that like companies even companies in similar spaces just think about things like completely differently and I think it's all like, it's definitely like.

know, founder, right? Like it's founder influenced. Like how does the founder view this? Like, I mean, that trickles down to probably every department within the organization, but just a very interesting insight.

Matt Huang (43:46)
Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And it's cool that you do get almost a bird's eye view of how all these other companies are doing it and how

Melissa Rosenthal (43:53)
It's the best

thing you can ever do as a founder. Even if our product shapeshifts in the next few years and we become something completely different or it evolves, it's all because we're just internalizing everything that all these different customers are telling us. we're like, we want to solve your problems. So it's a wealth of knowledge. It's a gold mine.

Matt Huang (44:14)
Amazing. Cool. So now we're going to move into the last segment, which is good idea, bad idea. So Melissa, I'm going to give you rapid fire, a bunch of different ideas. And you're going to just be completely honest with me, whether you think it's a horrible idea or the best idea you've ever heard. Sound good.

Melissa Rosenthal (44:30)
Okay, these,

what kind of ideas are these?

Matt Huang (44:32)
They're mostly related to LinkedIn. ⁓ our first one is vlogging on LinkedIn.

Melissa Rosenthal (44:35)
Okay, yeah, let's do it.

Depends, depends how it's done. Vlogging does work. I think it's like no one wants to see you at the grocery store. Like no one wants to see you like at the gym. But if you're videoing yourself talking about something important and you're actually creating like a really great narrative and talk track, I think there's nothing wrong with that. I actually like it when people do that. It feels like very honest and authentic and like you're in the room with them. But no, I don't want to see you like at the supermarket or at the gym.

Matt Huang (44:41)
same.

Fair enough. next one. Posting five times a day on LinkedIn.

Melissa Rosenthal (45:08)
Don't do that. Don't do that. I mean, like, first of all, I think LinkedIn, like, I don't know this for sure, but I think it definitely starts to ding you after you post, like, three times, for sure. There's something that happens. I don't know exactly what it does in the algorithm, but it definitely triggers something. But also, like, I don't know who that's good for. Like, why do you need to post five times? Also, optics are horrible on that. Like, do you have nothing else to do but post on LinkedIn?

Matt Huang (45:09)
haha

haha

Melissa Rosenthal (45:35)
So if you're saying that you're doing anything else, think people start to doubt that you're even doing that thing because all you do is post something like that. So don't do it.

Matt Huang (45:43)
That's funny. Man, I wish Daniel, my cohost was on this call because over the summer,

Melissa Rosenthal (45:47)
no, does he post five times a

Matt Huang (45:49)
not five, but there were days over the summer where I think he may have posted three or four times. And it was interesting looking at the data because the algorithm didn't seem to necessarily penalize him. He continued to get more impressions, but I think there may be a question around like post fatigue and people in cardio.

Melissa Rosenthal (45:54)
Yeah.

Heh.

Post fatigue. Also, like, it's not,

it's not, I'm not gonna call it X. It's not Twitter, right? Like, it's just not, it's not meant for that. So I think like, yeah, don't do it.

Matt Huang (46:15)
Valid. Cool. Next one is a little bit less controversial, but LinkedIn reposts.

Melissa Rosenthal (46:20)
Depends. I would say like they're kind of not that valuable. Like reposting feels a little like a cop-out unless you're adding your own thoughts to it. I think if it's something that's highly visible and you want to cite that person, it's okay. But I think you're not going to certainly get as much share of voice if you make an organic post and then just tag that person and tag their original thought. So anytime I'm going to repost something, if it's like

If it's important enough for me to repost it, I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna create an organic post around it and then I'm gonna tag the people that I'm quoting or I'm referencing as their original thoughts. So I would do kind of like anything to avoid a repost. just don't, I've never seen traction with them. It's not like it's a bad thing necessarily. I just don't see like a ton of value there.

Matt Huang (47:05)
Yeah, I've also tried reposts and also repost with thoughts and I've just always, the engagement for some reason has never been as good as if I just decided to write up a standalone.

Melissa Rosenthal (47:08)
⁓ huh.

to post yourself.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I always optimize for doing that. Also, if it's important enough for me to want to repost it, I can figure out something to say about it.

Matt Huang (47:23)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm totally on board with you there. Cool. The, the next one

little bit different. connection requests, LinkedIn has a limit and it feels like this limit is kind of like a soft ceiling because I've noticed some people with premium can send more than others without it. But like, what are your thoughts on maxing out the number of connection requests that you send every week?

Melissa Rosenthal (47:40)
Hehe.

Yeah, do it, do it. I mean, I don't do it. I don't know if I have time to do it, but anyone that comes into my network that I'm like, this could be a good company for us to work with, or this is a good person I want to be connected with, I will 100 % send a request to. I probably don't max out what I'm allowed to send, but I also accept 98 % of all inbound requests too. So I have a.

crazy amount of people that I'm connected to, like it's 20,000, 30,000, I don't know, something ridiculous, which makes it less effective when people are like, oh, we have a mutual connection, because I probably don't personally know that person, even if they're connected to me. But I do, I'm a big fan of maxing out your connections. This isn't a closed network anymore. It's evolved past that. It's a platform for growth, and it's a platform for distribution. So maxing out your requests is definitely good idea.

Matt Huang (48:36)
Awesome. And then last one here, paying for LinkedIn premium just to see who viewed your profile. Is that a good or a bad idea?

Melissa Rosenthal (48:44)
I don't think that's a, it's a weird idea. mean, paying for LinkedIn premiums was to see who viewed your profile. If there is enough of an impetus for them to do something, they're gonna take an action. I don't think, like I think people window shop a lot. Like I can see who viewed OutLever and I don't go after them. My goal is like, all right, well.

if they viewed this and it's a good person, I'll connect with them on LinkedIn for sure. I'll send them a note or a connection. But I don't know if it's like, I don't know. I think LinkedIn Premium, don't know, do I pay for it? I might be, because I'm a creator, I have a LinkedIn badge. They keep it to me for free. I think it's a good idea to have it. think if you can afford to pay for any sort of premium version of the product, they definitely like.

prioritize you in some ways. For sure, have early access to things. You get more analytics. But I think there's a lot more to it than just paying for it see who viewed your profile. I think there's a lot of analytics. If you want to ever do partnerships with brands, you kind of need to have it. Same thing with LinkedIn, what you said, maxing out connection requests. You get a lot more of that. You're allowed to send more in-mails. So there's a lot of benefits. I wouldn't do it for that one reason, but there's a ton of upside.

Matt Huang (49:51)
Yeah, 100 % totally agree with you. We actually had a conversation with Peter Walker, who's the head of insights at Carta. He, he was saying that people seem to sometimes forget the fact that compared to other social media platforms, LinkedIn has actually done a very good job in terms of the fact that they have a massive base of subscription revenue that Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, mean YouTube has subscription revenue now, but

Melissa Rosenthal (49:58)
Mm-hmm.

yeah.

What was, do you remember, did LinkedIn say that they just crossed a billion dollars in LinkedIn revenue? I think I read that like maybe a month ago. was like astronomical, like what they've built with subscription. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was a billion.

Matt Huang (50:25)
really?

Wow. Yeah, that's incredible. I'll have to look that up after this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. They've done a really good job at that. And of course the fact that they've been able to be, I think the only, I mean, there's probably competitors, the only social media platform where it's like primarily people doing business and networking, very professional focused. They, I think people forget that fact.

Melissa Rosenthal (50:48)
Yeah, yeah,

mean, it's like they evolved quite well in understanding that it was becoming a social platform and to feed into that because it wasn't like when I was, you when I made that cheddar post, like it really like wasn't like 99 % of the people that post on there every day today didn't do that eight to 10 years ago. So I think for them to be able to have fed into the fact that they saw it evolving in that way.

was super smart. mean, that was like a very, it wasn't a fast evolution. Yeah, I mean, it's really, really, really smart what they've done and the creator tools they've built and the experimentation, like not everything works for sure, but like they've experimented quite a bit. I did,

LinkedIn flew out to me like six months ago to do like a profile on my career.

Matt Huang (51:38)
wow.

Melissa Rosenthal (51:38)
yeah, like they have a whole like content team internally to tell people stories and people that like,

know, are on LinkedIn and have great career stories. So they definitely like, they have an entire editorial team and I mean, they're really like heavily invested in it, which is great. I mean, that's why it works so well.

Matt Huang (51:53)
Yeah, that's awesome. And we're actually trying to get Daniel Roth, the head of content, I think at LinkedIn to come in the pot at some point. So stay tuned for that. But Melissa, I guess last question then, is there anything we haven't talked about today that you want the audience to know about LinkedIn or about OutLover?

Melissa Rosenthal (52:13)
Yeah, I mean, I would just say like, you know, my parting thought is that...

people are going to be what drive your business forward. It's people, it's trust, it's personality, it's authenticity, it's having a clear voice and having taste. And I think all of that starts with taking an action. And I think you can be pretty deliberate and intentional every day on what that action is. And for me, it definitely is posting, a thought, using it as a journal, a business journal of what's happening within my own company.

And when I think about the amount that I've gained from LinkedIn and content posting over the years, it's like, it's not really measurable. Like it's, it's in a good way. ⁓ it's given me so many amazing opportunities. I've connected with so many great people speaking engagements.

Like, ⁓ I mean, just, it's just, you know, all of our business at OutLover comes through my LinkedIn and through, you know, know,

podcasts like this that I then post on LinkedIn. So I would say like,

It's wild to even think that like this is a question at this point but if you are in business or you like want to stay in business and want to stay employed and Employable doesn't matter who you are. You should be posting every day I think like the one thing also that you can take away with from any company that you're at and Obviously, we know how volatile the job market is now and will continue to be it's your personal brand

and having a voice and a unique and clear perspective because that's why someone's gonna hire you when they're looking in a pool of a thousand candidates and you stand out because they understand exactly what you're gonna bring to the table because you've been speaking about it and showing examples of it. So, best thing you can do is start posting every day, having a clear perspective. Just do it. It might be painful at first. It becomes a muscle. But I think optimizing for that in your life is a really great stepping stone to wonderful things. ⁓

Yeah, I can't recommend doing that, like enough.

Matt Huang (54:07)
Couldn't agree more. Awesome.