Why nobody understands what your startup actually does

Transcription

Matt: Explaining to my grandma that I write LinkedIn posts for a living is an impossible task, but this is also the same problem a lot of founders run into because nobody knows what they're building. Anthony Pieri is a product marketing consultant whose job is to help founders reposition their homepages so people actually understand what they're building. In this episode, we dive into how he's been able to grow to over 70,000 followers on LinkedIn and what the most common product marketing mistakes that founders are making are. Let's get into it. Welcome to Connection Accepted. We've got Anthony Pieri on the podcast. Daniel: Anthony, thanks for joining me. Anthony: Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here. Daniel: Anthony, for the people who don't know who you are and it's their first time meeting you, can you just give us the quick background on who Anthony Pieri is? Anthony: Yeah, I have jumped around in a lot of different fields and then found my way into business-to-business product marketing, specifically for software companies. So that's a very tight niche. And my co-founder and I met at a different agency that did a lot of stuff. And then we spun off our current company, which is called Fletch PMM. And effectively what we do is we help B2B software companies, most of the time they're startups, maybe they've raised some venture capital and think they're going to be, you know, next big multi-billion dollar company. A lot of times they struggle to explain the product that they've built. Software is kind of inherently nebulous, difficult to imagine exactly how it works. You can't just look at it. Like if you're selling shoes, it's like, there's the shoe. But if I look at a website and you're a software company, there's not like, well, there's the software. It's like a dashboard or something. And I don't know what it is immediately. So what we realized was that there's a lot of these software companies, engineers who start them, not marketing backgrounds of their own, struggle to kind of explain these products and platforms that they've built, which really makes it hard for them to gain market share and word of mouth and brand equity and all that stuff. So we've created this methodology where we basically come in, we run these two week sprints with different companies and then help them figure out the best way to, like it's called like positioning. So the best way to position their products. And then we get that documented in a slide deck. And then we want to have it documented in a customer facing asset. So we will usually help them rewrite the homepage of their website to reflect this new positioning strategy. And that's basically all we do. We've done it a bunch of times between me and my co-founder and our two full-time employees. We've actually helped position a little over 500 companies over the last three years. I think we hold the record in the world for the most B2B companies that have been positioned by a single agency or consultant. Matt: So, but yeah, that's basically the rundown. So you have a really interesting background and you want to talk a little bit more about how you even got into the marketing space to begin with? Daniel: Yeah, yeah, I definitely can. So I had about 10 years or so, I used to work for churches. So I was first out of high school. I worked at the youth group in the church by my house, kept working, took a full-time job after college, kept going up the ladder. Eventually I was a pastor actually. So I was getting up on stage, speaking every week, did that for a decent amount of time. And then eventually it was like, I want to change the pace. I want to do something different. I've done this for 10 years. I want to see something else. And so my background was always included elements of creating content. So when I took a very entry-level sales role at my last company, I met my now co-founder. And when we were ideating about starting this business, he brought a lot of the startup and technology company experience. And then I brought a lot of the content creation experience. So our initial spike of business came from LinkedIn posts that I started doing. And I have, I've done channel stuff on Twitter and Instagram and things like that over the years, YouTube, decent, gotten decent amounts of videos, like views and, you know, followers on those platforms. And then thought, why don't I just apply kind of the same type of principles to LinkedIn? How much harder can it be? And what we discovered is like three years ago, it was actually exponentially easier to get an audience on LinkedIn than any of these other platforms, because most people, if you ask anyone, you know, Hey, do you ever scroll on LinkedIn? The average person's like, what do you mean scroll? Like, that's just the website where I go to apply for a job. There's like a newsfeed. Most people don't even know that there's like creators on there. So it was this kind of best, uh, best kept secret. And really only business owners use it. So if you're selling to businesses, doing B2B stuff, LinkedIn is the place to be. And the barrier of entry, especially three years ago, was so low. The content bar was like at the floor. So any amount of interesting stuff that you did immediately would get huge traction. And actually the first two LinkedIn posts that I ever did, both of them went viral right back to back and we were freaking out. And then obviously we had a lot of that didn't go viral and weren't great, but it was enough spike that we were like, there's probably something here. So we kept kind of pushing ourselves down that path, trying different stuff and then eventually found this niche. And that's how we've been able to build our audience. Matt: That's incredible. And today does most of your customer base come still through your LinkedIn posts or how have you guys thought about the marketing strategy for your services when you're trying to reach these software clients? Daniel: Yeah, it, it's mainly LinkedIn. Daniel: I would say probably 95% LinkedIn and then maybe 5% is referrals, but it's still people from LinkedIn or former clients that found us from LinkedIn, but we don't do any outbound sales. We don't do any cold DMing. Uh, I will say we will do the occasional like speaking at a conference. I'll do podcasts like this from, from time to time. But yeah, the bulk of everything is coming still from inbound from our LinkedIn content and we don't really do any paid LinkedIn stuff either. It's really all just organic. Matt: Wow. That's incredible. Does your co-founder also post as actively as you or are you kind of the marketing guy? Daniel: No, we both do. So he's, I have, I have slightly more followers than him, but we're both kind of in the same ballpark, right? So I'm around like 70 something thousand. He's around like 65,000, but it's basically, yeah, between the two of us, that's what drives almost all the demand. And then people will come on the calls, you know, and they'll be like, Oh, I've seen your co-founder's content or, you know, I've seen your content. So it's a nice even split. Matt: It's really cool that both of you are really actively posting on LinkedIn because you, you know, the combined strength of your audiences, I'm sure drives a lot of traffic and inbound demand. I'm curious, do you guys follow any kind of posting strategy or when you think about the content that you're both going to post this week, is it like, you know, you post whatever you think is interesting and I'll post whatever I think is interesting? Or do you guys have a meeting where you're like, okay, you're going to post this and I'll, I'm going to post this this week? Daniel: It's very loosey goosey and kind of has been since the beginning. We don't really have a cadence. Some weeks we post a bunch, some weeks we don't post that much. It's really the speed of the insights is what drives the amount of posts. So we sell a very expertise-based business. And early on, we heard some quote from a guy who said, if you wanna sell an expertise-based business, you have to publicly demonstrate your expertise, which is the opposite of a lot of people who sell coaching services or consulting or whatever it might be where they hide everything behind the paywall and they're like, you have to pay to see my expertise. We took the opposite approach. It's almost sort of like, if you're familiar with open source software, we say, this is exactly how we run our sessions. This is our framework, our methodology. Here's insights from client projects. We share it all freely thinking that people will probably pay for the implementation because people will see it and they'll say, wow, I get this, but this looks like it's gonna be a lot of work. Can be pretty confusing. Clearly they understand it because they're sharing it all. So we should just pay them to do it for us. So that's what drives a lot of people to join. Matt: And then in terms of the individual posts, like I was saying, it's really once we have an interesting insight to share, we will try to get it out as fast as possible. And because we're still boots on the ground running these client projects, the insights are still coming. Whereas, you know, some people who have totally offloaded all the work to a team and are not in the trenches still doing it themselves, they're kind of recycling the same old stuff that they've already posted from a year ago. We have tried not to do that kind of from the beginning. We rarely repost ever and we're really just doing new, new insights that we get as we go, new ways of framing stuff. And a lot of that comes directly from the client projects. Like we'll be on a project with a client, we'll explain a concept in a specific way and say, Oh, I bet Daniel: Weeks with each client, and that includes four live calls and then some in-between work that we're passing back and forth with the client as we're putting together the strategy. So, you know, a year or two ago, me and my co-founder would each be doing two different companies per week. So I'd be meeting with one company in the morning, four days a week, and a different company in the afternoon, four days a week. And my co-founder would do the same. And the mental tax that takes on you is obviously pretty high. It's like a pretty big slog just to keep all these things in your head, you know, with all these different moving pieces. But, you know, you don't want to say no to clients. So eventually we were like, okay, well, we don't want to do this forever. We were learning a ton when we were making the model and the framework and stuff. I think the amount of companies we were working with directly was a huge input to that in a good way, like almost like training an LLM. The more data you give it, the better you can make it, the more robust, the more edge cases it can handle. But eventually it's like, okay, we don't want to be doing this every day, so many clients. So we hire a lady who actually lives in Berlin and she tackles a lot of the projects now for us. And then we still are doing, we went down from two projects a week to one project a week. And now she'll do, you know, one or two projects a week to make up the gap. And then, so she's full-time and then we have one other full-time copywriter. And then we have probably three or four more freelancers who kind of support on both sides of those. People who support on the more product marketing backend stuff, like with us, like handling some of that work. And then others supporting contract copywriters who are other full-time employees. She oversees kind of the copywriting team. Matt: Got it. And these copywriters are working with the clients on these projects, trying to improve the language on their landing pages, things like that. Is that right? Daniel: Exactly. Matt: Interesting. Daniel: One of the things that I am curious to pick your brain on as someone who also runs an agency is how you guys think about scaling up the business. As you know, it's, it gets kind of challenging at a certain point when you're running a service-based business and hiring almost becomes the constraint. So I'm curious, at what point did you guys decide, all right, it's time to bring on our first full-time or our second full-time hire. When did you guys decide, okay, we're at capacity. Like maybe this would be helpful to bring on someone new. We actually tried to hire someone probably five or six times in the last three years. And we would always get around to it and then we would stop right before we did because we would find a big flaw in the model or the framework. So we want to have this approach where we can basically take any company that comes in to work with us, diagnose the problems that they're facing, and then be able to offer a set of solutions that they could theoretically choose. And so we had different ways of doing that as we've been evolving this framework and methodology. And right when we were about to hire every time, we would uncover some huge problem. We would say, we just worked with this company and their unique scenario completely broke the model. Like, ah, got to go back to the drawing board. So we didn't want to bring someone in when the model was going to be so fluctuating in these big swings because someone would learn it. And then two weeks later, we'd be like, actually, it's completely different. We have to do it completely different. So we didn't want to have that whiplash. So we really wanted to wait to hire someone until we had really dialed it in. And we're still making tweaks. Like the frameworks that we're using, we don't want them to get stale. So we're still making them better and better and clearer and more concise and more powerful and robust and all these different things. But they're not these giant swings anymore. Like it's like more nuanced tweaks to make them better. And so we were like, we probably could hire someone now. And the challenge that we're running into now, as anyone does this, when you have this founder-led company, people come, I want to work with Anthony. I want to work with Rob. Now we're telling them, well, we actually would rather you work with this person on our team. How do you manage that tension? So we've tried different things so far. Some have worked better than others. The one that's working now is that we say, you can still work with me or my co-founder. We'll still run the program with you, but it's just, you're gonna have to wait a little longer because of the availability. So like I'm booked until, you know, maybe mid-March. Same with my co-founder. And then our team member has earlier spots that could be filled. So we basically would say if someone comes to us in January and says, I love what you guys do. I love your process. I'd love to work with you. Matt: We need to get this thing launched in like two weeks. We're like, well, you could do it with us if you really want, if you can wait and push everything back, we're fine with that. Or we have this team member who has now, you know, positioned 30 or 40 companies, which like already puts her, because of our model, we work with so many businesses. Positioning 40 companies is more companies that any product or marketer will do in their whole life. So like, she's already in the top 1% of 1% of 1% of how many positioning projects she's done. She just hasn't done 250, you know, that we each have done. So there's that trade-off and then people have to decide like, okay, am I willing to wait to work with Anthony or Rob directly, or would I just want to work with their team, trust the process. And we'll get it like a pretty even split. Some people are like, that's fine. I trust what you guys are doing. I believe in the methodology. I'll work with your team member. Other people are like, no, no, I want to wait. And we're like, okay. So sometime down the line, we may change that and say, like once we build out the team even more, we may be like, if you want to work with Anthony and Rob, maybe the two of us only do one project a month. Maybe it's way more expensive or something. And then the team is like a significant discount. So it's like, oh, I get to work with both of them. And maybe this is like the most important, maybe the largest clients that we work with. We would just do those one time a month. And then for the rest of the people, it's like, you're going to work with these, our team members will oversee it more behind the scenes, but we won't be in the trenches actually running the calls with you. Daniel: When you think about hiring, what are some of the learnings that you've had finding full-time employees? Matt: Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, we've only hired two so far full-time. So my learnings are minimal. And I will say one of those two people, we don't always share this publicly. One of those two people is my biological sister. So I had a lot of background with her, knew she was trustworthy. And then the other one, we hired someone actually, my co-founder was in this founder group called Hampton. And he asked for some wisdom from other people of like, who would be a good person to hire. And they basically said, find someone who was in one of the companies that went through our process as a client. So we looked back over all the people we had worked with and thought who would be a great person to join our team who really got the process, was, you know, understood it, kind of believe the same things we do. And that's how we found this lady named Sarah. She actually worked with one of the companies that went through our process maybe a year or two ago. So we reached out to her and actually their company was going through a big transition at that point. They had just gotten acquired. And so she was looking for another role. Matt: And we were like, would you, would you be interested in coming work for us? And she was like, absolutely. And we wanted to find someone who would be good with very little onboarding, very little structure. Because we're so small, we're like, now, as we think about hiring more people, we're debating on, do we hire more full-time people or do we go more like the design agency route where it's like design agencies will get a bunch of really high-end, high-quality freelancers who they kind of have long relationships with. So that's something we've been playing around with is like building up a team of product marketing consultants who are already full-time freelancers and basically pitching them, hey, would you want to do an ongoing relationship with us where we can send you a steady stream of business. That's always the same type of project that you could still run your larger custom projects with different clients. But this would be just like a nice supplemental income and then have them do that, get trained and then be able to lead these projects as well and pay them more money. So we've maybe onboarded three, maybe almost four of those types of like, we're calling them product marketing supporting roles. And that's been going really well so far. And they're getting it. They're getting to see the process. We're having them tackle more of the stuff behind the scenes. And theoretically that might be a more flexible model than just hiring a bunch of full-timers and trying to figure it out. Yeah. Trying a lot of things, Okay, anytime I see Refine Labs in someone's LinkedIn headline, I know that they're going to be super legit and just increase the brand equity even outside of the founder. And the founder was eventually able to hand off the business to a CEO that he hired and then sold his portion of it and now is doing other stuff. So that's kind of the long game. I'm not saying we're going to sell it, but the long game is to be like, can we increase the brand equity of Fletch, the entity, not just Anthony and Rob's personal brands, by maybe spreading it across multiple team members, having them all show up as their own thought leaders. And it's like, wow, everyone I see who has Fletch in their profile is super insightful and seems like they really get it. I want to work with that company. And I guess anyone, I don't really care who I work with because they all seem super legit. Daniel: That's such an interesting point, Anthony. And employee generated content, whatever you want to call it, is something that I think is very new right now but can be very powerful. And the people that are able to get their team members, their sales team, other folks to post besides just the CEO or besides just the founders, are really onto something. But I also think there is some challenges around getting people to post. Matt: And one of the things that Daniel, my co-host, and I have talked about and heard from some of our other guests is that it sometimes can be challenging to convince employees to post if they aren't incentivized to because unless you have some sort of program in place where if they post, they're going to see some sort of benefit, then it's hard to convince them to put themselves out there. And it is their face still at the end of the day on LinkedIn. So how do you think about that? And I know maybe for you guys, it's still in the ideas phase of how do we spread the brand equity, but I do like where that's headed. Daniel: Yeah, I think it's different for consultancies. So, for example, let's say I work for Stripe, which is like a payments platform. And Stripe's like, we think we really want to get employees to post about Stripe. And so I start doing posts about like payments processing and different vendors and stuff like that. Yes, I'm helping maybe get more business for Stripe, but that's not really doing anything for me personally. The thing that I think makes it slightly more attractive to a consultant who specializes, let's say, in positioning or product marketing in the field that we're in is basically, it's like you're going to get to piggyback off of our credibility where we are seen as an industry leader in product marketing for B2B companies. Your whole background is in B2B. Your whole background is in software. Any posting that you do where you borrow our credibility and then it goes on to you and now you're seen as this super legit product marketing person, if you ever leave our company, your job prospects will be a lot higher because you'll be able to say, oh, I'm one of X Fletch employee, which in our little sphere, we're only hiring people from our sphere, that actually carries a little bit of weight. So people say, oh, you're like, like even our team member Sarah, she's gone to a couple of these product marketing events and stuff like that. When people hear that she works for us, instant credibility. They're like, wow, this is amazing. Like you must be so legit. So like even that company, Refine Labs, almost all the initial people who built their audiences with Refine have gone on to do their own stuff. You know, maybe they work two, three years with the company, then they go on to do their own thing. Many of them have landed really great jobs in companies that are kind of in the space or have gone out to be their own consultants and were able to piggyback off in the audiences they've built. Daniel: So I think the employee posting strategy makes a lot of sense if it really is a win-win where you're like, the stuff that's going to grow your audience will directly translate to future audience growth that you could have, future business you could do if you go consulting or future job prospects because it's all kind of working together versus like, oh, check out, you know, I'm promoting my sandwich business or something that I work for the sandwich company and posting Instagram content about sandwiches. And then maybe I got a couple of followers, but then I go to work somewhere else and it's a completely different industry. It doesn't help me at all. So that's kind of how we've been thinking about it. I want to also pick your brain on product marketing, of course, since you guys have positioned so many software companies. What are the most common mistakes that you see with software founders and how they position their businesses? Matt: Yo, great question. So, I mean, I think, like I was saying before, the challenge with software is that it is so flexible. And another thing to think about too is like, so imagine you've created a company that sells bikes. You set up the factory. You get everything in place. You buy all the materials. You create the bikes and then you have to market them, distribute them, ship them, get them to stores, whatever that might be. You can't really fundamentally change the bike design without a pretty significant lift, like changing the whole factory. Like if you're like, oh, we don't think it should be a bicycle anymore. It should be a tricycle or something. Like it needs to have three wheels now. Like, okay, well, this is going to be pretty big to change that. Software is not like that. Software, you hire some engineers. They create the initial version of the product. And then the cadence is that every two weeks, they have a software sprint where they ship something new. So it's like, can you imagine the bike every week, it gets another wheel. It gets another seat. It gets another size. So all of a sudden, something that was very simple becomes very complex. And it's because when they go to sell the bike to company A, company A says, well, we would like the bike great a lot more if it had 10 speeds. And you go, great. So you add 10 speeds to the bike, sell it to them because it's maybe a couple of weeks of the engineer's time. Someone else comes in and is like, we need it to have like mountain biking tires. And then you say, okay, we're going to change that. And then someone else is like, can it be motorized? So each different company will ask for things because it's software and so flexible. Most companies will just change the product. And it's sort of like the result of an undisciplined product strategy where they'll just keep adding and adding and adding to win different clients. Matt: And then at the end of it, they're looking at something that used to be a bike and now is this crazy monstrosity that does all these different things for different people. And then they're like, how do we explain this? And then they come up with some stupid tagline that's like, you know, mobility for anyone. And then they put that on the website and then people see it and they're like, what the heck is this thing? I don't even understand. Who would you, what is it? And that's what happens to all these software companies. Like they keep adding on their product. Something that made sense and was really easy to understand at the beginning has become this massive platform. And they don't really realize the implications of like, okay, well, if I win one big company over here for this giant set of features I had to build for them, are there enough other companies who would want that same set of features that would make sense for me to build it? Or is this kind of just bespoke to win over just that group? And so most people don't think that way because they're not marketers. They're engineers. And they're like, could it be done? Oh, it could. Great. Let's do it. Then they go and close the deal. But eventually it gets to this point where the product is this massive platform. Nobody really wants to buy all the different things in it, but now they want to sell all the things that are in it because they're like, well, before we were this little point solution and we can only sell it for X amount. Now that we're this giant platform, we should be able to sell it for a hundred times that amount. But is there really a market for someone to want every single thing you've now added for this giant platform? And a lot of times there isn't. So that leads to these really confusing homepages, really confusing marketing language, really ineffective sales and outbound strategies and things like that because you're the messages you have to pitch are so broad and unspecific, but people buy very specific things for their businesses. So they'll be like, Hey, would you like help growing your company? Our software platform can help you grow. And you're like, I'm sending this to the spam folder. Or at the beginning, it would be something very specific. Like, Hey, are you trying to get this specific compliance certification? And like, I am like, we can help automate the whole thing. Like that sounds great. And then they would take the meeting. But you know, you can't just stay the small point solution. So it's like, that's, that's the struggle that a lot of these companies fall into, which then leads to these really complicated positioning problems. Daniel: That was so well articulated, Anthony. I don't have anything to add to that. I can tell you're a positioning expert and anyone who's listening, who maybe runs a software company, I know there's a lot of founders that tune in. Definitely go, go talk to Anthony. Matt: If you want him to take a look at your homepage, Anthony, I want to pivot to very specifically LinkedIn. Now you've been using the Many people's posts, and I'm sure it's the same thing for a lot of my posts, it's the same people are seeing them over and over and over again, where it's like, I'm sure there are more people who could be reached by this audience, but the content is really just going probably to my existing audience. And like, you could see this in like me and my sister who works for the company. She'll post something adjacent to what we work with, right? Stuff about copywriting for B2B companies, things like that. Very similar style. Like we're all using kind of the same Fletch design aesthetic. We'll both post it. Let's say they both get 30,000 impressions. She'll get 300 new followers, and I'll get nine new followers. And it's like, clearly the 30,000 impressions are going to 30,000 of my existing followers, and hers, because she's very new, are going to all new people. So I don't know if there's a fix for that, but I wish there was a way that you could sort of do something like that. It's also funny. There's some people who are building startups on top of LinkedIn. Like the DM experience is horrible on LinkedIn. It's like so clunky. You'll archive a person's DM and then it'll come back all of a sudden, like there's buggy and things like that. There's a guy named Mitchell who created this company called Kondo, which is basically just the LinkedIn DMs, but in like a really nice modern interface. And I pay for Kondo, and whenever I need to do a bunch of DMs, I'll go into there, and it basically it's just a front-end on top of LinkedIn. And it's like, you know, LinkedIn's shipping these silly games, like they have these weird puzzles. Like, who's doing LinkedIn puzzles? Like you could have used those engineers to fix the DM experience so that people like Mitchell don't have to go and make entirely separate products to fix this. Another lady I know, she just started a company called Scoops, and it's basically when you save a post on LinkedIn, you're like, oh, this is so helpful. I'll save it. The save folder is impossible to find. Like, gun to my head right now, where is the save folder? I would not be able to find it. So she built a whole product that's just like a layer on top that shows you all your saved posts. You could organize them. You could put them in folders. Like there's so many things in the product that you think they could just fix that they just don't. Like, and it's also one last funny thing is like, you know, people always say, Oh, features are so easy to copy. Like, oh, you know, you launch a new feature, all your competitors are going to launch the same feature. And I'm like, that might be true, but it seems like it's not easy to get them right. Like, you know, we all like Spotify wrapped, where at the end of the year, you have your Spotify wrap. That's like, here's all the music you listened to. Daniel: And it's super fun and engaging and everyone shares it on their stories and stuff. LinkedIn did their own wrap and almost all the stats in the LinkedIn wrap were wrong. Like my brother, he posts on LinkedIn. He's got a decent size audience. He's got about 30,000 followers. LinkedIn told him, you gained 90,000 followers this year. And he's only at 30 total. And I'm like, you're a multi-billion dollar company. How could you get these things so wrong? So those are like some of the little qualms. Matt: But overall, I still tell people, if you want to grow your business, I still think LinkedIn organic is the biggest, highly leveraged activity you can do in 2025 if you're selling to other businesses. Not if you're a consumer product, it's not a great fit for that. But if you're a business that sells to other businesses and your types of businesses you would sell to are on LinkedIn, there is no cheaper and more efficient way to reach them than doing LinkedIn organic. Daniel: I'm so glad that you said that, Anthony, in that doing LinkedIn organic, that's exactly the reason why I started my own agency. We focus purely on organic content on LinkedIn for brands and founders. We also work with a lot of software businesses. And I wanted to ask you, though, on that point, if I'm a founder, say I run a software company and I want to start leveraging LinkedIn organic for my marketing, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what to post. Where would you start? Matt: Yeah. It's really, you have to have some sort of insight as to a problem that you have some insight around how to solve it, that people maybe have overlooked. The more you can take something that's like modern wisdom, modern advice that is like best practices, that's actually not very good, and show that this thing that everyone kind of believes is actually really leading you astray. That type of content performs really well. Daniel: So for example, when we were first looking at people's homepages and we're like, why are all these companies so confusing? There's another big reason why, other than the one that I described before, where it's like the product's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Another big reason that people struggle to explain it is because there's just really common wisdom of, they say, start with why. You've probably heard that Simon Sinek guy, he wrote this book called *Start with Why*. People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. All this type of stuff. And that gets translated to, like, lead with the benefit. Lead with the business outcomes you can drive. And so when people see that, they put on their homepage, increase your revenue with our software product. But that doesn't tell me anything about what the product actually is. So we would do all these posts about, hey, starting with why is actually not a great idea for a software company. Matt: Because especially if you're a startup, nobody gives a rip about your why, because people would post like, you know, about their company's vision and mission, and like, we're here to transform the HR space. We're going to totally overhaul the way that logistics are done or whatever it is. Nobody really cares. People are like, I just want to know, is this software going to help me in my day-to-day life? And when they're like, we're going to grow your business. They're like, okay, but that's what everyone claims. What do you actually do? Daniel: So for us, it was this contrarian take to say, actually starting with why is leading you astray. Putting a bunch of examples of websites that start with the why that are so confusing and vague that nobody would care about them and showing that, those types of posts really, really do well. So it was an insight related to the service we deliver that got a lot of traction. Matt: So if you're going to go and promote your business on LinkedIn, you kind of want to look for what are best practices, general things related to the field of what you do and find why you think those things are broken and then post these kind of contrarian things that alter people's perception. That type of stuff goes really, really well on the platform. Daniel: And there's a lot of stuff too that people do that's kind of hacky to get more followers. But in my opinion, they don't necessarily translate to the right kind of followers. It's like posting selfies or posting personal stories. Like that can work for some people. I think it's, to me, I'm like, especially if you're in a consulting or coaching or freelance contractor business, I think that seems like a waste of time. Like we've gotten to 77,000 followers. I've never done a post like that. No selfie post, no personal story posts, no, this is what my friend's wedding taught me about B2B marketing, none of that. Like LinkedIn lunatics stuff. It's all just been like stuff related to the expertise, insights about the market, insights about things to help people do their job better. A lot of how-tos. Matt: Like there's a lady named Wes, Wes KO. She works for a company called Maven, or she did. I don't know if she's still there. Brilliant, brilliant woman. And she came up with these two phrases that we used at the very beginning. You should have a spiky opinion. So that's kind of along those lines of the contrarian stuff I was talking about. And then a super specific how. So when you create content, show people how to do something in a very specific scenario, very detailed way, like not a high level thing, like really, really specific. Daniel: Those also perform really, really well on the platform. And like, even just putting how-to in the title of a post, I've done a scientific test on this, but like, I bet you, if you did some sort of AB test, not using the phrase how-to and using the phrase how-to, I think the how-tos will outperform it probably two to one. Matt: I really like that point about the spiky opinion, which is probably going to be a little bit attention-grabbing, but then you back it up with providing a very specific how. And so you're giving that value. So it's not necessarily clickbaity because you're still delivering on a promise. And with that spiky opinion, you're hopefully beating out the hundreds of other posts in the feed that sound a little bit more generic or a little bit less interesting for someone to invest their time in. Anthony, it sounds like you take a very value-driven, insight-driven approach to your content. And anytime you are posting something, it's either taking knowledge or insights from your existing work with clients or posting about a common pain point that the software founders may have and then giving them a really detailed how-to or insight that they can action either today or Daniel: You can fight that, or you can lean into it. And we think the best decision is to just lean into it. So a lot of software companies, right? They'll be like, we got, there's a company called Gong. They got really, really popular because they were the first call recorders. The little thing that joins your Zoom call, records the meeting, gives you notes. To this day, most people think of Gong as call recording. And if you read Gong's website, you could imagine that they are very upset that people mainly still think of them as call recording because they've expanded the platform so we do so much more than call recording. And they're constantly fighting it. But now when they encounter new people who didn't know them before, they're greeted with this gobbledygook that doesn't make any sense. What the heck is this thing? And they have all these jargon and stuff like that. And they've lost that initial wedge, that initial Trojan horse method of getting a spot in people's minds. And I think the growth starts to slow when you get to these points because the thing that people knew before, it's actually, that's your biggest win. It's like you, if you're a singer, you would rather have a one-hit wonder that everyone associates you with than have no hits at all. Sometimes companies are amazing and they can have multiple hits, right? Like someone like Apple. For years, they're the computer company. Then they come out with the iPod. Oh, now they're the iPod company. Then they come out with the iPhone. They're the iPhone company. Like, each giant win repositions, changes people's perception of what Apple is. Most companies can't do that. Most companies will get one hit. And it's like, they'll spend their whole life of the company fighting that hit because they don't want to be the one, oh, like you can imagine the singer. I don't want to keep playing this, my biggest song. I have such... Listen to my whole catalog and everyone's like, that's the good one though. That's what everyone wants to hear. You know? So I would say lean into it. Let people box you in. Daniel: Let them, because that's going to make you so much easier to refer, so much easier to be remembered, so much easier to be bought. Matt: Sounds like Gong needs to give you guys a call. We've made fun of them so many times on LinkedIn. Daniel: They're probably not going to call us. They're the butt of a lot of our jokes, so we've probably burned that bridge many years ago. Matt: Appreciate it. Daniel: Well, thanks for the time, Anthony. This has been an awesome conversation. Matt: For sure. Thanks so much for having me. Super fun.