In this episode of GTM Innovators, Kyle James chats with Finn Thormeier, founder of Project 33, about how B2B founders and execs can unlock growth by building authentic, strategic personal brands. Finn breaks down what separates real thought leaders from content noise, how to turn subject-matter expertise into consistent demand, and why controversial takes (when done right) drive results. If you’re leading a GTM motion and want your voice to cut through, this episode is your playbook.
Finn’s Top 100 Target Accounts Playbook
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Transcript:
Kyle James 00:00
Kyle, welcome to another episode of GTM Innovators by 3Sixty Insights. I’m your host, Kyle James, and today we’re diving into a thought provoking sales and marketing playbook. Joining me today is Finn Thormeier. Finn is the founder at Project 33 then welcome to the show.
Finn Thormeier 00:24
Thanks for having me, man. So you and
Kyle James 00:27
I were kind of getting to know each other a little bit before the show started, and I spent some time kind of going through the project 33 website. And I think the perfect place to start is like your origin story is fascinating. It looks like you’re a very open book, the way that y’all do everything there. So let’s start there, like, let’s start with your origin story, how you came to found project 33 and then we’ll kind of dive into some of the details about how I found you and connected with you on LinkedIn. Sure.
Finn Thormeier 00:54
Yeah, let’s do it. I guess it started when I dropped out of college, I was studying physics and philosophy and in university, and dropped out because I was just doing it, because it’s kind of the normal thing to do. It’s what you do after high school. And but I didn’t really have a plan of what I wanted to do instead, and so I, I was, I would say, open minded about where my career would go. Maybe start a company, maybe do comedy, maybe do acting, I don’t know, just like randomly trying to physics,
Kyle James 01:25
there you go.
Finn Thormeier 01:28
I was just like, I think I just really embraced the whole like, let me actually figure out what I would want to do with my life if everything’s on the table. And so I thought about like, Man, that’s a big project. How do you even figure that out? You know? And it might take me a while to figure out what it is, right? And so I thought, What is the thing that I can already start doing now, not knowing what I want to be? And that thing was essentially like, document the journey, create content around me and my life and what I was doing and the decisions I was making. And I actually started out writing a blog because, like, I was, I didn’t have social media like I was not that person that was super on social media and super active. So I started blogging. Realized pretty quickly that that’s not the best way to build an audience organically anymore. And so, like, created an Instagram account, LinkedIn account, Twitter account, YouTube account, Snapchat account, all of those accounts. And just, you know, created content around what I was thinking about and that I dropped out and who I was meeting, and initial assumptions that I had and what I will try out next, and all those things and and ended up flying from Germany, Bremen, where I was, to New York, really, because I just realized I was too comfortable. And after I dropped out of college, I moved back into my parents place, because, you know, I didn’t have money, I didn’t have cash flow, so I needed to, and I just realized that that was way too you fall back into old patterns if you if you live with your parents, and that that was not really conducive to try to explore and, you know, learn new things about myself and who I want to be. And so I went on this walk. I haven’t told this story in a while, but I went on this walk because I had this, like, weird gap month between I was doing, like, a job, a fundraising job that I was doing to make some money, and but there was a month break. And so I was kind of like, what do I do with this month? Like, I don’t know what. And I went on this walk, put in some music. I was like, Man, I should do something crazy. I should, I should get out of here and go somewhere and just do something uncomfortable. And I was like, What’s the craziest place that I could go to right now? And I was like, New York. That was somehow the place that came to mind, because, like, this is across the ocean, different country. I’ve never was in the I’ve never been to the US. I don’t know anyone there New York, just, you know, it’s that dream where people go to, like, chase their dreams or whatever. So, like, I literally on that call after, after that walk, you know, listening to that music, I walked home, straight up to my computer, and I booked a flight. I think it was four days later, because, for some reason, I already knew back then that you need to act on inspiration. And I’m pretty sure that if I had said, no, let me just sleep a night on it think it through, I would have just woken up and be like, That’s a stupid idea to go to New York. Like, why would you do that? And I wouldn’t have done it. So I somehow had the, you know, the naive wisdom back then to just know that I had to, in that moment, book the flight, you know, burn my boats, and so flew to New York, had a flight back a week later, because you need an exit flight so that let you in, so that you can show intent of leaving the country. Ended up staying for three months. Yes, flew back to Germany, renewed my estats like a mini visa, came back for another three months, stayed in New York for six months. And I just like, you know, did things like I met people. I went to, like, three networking events every single day, all kinds of things like photographer meetup and yoga in the park and crypto meetup, and just like, you know, random shit, especially if there was free food that was the event, I would prioritize that it would, you know, make my New York stay easier. Otherwise, I just ate cashew butter out of a jar that was like one Bodega that sold expired cashew butter for half price off, and that’s that was, like one or two meals that I had every single day. Anyway, I’m digressing. You interrupt me when I’m going, when I’m like, you know,
Kyle James 05:51
it’s your origin story. Is your own go to market story. So,
Finn Thormeier 05:55
so I’m in New York at this point, like I had been creating content for maybe six months after dropping out and kind of doing some small jobs, fundraising, stuff like that, like charity fundraising and I was kind of settling on Instagram, Youtube and LinkedIn. Those were, like my three places, LinkedIn, very early on, that was when Microsoft had just bought LinkedIn, like 2018 and they had just introduced native video on LinkedIn. So before that, you could only post text post. You couldn’t upload a video file onto LinkedIn. And so I was a friend of mine told me, like, Yo, you got to post videos on LinkedIn. And so I did. So I was probably the the most random LinkedIn content ever, because we, there were all these serious business people doing it to like, you know, whatever, create demand for the company and all these things. I was just like, essentially vlogging on LinkedIn, and just like posting these events that you were going to and stuff like, yeah, like people I was meeting, just like random thoughts that I had and insights that I had, and I was growing an audience. Mainly, I don’t think because my content was great, maybe it was authentic, but it was just so early, like no one was posting video, and you were just, like, getting free distribution, and
Kyle James 07:16
they were notion that, because they wanted, yeah, people do that. So you were like, exactly, probably didn’t even realize it exactly. And so
Finn Thormeier 07:23
that was happening, I was posting on Instagram. I was doing the daily weekly vlog at that time on YouTube, and going to three meetups every day. And one of the meetups was an Instagram growth hacker meetup. And it was all of these Instagram influencers, like big accounts who had like, hundreds of 1000s of followers, who were like, making real money through Instagram. And they were like, you know, the idea was to kind of exchange tactics and ideas and what they were doing to grow their account and monetize it. And I was like, saw it, and like, went there, and I probably had 3000 followers on Instagram at that point, but I went and they did this thing where you could, in front of the whole room, kind of project your Instagram onto the wall, and then talk through, like, what you do and why you’re doing it. You know, growth tactics you’re using, what hashtags you’re using, and all this stuff. And I had a, I had a mod motto back then that that I called do the uncomfortable. And the idea was that if I feel uncomfortable about doing something, there’s value in doing it just for the sake of doing it, because it means that I will have done something I was uncomfortable with. And that’s already valuable on its own, sure. Um, so it’s like, man, that would be super kind of uncomfortable to just walk up there and show these, like established influencers, my 3000 follower Instagram account. I was like, Okay, now I gotta do it, shit. So I walked up, I showed them. And at the time I was doing this thing, and I was experimenting with it. Instagram had just launched Instagram story ads. So that was a new ad placement that they had just introduced. Instagram stories were still relatively new. And then couple months later, they introduced story ads. And so one of the things that I was doing was run Instagram story ads to promote my account. So I had at that top at point, like 300 followers, but I was growing at like 100 followers a day on like a $30 per month budget because I was spending the minimum, which was $1 a day, and I was running these ads which was kind of like, Hey, I’m this kid. I dropped out of university. I’m in New York. I don’t know what I’m doing here, but if you want to follow along the journey, go here, and then the link was just to my LinkedIn, to my Instagram profile, and so I was kind of using it as a follower growth tactic, and I presented this kind of not thinking anything crazy. And after the event, the organizer, Eduardo, approached me. And he had this, like, big Instagram account called pin Lord at the time. And he was like, that’s really cool. What you did there, could you set that up for me? And I was like, Sure. So we met. We met up for coffee. The next day. He bought my coffee. I was happy, and we just sat there on his laptop, and I just showed him how to set it up. And after we were done, which was like, 30 minutes, or whatever, he was like, What’s your PayPal? I was like, why? It’s like, I want to pay you $100 this is super valuable for me. Like, I’m going to use this. It’s like, I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, you got me coffee, like, I’m happy. He was like, no, look, what’s your PayPal? And so that’s the first money I earned with kind of this whole like, you know, I don’t know growth, personal branding type stuff, you know. And that meeting, that Instagram growth meetup, was also the first time where I kind of learned, to some extent, I kind of had a hint that what I was doing was called Personal Branding, that there was this term for it. I didn’t have a term for it. I was just, like, posting random shit about what I was up to. Yeah, I wasn’t building a personal brand in my head, you know? And so Eduardo, after paying me the $100 he also introduced me to a couple of friends that he had, and was like, this kid, like he knows shit because he’s just hacking away at things and and so we call those growth hackers now, but really you just, yeah, exactly. And so that was happening. And then at the same time, kind of I was in New York, I was also posting these kind of log style videos on LinkedIn. And I just got approached by two business owners in New York, and said, like, these videos that you’re posting on LinkedIn, that’s cool. Can you help me do that? And I’ll pay you money for it? And I was just again, like, why? I can show you how to do it. But why would you want to pay me money for it, you know? And so that’s, that’s how it, in a sense, all started end of 2019. Was when I had a friend of mine, Ben, who was already a freelance copywriter, and so, like we kind of CO I told him this thing and and we co founded this thing that we call the LinkedIn personal branding agency back then, because we, we kind of felt like this could be something that we do for More people, and he already knew, like contracts and proposals and invoices and all these things I had no idea about. And so we, we started with those two customers. Obviously didn’t retain them for very long, because we had no fucking idea what we were doing. But yeah, that’s how it started. And then, you know, that was kind of the birth of the agency, and then since then, it just been a a continuous process of just iteration, I guess, of narrowing down who we work with, what industry the offer, systemizing the whole approach of how we do it, obviously improving the service delivery and all of that. So yeah,
Kyle James 13:00
so let me ask you, it’s fascinating. Like, have you ever heard of the 9010 concept when it comes to content and like audiences and all this stuff? It sounds like you fell into that, not even knowing that. Tell me what it is. So, so But, and I think it’s 9010 it might be 8020 but it’s been a while, but. But when you think about it, it makes sense that, like, 90% of people consume content. 10% of people produce content, right? Most people are not producers. And what you’re getting into is there is this Venn diagram, if you will, of like CEOs and founders and thought leaders that have no idea how to produce the content, but those are the ones that need to be producing the content. Sure. How do you take them out of the 90% and put them in the 10% and what you kind of stumbled into, and have just like organically figured out, is, like, what is the template process for doing those things? Yeah,
Finn Thormeier 13:52
I just actually today, reta said that on LinkedIn, it’s actually 99 to one. Still,
Kyle James 13:58
is it? Is it even crazier than that? Okay, yeah, it’s changed more, I guess maybe. So maybe it’s 99 one, and it’s like,
Finn Thormeier 14:07
it depends on the platform. Also, I think on Instagram it’s something like 7723 or something like that. But
Kyle James 14:16
there’s some crazy percentage of people, yeah, consumer content still, even though you can’t produce and and really, what you’ve kind of figured out, and, you know, is, and kind of how I found you is friend of mine, Matt Stein, shout out to you, buddy. Posted something like, re shared something that you put out recently about, kind of this essentially an AB in playbook. But hey, if God, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna read it, because, at least the beginning of it, because I don’t want to mess it up. And it’s so brilliant, like, but you’re basically like, if I was a CEO, if my CEO asked me to book a demo with our top 100 target accounts in the next 90 days. Here’s how I get it done. And then you literally systematically walk them through the steps of exactly how you would go about doing that. And that’s what I find amazing and so cool. About what you’re doing is you’re transparent about everything, like on your website, like, there’s a 15 page Word document of exactly how you go about doing all this stuff, but then you still got people that are paying you 10s of 1000s of dollars just like, execute upon it. And I think that’s the
Finn Thormeier 15:15
nice thing about CEOs, you know, they they have money, but they don’t have time. So, yeah, if you can demonstrate that you know how to do something, they’re super happy to just have you do it for them, even if that means, you know, spending some money, because it will save them time,
Kyle James 15:30
yeah, yeah. And I think what’s interesting is there’s this, there’s this form of kind of go to market that’s become very popular. Basically, founder led growth, right? And it seems like that’s the niche you’ve really taken is like, how do you take these founders and let them lead the growth and generate leads and skills and build out a whole process about how to do that sort of stuff? Yeah, did it all just organically, just like hacking and figuring it out? Or was there some, like, light bulbs that you had along the way?
Finn Thormeier 16:00
No, I think I mean to some extent, it’s, it’s, it’s what we just started out with. Because the nice thing about how project 33 happened is that I was doing this without realizing, right, I was the founder, and I was putting out videos on LinkedIn and Instagram and YouTube, and that’s how we got customers, right? And then it was natural for me to just that. That’s the service that we also do for people. I think there was just a refinement in terms of like, initially, was just anyone who wanted to, like, create content. So it was a lot of coaches, consultants, sometimes artists, who wanted to grow on Instagram to sell their you know, products or whatever. And so I think part of it is just realizing who can actually, who actually has a good budget, so that that makes us move more to the CEO, business owner of a you know, company, and then, and then, at some point, just realize it really helps to kind of niche down. And that’s when we decided on SAS, because 70% of our customers were already just happened to be software companies for whatever reason, maybe because we’re very kind of system and process driven, and that just resonates more with software founders. And so I was like, if it’s already kind of naturally who we attract, let’s just, you know, put a stake in the ground and say we only work with them and then just refining of understanding, because we also did other leaders at companies. You know, sometimes it’s the head of product or the head of HR, and I still think sometimes they’re better suited than the founder, but it’s just that there’s this nice POV around if you happen to be the founder who’s also the right subject matter experts for the ICP that you’re attracting, it’s just, it’s so powerful if you do it,
Kyle James 17:49
let’s double click into that. Like you a company reaches out to you. See whoever reaches out to you, it wants to work with you. How do you go about that decision of, like, what are your right fit? Are we going to work with you or not? But like, who is the right person in the company that could become kind of the thought leader to lead this kind of content initiative?
Finn Thormeier 18:08
Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of elements to it. I think one is, who are you selling to? Who’s your ACP, right? If you sell to heads of HR, you need to create content that a head of HR will want to read and learn from and follow. And so you need to either have an HR background. You need to maybe have Biron head of HR before you started this company. Or at least, you need to have a pulse on what’s happening in the world of HR by talking to tons of these people, going to the conferences, reading up on other people. But what, for example, does not work is, if you sell to VPs of engineering, and then the person that you take it doesn’t have an engineering background, it’s like that. That’s not gonna work. And that and that exists, right? That exists many times. It exists, especially for CEOs, right? If you get hired as a CEO, you might have a private equity, sales, consulting, management background, but you’re selling to product people, yeah, it’s like, that’s probably not the right fit. So there needs to be this kind of founder audience fit so that we can then it’s like, what’s the depth of that? Because thought leadership is called thought leadership, because it’s you’re leading thoughts, you know? So by definition, most people are not thought leaders, right? They’re followers. They’re the people who just follow and do the best practices. And so there’s a difference between someone who, you know, who more or less does things by the book, as in the established consensus of how these things should be done, whether you’re an head of HR or VP of engineering, like there’s a the norm. Way of doing these things, yeah, and then there’s like, I actually disagree with this. I actually think the way that it’s done today is broken. I actually think most of the methods that we apply today are from 10 years ago, and in 2025 you need to do it differently and in this way, right? And so like trying to tease that out, and it’s not always easy and straightforward forward, but I think that’s important. It’s important how close you are to customers, because what sometimes happens is, let’s say you’re a software engineer, and you you you you freelance, and then you start building a software development company, and you hire people, and you train people, and now you’re like, running 100 people organization that does custom software development for people. Yeah, you’re not the software developer anymore. You’re now the CEO. You’re the person hiring people and managing the PnL. But you’re not building product. You’re not coding anymore. You’re not working with these AI products. And so if that’s who your ICP is, you maybe had that expertise 10 years ago when you started, but now you’re not, so you’re out of the game. And so the insights that you share will be kind of out of touch. That’s important. So like really having a pulse on things, which might just mean that you talk to five customers every week. Like, that’s that’s actually something that we ask everyone. It’s like, how many customers and prospects do you speak with on a weekly basis? And you will be surprised by the number of CEOs and founders of companies that are doing, let’s say, 5 million or more in revenue, who do not talk to customers a lot, and that’s the problem, because it’s like, that’s who we’re trying to attract. So unless you talk to a ton of them, you don’t have a pulse on what they care about. You know, what? What goals and priorities they currently have? Because that’s what we need to create content about.
Kyle James 22:00
Totally believe it too. Yeah, it’s what are their pains? What are their joys? What do they like you? What do they hate? Exactly? Understand all those things. Why are you winning versus not winning and then solving all those things? I’m curious too, because,
Finn Thormeier 22:12
sorry, I have one more thing. Oh, yeah, go for it. They need to be excited about this whole thing, about creating content and being out there and creating a brand, because in the end, it’s still you putting yourself out there. And so sometimes there’s this FOMO driven thing where they see someone like, I don’t know Adam Robertson or Chris Walker or founders who are successful with this, and they’re like, I should do this. But really they’re like, despise social media, and these people creating content, or it’s their cmo who tells them, like, Hey, you should do this. But really the founders, like, I don’t really want to, but if you tell me CMO, then I’ll do it. That’s never going to work. Like they need to see and believe and be excited about the idea of educating people and all of those
Kyle James 22:56
things. So okay, you teared up because I was going to ask you to me, like, I think about the person, well, one to be a thought leader, like, you literally have to go shatter from the mountaintop, because if you don’t say it, no one’s ever going to know your thought leader. Sure, and you got to be okay, like, putting yourself out there. But I think you dove in and tell me what I’m wrong. Like, could you identify and find and bring these people to life? Like they have to want to teach, right? Like, they have to, like, have some sort of a teacher. But are there any sort of other identifiers or persona traits that they have that that you find makes for really successful thought leaders?
Finn Thormeier 23:35
Then I think there is this. It really helps not being a perfectionist, because we’re not creating blockbuster content. We’re creating social content. We’re creating two or three or four posts per week, so there will sometimes be, I don’t know, something in the background. There will sometimes be a glitch in the video. There will with as much as we try, there will sometimes be a typo in the copy. Yeah, and if you are so hell bent of everything needs to be picture perfect, you’re gonna have a horrible, horrible time. Plus there, right? It’s not actually obvious that you want to have picture perfect stuff, because people can tell that it’s just too rounded around the edges, and it just feels too perfect. It looks like an ad, you know? And so it’s it, it. It often is actually beneficial to have a typo in there, even on them, because that makes people feel like they’re listening to a real person. Yes, the quality of the insight that matters, not that you miss an apostrophe or something like that. So it really helps not being a perfectionist. It also really helps being willing to ruffle feather. Course, little controversy, because, like, yeah, it’s and it’s not about being controversial for the sake of being controversial. And, you know, making some random statement about Trump or whatever, but it’s like, if you are a real thought leader, that is probably because you disagree with the consensus and you actually believe that some of the things that people do are is stupid or doesn’t make sense, so that some of the established companies in this space do it wrong. And unless you’re willing to say that, not exaggerate it, but just say it the way that you think it, then it’s again, it’s not going to work. And again, we work with these customers sometimes, and we try to identify it early on, and then, you know, mutually agree that it won’t work because they’re trying to be too diplomatic. Yeah, right, yeah, um, which
Kyle James 25:55
so I struggle with, right? Because I’m probably tough for my accent. I’m from South the United States, and my mom taught me ain’t got anything nice to say. Don’t say anything at all. And what you’re saying is, you know, well, if you don’t ever say anything not nice, you’re not getting controversial. You’re not like ruffling feathers, you’re not pushing hard buttons. And
Finn Thormeier 26:15
it’s not again, it’s not it’s not about lying. It’s just like, if that’s what you think, yeah, then that needs to get out there, right on your field, like you don’t have to, you know, talk about your political affiliations, but if you believe something about go to market, or you saw what someone else said, and you’re like, Chris Walker said this, I disagree. And here’s why, like, that needs to go out there, you know,
Kyle James 26:42
yeah, get that take out there. Um, I’m curious, too. Working with a lot of like establishing building thought leaders, you must have some fascinating stories of like, they were kind of hesitant or or wasn’t sure going to work. Then you put out some great content, and it lit up, and they were absolutely shocked at the virality of it, or something like that. You got any interesting stories like that, or what you discovered from some of that?
Finn Thormeier 27:08
I think for me, it just sometimes I think we want to make it work without going viral, because it’s hard to engineer virality. Plus, you know, we have customers who sell to Fortune 500 CTOs. That’s a very small audience. You know, you know, what are you going to say that a fortune 500 CTO will find interesting and valuable and insightful that also reaches 100,000 people? Probably nothing, right? And so if that’s what you’re chasing, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Now we do have I remember one post we worked with this founder until he sold his company. He was previously a VP at AWS, and we created this post around before he started this company, when he was at AWS, he was tasked with finding 400 million in cloud cost savings. And we did a breakdown video. It was like a long, four or five minute video around the three main levers or strategies he’s implemented. He implemented to find those $400 million in savings. That post got like 700 800 likes, and, you know, almost 100,000 impressions. And I was just like, I would have never thought that that topic could do so well. You know, I think for me, almost the more fun ones are. Where, like, I remember one customer telling us that, because every week we interview them, right? And we interview them around conversations they’re having with customers and what they’re seeing in the market and updates they’re making to the product that he he always wanted the topics in advance. Customers are like, half, half. Some want the topics in advance. Some just want to the interview and answer the question he wanted them in advance, and he had this routine where every week, I think, the day before or the day off when we recorded the interview, he would do his morning walk and just reflect on the questions that we wanted to ask him, not write down the notes. Role play, just like yeah, he was exactly he was doing, yeah. He was role playing, and obviously it helped create great content. But he gave us this feedback that he felt like he just had such a deeper understanding of his company and his product and his customers, because he would, he would, he would munch on these questions that maybe on a busy day he would otherwise just not deeply think about. And so it helped him when he went fundraising and had to pitch what they’re doing and how and why to investors. And so that, that, to me, is almost a cooler story where there’s this like side benefits. It’s not about the likes. It’s not about the. The followers. It’s not about the impressions. It’s about the because if you’re documenting a journey, and you’re documenting your thoughts like it actually helps you get clarity on where you are and what you’re doing and why, and it makes you think about things that you were otherwise. So it’s like, that’s almost cool up to me, because that’s you know, when people talk about you do it for the journey, not for the outcome, that’s the moment that they realize they’re doing it for the journey. They’re doing it for themselves, and the benefit that they derive, not because they get 100 likes or whatever on a post, it
Kyle James 30:36
forces them to get clarity on what they’re trying to say, and by putting it out there. They’re accountable to it too. Sure. Yeah, that I could totally see that. I can absolutely see that, yeah. What else? What other like side benefits like this is, that’s not an obvious one, but it makes total sense.
Finn Thormeier 30:55
I think a lot of them, because we tend to work with technical founders, so not the like natural markers, the ones who are natural content creators. Because, I mean, to some extent, it’s like, the value add that we bring is just less you know, if this comes natural to you, why do you need us to interview you and help you with this, right? So it’s often the Yeah, yeah. It’s often the ones who really don’t think of themselves as content creators and and so they just become better speakers, because we do a lot of video. And so for video, you you want to be yourself, but, but still, you have a certain standard that you set yourself that you don’t want to just mumble around and repeat yourself and ramble and you know. And so it’s just like with just as if, if if you would do a keynote every single week, yeah, and you would have 52 keynotes under your belt at the end of the year. You’re probably a much better speaker at the end of it, you know. And so it’s, it’s a little bit of that, you know, so again, but that’s kind of the benefit that’s like, you realize you become someone else through going through this process.
Kyle James 32:02
Yeah, well, and you said it yourself, like y’all eat your own dog food, right? You do this same process that you do, that you kind of train people to do. And, I mean, I’m just going back and pulling up this, this kind of post where you step by step, literally, what is this? There’s, there’s 14 steps the entire you give it all away. How do you feel? Like that impacts kind of the people you work with in more because, like, anybody could read this and go do this, and some people will, yeah, but, but I don’t know. Like, I don’t know if I’m asking more of the you know it clearly they know exactly what they’re getting ahead of time and getting into ahead of time. But also like, I don’t know like, like, it clearly makes sense to me. It’s like content marketing. You’re putting, yeah, you’re telling, you’re sharing stuff. You’re establishing yourself as a thought leader on how to do these things. Yeah, what other? What other? What other impact do you get from doing it that way?
Finn Thormeier 33:02
Um, well, demos that, that post that you, that you pulled up there, generated, I think 21 or 22 inbound sales calls for us.
Kyle James 33:13
That’s great. Um, and hopefully more after this, right?
Finn Thormeier 33:16
Yes. And so I think I don’t know. I think one is people who just realize they can trade money for time, and yes, they could do it themselves, but it would take longer to get there. It would take more of the time. And so if they’re a successful company that has revenue and customer and they’re a busy CEO, they’ll much rather outsource this than doing it all themselves. I think that’s one part. I think the other part is also, yes, it’s the whole process, and there’s obviously a lot of nuance to all of this stuff. Like, there’s caveats and nuances. And when you send the connection request, what exactly do you say in there? And when you ask these questions, like, how do you ask follow up questions, and how do you write the copy? Like, we have a whole internal four hour training that I built for our copywriters on how we take in an interview and an answer that a customer does into a LinkedIn post, right? And there’s a whole science around how you write the hook and all these things, right? There’s so many additional things that there’s no way I can fit that all in there. And so I think to some extent, it filters out. If people read this and they’re like, Oh, this is really all there is to this. And I’ll do it myself, that’s actually the type of customer that you don’t want, because they’re the type of customer who, after three months, says, Why are we paying you for this? Like, all you do is, like, ask me a couple questions on on a call, and then you clip the videos and then you upload it to LinkedIn. Because if that’s how they think about it, then that’s not a long term relationship, right, right? Because it’s never what you do is how you do it, right? Like, there’s a million cold email agencies who gonna run cold emails for you. But it’s not the Oh, use this software and send 100 emails per day and send a 14 day seek 14 step sequence. It’s like, what do you say in the copy?
Kyle James 35:19
What’s your hook? Why is it valuable? Why am I paying attention to this? And also, there’s my day in life better to read.
Finn Thormeier 35:24
Yeah, there’s some who are really, really great at writing this, you know, cold email copy, and some who are just really bad at it. And so, you know, just because someone tells you use this tool and send 100 emails per day to, you know, 14 steps, whatever, that’s not, that’s the, that’s the first level knowledge, you know,
Kyle James 35:43
yeah, well, I have to ask this, because so much of what I talk about, everybody wants to talk about these days is kind of AI related, right? How do you see kind of thought leadership and kind of product led growth changing with all the introductions of AI, and how are you bringing it into your processes? Right? I mean, clearly it can help streamline and brainstorm questions and content subjects and clean up copy, grammatically and all that. But, like, how do you see this evolving and changing over the next six, 812, months? Because no one could see any further out than that at this point. Yeah,
Finn Thormeier 36:17
I don’t know. I think I’m almost like, and I do have FOMO about this sometimes I’m, I’m probably not as, as deeply, you know, experimenting with all the AI stuff, as I maybe I should be,
Kyle James 36:31
but that’s interesting or not like that. That’s, that’s,
Finn Thormeier 36:33
I don’t know there’s, it’s like, part of it is just, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s like some Luddite tendencies I have, but it’s like, I mean, I played around with it and but, and we do experiment with things, and we do use it in certain limited use cases, but I don’t know there’s some, there’s, there’s, there’s something in me where, when everyone does this, like, my natural inclination is, like, I’m not interested in that. And so at least the bubble that I’m in everyone is doing AI and experimenting with AI and building with AI and telling you, you got to use AI. And this AI agent and that AI agent. I’m sure there’s a whole plethora of you know, the the industry that does not that, but the world that I’m in that’s like, what everyone does, and so I’m like, I don’t, I don’t know, you know, it’s like, my, my natural inclination is to be like, I’m not. I don’t want to. It’s a country now, take right now. I do think you think that hurts off that authenticity is that you just feel, I think, I think today, yes, because, I mean, the way that at least these language models work right now is that they predict the next word based on the corpus of the internet. Yes. So it’s kind of anti thought leadership, yeah, you’re never gonna have, it’s like, original it’s yeah, it’s gonna create the most averaged out, you know, consensus answer that you can give to any question, right? That’s why, I mean, what definitely never works is, you know, ask the thing of like the AI, you know, write me a LinkedIn post about an interesting take about marketing, because that’s exactly contradictory to how it works right now. I do think so. I think you always need that thought leader. You always need that person who who has that in depth expertise, and who has that that differentiated point of view that is anti consensus. And I do feel like right now, we don’t use AI to write the copy with two amazing copywriters who actually watch the conversation. They get the transcript right, which is AI generated, I guess, but then they take the transcript and they actually write it. So we don’t feed it into an LLM and say, Hey, write me a LinkedIn post. We’re experimenting with it. I think my hope is almost that. I think right now AI is creating a whole lot more noise, right? Because it’s just so easy to create content that just just so much more garbage on the internet now because of it. Yeah, Moore’s Law of content. Yeah, now I hope that the kind of bottleneck that we’re solving is you have a person who actually has deep expertise on a in a field right GraphQL Federation, or, you know, they’ve been a look we work with a customer right now, the previously been the CIO at Microsoft, Disney and VMware, wow, right, like that. That’s insane.
Kyle James 39:48
Yeah, that’s a cohort of one, right there. No one has ever done all of those.
Finn Thormeier 39:51
And I mean, Microsoft, massive, massive company, and then CIO, right? Like, you’re, you’re the most senior leader at that company when it comes to it. So, like. That person has seen things and done things and learned things that is genuinely different to what most IT people know and think, right? So, but the bottleneck is they don’t know content, they don’t understand social media. They maybe don’t want to create videos and all that, right? And we have solved that bottleneck, and hopefully AI will help create, actually long term, more signal, because for all those people who are not natural content creators, but who do have that genuinely, genuine insight and genuine, genuine subject matter expertise, it can just help get that raw material out and get it out into the world. And so I do think in probably 12 months, if you ask me, I will have a very different answer to how we use AI. But as of today, it’s, it’s mostly experimenting with it and using it in limited use cases, rather than, you know, having it right copy for us, or stuff like that there.
Kyle James 41:02
Like I said, it’s a contrarian take, but it’s there’s still value in that. Well, I know, Finn, we’re kind of running out of time here, and I want to be mindful of your time. What? What have I not asked you before we kind of wrap it up here? Like, is there anything that, like, I should have asked you, that we should have dove into, or something that you’re seeing out there working with companies and kind of go to market that has been super fascinating and interesting that not no one’s talking about.
Finn Thormeier 41:28
There’s no one talking about. Well, maybe I think that, and I’m probably guilty of that too, that, people over complicate everything you know, whether it’s how to build a product or how to build a company or how to create content with like all the tools that you can use and connecting some you know, workflows, and an AI agent who researches this thing and then creates a draft and then feeds it into that thing that then, you know, it’s like people are obsessed with this, like aI automation porn. And I think the it, it really just comes down to, who are you creating the content for? Right? Maybe that’s the head of HR at a manufacturing company. Understanding. What is that heads of hrs priorities and goals right now? Yeah, and then being able to provide solutions for that, and that might be a it’s simple insight that might be a step by step playbook, that might be a recommendation for them to read this or consume that so that they resolve this thing. And that’s it, you know. And then, yes, like, how you engineer the hook and all of that, that’s important, sure, and you know, like, what tool you use for automating this, but, and that’s, that’s kind of, that’s to me, still, the hopeful thing is that people stupid, yeah, and people, often, I see people raging about, like, the LinkedIn algorithm, and it’s promoting this, like, shitty, fluffy content and whatever. And maybe there’s some truth to it. But again, it works because people can, people consume them stuff, right? It’s like fast food. It’s like you complain about, or you can understand why it works, and you know why we’re naturally inclined to eat this stuff. But it is also still true that if you have a genuine insight, a genuine thought, a genuine tip or strategy that genuinely helps someone. It does well, yeah, and so if you just focus on that, you know, be very clear on who you’re talking to understand what they care about, not by guessing, but by talking to these people, and then put in the hard work to figure out, how do you solve that for them? And I think again, that’s where, like,
Kyle James 44:28
that’s never changed, right? Like, I never changed. It’s always been there. People are just always looking for
Finn Thormeier 44:35
shortcuts. Quality still wins, you know. And quality might not always think what is, not always what you think it is. In terms of, you know, high production quality, and you got a green screen in the background, quality is inside, um, and so, you know, I think one of the best people on LinkedIn, probably right now, is gal Aga, who’s the CEO at aligned. He goes like viral every week, but look at his posts. His posts are super long, super in depth and sharing incredible level of insight, right? It’s not some fluffy viral Tik Tok video that he’s sharing, but and I interviewed him on my podcast, he spends two to three hours per LinkedIn post. You know, because it’s, it’s the genuine exercise of thinking about, okay, who am I speaking to? In his case, it’s enterprise account executives. It’s what do these people, like, care about right now? Like, what are their problems? What are their desires? What are they’re stuck at, which, again, you only arrive at those things by actually talking to these people and having a pulse on things, going to the events, reading their content, and then sitting down. Okay, I know that one of the things they struggle with is, you know, whatever end of quarter is approaching, there have a couple of deals stalled in pipeline. They’re still only at 70% quota, and they they’re losing sleep trying to figure out how they move forward these stalled deals to hit 100% quota right, and then just sitting down with all of your expertise and all of your insights and all of the things that you’ve seen and heard and just thinking it through, what you would tell that AE, if your life depended on helping them, achieving that right, hitting that 100% quota at the end of the quarter when a couple of big deals stalled. And that’s probably not a quick, like, two minute take of like, oh, just reach out to them. But it’s genuinely sitting down and writing it down being like, no, wait, but this wouldn’t work, because in that case, you know, so I actually need to approach it differently. But then, what tool would I use for this? Let me do some research. Oh, this tool exists. Great. Let me mention it here. And you know, like, what would I actually say in the email that I would send them, because obviously a lot depends on what you say in that email that you let me, like, spend some time to craft the perfect email that I would write to these people. Like it’s spending time. It’s because writing is thinking, Yes, and so I don’t know. I just think that that, and that’s a real moat. Because the thing is, I know that intellectually, and it’s still hard for me to just say I’m just gonna spend three hours writing this LinkedIn post, because it’s so easy to just spend 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and write something that’s decent. But if you’ve been in your space for a while and you’ve done some things like, it’s pretty easy to relatively quickly write something decent, create something decent, right? But to then say, let me spend an additional two and a half hours to just make it great, you’re like,
Kyle James 47:57
Yeah, especially because there’s a good chance it’ll be disappeared a week from now,
Finn Thormeier 48:01
well, and you, you don’t, you can’t predict performance. That’s the because it’s not like someone can guarantee you just spend those two and a half hours and then your post will blow up. Because if you, if you could guarantee it, then everyone would do it. But there’s obviously the risk that you spend those two and a half hours, put in all those sweat, you know, blood, sweat and tears, and then it still only gets 10 likes right now is the chance much higher that it will do much better if you spend those two and a half hours, yes, but it’s not guaranteed. And so even me, who knows this, I’m like, do I? But that post that you saw that was three hours, right? That was me actually spending three hours because I wrote it, and then I had, you know, you actually need to think it through. And you’re like, No, wait, this step needs to actually happen before this step, because otherwise I don’t have the information to be able to do this. So you like, rearrange things, and you’re like, Wait a second. Now that have this info I can, I should also be doing this. And so you like crafted. And then I ended up with something that had 6000 characters, and LinkedIn character limit is 3000 so that was another hour of me like pruning it and kind of chiseling it and being like, Okay, how do I get this down to 3000 characters? What’s all the redundant information? What are maybe the steps that are not quite that necessary? How can I say this more concisely? But that’s time, right? And I’m writing one right now, and I’m trying to be like, Okay, you just invest the time. Invest the time until it’s there. But I’m like, maybe I just ship it now, because who knows, like, I might just post spend all that time, and then it’s gets only, you know, 20 likes, and then I’ll feel like a fool. So I think there’s a real moat in allowing yourself to actually take this to its natural conclusion and just you. Spend that like there’s a reason why Mr. Beast, the number one YouTuber, biggest YouTuber, with the fastest growth, is putting out one YouTube video a month, when everyone else is putting out daily YouTube videos, or at least weekly,
Kyle James 50:16
right? Right? It takes time to do the content, and he understood
Finn Thormeier 50:20
that it’s much more powerful to create one perfect, or close to perfect, banger video, doing something that everyone thinks is just absolutely over the top. And it’s insane that you would do this for YouTube video once a month, then create he could easily create really good YouTube videos twice a week, easily. I mean, he has a massive team, massive budget. He could easily create a top 0.1% YouTube video twice a week. But he understands that going from a 0.1% top 0.1% YouTube video to top 0.001 YouTube video is exponentially more powerful than having eight of those other ones. Yeah, and so I don’t know it’s, um, that’s,
Kyle James 51:10
that’s fantastic. That’s, yeah, it’s probably contrarian point take right, but it’s, I think it’s a really, it’s a really great, like leaving thought for people. Um, this is super insightful. Um, how can let me ask you this, how? How can the audience help you? I mean, definitely we’ll include in the link in the show notes, kind of to that LinkedIn post. We kind of that kind of connected us. Yeah, your your website, you also mentioned a podcast. How else can you know people find it and connect with you on LinkedIn and make sure you follow them so you can get access to this next brainstorm that’s coming, but
Finn Thormeier 51:45
now you’re setting the bar high, so that’s a problem.
Kyle James 51:50
Now you have to put it out.
Finn Thormeier 51:53
Yeah. I mean, on LinkedIn, I do have my own podcast, the founder of that Marketing Show, and other than that, I mean, I love when, you know, I’m a content creator, when people either tell me what resonated or a follow up question they have, because that informs, you know, because to some extent, you’re like a comedian on stage, and you’re throwing some shit against the wall, and then you need to gage the reaction that you’re getting to kind of lead you down a path. So yeah, when I get that information, it’s super useful. Yeah,
Kyle James 52:27
well, I’ll leave it to the audience. If you like this episode, enjoyed this episode, like and subscribe. Leave a comment. Share it with fan. Your favorite part? What did you enjoy? What did what could he do better? What does he need to post better? But what are the parts that really, really resonated with you? And I’ll leave it at that. Thanks everybody for watching, and we’ll be back next weekend with another GTM, innovators and everybody, keep growing out there. Take care. You.