Bill Stathopoulos

Founder

👋 I'm Bill, and here's my story:

1. Building SalesCaptain, an Outbound & AI GTM agency for B2B SaaS to $3M+ ARR, while being a digital nomad for 4 years.
2. Authored a book - "Cold Email Secrets"
3. Scaled a Growth Marketing Agency to $1M ARR at the age of 28. Grew the team from 7 to 25+ employees in 3 years. Closed clients like Nestle, Revolut, GE, and the Singapore Airport.
4. Helped multiple startups go from zero to $5M+ revenue in 18 months since 2015
5. Trained 2,500+ Growth Marketers in the last 5 years
6. Built the speakers lineup for Ad World, with 50k+ attendees and 100+ speakers, making it the largest advertising conference in the world
7. Interviewed Seth Godin, Scott Galloway, Arianna Huffington, Rory Sutherland, the CMO of Samsung, the CMO of Hubspot, and 30+ world-class Marketing executives.
8. Published the book “Cold Email Secrets”, the bible of modern Outbound & GTM. 
9. Named “Top Lead Generation Voice” on LinkedIn in 2024
10. Became the Clay Club Host in London, leading a team of 15+ GTM Engineers

What you'll get working with me:
🧲 Your Go-To-Market (aka GTM) Strategy
🏀 Optimize your Marketing channels; make the most of your budget
🏆 Build systems for User Acquisition, Activation, Retention, and Revenue

Peace, love & growth ✌️

Bill

Co-Founder

We build and scale Outbound Sales systems that include multi-channel prospecting, lead response, and our cutting-edge processes to help you build your business.

Most people who call themselves GTM engineers won’t last the next 12 months!

That’s exactly why we built the SalesCaptain AI GTM Coaching Program.
For the next cohort, we’re opening one scholarship seat.
One person gets full access for free.
 
The market is already separating surface-level skill from real capability.

Knowing one or two tools does not carry a team anymore.
Budgets tighten, channels and tools change fast and last year’s plays are expired.
 
Running GTM now requires command of the full motion.
From data to message to campaign to pipeline. And from first signal to booked meeting.
 
The program runs for 8 weeks and I teach it myself.

We work through:
* Outbound structure
* Clay list building
* Campaign setup and copy
* GTM systems and infrastructure
* Operating as a GTM engineer inside a real team
 
We have weekly live sessions, a private Slack channel and all recordings included.
The scholarship gives full access to all of this.
 
To apply 👇 
Comment GTM and repost this post.

 
We’ll announce the selected participant at the beginning of December.
 
We’re training the next top 5% of GTM engineers.
This scholarship makes space for one more.

The program's link is in the 1st comment.
#aigtm #scholarship #gtmengineer #clay

CEO, SalesCaptain | Clay London Club Lead 👑 | Top lemlist Partner 📬 | Investor | GTM Advisor for $10M+ B2B SaaS

We walked into a time machine and saw what GTM looks like in 2028.
That’s what Clay Club Paris felt like.

After talking with Varun Anand (Clay), Charles Tenot (lemlist), Frank Sondors 🥓 (Salesforge.ai 🔥) and other operators in the room, the pattern were obvious.

The strongest teams aren’t arguing about tactics or tools anymore.
They’re redesigning their GTM in 2026 around these 5 values:

1️⃣ SYSTEM DESIGN
The strongest teams build GTM as one connected system. CRM, enrichment, outbound and reporting move as one. If people are still moving data manually between tools, no matter what you do, this setup won’t scale.

2️⃣ ACCOUNT STRATEGY
The best teams spend more time deciding who not to target than rewriting copy. Insisting on volume is nothing but a way of hiding weak targeting.

3️⃣ DATA
Pipeline quality depends on your data quality. 
Find unique data sources that will set you apart. Make sure your Outbound decisions are not relying on opinions, they must rely on signals.

4️⃣ PEOPLE & PARTNERS
- Great hires think in workflows, not tasks, they design how leads, data, and decisions flow across the team.
- The strongest partners run their own product in production (example: Clay). If they don’t trust it for their own GTM, they won’t make yours better.

5️⃣ COMMUNITY
A few hours in the right room replaces months of trial and error (that's why events like Clay Club matter). 
Make sure you invest in attending/organizing the right events and talking to real operators. If people travel to be there, you know that room matters.

If you want to build GTM the way the strongest teams do, tomorrow I’m sitting down with Davide Grieco, Clay’s Head of Growth.

We’ll walk you through how Clay (a $3B+ company) runs its own GTM internally. 
Prepare your questions, we're revealing everything.
Here's the link: https://lnkd.in/egmdt3uy

P.S. A Paris trip isn’t complete without a stop at lemlist. That team is exemplary of these GTM values.
Later, Julia Guenier told me the visit landed with them, and the energy after it was 🔥. That meant a lot :))

A $30M SaaS CEO confirmed something to me that most GTM teams don’t want to hear:
AI isn’t making sales faster.

Last week in Bucharest, I spent an hour with Charles Tenot, CEO of lemlist.
Talking about the uncomfortable parts of building a real SaaS company.

What became obvious fast to both of us was this 👇 

Growth almost never stalls because of the market.
It stalls because companies stop building for customers.

Lemlist didn’t hit a wall because demand disappeared.
 They hit it because too much energy went into fixing systems,
and not enough into shipping things users cared about.

Charles walked me through a few decisions most teams won’t touch, but for Lemlist they changed everything:

- They killed SEO even though it worked.
- They stopped writing content they wouldn’t read themselves.
- They rebuilt the team around product velocity, not headcount.
- They treated brand like an asset, not a channel.
- They accepted the truth about AI: it looks better in RevOps than in real sales workflows.

In his words:
“AI looks great in operations. Sales barely uses it.”

And that gap explains most “AI transformation” failures.
We’re building software for teams that design workflows…
Not for the people who actually run them.
Until AI lives inside the rep’s day, not just inside the dashboards,
productivity will stay flat.

We also went deep on:
– Why traffic lies
– Why attribution rarely tells the truth
– Why dashboards don’t create leverage
– Why outbound is shifting from volume to precision
– And why CEOs shouldn’t fix problems, they should clarify them

This was a founder conversation about what breaks, and what actually fixes it. And I really appreciate his openness and honesty.

If you’re building SaaS, leading GTM, or trying to grow without getting lost… believe me, you’ll see yourself in this!

Full interview is live: https://lnkd.in/eznRgyTr

#lemlist #aiinsales

Last night we brought together 20+ GTM leaders for a private dinner in Bucharest 🇷🇴  on the sidelines of Tekpon AI Summit.

Lately, I’ve started making these small, private dinners a regular thing.
It’s my way of being focused on real conversations with the people running GTM every day, and staying close to the actual operators, about what’s working and what’s breaking and what they're doing next.

Here are some key points from the conversations we had:

- AI is forcing org design changes. GTM teams are getting leaner, more cross-functional, and structured to ship faster (not just operate faster).

- Outbound in commoditized markets needs more than volume, strong positioning and localization are becoming (the) real differentiators.

- Scaling product-market-fit isn’t one playbook. Early-stage teams need speed and a sharp narrative. Later-stage teams are solving for specialization, structure, and focus.

I love these insights because they come from unscripted conversations between people actually building.

Next dinner is in London on Dec 2.

Thanks to everyone who joined the table 💚 
Frank Sondors 🥓, Mike Korba, Ciprian Vlad, Cristian Dina, Robert Jackson Batiste Pasquet, Ignacio Villanueva Martin, Catalin Gealapu, Robert Strobl, Marijana Gligoric, Osman Koc, Hai Ta, Abdul Mukati, Alina Mitrica, Alina Ionciu, Dan Tabaran, Elizaveta Chugunova, Mihai Vinatoru, Fulvio Covone, Tommaso Fè and of course Theo Kanellopoulos.

Apologies if I missed anyone, let me know in the comments.

#gtm #dinner

95% of go-to-market teams are drowning in data,
and 0% know what to do with it!
 
That’s the brutal gap we uncovered yesterday in our live session with Davide Grieco (Head of Growth at Clay).

I will get straight to it.

Here are 6 things the most advanced teams are doing (and you should be copying in 2026):
 
1️⃣ Leads → pipeline, only when routed intelligently.

Webinar signups, demo requests, product usage...all of it lands in Slack or your CRM. But without prioritization, reps don’t know where to focus, and leads go cold. 
Top teams auto-score and route leads based on fit, behavior, and deal potential, so sales only acts when it matters.

2️⃣ Intent doesn't always trigger action.

A single website visit doesn’t trigger a sequence. Clay’s team proved that orchestration only works when fit + behavior + value are layered before making a move.
 
3️⃣ The 3-dimensional scoring system.

Leading teams score every account across these 3 core dimensions👇 

1. Account Fit Score: Tech stack, GTM motion, sales team size.
2. Engagement Score: Product usage, events, LinkedIn activity.
3. Contract Potential: Will this account be worth $5K or $500K?
 
4️⃣ Every account gets routed into one of these 4 tiers:

- Low fit, low engagement → Ignore or self-serve.
- High fit, low engagement → Educate & warm up.
- Low fit, high engagement → Monitor with product nudges.
- High fit, high engagement → Full GTM firepower: sales + ads + content.
 
5️⃣ Go-to-market teams are in sync

Sales, Marketing, and RevOps work off the same live dashboards (powered by Clay) where scores, tiers, and signals update in real time.
 
6️⃣ Everything maps back to revenue.

Every live stream, post, and paid ad is tracked, not just by clicks, but by which ICP accounts engaged. Engagement score goes up → campaign triggers fire → pipeline grows.
 
Is this just another GTM framework? ❌ 
No, This is what Clay, a $100M ARR company (with a $3.1B+ value) is doing internally, and it’s working.

I'm sharing the full slides from the session, because I believe every GTM team should have this playbook!

Comment SLIDES and I’ll DM you the full deck.
+ Link to the full webinar video in the first comment.

LFG🔥

We built a predictive outbound engine for a $35M SaaS that finds buyers before they raise their hand. 
This changed their pipeline forever.

Before, this is how Outbound worked 👇 

You would scrape lists, launch cold emails, and hope someone was “in market.” 
Most replies--> Not interested/Wrong timing/ Or worse-no reply at all.

Now, our process changed that model.

Here’s how we do it:

1️⃣ Step 1: Start with intent

We use Propensity, Bombora and Warmly, to track which companies are researching relevant topics.
No more industry limits, we open the filters wide to spot interest across every sector.

💡 Optional: Add a growth filter if you want to get even tighter, but the main thing is finding those “hidden” buyers.

Output: A live list of companies already searching for solutions you offer. These are not cold leads, they are future buyers you catch before the market does.

2️⃣ Step 2: Enrich and qualify, fast.

Now we drop those accounts into Clay or BetterContact

We pull:

→ Company size, revenue, funding, HQ
→ Who they’re hiring (remote, distributed roles)
→ Decision-makers in HR, Ops, IT, Finance (or whatever is relevant)
→ Fresh news: funding, layoffs, partnerships, expansions...etc

Every bit of context shapes your outreach (No more “saw you have a dog” lines. Each message hits real pain points, in real time.

The result?

A pipeline full of warm accounts, primed for outbound. 
Each one shows real signals.

The best part: These leads convert. 
We see up to 4-5% positive reply rates, and half of those turn into booked calls.

Outbound is about building systems that spot real buying intent, enrich every record, and make every touch count.

Want to see how this works for your team? DM me or drop a comment below and I’ll show you our workflow.

#outbound #saas #b2b #workflow #clay

Most outbound problems start in the same place: 
You’re talking to the wrong people.

I see teams rewriting copy 10 times, testing 4 versions of the offer, arguing about subject lines…
and the reply rate is still stuck at 1–2%.

This is not because the email is bad.
It's because the list is.

Here’s the simple way I look at outbound:
→ Targeting: who you’re reaching
→ Messaging: what you’re saying
→ Offer: what you’re proposing
(+ Deliverability and Infra: whether your email even lands)

If the audience is off, nothing else matters.

You can’t “out-copywrite” a bad list.
The only soft KPI I obsess over is positive replies.
(Not replies, POSITIVE replies).

If those aren’t moving, you’re hitting the wrong segment, full stop.

We learned this building campaigns for both early-stage teams and big brands.
- More volume won’t fix it.
- Personalization won’t fix it.
- A clever opener won’t fix it.

Here’s what actually works:
→ Pull real data from your CRM before you guess anything
→ Build a list around pain, not job titles
→ Use Clay to enrich and filter, don’t just scrape everything that moves
→ Test in small batches (50–100) before scaling
→ Watch for buying signals, not vanity signals
→ Protect your domains

When you get the audience right, everything downstream gets easier.
Your message lands.
Your offer makes sense.
Deliverability improves because people actually respond.

Curious: what’s the targeting mistake you see most often?

#targeting #leadgen #deliverability #gtm #outbound

Just because you can see a signal doesn’t mean you should use it in your outreach.

In the webinar we had with Frank Sondors 🥓 from Salesforge 🔥, we talked about one of the easiest ways teams break intent-based campaigns:
 
They take the signal…
and put it straight into the first line of the email.
 
“Hey, I saw you joined this webinar.”
“Hey, I noticed you liked that post.”
 
Good signal + bad experience = dead reply rate.
 
I shared what I call the Underwear Rule:

You can have deep visibility on a prospect, but you don’t have to mention everything you know.

Here’s how to use signals properly (and actually increase replies):

1. Use the signal to pick the right audience

Signals tell you who’s worth contacting, not what to write.
Examples: webinar topic, pricing page visit, post engagement, job change.

2. Write the message around the problem, not the signal

Don’t say “I saw you…”
Instead, talk about the challenge the signal points to.
That’s where relevance comes from.

3. Keep the opener clean

Lead with an idea, question, or observation, not creepy surveillance.
Your first line sets the tone.

4. Use the signal to choose the CTA

Hot signal: ask about timing.
Warm signal: ask about priority.
Cold-ish signal: ask about relevance.

5. Let the signal guide your segmentation, not your copy

Signals = filters.
Your copy = insight.
That’s the whole game.

I would love to know which signal would win "The most useful" award in your outbound this year?

#intent #intentsignals

A $3.1 Billion company is not built only on features.
The secret sauce is in how teams move.

Clay didn’t become the giant it now is only by shipping better software.
They did by rewriting how a GTM company is designed.

I saw it up close.

I remember in March 2024 we were running webinars teaching teams how to use Clay.
Back then, most had heard of it.
But very few knew how to build systems with it.

Since then, as SalesCaptain we’ve touched Clay from every angle:
• Webinars, events and Clay Clubs
• Running Clay workflows inside 60+ real teams
• Building and sharing Clay tables that went viral on LinkedIn
• Being recognized as a Clay Solutions Partner
• Watching our team build tables from mid-air paraglides and under the Great Pyramid of Giza as part of the Clay World Record
...etc

And here’s what I want to highlight 👇 

The most impressive thing about Clay was never just the product.
It was the operating system behind it.

Clay doesn’t run like your typical SaaS company.
It runs like a studio.
Builders, operators, community, partners…
All working in public.
All sharing what actually works.
All treating GTM as a craft, or an art.

Examples from inside Clay:
👉 Marketing, Growth and Sales don’t “align”, they operate as one system.
👉Accounts don’t move by MQL stages, they move by behavior.
👉Teams aren’t built around channels, but around buyer movement.

Notice anything?

GTM in Clay is not a department.
It is company design.

On December 9, Davide Grieco (Head of Growth at Clay) and I are going live and revealing EVERYTHING.

We’ll walk through:
• How Clay designs teams around the buyer journey
• How growth connects sales and marketing in practice
• How decisions run on signals
• How execution scales without adding layers
• How the same operating model runs inside SalesCaptain and across every team we work with.

If you’re still trying to “optimize” your GTM,
Time to wake up!
Your competitors are redesigning their companies around it.

Tuesday, December 9: https://lnkd.in/egmdt3uy

(Picture from the latest Clay Club in Paris with Varun Anand Co-Founder of Clay, Charles Tenot CEO of lemlist, and Frank Sondors 🥓 CEO Salesforge.ai 🔥)

The 30+ Clay workflows we rely on going into 2026.

Yesterday we had an amazing webinar with Frank Sondors 🥓 from Salesforge 🔥, where we walked through the top Clay and GTM workflows going into 2026.

Here's a quick recap since many asked for a breakdown 👇 

- The old B2B GTM game of add reps, push more emails, hope for pipeline is breaking down. AI is everywhere and channels are flooded. 
Getting the right attention is hard and costs keep climbing. 

Here’s how we are facing this:

→ Clay became our GTM data warehouse. We plugged in 150+ sources: intent, CRM, hiring, events, social, you name it. 

→ We split outreach into 3 layers: 
1️⃣ AI Outbound for hyper-personalized reach at scale (50+ signals, real data enrichment, real prospect pain points). 

2️⃣ Intent-Based Audiences for targeting people who show the right buying signals (hiring, visiting our site, mentioning us, attending events). 

3️⃣ Inbound-Led Outbound for those already aware and engaged with our brand (catching the warm leads before they go cold). 

→ Every workflow runs off real-time triggers. New CMO hire/Product launch/ Company raises a round...etc, they get a message they’ll actually want to open. 

→ A small team of 5-6 reps built enough pipeline to keep pace with teams of 50. (Yes, really, ask Frank Sondors 🥓) 

→ We ran event workflows for speaking gigs, sent local cues in cold outreach, and mapped out who in our ICP was moving jobs.

→ Before, we relied on “more hands.” Now, it’s “more brains”. This means automation, data, signals, and speed, all working together through workflows that talk to each other. 

The truth is, traditional outbound is not coming back (you need to let go).

GTM needs to evolve, and the systems behind it are now the biggest advantage. 

The full slide deck from the webinar is ready for anyone who wants a closer look. Drop “CLAY” below if you want it. 

#clayworkflows #gtm #webinar

On 9 Dec, you’ll see exactly how Clay uses Clay to run its own GTM motion.
(And how that’s shaping everything we build for 2026.)

Yes, we are unveiling the system we operate on daily.

Because if I opened your CRM right now, could you show me the 20 accounts you’d bet your quarter on?

And i'm not talking about the logos, or leads that “feel hot.”
But the ones that actually matter right now, who fit, who are in market, have money and will move.

That’s the standard Clay runs on internally.

Every account is scored by what we call at SalesCaptain, "The GTM Rule of 3"
1. Fit: Who actually matters
2. Behavior: Who’s active, showing intent
3. PCV: Where the deal value sits

High Fit, High Behavior, High PCV --> Sales moves.
Low Fit, Low Behavior --> CRM automation takes over.
This ensures marketing and sales don’t argue about stages, instead, they move accounts.

This is the model we’re using internally at SalesCaptain.
And it’s the same framework we implement across companies building high-efficiency GTM engines.

On Dec 9, Davide Grieco and I will walk you through:

• How GTM is shifting from channel-first to signal-first
• The matrix Clay uses to map every account to TOFU, MOFU, BOFU
• What real account prioritization looks like using data + AI
• The workflows teams should build going into 2026
• Case studies from Clay and SalesCaptain teams in the field

You’ll leave with a working model for how to run GTM in 2026.

You don't want to miss this.
More details and link in comments.

JSESSIONID

li_at

Sales Navigator

90% of teams using AI personalization are fooling themselves.

Why?

Because a like is not demand.
And a comment is not intent.

We both know most prospects give you NOTHING to personalize.
No posts, opinions or any real signal.
Just a job title and a logo.
(Scroll LinkedIn  and you’ll see it.)

So what happens?
You scrape a name.
Grab a company.
Dump it into a prompt.
AI spits out something that looks personal.

But where’s the connection?
Nowhere.

Then comes the big mistake:
Someone liked a post.
So you assume interest.

❌ Wrong.

That person might be bored.
Half-asleep on a train.
Doomscrolling before a meeting.
Nothing about that means they want to buy.

Activity is not intent.

AI can’t create demand out of thin air.
So you end up sending “custom” messages that are all the same
except for the first name, and calling it personalization.

Here’s how we actually run it at SalesCaptain (and how you should too):

1. AI filters by company, role, and pattern
2. Write by segment, not fantasy personas
3. Use variables for real context
4. Keep the voice human

If your personalization starts and ends with a prompt, it’s not personalization.
It’s a fancy automation with better grammar.

P.S. The photo below is from a special interview with a CEO of a $30M ARR SaaS. It drops soon. Stay tuned. 😉

#aipresonalization #gtm

🔥 The lead scoring blueprint you wish you had 3 quarters ago.
Built on Clay’s internal prioritization model,
and it’s the same system we apply internally at SalesCaptain and with our clients.

At SalesCaptain, we work with go-to-market teams across industries. 
And this prioritization matrix consistently drives impact.

Why? Because it aligns sales, marketing, and growth around the ONLY two questions that matter:
1. Is this account the right fit?
2. Are they showing meaningful engagement right now?

We walked through this in our recent webinar with Clay, where we shared a practical 2x2 matrix that drives everything from outbound plays to PLG routing to paid campaigns.

👉 If you only update one thing in your GTM motion for 2026, make it this.

Here is how the "2026 GTM Prioritization Matrix" works

✅ Account Fit Score
We look at indicators like:
- B2B vs B2C
- GTM motion (PLG + SLG)
- Stack: Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, Clay...etc.
- ICP signals: size, vertical, hiring patterns
- Similarity to past closed-won accounts
➡️ This tells us if this account worth pursuing at all?

✅ Engagement Score
We track behaviors like:
- Pricing page visits
- LinkedIn engagement
- Webinar attendance
- Product activation
- Positive replies to outbound
➡️ This tells us: are they leaning in, right now?

Then we tier every account accordingly:

🟥 Tier 4: De-prioritize
→ Low fit, low engagement
→ No sales effort. Light nurture via PLG motion

🟦 Tier 3: Opportunistic Sales
→ High engagement, low fit
→ Route to PLG. Sales steps in only when signals are strong

🟨 Tier 2: Marketing Nurture
→ High fit, low engagement
→ Warm up with content, events, and thought leadership

🟩 Tier 1: Target Accounts
→ High fit, high engagement
→ AE multi-threading, dinners, BOFU ads, the full pipeline play

This matrix now powers every core GTM workflow we run:
* Clay-based scoring + tiering
* CRM enrichment
* Real-time Slack alerts
* Tier-specific outbound messaging
* Dynamic paid campaigns
* Internal dashboards
* Client workflows

No matter if you’re running outbound, PLG, ABM (or all of the above) this system adapts and scales.

We’ve deployed versions of it for category leaders, high-velocity startups, and bootstrapped teams.
It works, it scales, and it gets your entire GTM speaking the same language.

These strategies separate good GTM from elite GTM.
Save this post and share it with your team.

Your job title is killing your outbound.

One of the strangest patterns we are seeing in Outbound:
Teams do everything right. They have:
→ strong offer
→ clean data
→ good workflows
→ optimized profiles
…but their acceptance rate still tanks.

Why?
Because the outreach is coming from someone with “Sales” in their title.

People don’t want to talk to:
❌ BDRs
❌ SDRs
❌ Account Executives

They want to talk to the person behind the thinking.
In LinkedIn lingo: a thought leader.

Here’s what actually works 👇 

1️⃣ Run outreach from leadership profiles
CMO, CEO, COO...etc anyone whose title naturally signals expertise and decision-making.
Even if they’re not the ones pressing “send,” their profile creates trust and gets conversations started.

2️⃣ Keep your sales titles out of the front line
You can still route replies to your reps.
Just don’t let a “BDR” title be the first thing a prospect sees.

3️⃣ Treat LinkedIn profiles like landing pages
Your headline and top section shape acceptance rates more than the copy inside your message. Read that again.

4️⃣ Apply this to both email AND LinkedIn
Email inboxes filter by sender name.
LinkedIn surfaces your title immediately.
In both cases, the wrong title can lower your engagement rate.

If you’re not getting responses, don’t jump to rewrite your sequence.
First check whose name is sending it.
Let me know if you faced a similar issue, or if you have any questions drop them below.

#outbound #bdr #sdr #linkedin

What can your SDR actually produce in 5 minutes?
I ask every team the same question.

For most reps, the answer is:
Almost nothing… because the workflow is full of friction.

Those 5 minutes usually disappear into admin work:
CRM checks, fixing fields, searching for contacts, bouncing between tools, rewriting the same intro line.

And there's nothing I love more than removing friction!
Then, 5 minutes becomes a surprisingly productive unit.

Here’s what a “5-Minute SDR Workflow” looks like in the systems we build at SalesCaptain:

Minute 1:
Open LinkedIn → Identify a new contact → Add + enrich instantly
(When it comes to EU, we use Surfe here to pull enriched data + correct fields)

Minute 2:
Auto-sync to CRM → fields mapped, company matched, no duplicates

Minute 3:
Check job-change alerts → Does this person recently move roles?
If yes → add to a “new role” micro-segment (high intent)

Minute 4:
Add contact to correct sequence based on tier:
Tier 1 → personalized multichannel
Tier 2 → semi-automated
Tier 3 → automated

Minute 5:
Add one line of personalization using ICP pain points → send first touch

One rep.
Five minutes.
One fully activated contact, correctly enriched, correctly segmented, correctly sequenced.
If that’s not real output, I don't know what is!
 
For Outbound to work best, automate/compress everything that slows reps down.
Once you remove the admin, every 5 minutes becomes meaningful.


I'm adding a link here if you want to try Surfe for free: https://bit.ly/4rygOiB

The 5 Min SDR Workflow

You can delegate campaigns, but never delegate knowing what works.

In the early days as a founder, you are the sales team
You are the product manager
You are marketing
There is no other way. You need to see every reply, feel every objection, and spot every pattern in the feedback.

You learn fast when you run outreach, write copy, and jump on calls yourself. 
You see what channels drive real conversations. 
You hear what features make people say yes. 
You know what gets ignored.

That is not busywork. That is the job! 
You build your playbook from the inside out.

But as the company grows, your time gets pulled in new directions. 
Team building, hiring, culture, leadership...etc.
Suddenly, running every campaign yourself is not the highest ROI. 
You have to let go of the day-to-day.

Here’s what you need to remember: stepping back does not mean stepping away.

You can hand over the outbound engine, you can hire a marketing lead. But you cannot lose the pulse. 
The moment you stop knowing what messaging lands, which channels convert, or what customers want, your edge is gone.

Your business only stays alive if you keep the connection, which means:

→ Staying close to your team’s feedback
→ Reviewing campaign results together
→ Jumping into customer calls when needed
→ Tweaking strategy based on what is working now

You move from solo operator to team captain, but the market never stops moving, so you cannot stop listening.

I have lived this at every stage-agency, SaaS, conference, outbound, you name it. The founders who win are the ones who keep learning, even when they delegate.

When do you think is the right moment to let go? I would love to know how you did it.
#founder #gtm #saas #startup #outbound

I’m giving away a full outbound system-built for you, free.
In partnership with ZenABM and HeyReach.io

Signal-led outbound, (according to Kyle Poyar), is the #2 bet for marketers in 2026.

Yet many teams fail to apply it!
And it's not because they lack tools,
but because they lack the GTM engineering power to connect them.

You can spend thousands on “deals” this Black Friday.
But without a connected, intent-driven process, you’ll still have no pipeline.

That's why we decided to give away something better than any discount code.

A fully done-for-you Intent-Led Outbound Operation.

Built for you
End-to-end
Free.

Here’s how we will do it 👇 

→ ZenABM (free): capture high-intent accounts from your LinkedIn ads
→ Clay (done-for-you): auto-prospect the right ICPs inside those hot accounts
→ SalesCaptain (done-for-you): write and build winning LinkedIn + email sequences
→ Outbound setup (free): launch Smartlead + HeyReach.io campaigns
👇
You start booking meetings in weeks.

If it works (and it will), you keep the tools at a 20% discount.
If not? No commitment.

I honestly think this is a deal of a lifetime 🔥 

Slots are limited and open until December 5th.

First come, first served.
If you want in, the link is below in the comments.  

#outbound #signalled #free

Founders are searching for a stamp that doesn’t exist.

My cousin is an orthodontist.
She went to uni, did her master’s, got her accreditation, and now has a paper that literally says:
“You’re good enough.”

From that moment on, 90% of what she’ll face in her career, she’s trained for.

Founders don’t get that.

There’s no school, no license, and no moment where someone hands you a certificate saying:
“Congrats, you now know how to hire, fire, sell, market, lead, forecast, do finance, and not lose your mind.”

You just wake up everyday and try not to break the company.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with two things to stay sane and keep scaling:

1️⃣ Systems for alignment
I’m reading "Measure What Matters" (thanks Theo Kanellopoulos for the recommendation) because as SalesCaptain grows, I can’t be in every room.
So we need to rely more on OKRs not as “productivity hacks”, but as a system to answer:
“How do I make sure people know what matters without me intervening?”

2️⃣ Beliefs for sanity
I’m rereading "The Greatest Salesman in the World", not for new tactics, but actually for reminders:
* You’re a unique creature, stop trying to fit in.
* Approach people with love if you want them to open up.
* Success might be one more bend in the road away. Keep going.

Of course, tools matter and tactics help.

But every founder needs two invisible frameworks:
1. A system to align the team.
2. A belief system to keep the fire burning.

Scott Ward (HabitStack) unpacked this beautifully in our chat.
You can watch the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/eAgHjSrH

Still no stamp. But maybe that’s the point. 😉 

Let’s keep building.🔥

We turned LinkedIn ad clicks into 137 meetings last quarter ($50k ad spend). Here’s the workflow most teams hide from you.

Many run LinkedIn ads and hope for form fills or brand awareness.

At SalesCaptain, we do it differently.

We use LinkedIn ads as intent signals and connect them to outbound-turning every click, view, and impression into booked meetings.

Here’s the exact workflow we run:

1️⃣ Run LinkedIn Ads to a laser-focused ABM list
→ Target only your ICP
→ Promote an educational asset or case study
→ Build trust before outreach even starts

2️⃣ Use ZenABM to spot who engaged
→ Find companies who clicked or viewed (even without a form fill)
→ Get a list of “warm” accounts who already know your name

3️⃣ Enrich and find real contacts in Clay
→ Pull decision-makers and get direct emails
→ Layer in firmographic and intent data
→ Turn anonymous clicks into actionable leads

4️⃣ Personalize your outreach
→ Reference the exact ad or asset they engaged with
→ Use case studies or proof points that match their interest
→ Make every touch feel relevant (not cold)

5️⃣ Launch outbound campaigns
→ Tier 1: Human-led, high-touch for top engagers
→ Tier 2: Automated sequences for the rest
→ Use lemlist or Instantly.ai as well as HeyReach.io for fast, scalable delivery
→ Mention the ad they saw (“Noticed your team checked out our [case study] last week…”)

What happens next?

→ Ad engagement becomes real pipeline
→ SDRs reach out to prospects who are already aware
→ Marketing and sales use the same ABM list
→ No siloed channels, nor wasted spend

This way, LinkedIn Ads became a sales activation channel.

If you want the exact Clay table drop a comment below.

#linkedinads #abm #smartworkflow

GetAds

GetAds delivers frictionless, conversion-driven creatives from a professional team that understands advertising.

Fantom

• Develop high-growth strategies for SaaS companies
• Substantiate ROI & sustainable growth
• Frame high converting sales funnels
• Enabling SaaS companies to become market leaders while increasing MRR/ARR
• Increasing SaaS subscription volume

Janover (NASDAQ: JNVR)

Helping drive growth through various channels and innitiatives.

Growth Engineer

GrowthMentor

GrowthMentor is a curated platform of vetted startup founders and growth marketing mentors offering business advice, feedback, and coaching. Join to find your next mentor at growthmentor.com

As a mentor, I help SaaS entrepreneurs achieve their goals by providing 1:1 mentoring in the area of paid advertising to understand their business and ways to scale.

Check out my GrowthMentor profile here: https://geni.us/GrowthMentor

Growth Mentor (Paid Ads)

• Optimize campaign performance against established KPIs
•  Track, measure and report online marketing performance
•  Evaluate and recommend new online marketing opportunities
•  Collaborate with clients and internal teams on a regular basis
•  Manage budgets and bids for specific clients on multiple platforms including Google AdWords,
Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads
•  Provide constructive feedback regarding landing page performance / conversion rate
optimization
•  Work with clients and internal stakeholders to implement new campaigns and strategies
•  Assist the Paid Media Manager and Director of Marketing with new builds, sales opportunities
and ongoing client management
•  Perform traffic analysis in Google Analytics related to paid digital traffic and other sources /
mediums

Paid Media Specialist

Serendipit Consulting

• Research, build, manage, and optimize PPC/AdWords campaigns for clients
• Use Google Data Studio to create visually appealing reports for external and internal use
• Use Google Tag Manager to inject tags into client websites to efficiently track performance and debug
• Create weekly & monthly performance reports
• Analyzing data from applicable platforms to discover trends & areas for improvement
• Analyzing keyword bids, day parting, device, & location targeting in AdWords to make recommendations
• Developing ad copy for Text Ad campaigns, as well as Ad Extensions for AdWords
• Adding negative keywords to reduce irrelevant traffic
• Staying current on best practices and updates to Paid Search Advertising
• Testing & optimizing PPC campaigns on AdWords & Facebook platforms
• Landing page optimization

Paid Search | Social Media Specialist

• Create, manage, and optimize Facebook advertising campaigns for multiple clients
• Research, build, manage, and optimize PPC/AdWords campaigns for clients
• Implement Google Analytics to client’s websites
• Use Google Data Studio to create visually appealing reports for external and internal use
• Use Google Tag Manager to inject tags into client websites to efficiently track performance and debug
• Create landing pages for digital marketing campaigns
• Keep track of social media calendar and alignment with other marketing/communication timelines
• Create and execute social media strategy that stimulates engagement for clients 
• Forge consistent brand messaging and apply brand design standards for clients
• Craft new content and deploy through all social media channels 
• Work with different departments to come up with new, fresh ideas
• Work with different internal teams and partners to develop social media "voice" for clients
• Strategically develop social media KPIs, standards and goals 
• Creative development for crafting creative marketing strategies with different departments 
• Work with online influencers for clients
• Assess and analyze social conversion ratios
• Present work to internal team and clients

Social Media Specialist

ACTIV APPAREL

•	Initiative and Creativity
•	Negotiate prices with Global manufacturers and suppliers
•	Sales Experience
•	Customer Service
•	Social Media Marketing
•	Adobe Photoshop Experience
•	Experience with Facebook Pages
•	Facebook/Twitter Ads and Ad Campaigns
•	Instagram Marketing Tactics and Strategy
•	Google Analytics
•	Google AdWords
•	Mailchimp Experience
•       PR
•       Magazine Interviews/Publications (Online)
•       Order Fulfillment 
•       Product Procurement 
•       Influencer Reach Out and Marketing

CEO/Founder

Paragon Mortgage Corporation

•	Social Media Marketing
•	Website Management
•	Updating and Writing Content for our Marketing Collateral
•	Creating and Managing Email Blasts
•	Creating Micro-Marketing Ideas for Individual Properties and implementing them
•	Thinking Outside the Box to Advertise services
•	Finding Unique Marketing Opportunities aimed in the Western US
•	Efficiently Create and Upload Content Throughout the Web
•	Mail Chimp experience
•       Wordpress Editting 
•       Google Analytics Implementation 
•       SEO/Keyword Searching
•       Adobe InDesign (Basic Experience) 
•       Direct research to create Comp Reports on Excel

Digital Marketing Manager

👋 Hi, I'm Luis Camacho - Founder @ GetAds (getads.co)

We help brands and agencies scale their conversion-driven creative output with our team of heavily vetted designers & video editors, expertly trained in advertising & consumer psychology.

Our team has worked with agencies and brands in various industries and business models. From DTC in the CPG space to biotech and B2B Service and SaaS in the fintech industry and mental health space to everything in between. If you're an agency or brand struggling with creative output, our team can help.

Here are some testimonials: 

"Spent a lot of time and money looking for a solution to our agency's ad creative output. I'm happy to say I think we've found the answer. Not only are GetAds ad creatives top quality, but they actually perform better than anything/anyone we've used before! Highly recommend!" - Mike W. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

"As an ad agency owner, I need unlimited creative that’s affordable, easy to use, and delivers high-quality results for my clients. GetAds is that. Their web portal is super easy to use, the price is the best in the business, and their team of designers are the best there is, bar none. I’m even impressed with their turnaround time. That’s all I need. Thanks, GetAds!" - Carlos C. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

"We are very very satisfied and will continue to use Get Ads for our business. They are almost fully integrated into our business via slack which is amazing and learn over time what we like and dislike." - Jake S. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

"GetAds has been a fantastic addition to our design suite. We are able to get strong B2B creative graphics/videos quickly with the GetAds team." - Josh L. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Side note, our newest product helps media buyers & creative teams organize, collaborate, and save ad inspiration in one place. If you want to supercharge your ad creative workflow, sign up, it's free (forever) → getads.co/app

Want to chat? Shoot me a DM :)

Luis Camacho

Stop hunting for the one “hero” ad.

Teach Andromeda what to do instead.

Controversial take: the fastest path to scale under Meta’s Andromeda is not perfect creative. It’s intentional, fast failures that teach the model what to sequence and who to show it to.

Here’s a practical playbook to test smarter and faster:

1️⃣ Create micro-hooks, not finishes
↳ Launch 12–20 short, rough hook variations per week. Think 3-word hooks, 5s captions, raw UGC snippets. Purpose: give the model entry points to match to user intent.

2️⃣ Run controlled chains
↳ Group creatives into sequences: Hook → Pre-story → Product Intro → Close. Test chains, not isolated ads. Andromeda optimizes sequences, so feed it logical paths.

3️⃣ Prune like a surgeon
↳ Evaluate after 48-72 hours. Kill the bottom 50% by engagement and early sequence conversion. Reinvest in the top 10% and iterate variants of those winners.

4️⃣ Teach negatives
↳ Include 10% “intentional fail” creatives that surface who won’t convert. These negative signals are as valuable as winners for the model’s personalization.

5️⃣ Measure sequence metrics, not just CPA
↳ Track first-touch engagement, mid-funnel lift, and sequence completion rate. These tell you if Andromeda is learning your journey.

The secret: speed + signal quality beats polish. Give the algorithm lots of diverse, directional data and let it stitch journeys you could never handcraft.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with creative bottlenecks? We can help.

Conversion-Driven Creatives On-Demand for agencies & brands with our streamlined process & platform. ⚡️

If you treat reviews like trophies you put on a shelf, you’re leaving ad ideas on the floor.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your customers already wrote your next 50 ads for you. You just need to read them like a creative director, not a product manager.

How to mine reviews for ad concepts that actually convert:

1️⃣ Collect and clean  
↳ Export all reviews, filter by recency and purchase intent, remove noise.

2️⃣ Cluster by emotion, not feature  
↳ Use word clouds + n-gram frequency to find emotion clusters: relief, pride, disbelief, anger. Those are your creative muscles.

3️⃣ Pull the verbs and phrasing customers actually use  
↳ Verbs = motion. “Stopped waking,” “saved 2 hours,” “no more back pain.” Build hooks from those exact lines.

4️⃣ Invent the ad formats from the clusters  
↳ Relief = immediate benefit UGC. Pride = aspirational brand film. Disbelief = discrediting angle. Anger = objection-handling FAQ ad.

5️⃣ Use negative reviews deliberately  
↳ Turn a complaint into a discrediting hook: “Thought it would be cheap? Here’s why it outperformed my $300 pill.” Controversial but powerful.

Quick examples (pulled straight from reviews):  
- Hook: “I stopped waking up at 3am.”  
- Pre-story: “Tried every supplement for 2 years…”  
- Close: “Here’s how it actually works for busy people.”

Test in small batches - 5–7 concepts per cluster - and double down on the winners.

If you only use star ratings in your ads, you’re wasting the real signal: language. Want a template to turn reviews into 50 ready-to-run ad ideas? Follow, like, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with creative bottlenecks? We can help.

Happy Thanksgiving. Controversial take: say thanks for the things that annoyed you this year.

Most gratitude posts celebrate the wins. I want to celebrate the friction.

1️⃣ Constraints beat freedom  
↳ The deadline you hated forced you to choose what mattered. Without it you’d still be indecisive.

2️⃣ Criticism that felt unfair  
↳ The person who ripped your idea apart gave you the clearest path to improve. Pain + honesty = growth.

3️⃣ The boring, repeatable work  
↳ The tasks you complain about build the compounding habits everyone pretends are sexy. They quietly scale results.

4️⃣ The people who left  
↳ When someone walked away you were forced to redesign the team, values, or priorities. That purge created space for better fits.

This year I’m grateful for a brutal feedback session, a night of tedious customer support, and one teammate who didn’t sugarcoat problems. None of it felt good in the moment. All of it made the next year easier.

If you want a small exercise today: pick one person or one painful moment from 2025 and send a real thank you. Not a generic message, a sentence that names what they forced you to face.

Who are you secretly grateful for that annoyed you? Drop a name or a one-line thank you below.

Controversial: Your best ad should repel most people.

Hear me out.

If you want Meta to scale your account, stop hunting for universal appeal. The algorithm rewards creative that signals who to show it to. That means your job is to create angles that attract the *right* people and repel the rest.

Here’s a practical way to diversify angles for true Meta scale:

1️⃣ Map orthogonal axes, not micro-variations  
↳ Emotion, Logic, Identity, Utility. Each axis hits different user psychology. Don’t just tweak the headline.

2️⃣ Build angle sets per segment  
↳ For one segment, create 4 angles - one per axis. Repeat for 3+ segments. That gives the algorithm distinct entry points to learn from.

3️⃣ Launch controlled volume, not chaos  
↳ 12–20 creatives per segment, launched in small batches. Let Meta stitch journey paths across those angles.

4️⃣ Measure resonance, not vanity metrics  
↳ Track engagement-to-conversion ratios by angle. If an angle gets clicks but poor LTV, let it die or repurpose as a top-of-funnel filter.

Bonus controversial tweak: intentionally include 1-2 polarizing angles to speed up audience sorting. They’ll drive higher LTV even if CPA looks worse day 1.

Stop multiplying similar creatives. Multiply psychologies.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling to create angle libraries fast? We can help.

Stop polishing ads like luxury watches.

Make them Lego instead.

If you want faster learning on Meta, speed is not about more people or overnight designers. It is about modular creativity you can recombine and launch at scale.

Here’s the system that actually speeds up testing and scaling:

1️⃣ Build primitives, not finished ads
↳ Separate Hook clips, Product shots, Context b-roll, and CTA overlays. Each is a reusable block. Snap 5 hooks + 4 visuals + 3 CTAs = 60 unique creatives in hours.

2️⃣ Automate assembly
↳ Use a templating tool or a simple script to render combinations. No designer babysitting. The first version can look rough. That is fine.

3️⃣ Define kill rules before launch
↳ If CTR < X or CPR > Y by day 3, retire that combo. Predefined exits keep your pipeline fresh and avoid tribal attachment to “clever” concepts.

4️⃣ Prioritize learn metrics over vanity
↳ Track micro signals - first 3 seconds retention, CTA clicks, comment sentiment - not just first purchase CPA. Those tell you what to iterate.

5️⃣ Refresh like clockwork
↳ Replace 20% of live primitives weekly. Momentum requires steady input, not heroic marathons.

Controversial take: a perfect ad that never tested is just expensive opinion. Launch ugly. Learn fast. Iterate to beautiful.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with creative bottlenecks? We can help.

Keeping all creative in-house is the silent growth tax your CFO never signed up for.

Here’s the unpopular truth: scaling brands that refuse to outsource creative are voluntarily shrinking their addressable ROI.

Why? Because internal teams hit an idea ceiling. Same people, same feedback loops, same tired angles. You need an external pressure valve to inject novelty at scale.

Here’s what outsourced creative partners actually buy you:

1️⃣ Speed as a strategy  
↳ They run parallel bets. More live variations = faster signal. Best-in-class partners push 10–25 meaningful variations per $100k spend monthly. In-house teams usually hit 3–6.

2️⃣ Cross-brand playbooks  
↳ Good partners bring tactics that worked for unrelated categories. That cross-pollination shrinks your learning curve.

3️⃣ Budget elasticity  
↳ Outsourcing turns fixed headcount into variable spend. Scale up when a funnel works, scale down when it doesn’t.

4️⃣ Creative immune system  
↳ External teams spot stale messaging you’ve normalized. They’re the early-warning system for creative decay.

How to make outsourcing work (not cost you headaches):

• Start with a sprint: 30 days, 10+ variations.  
• Insist on a shared learning vault: test results, hypotheses, assets.  
• KPI = Creative Throughput not just CPM: track new winning variants per month.  
• Avoid full handoff. Keep brand governance, outsource iteration and volume.

Controversial take: If you fear losing brand voice, the bigger risk is keeping a mono-culture that slowly kills conversion.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling to scale creative output? We help brands build reliable outsourced engines.

Controversial take: clients trust GetAds because we lose on purpose.

Not because we enjoy losses. Because strategic losses are the fastest path to real, repeatable wins.

Here’s why that brittle honesty builds trust faster than slick case studies:

1️⃣ We design experiments to fail fast

↳ Small bets that surface the 80% of wrong assumptions. Then we double down on the 20% that actually move the business.

2️⃣ We share the ugly data, not just the wins

↳ Minute-level dashboards, failed creative notes, and playbook updates. Clients see the process, not just polished outcomes.

3️⃣ Creative accountability = shared risk

↳ When we underperform, it’s on us to fix it — not the client.

4️⃣ Copy-first, hypothesis-driven creative

↳ We write the message before we make it pretty. That prevents “vibe” briefs and saves weeks of wasted design.

5️⃣ We hand over a living system, not a one-off ad

↳ SOPs, templates, and a sequencing library clients can scale themselves. Knowledge transfer turns reliance into independence.

Trust is earned when you’re willing to fail in public, learn faster, and refuse to hide the process.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with creative bottlenecks? We can help.

Most agencies are denying themselves scale — because they worship control over results.

If you insist on keeping creative and execution under one roof, you trade speed for comfort. That’s a choice. And it’s a costly one.

Here’s why agencies scale faster with an external performance-creative partner:

1️⃣ Remove the utilization ceiling
↳ In-house teams are limited by hours and headcount. External partners operate like factories — pumping 10 to 50 new creatives a month so you can feed the algorithm.

2️⃣ Risk without reputation damage
↳ Partners run the wild experiments your client would never approve internally. You get the learnings. They absorb the failed bets.

3️⃣ Incentives actually align
↳ Fixed-hour billing favors slow perfection. Performance partners can work on outcome-based or creative-output models that reward velocity and wins.

4️⃣ Build a separate test kitchen
↳ Different tooling, different workflows, zero internal politics. That means faster hypothesis cycles and documented learnings you can scale across clients.

5️⃣ Volume is strategic currency
↳ Meta/Google reward variety. A partner focused on scale supplies the diversity your account needs to unlock compounding performance gains.

Keeping everything inside feels safe. But safe rarely builds category leaders.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. if your agency is stuck between hiring more designers and missing quarterly goals, we plug in as your performance-creative arm and multiply output. DM "PARTNER" to chat.

If you think gifting creative starts in November, you are already late.

Gifting is not a last-minute creative brief. It is a sequence you must seed weeks before shoppers hit checkout. Here’s what most brands miss and how to fix it fast.

1️⃣ Dual-audience creative
↳ Buyers and recipients are different people. One ad must sell convenience, status, and deadline to the purchaser. Another must sell delight and unboxing joy to the recipient. Prepare BOTH.

2️⃣ Timeline reality
↳ UGC, influencer kits, and wrapped-product shoots take 6-12 weeks to land reliably. If you haven’t started, you’re buying rush fees and mediocre results.

3️⃣ Three must-have assets
↳ Authentic unboxing (first 3 seconds hook)
↳ Reaction reels (recipient POV)
↳ Last-minute digital alternatives (e-gift, express shipping)

4️⃣ Ops + creative sync
↳ Tag visuals with SKU, shipping windows, and gift-pack options. If the creative promises next-day shipping but ops can’t deliver, you break trust.

5️⃣ Scale for sequencing
↳ Batch 10–20 variants per channel. Feed them into a journey: awareness (gift idea) → consideration (why this makes a great gift) → conversion (add gift wrap, choose delivery date).

Here’s the controversial part: the person who receives your gift is now a converted customer before they ever see your ad. Treat the unboxing as onboarding, not packaging.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with gifting bottlenecks? We can help.

Why are you filming 30 videos for a hook you have not proven?

Most teams reverse the order. They spend weeks on video that dies in feed because the hook never worked in the first place.

Here’s a contrarian play that wins faster and costs less: validate hooks with statics first, then scale the *winning* hooks into video.

1️⃣ Treat statics like a hypothesis lab
↳ Run 15–25 static headlines/visuals for 48–72 hours. Statics isolate the hook so you get clean signals quickly.

2️⃣ Kill noise with simple thresholds
↳ Keep the top 10–20% by CTR relative to account baseline, or the creatives that hit 1.5x your usual CTR. Everything else dies.

3️⃣ Film only the winners
↳ Take 3 winning hooks into production. For each hook, make 3 video executions: UGC, quick demo, cinematic product moment. That’s 9 videos, not 90.

4️⃣ Match creative intent to channel
↳ Some hooks want authenticity, some want authority. Don’t translate a top-performing headline into a video format that contradicts its tone.

5️⃣ Budget like a scientist
↳ Spend 10% of your creative budget on hook discovery, 70% on proven video production, 20% on iteration and scale.

Controversial truth: if your videos flop, it is 80% the hook, 20% the production. Prove the idea before you craft the masterpiece.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with creative bottlenecks? We can help.

The prettiest ad is the worst way to learn.

If you want winners faster, stop funding pixels. Start testing the idea.

Here’s a faster way to find concepts that actually work — before you hire a photographer or brief a designer:

1️⃣ Test the premise, not the polish
↳ Run headline-only ads and short captions to validate the story. If the hook fails as text, it will fail as video.

2️⃣ Use a 3-tier fidelity ladder
↳ Low: thumbnail + headline (cheap, fast)  
↳ Mid: animated mockup or UGC placeholder (cheap production)  
↳ High: full shoot only for proven winners

3️⃣ Run bracket-style tournaments
↳ Launch 8 premises. Week 1 eliminate 4. Week 2 double down on the top 2. You get signal in days, not months.

4️⃣ Measure story lift, not just clicks
↳ Track 3s and 6s view retention, sound-on rate, and early dropoff. These metrics tell you if the story landed before conversions lag.

Why this works: ideas generalize. Execution can be optimized. Finding the right narrative first multiplies your returns on production spend.

If you keep polishing first, you will keep wasting budgets on the wrong stories.

Found this useful? Like, follow, and repost ♻️ so others can too!

ps. struggling with creative bottlenecks? We can help.

We stopped guessing why an ad worked and our creative reviews got faster and sharper.
Last week’s “winner” had clicks but flat revenue.

The room started the usual debate: hook, offer, pacing. I ran it through GoMarble AI and it told us why in plain English.

It literally watched the ad and broke down what moved the needle.

1️⃣ What changed  

↳ GoMarble AI explains the why behind performance. It calls out the opening 3 seconds, hook clarity, captions vs VO, product reveal timing, offer framing, and the CTA that actually drove action.  

↳ It’s data-connected to Meta Ads, Google Ads, GA4, and Shopify, so the creative story matches real outcomes.

2️⃣ What I ask it  

↳ “Explain why these 5 ads worked for new customers. Call out patterns and drop-off moments. Recommend 3 tests.”  

↳ It returns a clean narrative plus a test plan I can hand to an editor or UGC creator.

3️⃣ Outcomes you can repeat  

↳ Briefs built from proven patterns, not vibes  

↳ Weekly creative reviews that end with a test plan  

↳ Less busywork, more decisions

4️⃣ Free resources for you  

↳ Winning Ads Creative Playbook: 500+ top ads across 20 categories analyzed to reveal patterns, hooks, and psychological triggers you can reuse  

↳ GoMarble AI Agents: 20+ one-click agents, including Creative Performance Audit, Hook & Angle Testing, and Creative Fatigue Detection

Sponsored by GoMarble AI.  Demo video below.  Link in comments.

Comment “GoMarble AI” and I’ll DM you 14-day access, the Playbook, and my prompt pack.

Board Member & CCO (Nasdaq: DFDV); Chairman & CEO @ Janover (formerly Nasdaq: JNVR); Board Member (NYSE: SOUL) | YPO | NATSEC Fellow | 🇺🇸🇮🇱

hiring a b2b saas account executive in boca/delray (f/t in office like it's 2018). if you crush at sales, dm me. otherwise repost/share/tag.

taplio

The Battle

Bill Stathopoulos

Luis Camacho

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreBill Stathopoulos's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreLuis Camacho's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Bill Stathopoulos

Luis Camacho

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Bill Stathopoulos's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreLuis Camacho's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreBill Stathopoulos's LinkedIn Performance