After running AdTribe for six years and managing over $100M in ad spend, I learned how hard it is to build and keep a world-class media buying team.

Finding great talent takes months.
Training takes even longer.
And the wrong hire can cost you clients and profit fast.

So I built the service I wish existed back then — Haven.

Haven is a white-label media buying partner that helps marketing agencies scale without hiring.

For $799 per account, you get a complete senior-level growth team:

✅ Media buyer
✅ Creative designer
✅ Video editor
✅ Developer
✅ Performance strategist

No hiring. No overhead. No training headaches.

Today, more than 20 agencies partner with us to handle their paid media.

A few of them said it best:

Olivia Kean, CEO at Fusion Hub
👉 “It’s allowed me to focus on the things I love, knowing they’re crushing it on their end.”

Kory Baraba, CEO at Grow Fast
👉 “We’ve worked with 4–5 different media buyers from Haven, and they’ve all been amazing.”

See more client stories here: https://www.hirewithhaven.com/clients

If you run a marketing agency and want to scale fulfillment without adding headcount,
connect with me or reach out at dmitry@hirewithhaven.com

Dmitry Fesenko

I'm running two marketing agencies full-time.

These 7 tools generate 20-30 qualified calls every single month:

1/ HeyReach

Sends 30-40 connection requests daily to agency owners.
Acceptance rate: 42%. Reply rate: 14%.
Gets me in front of 200+ decision makers weekly.

2/ Clay

Enriches every lead with company data before I reach out. 
Tells me their employee count, estimated revenue, tech stack. 
I know if they need help before they know it themselves.

3/ Unipile

We run LinkedIn outbound from 7 team member profiles. 
Unipile manages all conversations in one inbox. 
No more account switching.

4/ N8N

My SDR loves n8n.
We automated everything from intent signals to data cleanup to routing warm leads into our CRM.
Zero manual work.

5/ Smartlead

Cold email on steroids.
Warms up 10 email accounts. Sends 300 emails daily.
Gets me in front of agencies not active on LinkedIn.

6/ RapidAPI

Pulls LinkedIn data straight into my CRM.
Shows me who viewed my posts, who engaged, who is quietly checking my profile.
Perfect timing for warm outreach.

7/ Folk CRM

Tracks every prospect from first touch to placement.
One dashboard shows pipeline value, conversion rates, follow-ups needed.
My close rate jumped from 20% to 45% once I could see patterns.

These tools run 24/7. 
All I do is show up to calls.

Total monthly cost: $847/month

What sales tools are actually moving the needle for you?
👇 Share below.

CEO at Haven | Hire world-class media buyers for 65% less than in the US | $100M+ in managed ad spend

7 sales tools

We've rebuilt our media buyer compensation system 6 times in 7 years.

Here's the full evolution:

↳ 2018: Tiny base, no bonus

Started my first agency with no money. Hired juniors who'd never heard of marketing and taught them Facebook ads.

My current Head of Paid Media started at $500/month.

↳ 2019-2020: Higher base + fixed bonus

Fixed bonus per account managed.

It was simple and easy to calculate, but incentivized the wrong things: quantity over quality.

↳ 2021: Weighted bonus

Paid a consultant $3K to build the "perfect" system.

Weighted by account complexity, niche difficulty, retention metrics.

 Once we hit 50 accounts, payroll took 10 days to calculate.

It was too complex to maintain.

↳ 2022-2024: retention system + CEO bonus

Fixed bonus per account plus extra for 6+ month retention. Added "CEO bonus" for outlier accounts that were unusually demanding.

This system lasted the longest.

↳ 2025: % of rev or fixed bonus

Split the team into AdTribe and Haven. 

Media buyers who worked with direct clients earned % of revenue, media buyers who worked with agencies got fixed bonus per account. 

Couldn't generate enough volume for both. Merged them back after 6 months.

↳ 2026: Revenue share

We're changing compensation again to reflect our new pricing. 

Stay tuned.

***

After 6 iterations, what I learned is that there is no perfect system.

What works depends on your stage and who you want to attract. 

A 25-year-old takes risk for reward. A 35-year-old with a mortgage wants predictable income.

Your compensation structure IS your culture.

Choose wisely.

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger

When I started my first agency in 2018, I made a huge mistake.

I hired full-time employees way too early.

At the time, I had only one year of media buying experience and was managing 15 clients as a freelancer.

I decided it was time to build something bigger than myself and start an agency.

Over the next 6 months I hired:

→ 6 full-time media buyers
→ 1 social media manager
→ 1 part-time developer

On the outside, it looked like I made it.

Big team. Cool office. Friday parties.

The reality?

I was maxing out credit cards to pay salaries.

My lead flow was inconsistent, so most media buyers were operating at half capacity.

Our service quality was mediocre because I had no hiring or training process.

Client churn was high.

Then Covid hit and I had to let go most of the team and cut all bonuses for the rest.

It was rough.

Looking back, I made my life much harder than it needed to be.

If I had to do it again, I would:

→ Stay a freelancer longer and save more money
→ Keep raising prices until I had 10 solid clients
→ Outsource some clients to a contractor or a white label partner like Haven
→ Hire a full time media buyer only when their salary is no more than 25% of agency revenue

The lesson?

You don’t need a big team to build a real business.

You need a good offer, a good lead flow, and a fulfillment partner you can rely on.

Agency life is already hard.

Don’t make it harder.

We will hire a vetted offshore media buyer for your agency in under 30 days or you don’t pay.

Over the last 7 years, we’ve hired and trained 50+ media buyers for my two agencies, AdTribe and Haven.

Most of our talent comes from Ukraine and Eastern Europe. They work hard, learn fast, and know the platforms inside out.

It has been my secret weapon.

A few months ago, an agency owner DM’d me asking if we could hire and train a media buyer for his agency.

That one message turned into our Media Buyer Placement Offer. 

Since then, demand exploded.
We even brought on a full-time recruiter to increase our hiring capacity.

Here’s what agencies get when they work with us:

✅ World-class offshore talent with real platform depth
✅ Every candidate is vetted by our Head of Paid Media
✅ 90-day replacement guarantee
✅ Additional support and access to our SOPs

Keep in mind, this is not our main focus. 

We still hire and manage our own internal team of media buyers running ads for 90+ accounts.

So we only take up to 5 placements per month.

If you’re hiring in the next 60 days, DM me.

The main thing that kills agency margins is simple:

too many managers who don’t do any billable work.

At Haven, every team lead and even our head of paid media manages at least a few strategic accounts.

Four reasons:

→ it keeps our COGS low
→ they stay sharp and keep practicing their craft
→ they actually understand what good looks like
→ fulfillment doesn’t suffer when a media buyer takes a vacation

At the end of the day, your best managers never stop being practitioners.

Otherwise, you end up building a company where managers manage managers and no one knows how to do the work.

🚀 October 2025 results at Haven

Ad spend: $1.2M
Revenue: $3.1M 
Leads generated: 91,870

Top-performing niches: 

→ Apparel & Accessories ($1.8M in rev) 
→ Home & Lifestyle ($517K in rev) 
→ Food & Beverage ($320K in rev)

Platform breakdown: 

→ Meta: 58% 
→ Google: 41% 
→ LinkedIn, TikTok, Taboola, Email: 1%

Wins this month: 

✅ 71% of accounts hit or exceeded targets
✅ Introduced a new media buyer placement offer ($12,500 in contracts closed)
✅ Onboarded a few new agencies (ecom + B2B)
✅ Team started logging all inputs in Asana
✅ Hired a new media buyer

P.S.

Q4 is almost done. 
Black Friday is around the corner. 
This is when most agencies scramble.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

At Haven, we help marketing agencies scale without the stress of hiring.

Our senior media buyers run Meta and Google ads under your brand so you can take on more clients and protect your margins.

We have one spot left to fill our 2025 capacity.

Your CAC is irrelevant.

Ask yourself:

Would you rather pay $200 to get someone who spends $500?

Or $1,000 to get someone who spends $5,000?

I had this conversation last week with one of our MedSpa clients.

We kept pushing their hangover drip because it had the lowest CAC. On the surface, it looked like the right move.

Then we dug deeper.

Hangover drip customers almost never come back. 
They buy once and disappear.

Wellness drip customers are the opposite.
They turn into long-term clients spending over $5,000 every year.

Yes, the CAC to acquire them is higher.
But the CAC to LTV ratio makes way more sense.

Lesson?

Don't just push ad spend toward the products with the lowest CAC.
Focus on the offers that attract whale customers with the highest LTV instead.

That's how you build a great business.

Every agency has access to the same AI tools.

ChatGPT costs $20. Claude costs $20. Everyone can afford it.

Which means the tools themselves are not an advantage.

Knowing how to write prompts is not advantage either. 
You can literally ask ChatGPT to write the perfect prompt for you.

So what actually gives you an edge?

Data.

Data is the moat.

The more high-quality data you have, the better your AI outputs will be.

Once I realized this, we:

→ Moved all spreadsheets into Airtable 
→ Started logging every action in Asana 
→ Stored 7 years of campaign performance in our database 
→ Updated SOPs so LLMs can actually digest them 
→ Added ChatGPT to all our Slack channels
→ Saved all my LinkedIn posts and newsletters for voice training

Piece by piece, we're building our agency's second brain.

It's not sexy. 
Most people would rather build another ChatGPT wrapper that produces mediocre results.

We're aiming for excellence and willing to do the boring work.

That's what it takes to build a true AI-powered agency.

I was skimming through "Unreasonable Hospitality" the other day, and one line popped up:

"The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.”

It's true in restaurants. It's even more true in agencies.

 After hiring 50+ media buyers over 7 years, I've learned the best ones are always detail-oriented and organized.

They:

→ use clean naming conventions
→ show up to meetings on time
→ never miss a deadline
→ document their tests 
→ set up campaigns without mistakes

When hiring at Haven, I look for these small signals first. Not their experience. Not their certifications. The details.

Because if someone can't follow a simple naming convention, they won't follow complex SOPs either. If they're sloppy with campaign structure, they'll be sloppy with your budget.

Excellence starts with the details.

I used to think my main job as a founder was to hire smart people and let them cook.

Turns out, that’s only part of the equation.

Even the most talented team needs structure. Your business should run like a well-oiled machine, not depend on individual brilliance.

And that comes down to systems.

If your operations are messy, even A-players won’t save you.

From how you onboard new talent to how you define “great work,” everything needs to be documented, clear, and repeatable.

And once you set those standards, your job still isn’t done. You have to make sure everyone actually follows them.

That means meetings, reviews, accountability, and constant communication.

My point is, building an agency is hard. Very hard

It’s a never-ending cycle of winning clients, fulfilling work, hiring, and managing people.

But there’s a way to remove at least half of that stress.

👉 Hire Haven

We handle most of the client fulfillment so you can focus on growth.

And finally take a vacation without your phone blowing up.

Last week, we did an account audit for one of our agency partners.

Here’s the message they sent us after sharing it with their prospect 👇

"We had a great call yesterday evening. The prospect should be signing this week."

And this isn’t an exception.

Our audits convert over 50 percent of prospects into paying clients for our partners.

Here’s what the audit covers:

→ account structure 
→ creative strategy 
→ competitors analysis
→ website & CRO recommendations
→ a clear step by step action plan

It costs only $199.

The best part? Every new partner gets one audit for free.

DM me “audit” and I’ll send you the details.

Each month, our media buyers review what's working across 90+ accounts.  

Here are 6 things that stood out in November:

1/ New case study for CPG

We scaled a beef jerky brand from $5k in ad spend to $25k/month at 3.0 ROAS.

 What worked:

→ BOGO offer 
→ Build your bundle LP
→ Creative diversity
→ ABO < CBO

2/ Smaller radius = higher ROI for local businesses

Wellness client kept expanding radius to get more leads. Cost per lead kept climbing.

Worse: No one drives 10+ miles for IV therapy.

We cut radius to 5 miles. 
Optimized GMB.
ROI has increased from 2.5 to 4.97

His clinic is fully booked now.

3/ Inventory kills momentum

Tableware client: $4-5K daily revenue during peak season.

Ran out of stock. Had to cut ad spend. Revenue crashed to $2K/day.

We had winning ads pulling 3.5 ROAS but nothing to sell.

Another reminder why I don't start my own ecom store 😅

4/ Excluding branded keywords backfired

Client wanted more new customers. We excluded branded keywords from PMax.

→ ROAS tanked
→ New customer rate increased only 2% 
→ Competitors started bidding on their brand

Never leave your branded search unprotected.

5/ Pmax for lead gen clients 

Most lead gen PMax campaigns fail. Google drives tons of volume, but nothing converts.

Why? You're optimizing for cheap calls, not revenue.

Solution: push offline conversion value back to ads manager

We did this for a MedSpa client and increased appointment value by 67%. 

Treat every lead gen account like ecom. 

6/ Friction kills conversions

Client's 25% off sale failed completely.  

The problem: Promo code buried in the creative. Not auto-applied at checkout.  

The fix: Code in headline + Meta's promo extension or Shopify auto-apply URLs.

Small friction = big revenue loss.

P.S.  Managing 90+ accounts means we see patterns before they become trends.  

If your agency needs media buyers who actually know what they're doing (and cost 65% less than US talent), DM me

Another week, another round of wins from our agency partners 💪

Love seeing these messages pop up in Slack.  

90+ accounts under management.  
18 agency partners. 
Wins like these every single week.  

This is why we do what we do.

We stopped running Haven like one big team.

Instead, we built it around pods: 
small independent teams that operate like mini agencies inside Haven.

Each pod has a team lead who acts like a CEO.

They hire their own people, manage their own mini P&L, and take full ownership of results.

It changed everything.

Before, I had to review every decision, jump into Slack threads, and fix small fires every day.

Now, team leads make decisions fast, solve problems on their own, and take full accountability for outcomes.

Each pod has its own strengths:

Pod #1 - Meta and Klaviyo 
Pod #2 - Meta and Google 
Pod #3 - Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn 

Team leads are incentivized like founders.

They earn a percentage of their pod’s profit, so when the pod wins, the whole agency wins.

Extreme ownership is how we scale without losing quality.

I posted my first LinkedIn post back in 2020.

It got 6 likes.

I remember spending hours writing it and thinking it was a waste of time when I could be doing something more important.

So I stopped.

But here’s what I realized:
If I had stayed consistent, both of my agencies would probably be 3x bigger by now.

I finally started posting regularly this year.

Here's what happened:

→ my calendar got packed with leads
→ I met amazing people who became close friends
→ hiring talent became 10x easier

The math is simple:
More visibility = more opportunities.

But here's the thing most people miss: it's not about going viral.

It's about showing up consistently so the right people find you when they need you.

If you run a B2B business, LinkedIn is still the best marketing channel to go all in on.

The best time to start was 5 years ago.
The second best time is today.

We used to send 30 to 40 invoices manually every month. Now it's all done automatically in Airtable. 

Before...

...everything lived across spreadsheets and Slack messages

...invoices for small one-time projects were getting missed 

...our accountant had to log in to Stripe and send every invoice by hand

...no one really knew which invoices were already sent or still pending

In short, it was messy. 

Once we moved our entire back end to Airtable, it finally made sense to automate the whole thing.

And we did. Here's how it works now:

→ A script pulls all active accounts with the retainers we charge
→ Head of Paid Media goes through the list and approves everything
→ Agencies confirm their accounts through Airtable Interfaces
→ Airtable pushes invoices straight to Stripe through API

Now, I don’t even think about invoicing anymore (almost 😅). 

The team reviews their part, agencies confirm their active accounts, and Stripe sends everything on its own.

It finally feels like a real system instead of something I had to babysit every month.

Airtable has been our biggest operational win this year.

Super happy we made the switch.

Our $199 audits are closing deals for agency partners.

Here's what one of them just told us: 

"Whoever did the audit, please tell them they did a great job! I like how they incorporated infographics and embedded videos directly in the audit. Overall it was very thorough and helped me close this client."

We've done 30+ audits in the last 3 months.

They convert over 50% of prospects into paying clients.

 Here's what every audit includes:

→ Full account structure analysis 
→ Creative strategy breakdown with examples 
→ Competitor analysis with actual ad screenshots 
→ Website & CRO recommendations 
→ Step-by-step action plan for the first 90 days

After reviewing dozens of accounts, we see the same patterns:  

Most agencies are leaving money on the table with poor campaign structure. 
Creative testing is almost non-existent.
Landing pages don't match ad messaging.  

The audit shows prospects exactly what they're missing. And more importantly, how to fix it.

Price is $199. 
But every new partner gets their first audit free.

We only do 10 audits per month because our Head of Paid Media reviews each one personally.  

If you have a prospect on the fence, DM me "audit" and we'll help you close them.

When I started Haven, I wanted it to be fully productized.

Same deliverables.
Same process.
Same price

But I learned very fast that with agencies, this is not gonna work.

Every agency I talked to had its own workflow, its own reporting style, its own way of communicating with clients.

I couldn’t force them into our system, so we had to change our approach.

Now, for each agency we work with, we create a separate Notion doc:

"How to work with agency X"

Each doc covers: 

→ how they like communication
→ what reports their clients expect
→ what “good” means in their niche
→ what we need from them to do our best work

It does make our ops more complex.

Just think about it:
we are managing more than 90 accounts across 18 agency partners in multiple niches: ecommerce, home improvement, medspa, apps, coaching, and a few others.

Each agency and each niche needs a tailored way of working. There is no one-size-fits-all.

But the deeper we integrate ourselves into those agencies, the longer they stay.

We still have agencies that worked with me 7 years ago when I was a freelancer. 

And in the agency world, retention is the only thing that really matters.

If you can retain clients for years, you can always optimize your processes to improve margins.

But if you lose clients left and right, your agency will always feel like it’s on fire.

One of the most useful things I use AI for has nothing to do with writing or creative work.

Every month, I ask Claude a simple question:

“Which clients are at risk of churning?”

It analyzes our Airtable data: ROAS, retention, % of goals hit, creative performance. 

Then gives us a breakdown like this:

🔴 High-risk clients
🟠 Medium-risk clients
🟢 Stable clients

My head of paid media and I review it together.

We use it to:

→ Spot accounts that need attention
→ Identify patterns across underperforming campaigns
→ And plan cash flow accordingly

Instead of waiting for clients to Slack me “hey, can we hop on a call?”, we reach out first. 

We flag the performance concern and bring solutions before they have to ask.

Most people use AI to write posts or make funny videos with Sora.

But the real unlock is data analysis.

What used to take hours in spreadsheets now takes 30 seconds.

How are you using AI in your agency?

Another week, another round of wins from our agency partners 😊

Jumpact

Born in 2022, Jumpact (previously Spark Media) is a bold, branding-first creative agency based in Mississauga. We specialize in social, branding, and production. From ideas to impact, we make brands unforgettable.

Founder

Science&Humans

- Leading a team of SEO and paid ad management specialists, email marketing and growth specialists, graphic designers, content writers, and content creators, to position the brand as a leader in the private healthcare space.

- Leading complete brand relaunch with new products and expanded market segment including: new website including UI/UX, revamped social media presence, updated digital and content strategy. 

- Driving 20% MoM growth in user acquisition with an integrated marketing strategy (SEO, social media, influencer, and email marketing)

- Working on corporate sales program as a new channel to drive growth via customer acquisition.

Senior Marketing Manager

Meridian Global Uniforms

Marketing Manager

Lagom Interiors

Founded Lagom Interiors as an online only shopping store for Modern, Mid-century, and Scandinavian furniture. Lagom is an online furnishing brand on a mission to provide an excellent customer experience and a remarkable product quality. 

Lagom is fast becoming an established brand in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad, with a client retention at an astounding 90%, and MOM revenue increase of 30%.

Founder & CEO

Telenor

- Grew the revenue base of Alternate Channel sales by onboarding new partners, particularly non telco retail acquisition to enhance the retail foot print in all major cities.
- Trained, enabled and equipped the alternate channel team to sell Telenor’s Business product portfolio.
- Identifed, developed and traiedn the agent/merchant network and team network to reach out to the masses and promote Telenor Business products and services 
- Proactively managed and mitigated issues through engagement with relevant stakeholders by counterbalancing negative representations and acting as a counterweight to short-term thinking and negative perceptions 
- Developed presentations, reports, strategy documents and manage relationship with partners and strategic alliances

Manager Alternate Channels B2B

Careem

Responsible for the acquisition of corporate customers and restaurant partners, developing ecosystems and driving business growth and profitability.

- Penetrated large scale organizations across FMCG, Telco, and Pharma and effectively closed business deals of PKR 7 million
- Ensured efficient maintenance of the CRM system to accurately record sales activities, pipeline and progress towards
- Worked closely with in house teams of Product, Finance and Marketing to ensure that client requirements are effectively articulated internally
- Identified upselling opportunities from the existing client base and grow an existing portfolio of clients by 12 large accounts within 3 months

Head of Corporate Sales

Headed Careem business including performance, growth, marketing, operations, and PnL for the north province of Pakistan. Key achievements are as follows:

- Built and coached an organization of over 35 people for Careem North ground up. This team is now the most sought-after talent of the province
- Grew the business by 4x within 9 months, and made Peshawar the fastest growing city across Careem Pakistan, and at one point, across Careem Global
- Launched new products that were market relevant (bikes and dabba) to facilitate and solve transportation need, and fuel business growth
- Reduced the OPEX and direct costs by 50%, while delivering exceptional growth
- Launched Women Captains Program across Pakistan, an initiative that won National Civic Innovation Award by Pakistan Innovation Foundation in Dec 2017

General Manager North Province

Telenor Pakistan

Program Manager Startup Accelerator

Focused on devising and delivering Commercial Division's business transformation change management. The role includes strategic planning, senior stakeholder mobilization and providing extensive consulting and coaching. 

Core responsibilities are as follows: 

- Engaged in transforming Telenor Pakistan from a traditional Telco to a Digital Service Provider
- Playing a key role in Commercial's strategic planning to drive business
- Responsible for managing Commercial Division change initiatives and transformation 
- Leading strategic leadership communication across division
- Securing projects sponsorship and define relevant teams to drive change
- Responsible for collaborating with cross functional teams to deliver on agenda
- Identifying and securing efficiency opportunities and make constructive suggestions for  operational efficiency
- Institutionalizing learning from change initiatives

Assistant Manager Business Transformation

The Scottish Government

Reported to the Procurement Manager of Scottish Government Directorate
- Revised business planning processes and provided solutions for maintaining continuous improvement in the Strategic Prioritisation Practice in the Scottish Procurement and Commercial Directorate (SPCD)
- Analysed barriers to performance improvement within projects demonstrated in the 2012 engagement index of the Directorate teams

Continuous Improvement Consultant, The Scottish Government

Nestle

Oversaw the sales analysis, demand forecasts, and inventory maintenance for a monthly product turnover of USD 18.5 million. 
- Collaborated with Sales & Marketing teams to track operations performance and identify business improvement areas
- Communicated and negotiated with key business partners for channelling and implementing Sales & Marketing strategy
- Designed and maintained processes and tools to capture customer feedback on distribution operation efficiency 
- Managed the end to end Supply Chain for associated Sales and Marketing teams

Supply Chain Analyst

Managed the resource planning and optimization for national distribution operations involving floor staff of over 300 employees, daily transportation fleet of minimum 150 vehicles and a daily product dispatch worth USD 2.8 million 
- Implemented resource and operational restructuring based on business growth and production plans, particularly through DMAIC projects 
- Managed the centralized information repository such as warehousing SOP documentation 
- Conducted internal audits as a certified internal auditor for OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001

Team Leader Planning (Physical Logistics & Warehousing)

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited

Development of Operational Master Plan for the deployment of more than 1000 Distribution Points across the country.
- Development of Network Plans for coverage of emerging sectors of Islamabad and its Implementation through GIS Mapping Application

Management Trainee

Entrepreneur | I build powerful branding solutions for bold businesses

I help AI and Tech B2B businesses build brands that shape industries. Companies that work with me aren’t looking for another branding agency. They need a strategic partner who understands how to position them for long-term demand and market leadership.

At Jumpact, we focus on positioning brands where perception drives growth. My work spans high-growth companies in Canada, US, UK,
Middle East and beyond, helping them gain visibility, credibility, and competitive strength.

What I focus on: 
✔ AI and Tech B2B brand positioning
✔ Narrative-driven branding
✔ Category ownership and market perception

If you’re building in AI, SaaS, or future tech and need more than a branding service, let’s talk.

Momina Rajput

Five meetings. Same pitch. Zero conversions.

A tech founder came to me last month with this pattern.

Great product. Solid traction. Investor meetings going well. 

Then radio silence after every pitch.

Perfect market-fit product but just one problem:

Tonal whiplash.

His LinkedIn read like a thought leader. 
His pitch deck read like a compliance document. 
His founder energy in calls felt like a completely different company.

Buyers sensed something was off.

When your tone shifts across touchpoints, trust fractures.

Investors question which version represents reality. 
Customers hesitate because the pieces don't fit. 
Your team struggles to match a voice that keeps changing.

Tone shapes recognition faster than your logo does.

It's how people identify you before they remember your company name.

Here's what changes when tone stays consistent:

→ Your content sounds like your sales calls 
→ Your team creates without waiting for your approval
→ Buyers move faster because everything feels aligned

Tone transfers trust across every interaction.

When your posts sound nothing like your pitch deck, revenue leaks through that gap.

Below are 5 signs your tone is leaking revenue: 

P.S: I’m currently taking on founders for Brand VoicePrint sessions.

DM “Voice” to grab a spot.

Brand Messaging for B2B Tech Founders: Build Authority, Win Clients & Raise Capital

Three creators built million-dollar brands with one system.

Most LinkedIn advice pushes tactics. Post at this time. Use this hook format. Try this content style.

But the creators who actually convert attention into revenue?

They built content systems that scale without them.

I studied how Alex Hormozi, Sahil Bloom, and Nicolas Cole 🚢👻 turned LinkedIn into revenue engines.

They share one operational principle most founders miss entirely.

Swipe through to see the system behind their success.

What Top Creators Do Right About Content Systems

Three creators turned content into income engines.

Most LinkedIn advice obsesses over creation. What to post. When to post. How to hook.

The creators who actually monetize have cracked distribution before they perfected content.

I studied Gary Vaynerchuk, Justin Welsh, and Dickie Bush 🚢.

Combined, they've generated $50M+ in revenue from content.

None of them won by creating more. They won by distributing smarter.

Swipe through to see the distribution systems that built their empires.

What Top Creators Do Right About Distribution

Notion became a verb without paid ads.

"Let me Notion that." "I Notioned the meeting notes."

When your product becomes part of daily language, you've won a game most SaaS companies never even play.

Notion launched in 2016 into a crowded productivity space.

Evernote owned note-taking. Google Docs dominated collaboration. Trello had project management.

Every category seemed claimed.

Then Notion did something least expected, they refused to pick a lane.

Instead of positioning as "better Evernote" or "simpler Trello," they created a new category entirely.

"All-in-one workspace."

That phrase unlocked everything.

The messaging was ruthlessly simple: "Write, plan, collaborate. All in one place."

Just a simple promise that you could stop switching between twelve different tools.

Here's what made it stick:
→ They owned ambiguity as a feature. 

Most SaaS companies panic when prospects ask "what exactly does this do?" Notion leaned into it. 

The answer was always: whatever you need it to.
→ They built for community, not just executives. 

Early adopters were students, creators, and solo operators who customized it obsessively then evangelized freely.
→ They made templates the distribution engine. 

Every shared template became a demo. Every demo created a new user. The product marketed itself through use.

The visual identity reinforced flexibility. Soft colors. Modular blocks. Endless white space.

The design whispered: "You're in control here."

By 2021, Notion hit a $10B valuation with minimal paid acquisition.

Growth came from word-of-mouth because the message was simple enough to repeat:

"Stop using ten tools. Use one."

When Andrew Chen joined as GP at a16z, he called Notion "the productivity tool for the next generation of knowledge workers."

Most SaaS founders think category creation means inventing new jargon.

Notion proved the opposite.

They took existing behaviors and gave people one place to do all of them.

The lesson for B2B founders is you don't need a new category if you can own the overlap between existing ones.

Notion didn't invent docs, tasks, or databases. They just made switching between them unnecessary.

That message was clear enough to spread without a marketing budget.

👉 What tool have you started using as a verb without realizing it?

Ask three clients what you do. You'll get three different answers.

Here’s why:

You've perfected your About section. Spent weeks on homepage copy. Nailed your pitch deck intro.

Then you ask a customer to refer you.
They stumble. Pause. Default to "They're in marketing, I think?"

That moment reveals everything.

Your positioning only works if other people can repeat it.

Real positioning lives in this sentence: 
"Oh, you need to talk to [founder name]. They help [specific people] with [specific problem]."

That repeatable sentence becomes the asset that scales.

It gets you into rooms you didn't apply for. It generates warm intros instead of cold outreach. It makes you referable.

Most founders optimize for impressiveness.

They load positioning with industry jargon and feature lists. They want to sound comprehensive.

Then they wonder why referrals never come.

The test is simple:
Can someone who heard your pitch once explain what you do to someone else?

When positioning is too complex, it dies in translation.

The best positioning borders on simple.

Stripe: "Payments for developers." 
Notion: "Write, plan, collaborate. All in one place." 
Superhuman: "The fastest email experience ever made."

You read it once. You remember it forever.
That clarity makes you easy to recommend.

Your positioning should work for the person introducing you, not just the person hearing the introduction.

Strip away everything that makes you hard to explain.

Make referrals effortless.

Test this: Ask three clients to explain what you do. If they each say something different, you've found the problem.

9/10 founders don’t realise just how MUCH their voice shapes market perception.

71% of B2B buyers say they trust a founder’s public insight more than a company’s marketing (Gartner).

And 82% of people are more likely to trust a company when they feel they “know” the founder (Edelman Trust Barometer).

The impact of a founder’s narrative becomes SO obvious when you look at what these founders built by showing up with intention:

1. Adam Robinson (Retention.com → RB2B)
- Built Retention.com to ~$25M ARR with a lean team, fueled heavily by his public presence.
- One LinkedIn post pulled in 1,600 qualified leads.
- The credibility he built online helped him reach $200K MRR at RB2B in six months.

2. Guillaume Moubeche (lemlist / lempire)
- Started with $1,000 and grew lemlist to $28M ARR.
- His build-in-public style positioned him as a category voice.
- The attention he created translated directly into inbound demand, partnerships, and a loyal user base.

3. Kait Stephens (Brij)
- Her LinkedIn presence reshaped Brij’s entire trajectory.
- Her narrative contributed to 10x revenue, 5x pipeline, and 50x website traffic.
- Nearly half their deals had a direct path back to her thought leadership.

4. Chris Walker (Refine Labs)
- Tracked every deal publicly for two years.
- Founder-led content drove $50M in pipeline and $14M closed.
- Zero ads. Zero outbound. Just consistent perspective shared with the market.

A founder’s voice is not a nice-to-have.
It is literally an economic driver.

It shapes the trust, speed, and quality of opportunities coming your way.

Your product creates the result. Your narrative creates the demand.

So, it’s high time you stop putting off building your authority narrative and start showing up with your brand.

I used to believe better features won until I saw a brand win with just one defining choice.

Competing to be “better” leads you directly into the commodity pile. 

That is the territory of endless price wars, feature bloat, and marginal gains. 

Products focus on features; brands focus on meaning.

To be different is the easiest path to standing out - even if that feels weird.

Differentiation means subtracting everything that distracts from your single, defining choice. 

Your brand must articulate the unique meaning behind your existence, not just the exhaustive list of functions you perform.

When you compete to be better, you are accepting the existing rules. 

When you choose to be different, you change the game entirely.

Focus on being the only one that does X, not the best one that does A, B, C, and D. 

- Volvo Cars chose Safety over speed or luxury.
- Airtable chose Flexibility over just data entry.
- Salesforce chose Cloud First over enterprise software breadth.

That single defining choice is the cornerstone of sustainable premium positioning.

The deepest work for a founder is isolating that singular source of truth. 

It requires setting aside product pride to find the one strategic constraint that unlocks an entire market narrative. 

If your product is brilliant but your message is diluted, that constraint is the next system we need to build.

If you are a tech founder and want to map the strategic constraint that dictates your entire brand narrative, DM “Brand Bible” and that’s exactly what I’ll lay out for you.

He started at one percent polling.

Zohran Mamdani pivoted from that and went on to win the New York City mayoral race.

The first Muslim mayor in the city's history.
The first person of South Asian descent to hold the office.

More than 2 million voters cast their ballot in the 2025 election, the biggest turnout for a mayor's race since 1969.

The city that never sleeps showed up for a message it believed in.

But it wasn't always like this.

A year ago, Mamdani was a virtually unknown state assemblyman from Queens.

When he entered the crowded mayoral race in October 2024, he was polling at around 1% against establishment favorites.

Most political strategists wrote him off immediately.
Then his campaign did something unusual with branding.

While every other candidate ran traditional red, white, and blue campaigns, Mamdani's team chose vivid blue and bold orange.

The colors referenced Bollywood posters, bodega signs, and taxi cabs.

Familiar to New Yorkers. Impossible to ignore.

One marketing professor noted the campaign's visuals "created a brand that supporters wanted to wear and share." 

His competitor, Andrew Cuomo, actually rebranded mid-campaign and copied those exact colors.

That's when you know your message stuck.

The verbal message was equally sharp: "Focus on affordability."

Three words that every New Yorker immediately understood and related to.

Mamdani communicated in English, Spanish, Urdu, and Hindi through consistent and meaningful content in all four languages PR & Lattes, showing communities they mattered enough to be spoken to directly.

As one branding expert put it: "In a sea of sanitized political messaging, Mamdani's visuals stand out because they mean something."

The campaign turned 104,000 volunteers into a distribution engine because the message was simple enough to spread and specific enough to mean something.

Generic messaging gets generic results.
Specific messaging creates movements.

Mamdani proved something most B2B founders forget: 
When your message is clear and distinct, people don't just consume it.

They wear it. Share it. Repeat it.

Your message should make people choose sides.
It should feel like it was built for a specific community.

Mamdani's message worked because it meant something to someone, not something vague to everyone.

The lesson for B2B founders: clarity and cultural specificity beat generic "professionalism" every single time.

When your message actually stands for something, people amplify it for free.

From 1% to 50.4% of the vote in twelve months.
That's the economic value of a message that sticks.

If your content still sounds like your startup days, it’s costing you enterprise deals.

Let me explain...

Every founder hits a turning point.
Usually mid-pitch. Sometimes mid-post.

You hear yourself talk… and realize the story that once sold your dream no longer sells your business.
It feels too small for the size of what you’ve built.

In the early days, your voice was your advantage.
It was raw, personal, and bold - because your buyers were early adopters betting on potential, not polish.

But as you scale, the audience changes.
Now, you’re in rooms with risk-averse decision makers.
They don’t buy belief. They buy certainty.

And that’s where most founders lose traction - not in product, not in performance - but in perception.
Their tone still screams “early hustle” when their company’s already in the big leagues.

That mismatch quietly kills deals, weakens trust, and limits how far your message travels.

Here’s how I fix that for founders:

➡ Refine your voice to match your company’s current stage.
➡ Rebuild your story to earn confidence in high-stakes conversations.
➡ Shape a narrative that scales across teams, content, and clients.

Because your voice isn’t wrong - it’s just outdated.
And every level of growth demands a new language.

If your story hasn’t evolved as fast as your business, you’re already behind.

DM me “Voice” and I’ll personally audit your brand language - so it fits the scale you’ve reached and the markets you’re stepping into.

Twenty-eight times before they buy anything.

That's the average number of touch-points a buyer needs before making a purchase decision.

Reading an email. Watching a video. Clicking through. Engaging with a post.

Twenty-eight separate moments where your message shows up and registers before it finally clicks. 

Most founders hear that number and think: 
more content, more channels, more noise.

They scatter their message across platforms hoping something sticks.

What actually works is repetition with variation.

Same core message. Different angles. Multiple formats.

Think about how you discovered ChatGPT.

You didn't see an ad and sign up immediately.
You saw tweets. Heard conversations. Read articles. Watched demos.

Then one day you just typed it into your browser.

That's the pattern for every SaaS adoption.
The founders who crack this understand something most people miss: buying happens in layers.

Each touchpoint adds another thin coat of trust.
By touch twenty-eight, the decision feels inevitable.

Most B2B founders change their message before it has time to sink in.

New positioning every quarter. Different value props for different campaigns.

Constant pivoting because they're bored of saying the same thing.

Your audience hasn't heard it enough times yet.
You have.

The discipline is staying with one message long enough for it to compound.

When someone finally types your company name directly into their browser, that's not impulse.

That's the result of systematic exposure to a message that stayed consistent long enough to become familiar.

Most founders abandon their message around touch seven.

Right before it would've started working.

Are you changing your message because the market doesn't understand it? Or because you're tired of repeating it?

👉 How many times do you think your ICP has actually encountered your core message?

I bought a car yesterday, my first in Canada.

Iv owned cars before but not in Canada.

I was a new immigrant. We were too stretched. 

We first bought an old rundown sedan that we weren’t sure would start the next day.

Then we got a nice family car but we had to share because… we were new immigrants and we were too stretched.

But Nabeel would have to drive over an hour to work so I would
mostly be on public transport, or ubers if with kids.

And then, three years, two houses, and one new kid later, my uber bill started matching a lease I could afford.

So here we are.

I’m really stoked and I wanted to share this happiness with you all :)

Some days some things feel like a really far off dream. But time passes and you catch it, you catch your dream.

And then your dream becomes your new normal.

Very thankful to Allah for everything 🤍

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It wasn’t until I got multiple “Congrats on your 3 years at Jumpact” messages this evening that it sunk in.

It was today, three years ago, that I perched on my almost new green IKEA sofa in our first apartment in Canada and googled how to register a business. Then followed the steps and named it Spark Media. On the spot. On a whim.

ChatGPT wasn’t too popular then. Or maybe I didn’t know about it. Else I’d have searched there. Anyway.

I was working with a health tech startup then. I had recently moved as a new immigrant. I had no close friends or family. My brother was in Canada but 6 hours away.

I would send my daughter (I only had Miraal then) to daycare and every second week, I kid you not, she would be home, sick with a new viral I hadn’t heard of. And I would have to take WFH days.

The pressure of earning, cooking, cleaning, raising a child on our own, the impending first winter, finances, all while setting up base in a brand new country was gutting both Nabeel and me.

Our relationship was struggling. And so was our health. My mental and hormonal health took a nose dive.

I spoke to the founders and requested work from home, especially because my hormonal health was totally f*cked.

They said “no can do” (ironic because they were in the hormonal health space).

That was the wake-up call. By then Nabeel had landed a job, so I knew we would have a roof over our heads and food. I resigned and decided to work for myself. After all, I was doing that in Pakistan. How hard could it be?

As it turns out, it was pretty darn hard.

In the year that followed I was hustling to take up projects for 200 dollars to run social media pages for realtors and small local businesses.

But I kept at it. I kept messaging my university alumni groups and other groups I was part of.

“Hi, this is Momina. I run a marketing agency. We offer social media, SEO, … “

And I kept getting banned for spamming and not following group rules.

It was one such group that I landed my first 2k project from. A cybersecurity business.

And rest is history.

As soon as I started working with this business, I realized the one thing I was bloody brilliant at:

Understanding that most tech founders, especially in B2B, struggle to explain what they do. And I, being an engineer turned marketeer, could grasp exactly what their product does and make their audience dance to our tune with on-point brand messaging instead of “let me bore you to death” jargon.

That was it. That was my opportunity.

3 weeks after giving birth to my 2nd child in 2024, I decided to zero in on JUST THAT. I incorporated my business as Jumpact, went all in on LinkedIn personal branding, and that’s how I moved from a 200 dollar ticket size to a 10k dollar one.

If you never start, you will never know. And once you know, there’s no going back!

This is us on our first ever flight from Islamabad to Toronto. Excited and nervous, not sure where life would take us, but I love where it did :)

Happy birthday Jumpact 🤍

Founders love to say their pitch is “dialed in.”

Last week, a young pre-seed founder told me the same. 

She’d pitched it fifty times. Got good reactions. Felt rock-solid.

Then I asked her five questions.

She stumbled on the third one. Couldn't answer the fourth. Looked genuinely confused by the fifth.

Her messaging collapsed the moment she stepped off the script.

There's a difference.

Memorized messaging breaks the moment someone asks an off-script question.

Tight messaging holds under pressure because the founder owns the story, not just the delivery.

Here's the audit I run with every founder who thinks their message is ready:

These five questions expose every weak point in your positioning.

If you can answer all five without hesitating, your messaging works.

If you stumble on any of them, you've found where revenue leaks.

Almost 9/10 founders get stuck on question three.

That's usually where I know we have real work to do.

If you think your customers care about your brand, think twice.

They care about the tribe they're joining.

I just finished rewatching Chris Do's conversation on personal branding, and one line stopped me cold:

"Nike doesn't sell shoes."

He's right. 

They're selling enrollment into a tribe of people who believe in human achievement. The swoosh is a signal.

Here's what that means for your messaging.

When tech founders come to me frustrated that their brand "isn't landing," they're usually fixating on the wrong thing. 

They're perfecting taglines. Polishing websites. Obsessing over copy.

But branding isn't what people feel when they interact with you.

Corporate brands spend millions trying to sound human. Meanwhile, founders with the natural advantage of being human are trying to act like corporations.

You're copying what you think big brands do - which is advertising. 

Performance marketing. Transactional pushes.

Personal brands, however, win by doing what corporations can't: being consistently and undeniably human.

Your audience doesn't look for perfection. They want connection. 

They want to know who you are, what you stand for, and whether they belong in your world.

Think about the brands you're loyal to. 

I guarantee it's because somewhere along the way, you felt like you were part of something bigger than a transaction.

Chris calls it "karmic equity." I call it messaging that compounds.

When you lead with clarity about who you serve and what you believe, people don't just buy from you. They join you.

So if your brand feels scattered right now, ask yourself: 
Are you trying to sound like a corporation when you're already sitting on the most valuable thing they're trying to fake?

You're human. Act like it.

Time got expensive after I became a parent..

And it made me a better founder.

When you only get a few real work hours a day, you start treating them like prime real estate.

- You stop taking meetings that should’ve been a message

- You stop entertaining “quick questions” that derail half your afternoon.

- You stop giving polite yeses to things you’ll resent in 48 hours.

I make decisions faster now.
I waste less time.

If something doesn’t move my business forward, it’s gone.

Honestly, I wish I had this level of discipline before kids.

Back then, I had time.
Now, I have priorities.

And this shift alone has made me a sharper founder than any productivity hack ever could.

If you’re a parent building a company, what’s one thing you’ve become absolutely non-negotiable about?

If you think B2B must sound boring and safe, think twice.

Intuit Mailchimp built a $4.2 billion business selling email marketing - a commodity service. 

Their competitors focused on lists and deliverability. 

Mailchimp focused on Freddie, the chimp, and an unforgettable, quirky tone.

In a category where they’re certainly not the cheapest,and most likely don’t have the most features either. 

→ They won by being the most human.
→ They took the fear out of email marketing for small businesses and creators. 
→ They told their users, "It is okay to be nervous about hitting send," and backed it up with reassuring copy and delightful micro-interactions.

Here’s what that led to:

According to Forbes, in 2018 it had 20 million users, generated over $600 million in revenue, and was valued at $4.2 billion.
Let that sink in. 

So how did they achieve this in such a competitive space? 

→ They owned one attribute: Approachability and quirky confidence.
→ They targeted one psychographic: The small business owner who feels overwhelmed by technical marketing.
→ They created one transformation: Turning a necessary evil (email) into an enjoyable weekly task.

Mailchimp proves that brand personality is a competitive moat. 

When your competitors are focused purely on the technical spec sheet, you can win by focusing on the user's emotional experience.

Most SaaS founders believe B2B means professional neutrality.
Mailchimp proved that professional distinctiveness is the ultimate premium feature.

What essential tool do you use mainly because you love the way it makes you feel?

Every time I have started my exercise journey, I have crashed.

I’d go in giving myself 2 months to lose 10 pounds and workout x number of days and stick to a very strict diet and the all in or nothing mindset.

Always.

But this time it’s different. I am going in with a love-myself mindset. Let’s stretch to calm my mind, let’s lift to make me stronger, let’s walk to make me lighter. 

Let’s show up because I love me and I want to show respect to my body and mind.

I have 9:30 am to 3:30 pm daily while kids are in school/daycare to get work, personal chores, and workout done.

But this comes as a priority. I will delay meetings and leave the kitchen dirty but I will not deprioritise myself.

This new found mindset has taken years to arrive. I have shifted from “lose your weight” to “love yourself”.

And it is making me a better businesswoman, a better mom, and a better partner.

So I preach to you too my friends, please go and love yourselves! 🕊️

I was just going through some of my top performing content on Linkedin over the last 365 days,

and here’s what I learned:

All of these posts (except one), were written on the spur of the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, I plan my content to the T, as you know, my business depends on it.

But none of the planned content performed like my spontaneous posts did.

Because they were coming in deep from the heart, and they all sounded like the God honest truth. Because they were!

So I highly recommend you pour yourselves some chaye or wine and treat this platform as a journal from time to time.

And just write.

You know, by typing on the phone and not copy pasting from you know where ;)

I’d recommend a pen but let’s not carried away :p

Wishing you all a very very solid personal brand a super start of the week 🕊️

(Almost) all posts are written by AI and that’s okay.

We’re all using machines.
No one is handwriting philosophy in candlelight.

We’re busy. We delegate. We automate. And that’s fine.

Thing is, we write with ChatGPT,
but we want to read content that feels human.

Because that’s where trust comes from, and that’s the whole dichotomy.

Below are some lines you might be using that make your audience think of ChatGPT immediately:

“Here’s the truth no one talks about…”
“It’s not about A, B, C. It’s about X.”
“Most people overcomplicate…”
“Growth happens quietly.”
“The kind you can’t fake.”

These statements aren’t wrong or something..

But they read like they were picked from the AI rack.

Writing feels different when it comes from someone who has actually lived what they’re describing.

It has a rhythm you don’t get from prompts.

A detail that doesn’t sound borrowed.

A tone that isn’t smoothed for universal appeal.

If you’re using ChatGPT (which we all are), just pull the draft out of the window and spend a few extra minutes with it.

Add one thing only you would say. 

AI content is the new “sponsored” and human content is the new “organic”. 

And we know which one will build us credibility :)

What other lines do you see everywhere that instantly smell of AI?

Elegance in communication is a business strategy, and some leaders build empires with it.

I always pay attention to how people speak in high-pressure rooms (founder calls/investor updates etc)

The people who rise fast communicate with ease. There’s a steadiness in their tone, a certain calm. They exude a sense that they’re fully present, and not performing..

It changes the whole dynamic around them, and you feel it immediately.
Your guard drops.
You listen eagerly.
You trust them without needing a long explanation.

Oprah Winfrey is a super example of this on a global scale.

Her interviews work because her voice carries warmth and authority at the same time.
She asks questions that feel grounded. She gives people space to breathe.
She creates emotional safety through the way she communicates.

And that energy is a core part of what makes her brand feel premium everywhere she shows up.

Elegant communication can build you a SOLID reputation. People remember how you made them feel long after the words fade.

If you want a premium brand, start with the way people feel after talking to you.

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