Founder, P33 | Executive Thought Leadership Agency

Helped 50+ B2B tech companies build their Founder/CEO Brand and implement Executive Thought Leadership Programs for LinkedIn. Customers, results & process: project33.io

About me:

I'm Finn, 29, grew up in Bremen, Germany, studied Physics & Philosophy in Heidelberg for 3 semesters, dropped out of college in 2017 because I was doing it for other people, flew to New York with no plans, documented the journey on Linkedin, Instagram and Youtube, and started my first company (Project 33) on the back of having grown a small audience. We're a small remote agency that helps B2B founders & execs create thought leadership content for Linkedin.

In my free time, which I try to have as much as possible of, I read (fav author: Nassim N. Taleb), write, run, lift, code (currently building an app), cook, make Youtube videos, turn books into Instagram accounts, grapple (BJJ), and travel (lived in NYC, Cape Town, Bali, Minsk, CMDX, Lima & Antalya so far). In December 2020 I married the most beautiful woman in the world. In January 2023, I became dad to the most beautiful baby girl. We currently live in Berlin, Germany.

Finn Thormeier

If you're in B2B marketing, you should be studying Sydney Sloan. She was: CMO at G2, CMO at Salesloft, CMO at Drata 🤯 Plus 16 years of multiple leadership roles at Adobe.

And last week, I got to sit down with her and ask about her biggest lessons + advice for GTM leaders going into 2026.

Some of the things we cover:

- The advice Sydney would give herself before her first CMO role
- Buyer research shifted from 29% to 50% on AI chatbots in 4 months, and what that means for you AEO strategy
- Why you probably don't need marketing automation the way you used to
- “Human in the loop” vs “human in the lead”
- The Show-Up-Bigger-Than-You-Are playbook
- Reorganizing GTM teams around outcomes, not functions

You can listen here:
-- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/daewkRiJ
-- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dtpHYD4Y
-- Apple: https://lnkd.in/dstuaPUb
-- Substack: https://lnkd.in/dJnX9Sud

Some of my takeaways:

1. The shift to AI search is happening FAST. G2 data showed that in April 2025, 29% of buyers said they started their research in of of the AI chatbots. By August that number hit 50%, just 4 months later. In 2026, every company needs to make sure their brand is the citation source LLMs use

2. Sydney got this advice from the CMOs of Okta and Snyk: Show up bigger than you are. You don’t need a massive budget, you need one anchor event or one bold move. At Drata, they bought out every ad space for two blocks around Moscone Center for RSA conference so attendees couldn’t miss them. At Salesloft, they bought a billboard on Highway 101, but the ROI didn’t come from the traffic driving by, it came from leveraging photos of it online. Big one-off events can signal momentum to investors and customers more than anything else

3. We’re entering the “Rick Rubin economy” - AI lowers the barrier to entry for content and code, so the only differentiator is taste. You can’t prompt your way to good taste. You need to hire for context and judgment, or leverage advisory boards of influencers who actually understand the market. AI provides the speed, but humans provide the creative direction that determines if anyone actually cares

4. Do we need GTM Architects? Everyone is rushing to hire GTM Engineers and build AI workflows, but in software development, you need engineers and architects. They work at different levels of abstraction - software engineers build and maintain software, software architects design the system as a whole. We need this for GTM: someone to map the strategy, choose the agentic platforms, and decide *what* to automate before you build it. Sydney sees this as a separate role, likely sitting in RevOps

5. The biggest mistake new CMOs make: obsessing over their domain of the marketing department. Sydney’s advice: Spend your first 90 days building deep relationships with your peers - the CFO, CRO, CEO. If you don’t understand the business context and have alignment with your peers, even the best marketing strategy in the world won’t save you

Top LinkedIn ghostwriting agency for CEOs, founders & execs -- Founder at Project 33 and Host of the Executive Brand Podcast

People forget that *high engagement* usually means *easy to engage with*. What's easy to engage with? Short posts, selfies, black/white takes. 

That's the real reason why there's so much of that stuff on Linkedin.

So when your local Linkedin influenster who gets hundreds of likes on every post and whose main product is a $99 course tells you that this is the kind of content your NEED to create, remember:

In B2B, inbound/customers/conversations with VPs+ often come from high trust. 

What builds high trust? Deep insights, balanced/nuanced takes, complete breakdowns - aka stuff that can't be skimmed in 3 seconds.

I discovered Louis Grenier a couple weeks ago - how did it take me so long?? This man grew his LinkedIn to 39,000+ followers and built a successful solo-consulting biz while breaking ALL the rules of LinkedIn the "gurus" want you to believe in:

- Bright orange profile pic
- Uses the F word ALL the time
- Spent $8,500 to produce a YouTube (!) mini-series to market his services
- Wildly mixes his post formats
- Regularly includes links in the post copy
- Publicly ROASTS his sponsors
- Pays zero attention to the algorithm

Dave Gerhardt called him the french Harry Dry

If the all LinkedIn Gurus were right, Louis should be nowhere near where he is today, getting nowhere near the results he's getting.

Want to learn how he does it?

This Thursday at 11am EST, I'm doing a live Zoom call with Louis to ask him about his approach and how, you too, can Stand The F*ck Out. We'll include audience Q&A, so you can bring your own questions.

Join us here: https://lnkd.in/dQ7J9vXh

I strongly believe almost all companies who currently do great marketing, I'd eg. list Clay, PostHog, 37signals, have some version of this mindset when it comes to brand. Here articulated by Chris Evans, co-founder of incident.io. 

You gotta have taste, take some risks, have fun, think about the customer, and just trust that it will all somehow, in the end, benefit your company. You can't measure it and you shouldn't even try. Almost by definition, if you could measure and attribute brand marketing, it would be called demand gen.

In prepping for a podcast episode, I was reading a CEO's Linkedin content today. What stood out to me: I actually LEARNED things. It's crazy that this feels like a rare experience these days on Linkedin.

The posts weren't formatted with tons of bullet points and 5-part lists and one-line paragraphs.

The hook was just a regular sentence that didn't feel "optimized"

The overall posts and topics didn't feel engineered - no trend jacking - just grounded lessons from 10 years being in the industry.

The average post of this CEO got 20-40 likes.

There's plenty of people in his space that are getting 10x that.

But he was talking about marketing fundamentals, lessons learned, deeply thought-out takes or rebuttals on current trends, and I actually found myself taking notes, rethinking certain decisions of mind, doing additional research to fully understand his point of view.

Maybe because of this, when I looked at the 20-40 people who did engage, many were CMOs, VPs, CEOs, and a good amount of lengthy comments, people who actually, read, internalized and responded to the post with their own thoughts.

This is much rarer than it should be.

So much of content is performance. Probably my own included. Trying to fit some template. Trying to stick to some "best practices". Optimized and engineered for engagement, which is often a race to the bottom.

My sense is that this CEO has his own quality bar. Decides what to publish based on what *he* deems insightful, not what the algorithm is nudging him towards. Maybe I'm wrong here.

We should normalize publishing content we feel PROUD of, in the style that feels like ourselves - that's the bar.

My podcast episode with Jessica Gilmartin is live!!! Jessica has an insanely impressive track record: CMO at Calendly, Head of Revenue Marketing at Asana, Head of Product Marketing at Google. Today, she advises founders and first-time CMOs through $100M ARR on marketing, GTM strategy, hiring and org design.

And last week, she joined me on The Executive Brand podcast.

What we cover:

- Why CMO + CRO combo roles usually fail
- Why companies now hire CMOs from smaller, scrappier startups
- Where AI is truly useful vs pure hype
- Why random acts of marketing kill momentum
- How Calendly moved from viral PLG to focused enterprise ABM
- The real reason CMOs only last 18 months
- Why taste, courage, and focus still matter more than tools
- And much more

Listen here:

-- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/grQb6kgv
-- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpBmkJWg
-- Apple: https://lnkd.in/gXPSpKEU
-- Substack: https://lnkd.in/gBeDP56X

Some of my takeaways:

1. We’ll replace most of our day-to-day work with AI in 5-10 years. But right now board members are mandating AI adoption without specific use cases. The reality is AI is making teams 10-20% more efficient and that it works as an enabler, but not as a replacement. The best use cases she’s seeing are data enrichment for lead prioritization, competitive research for product marketing, and using LLMs as synthetic customer panels

2. There are three paths to CMO: via product marketing, via demand gen, and via brand. In B2B, 50% of CMOs come from product marketing, 50% from demand gen, almost none from brand. That might be an opportunity

3. CEOs keep hiring the wrong CMO. They want a unicorn who's great at both strategic messaging (product marketing) and growth (demand gen). It’s like finding an engineer who's great at backend AND designing beautiful interfaces. Hire for your actual problem/bottleneck right now, not the one you’ll have at $100M

4. Attribution is broken and that’s okay. You’re getting 70-80% accuracy at best. Jessica’s approach is to use the 80-20 rule. Get directionally correct data so teams understand where they can make impact and then work from there. The bigger issue is that companies wait too long to implement basic data and reporting infrastructure

5. Random acts of marketing kill focus. At Calendly, Jessica pivoted the entire team to one thing: repositioning for enterprise customers. Marketers hate focus and they want to sprinkle seeds everywhere. But the winning strategy is making big bets, being explicit about trade-offs, and ensuring no one goes off track

Reminder: your most interesting thoughts are those you want to keep to yourself.

LinkedIn Playbook with Jess Cook and Joshua Perk of Vector 👻

ActiveCampaign

Director of Demand Generation

Refine Labs

•	Leading demand gen strategy for 5+ B2B SaaS clients
•	Implemented campaigns that decreased cost-per-opportunity by over 50% over 6 months, largely through improving demand capture and inbound buyer journey inefficiencies.
•	Increased marketing-sourced pipeline by 37% with flat budget, through executing paid social campaigns that drove brand and product awareness in our ICP.
•	Identified and fixed sales funnel process issues which resulted in a 25% reduction in average sales cycle length coupled with an 18% increase in ACV.

Senior Director of Demand Generation

•	Led demand gen strategy for 5+ B2B SaaS clients
•	Implemented cross-channel ABM strategy that resulted in a 42% increase in named account acquisition.
•	Led company from outdated lead gen strategy to true demand creation strategy, resulting in lead > closed-won rate jumping from 0.2% to 10%.
•	Executed an overhaul of Salesforce instance, identifying and remedying infrastructure gaps that led to a 20% increase in sales velocity.

MindTickle

•	Responsible for global go-to-market strategy across all digital acquisition channels, including paid search, paid social, email, chatbot and ABM.
•	Implemented a site-wide chatbot workflow that improved on-site conversion rates by 22%.
•	Created an intent-based ABM framework that nurtured accounts through the intent funnel and delivered a 15% increase in qualified B2B pipeline to the sales organization.

Senior Manager, Digital Marketing

Showpad

•	North America digital marketing manager for B2B SaaS company.
•	Oversaw a multi-channel campaign strategy that resulted in at least 25% YoY growth in ARR contribution from digital acquisition.
•	Was responsible for bringing all digital advertising efforts in-house from the previous agency, and in doing so realized a 38% reduction in customer cost-per-acquisition via paid search within the first two quarters.
•	Implemented Bizible multi-touch attribution infrastructure to gain deeper understanding of customer journey.

Senior Digital Marketer

L2TMedia

•	Manager of 7-person team at digital marketing agency
•	Responsible for overall book of business of ~1000 clients. Implemented a client-facing reporting framework that resulted in a 15% reduction in churn QoQ.
•	Identified service delivery process issues and created a ticketing system with a new SLA framework that improved efficiency by 30%.
•	Developed SOPs, 90-day plans, and training materials that massively improved new-hire onboarding based on employee satisfaction survey results.

Digital Media Manager

•	Supervisor of 3 direct reports at digital marketing agency
•	Managed the accounts of our biggest, highest-touch key client groups, resulting in +55% increase in ARR through account expansion and increased media spend.
•	Awarded “Employee of the Quarter” in Q3 2016 for delivering outstanding results for our clients.

Digital Media Supervisor

•	Responsible for book of business at digital marketing agency
•	Drove a 33% reduction in cost-per-lead through improving paid search account structure, bidding strategies, and keyword selection.
•	Created a new reporting framework that gave better insight into budget pacing, allowing us to improve client paid media budget utilization by 15%.

Digital Media Specialist

General Medical Council

•	Prepared documentation and communicated with relevant parties in preparation for medical tribunals.
•	Organized colleagues’ workloads, assigned tasks and managed progress.
•	Produced in-house training material and led training of new team members.
•	Managed onsite and offsite document storage facilities.
•	Facilitated tribunals by liaising with legal representatives, doctors and the press, swearing in witnesses and managing conferencing equipment.
•	Acted as point of contact for members of the public, by telephone and in person.

Adjudication Assistant

Jazyková škola James Cook Languages s.r.o.

•	Taught both general and business English to public and corporate students, including children.
•	Demonstrated strong communication and analytical skills in the classroom.
•	Provided detailed feedback to students and developed both short and long-term plans to help students reach their potential.
•	Created teaching materials and lesson plans tailored to individual student requirements.  
•	Completed workshops and training exercises to improve key skills.

English Teacher

Hanover Sterling Ltd/Fairline Financial Ltd

•	Managed online marketing accounts with a total annual budget of $2,000,000.
•	Created and executed various marketing campaigns, including paid search marketing, SEO, social media marketing and email marketing campaigns.
•	Performed ROI analyses of all marketing channels, from total spend through to real and projected income.
•	Created search engine optimized copy for a wide range of websites.
•	Worked with and calibrated a variety of software programs, including lead management software, website analytics, CRM systems, landing page optimization programs and presentation software.
•	Worked closely with other departments to provide more qualified leads and establish continuity in the client experience.

PPC Analyst

Add People

•	Managed the online marketing campaigns of around 100 clients.
•	Liaised with clients to establish goals and key metrics, which were reported monthly via phone, email and in-person meetings.
•	Implemented and managed online marketing campaigns, particularly involving paid search and SEO.
•	Responsible for contract renewal and upselling opportunities.
•	Created and managed Google AdWords paid search marketing accounts of clients.
•	Reviewed and corrected my team’s advertising campaigns before they were submitted to clients.
•	Developed resources/tools, metrics, and a review structure to maintain and improve reporting standards.
•	Implemented process improvement initiatives to streamline intra-department communication and production workflow.

Business Development Manager

ARMSTRONG SOLICITORS LIMITED

•	Assisted fee earners in all areas of case management, from initial Letter of Claim through to readying materials for court.
•	Provided extensive overtime support when caseloads required it.
•	Managed fee earners’ workloads and ensured court deadlines and correspondence deadlines were met.
•	Communicated in writing, by telephone and in person with clients, solicitors, insurance companies and court officials.
•	Provided training and helped implement new case management software.
•	Maintained both physical and virtual filing systems, including data input, data cleansing, photocopying and faxing.
•	Managed all incoming and outgoing mail and faxes.

Legal Assistant

Director of Demand Generation @ ActiveCampaign | B2B SaaS | British Dad in the USA

I'm an experienced B2B demand generation leader with a passion for driving revenue growth through innovative marketing strategies.

I have a proven track record of managing the transition from low quality lead generation to true demand creation, having led 12+ SaaS companies on this journey so far. I truly believe that marketing should be judged on delivering revenue and qualified pipeline, rather than delivering buckets of leads that don't turn into won business.

Some highlights of campaigns I've implemented:

Decreased cost-per-opportunity by over 50% over 6 months
Increased marketing-sourced pipeline by 37%
Drove a 25% reduction in average sales cycle length coupled with an 18% increase in ACV

In my current role at Refine Labs, I lead demand gen strategy for multiple clients, allowing me to experiment and learn at scale. I've executed dozens of successful campaigns across multiple ad platforms to drive marketing-sourced revenue, working with wildly different products, audiences, and budgets.

Outside of work, I'm a British dad enjoying life in beautiful Chicago with my wife, daughter, and dog.

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The Battle

Finn Thormeier

Chris Wood

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The Battle

Finn Thormeier

Chris Wood

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);}Finn Thormeier's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreFinn Thormeier's LinkedIn Performance