Marcus Chan

Helping AEs earn $500K+ and max their potential to achieve freedom, fulfillment, & security without grinding or slimy sales tactics | Team + Individual Programs | 4X Salesforce Top Influencer | WSJ Best-Selling Author

Three quarters in a row, the number slipped.
The CRO was out of answers.
Reps were burning out, the board was circling, and pressure was suffocating.

After one framework from our Revenue Engine OS™, that same org hit 114% the next quarter — with no new hires and no extra leads.

A $40M HR tech firm was losing 6 out of 10 deals to “no decision.”
Their pipeline looked full. It was fiction.
After installing our discovery system, deal velocity jumped 65% and win rates climbed 47%.

A fintech startup took 14 months to ramp reps.
After Venli, they did it in 6 and doubled first-year retention.

That is where we step in — when chaos meets quota pressure.

At Venli Consulting, we help CROs, VPs of Sales, and Revenue Leaders fix the invisible breakdowns that quietly drain $2–$10M+ in revenue every year.

Every strategist and trainer on our team has led sales organizations from the trenches.
We have carried quota, built teams, and scaled revenue firsthand.

Because most sales orgs do not have lazy reps.
They have leaky systems:

→ Discovery that fails to create urgency
→ Demos that die in silence
→ Managers stuck chasing deals instead of building people

I’m Marcus Chan, Founder & CEO of Venli and creator of the Revenue Engine OS™, a proven system used by 100+ organizations to turn chaos into predictable growth.

Before Venli, I led a $195M/year Fortune 500 sales organization, earned 12 promotions in 8 years, and authored a Wall Street Journal bestselling book.

Recognized by Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Forbes, I’ve spent my career helping sales leaders stop gambling on effort and start scaling with systems.

If you lead a sales organization generating at least $10M+ annually, I can show you exactly where your revenue is leaking — and how to fix it systematically so you can scale to $100M and beyond.

👉 Benchmark your revenue engine: https://venli.co/47c-sta-vsl

📕 232-page tactical playbook (50,000+ leaders): https://venli.co/xxt-sfss-book

💻 100+ hours of elite B2B sales training: https://urlgeni.us/youtube/channel/marcuschan

Predictability is not luck.
It is engineered.

President / Founder

We help AE’s earn $250K-$500K+ and develop record-breaking sales skills.

We provide proven sales coaching + training for reps and teams teaching the exact President’s Club winning system that helped me close $140M ARR and hit 100-250% to quota 13 years in a row.

With over a decade of winning awards, crushing sales quotas, and sales leadership experience, we can help you transform your results! Yes, we are sales coaches that have actually achieved real proven results consistently before we started the business!

In under 5 years we've grown from 0 to 600+ clients and have achieved a few of the following things:

✅ 4X Salesforce Top Sales Influencer to Follow
✅ Wrote a Wall Street Journal and Amazon Best Selling Sales Book
✅ LinkedIn Top Voice - Sales: #5 out of 300M+ active users
✅ Featured in Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, MarketWatch, CNBC, and more!

Make sure to access our free most popular free training resources including our on-demand no cost training in the Featured section of my profile.

CEO @ Limelight | Helping Brands Partner With 2,000+ B2B Creators | The First-Ever B2B Creator Partnership Platform | 3x Founder | 10+ Years in B2B SaaS

If you're reading this, you're either:

a) A brand struggling to conduct high ROI marketing
b) A B2B creator struggling to monetize your brand

Limelight solves both problems.

We are the first B2B creator partnership platform. 

I built Limelight with a world-class team (previous: Uber, Amazon, Indeed).

↳ 40+ years of combined B2B SaaS & tech experience
↳ VC-backed by two incredible billion dollar AUM funds
↳ Team of well-known strategic angels and advisors

Limelight help brands:

- Discover & match with creators (10,000+ SME’s)
- Create partnerships fast (automate 90% of process)
- Reach engaged audiences (book ad slots in seconds)
- Measure & scale results (with real-time ROAS metrics)

Limelight help creators:

- Promote their content & get paid (set up a storefront)
- Discover brands & other creators (collaborate instantly)
- Get inbound paid proposals (accept or reject in-app)
- Monetize content (automate invoices & payments)

We built a recommendation engine that connects amazing brands with relevant B2B creator audiences.

Delivering high ROI through scalable content partnerships. 

$10 vs. $27 (avg influencer CPM vs. LinkedIn paid ads).

The results don’t lie.

🔥 50M ORGANIC REACH IN 9 MONTHS!
"Managing campaigns was chaos. Limelight changed that."
(Bruno, Growth @Clay)


🔥 500 LEADS IN FIRST CAMPAIGN!
"Our cost-per-lead is already 35% more efficient."
(Dominic, Paid Ads Team Manager @HubSpot)


🔥 BOOKED OUT FOR 6 WEEKS! 1,000 LEADS!
“From 50 demos a day to 1K booked in one day.”
(Keith, Head of Growth @11x)


🔥 200 SIGNUPS FROM ONE CREATOR!
"A significant increase in high-quality sign-ups."
(Anna, Head of Marketing @Nethunt CRM)


🔥 SAVED 60% CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT TIME!
"We have a much more established pipeline."
(Casey, Sr. Growth Manager @ActiveCampaign)


Sign up for free at LimelightHQ dot com.

David Walsh

Meet Janine. A mum to a 6-year-old from the Philippines.
Yesterday, I increased her hourly rate by 40%

She joined us through a VA hiring agency. 

18 months ago.
On a part-time role.
Working 20 hours a week.

And yesterday...

I made one of the easiest decisions of my career.

I hired her FULL-TIME 🎉

And promoted her with a major pay rise!

I also bought her a brand new monitor for her WFH setup.

Janine is not “just” an assistant.

She runs ops.
Keeps projects moving.
Limelight clients love her.

And quietly, she makes us all look way more organised than we actually are 😂

She’s our glue.

And I wanted to make sure she knew it!!!

So instead of treating her like a “contractor” we’re treating her like what she actually is...

→ A core part of our team.

Most founders outsource internationally for cheap labour.

No PTO
No 'sick pay'
Low hourly rates

It's the dirty secret of startup culture.

Founders are quick to brag about their 'culture'.

But then pay someone $4/hour.

🙄

These are people.
With bills to pay.
With families to support.

If you value your people, invest in them.

Wherever they live.
Whatever their title.

A "thanks" isn't enough.

I’ve seen startups blow $20K/month on crappy agencies and rip-off consultants…

While underpaying the hard-working assistant who actually makes their business run.

Not here.

→ We celebrate our people.
→ We pay them properly.
→ We build together.

Janine, thank you for being the quiet MVP of this company.

We’re so damn lucky to have you. 💙

PS: Thank you to Magic for helping us find Janine Bulao and allowing us to take her on full-time 🙌

Founder & CEO @ Limelight | B2B Creator Marketplace | 3x Founder | MBA Mentor

Today I’m announcing our $2,100,000 funding round 🎉💰
And a HUGE NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH!! ...

Our brand new AI agent for Social Listening is live.

It can:

→ Research your company
→ Precisely define your ICP
→ Identify all of your competitors

Then automatically surface buyer intent from social content and turn it into sales pipeline. 

Early users are raving about it already!!

And just a few weeks ago,
We won the Global Pitch Competition!
On stage at SaaStock (€1M prize money)

THIS. IS. WHAT. MOMENTUM. LOOKS. LIKE.

Here’s why investors are loving Limelight

👇🏼👇🏼

Everyone is talking about personality-led marketing.

- Niche B2B creators are stealing trust.
- Employees are becoming mini media brands.
- Buyers follow PEOPLE, not 40-page whitepapers.

But the problem - up until now?

Everyone KNOWS influence drives revenue.

Yet nobody can measure it.

So budgets have stayed trapped in paid ads & cold outbound.

Limelight SOLVES this problem.

We’re showing brands - how CONTENT drives REVENUE.

We are making influence marketing performance-based.

So brands can track:

🔎 Which post led to $142,000 in pipeline
🔎 Which creator drove 237 product signups
🔎 Which campaign closed $1.9M new business.

(All REAL Limelight case studies! 📈)

We’re turning B2B influence from a “nice-to-have branding play” into a scalable revenue engine.

Big SHOUT out to our new investors for believing in us

Amit at SNR (led the round!) 
Eran at Savyon Ventures 
Kenneth at BackFuture
Kaan at First Degree 
Josh at OpenSky 
Kirby at Ascend

And many others like Ran Makavy, Gert Lanckriet, Suhit Gupta, Amir Ashkenazi, Mike Head, Eli Schwartz, Tom Waddington, Dan Murray🧠, Garrett Scott, Michel Lieben 🧠 & Alex Vacca 🧠🛠️.

A group of incredible operators/investors who know personality-led growth will define the next decade of GTM.

What’s next?

Goal remains the same:
→ Hit $10M ARR with a team of 10.

This funding round lets us:

⚡ Build even faster
⚡ Hire a few elite engineers + AMs
⚡ Push deeper into creator-based attribution
⚡ Power influencer programs for every GTM org

Huge gratitude to my tiny but might team Youngjae JI, Demir Capan, Blas C. and Janine Bulao. 

And most importantly...

The creators and brands (HubSpot, Webflow, Clay + 100s more) who are building this category WITH us 💪🏼

THIS IS JUST THE START.

PS. if you sign up as a new customer in the next 48 hours you get your 2nd month free! (DM me and I will do it for you)

I’m HIRING a Customer Success Manager!! 🎉 👀 Want to join a tech startup DOMINATING the creator economy space?!

Keep reading 👇

I don’t care about your fancy degree.
Or what brands are on your CV.
Or how old you are.

If you're awesome at what you do...

WE WANT YOU!!!

Simple as that 👏👏

The ideal candidate:

🔥 Has startup experience (and can work fast)
🔥 Can build relationships with enterprise customers
🔥 Understands B2B influence/creator partnerships
🔥 Has the grit and accountability to own outcomes

You'll get:

→ Ability to work from anywhere
→ Skin in the game + bonuses
→ Responsibility from day one
→ Total creative freedom

This is a rare opportunity for someone to join our early team and go on a MAJOR growth journey with us.

A bit about Limelight:

- Just won SaaStock Europe’s global pitch
- Growing fast with $3.6M in proposals sent
- Working with brands like HubSpot, Clay, Xero
- Building the future of B2B influencer marketing
- Used by thousands of world-class content creators

We made our last hire in under 10 days.

And we’re looking for someone incredible again.

Ready for the challenge?

Apply here: https://lnkd.in/d6bnJyJP

Know someone who is?

Tag ‘em!

Holy f*ck. This is how WILD LinkedIn can be.
A stranger just wired me $50,000.
After one DM 🤯

Friday night, I got a Slack ping.
A new customer just signed up for Limelight.

I clicked the name. And froze.

Amir Ashkenazi.

→ Raised $43M incl. Sequoia 
→ Took one company public 
→ Sold three others

I thought: There’s no way this guy just signed up through our self-serve product.

But he had.

So I sent a quick DM:

“Thanks for joining! Would love to hear what you’re building.”

He replied instantly: “Let’s chat. Monday?”

11am Monday, we were on Zoom.

We spoke for 20 minutes about the future of creator-led growth, B2B marketing, ad-tech and AI.

10 minutes into the chat, he said:

Him: "Dave, can I invest??" 
Me: "Yes, but the round is oversubscribed. $20k ok?”
Him: “I was thinking $50k”

By 5:30pm (that SAME day)…

$50,000 was sitting in our bank account 💰

Now he’s not just a customer.

He’s an investor.

And we’re running his full creator campaign for his AI agent company. 
(With insane results 📈)

That’s the thing about building in public...

You never know who’s watching.

Founders, CMOs, execs...
If you’re not showing up online 👀
You’re INVISIBLE in the new B2B world.

Your next investor, customer, or partner is already lurking in your feed.

Waiting to bite.

So...

Share what you’re building. 
Post more content. 
Be noisy.

Amir, welcome aboard, sir 👊

P.S. What’s the wildest thing that’s happened from YOU posting on LinkedIn? Drop it below.

In January 2023, I quit my own startup.
Just 12 months after raising $15M.
My mentor said it was “career suicide.”

(His words, not mine).

3 years later, do I regret it?

NO!

It was tough.
I left a great team.
I made mistakes & have regrets.

But it was still the RIGHT decision.

Here's the story...

I was hired to start the company in 2019.
I got offered $120K salary and 10% equity.
I was between visas, desperate to stay in the US.

So I said yes.

And I started the tech startup from scratch. 
(Albeit with a wonky cap table)

It felt like a dream - for a moment.

But after we grew fast and scaled beyond even my wildest expectations, I realised....

I was deeply unhappy.

Every day, I’d stare at my calendar and feel sick.

If I'm 100% honest...

I felt like I was wearing a mask going to work. 
And DEI wasn't the right fit for me.

I scaled a business that wasn't really my own.
And I wasn't the right person to lead it!

So 4 years in…

I had hired great leaders, and it felt like the right time to go.  

When I left, I had nothing lined up.

People thought I was having some sort of breakdown.

(I had old friends/colleagues reach out).

They said I was crazy for:

→ Walking away from security
→ Wrecking my reputation
→ Starting from zero 

I went from Series-A founder to full-time dad.

Overnight.

My wife became the breadwinner.
(So I could ‘figure things out’)

While soul-searching I promised myself 3 things…

The next time I launch something I would:

1. Find a brilliant technical co-founder.
2. Become a subject matter expert.
3. Build in public this time.

That’s how Limelight began.

Fast-forward to today:

💰 $3.2M funding closed.
🤝 A top 1% Co-Founder (ex-Uber)
📈 90% of our growth from my content.
🔥 Clients like HubSpot, Webflow & Clay
🎤 Spoken on 13 industry-leading podcasts
📢 PR in Business Post, Entrepreneur, Insider
🏆 Featured in Top 50 Entrepreneurs to Watch

And I’ve never been HAPPIER!!!!

Looking back, I would have done a few things differently. 

But I would still SAY YES again! 

There is no substitute for that experience at 27 years old. 

Sometimes you have to kill your old identity to build the one that actually fits.

Success is great on paper.

But if you're not genuinely happy...

It's not worth it.

Life is too short to be miserable.

P.S. I also had 6 months work-free with my 1 year old son. I spent EVERY DAY with him. Time I will cherish forever.

No alternative text description for this image

Last month, we closed a $2.1M funding round 🎉
Today, I'm sharing our investor deck!
(For the FIRST TIME EVER).

👉 Share this post in a DM.
👉 Hit save for later.

It's been a wild journey.

From quitting my last startup and then becoming a full-time, stay-at-home dad overnight.

To building one of the fast-growing, most highly trusted B2B influencer marketplaces in under 18 months with a tiny but mighty team of 5 people.

The journey has been anything but easy. More on that tomorrow.

But once you’ve experienced real lows (like I did)…

You have so much APPRECIATION for the highs.

Right now, Limelight is on a tear.

Q3 2025 was our biggest ever! 📈

- 14,000+ applicants to campaigns
- 3,244 total proposals sent
- $1.3M in payments

But lets be real... 

Some days I wake up thinking how the hell did this happen 😅

SHOUT OUT to all of our investors for backing us.

They know one thing…

The age of CORPORATE MARKETING SLOP is over!

- Niche B2B creators are stealing trust.
- Employees are becoming mini media brands.
- Buyers follow PEOPLE, not 40-page whitepapers.

And Limelight is 5 steps ahead 🔥

We turn B2B influence from a “nice-to-have branding play” into a scalable revenue engine.

Measurable ROI. 
Trackable campaigns. 
Direct revenue attribution.

Just last week, we paid out $78,000 to creators!!

This CRUSHED our previous record of $68k.

Lesson? 👊

Brands are QUICKLY moving paid ad budgets to B2B influence.

Faster than anyone first thought!

P.S. Let me know what you think of the deck and be sure to HIT SAVE 🔒. Hope this helps others trying to raise 💰

Limelight Public Deck

Most holiday parties are the same:

Cold food.
Awkward small talk.
Someone gets too drunk.
A set menu nobody wanted.
Half the table can’t hear each other.
Someone will have been fired by Monday.

Can’t think of anything worse 😅

So last week, I took my team on a 3-DAY retreat in Palm Springs, California 🌴🏌️

A 5-bedroom luxury villa.
Set on a golf course.
BBQ every night.
Phones off.
Chill time.

I’ve sat through too many “corporate socials.”

They always felt a bit phoney.

People trying to impress the big boss...
Nobody is able to fully relax.

I'll put my hands up...

In old jobs, I’d make excuses just to leave early.
(Anyone else done that? 👀)

So when I built Limelight, I promised to do things differently.

2023: I worked solo from a laptop in my 'office' (i.e. my son’s playroom).

2025: Our US-based team (we're just making our 6th hire) are spending a few days to:

Announce our fundraise together
Enjoy golf and a hibachi chef
Have meaningful convos

And of course to celebrate 🎉🎉

You can grind 12 hours a day.
Ship features every week.
Crush revenue goals.
Raise millions.

We did all that this year 💪🏼

But if you don’t make space to breathe with the people who carried the weight with you?

You miss the whole point.

As I get older (and hopefully wiser)... I'm starting to realise:

→ Work never stops.

Sometimes you have to slow down to smell the roses.

So make sure during this Thanksgiving break, you do just that.

P.S. I managed to bag a 35% discount - so got the villa for only $2,857. Cheaper then hotel rooms. Crazy!

WHAT. THE. HELL? On Friday, I got a Slack from our EA Janine and it just said "David, brace yourself for what I'm about to tell you."

No context 😅
My stomach dropped.

Her next line said:

"Last week, Limelight paid out $78,000 to B2B creators."

I stared at the screen.
Read it 5 times.
Swore a few times.

That's our COMPANY RECORD!! 🥇
(Roughly a $4M annualised run rate)

From a tiny remote team.
In a market people said “would never scale.”
From an idea investors laughed at 18 months ago.

Insane.

Absolutely INSANE! 🤯

I remember when a creator made their first $1,000.

I screenshotted it and sent it to my wife like it was the birth of a second child.

But even after that...

I'd refresh Stripe every hour.

Thinking…

“Maybe this won’t work.”
“Maybe I've made a mistake."
"Maybe I've got the product wrong"

And now?

Creators earn $30K+ in a single partnership.
Brands run 80-90 creator campaigns a month.
And every metric is in the green zone.

I spent 12 years in B2B SaaS dreaming of building a consumer product…

But I was terrified no one would care and it wouldn't scale.

So instead…

I built the bridge between the two:

→ A platform that gets creators paid
→ A marketplace where brands earn ROI
→ A system where EVERYONE shares the upside

Watching the numbers grow has been surreal.

Not just because of the money...
(Though that's nice).

But for the “holy sh*t, this is ACTUALLY happening” feeling every founder secretly craves.

You can’t beat it!!!

A new era of B2B marketing is forming.

And Limelight is building the rails beneath it.

So to every creator, brand, supporter, early believer...

THANK YOU 🙏🏼

Biggest week ever.

PS: we're launching a new product very soon 👀

HOLY MOLY! Just had our BIGGEST month ever. We crossed $200K in monthly transactions 🎉

Still can’t believe I’m typing that.

💸 $200,728 processed (+24%)
📩 370 proposals sent (+36%)
👥 2,661 campaign applicants (+14%)
🔁 159 completed transactions (+73%)
💰 +4.2% annual recurring revenue

Limelight is compounding… FAST!

Next mission?

Make. This. Stick.

November was the month we tackled the tiny, annoying, silent friction that...

⚡ Kills activation
⚡ Slows adoption
⚡ Quietly eats retention alive.

The stuff you don’t notice until you zoom out and go…

“Oh sh*t, THAT’S the problem.”


HERE'S WHAT WENT DOWN 👇🏼

Very early in the month, we asked a simple question:

“Why are people signing up… but not activating fast enough?”

The answer punched us in the face.

Cue: full rebuild mode.

We tore out our old onboarding.
Rebuilt it with AI agents.
Shipped fixes weekly.

And tackled every tiny UX papercut that’s been piling up for months.

Meanwhile… the numbers kept climbing.

📈 Creators kept applying.
📈 Brands kept converting.
📈 Deals kept closing.

And November very quickly turned into the most productive (and chaotic) month we’ve had this year.


THE WINS 💪🏼

1/ AI Onboarding is LIVE & KILLING IT

Launched mid-Nov and hit 57% success rate in 72 hours. Time-to-value is moving in the right direction.

2/ MASSIVE hire: Head of Customer Success

Took us 7 days to hire an industry veteran. He scaled an influencer-tech company from 35 → 450 employees → ~$1B valuation. FIYAH!

3/ Social Listening & Signals are LIVE

Brand mentions. Competitor tracking. Up to 10 Signals per account. This thing is quietly becoming a full-blown intelligence engine.

4/ LinkedIn is ON A TEAR

359K+ impressions. 189K+ people reached. All organic. No ads. No cold emails. Raw founder-led storytelling = UNBEATABLE!

5/ 108 new brands JOINED us

Including Airtable, Zenzap, Weglot, MarketerHire, Confetti, PandaDoc, and Equitybee. Referrals are ROLLING IN. Absolute madness.


THE BAD 😬

Look... every good month has some ugly bits.

1/ Churn is still the villain

Especially self-serve. But we know the fix: activation → adoption → CS motions. Our new hire will be in charge of this!

2/ Signals adoption needs to speed up

It’s powerful. People love it. Now it needs to become the default behaviour, not a “nice-to-use” extra.

3/ Roadmap vs bandwidth

Demand is high. Resources… not so much. We’re a tight team of 5, so Dec will require ruthless prioritization.


Wrapped it up with a 3-day team trip to Palm Springs!
Sun, strategy and a lot of writing on whiteboards.

(In true startup style 😅)

And now?

We’re ready to GO. GO. GO.

Nov = biggest month in company history!

December is where we BUILD on it.

Most startups will slow down for Christmas.

Not us.

We're going to go EVEN BIGGER!

Let's finish the year swinging 🏌️‍♂️

P.S. Sharing our metrics is loose, should I stop?

I hired this dude 6 weeks ago. In week 2, he put a Zoom call in my calendar (with zero warning) and said: "No offence Dave, but your onboarding is crap."

Fair play 😅

You can't knock his boldness.

Blas TORE our entire product onboarding apart.

Was he right? Yup.

First impressions matter.
And ours SUCKED!!!

20+ companies sign up to Limelight a week.
(FYI: we've $0 spent on paid marketing).

Which is pretty neat.

Brands like ZoomInfo, Webflow & Clay join organically.

But the issue?

Many brands dropped off BEFORE they'd ever understood what Limelight could do for them.

Onboarding was clunky and manual.

Nobody was excited to touch it.

Until Blas C. joined.

AKA our new founding engineer / certified menace!

Week 2, he walks in and says:

“Let me rebuild onboarding with AI agents. Give me the website URL and I’ll automate everything.”

I didn’t believe him.

Then last week…

He showed me the demo.

My jaw hit the floor.

The agent executes 6 tasks simultaneously:

🕸 Reads your entire website
🎯 Maps your ICP
🧑‍💼 Finds employees posting content
⚔️ Identifies your competitors
📡 Detects buyer signals
🤝 Matches relevant creators

Then it builds your company page AND launches your first creator campaign… all in 20 seconds.

Twenty. F*cking. Seconds.

No forms or bottlenecks.

Just AI doing the job a 3-person onboarding team *should* have been doing.

(I’ll take the L - I got complacent 🙋🏻‍♂️)

But now the next era of Limelight is here:

→ Instant activation
→ Instant insights
→ Instant pipeline

The onboarding agent is LIVE.

Sign up for free on our website and check it out.

Prepare to have your mind blown.

P.S. More startups need a Blas - someone who walks in, calls out your bullsh*t and fixes the thing you’ve been avoiding. 🔥

18 months ago, before writing a single line of code, I interviewed 100+ B2B creators. This one call had me absolutely buzzing 👇

I met one of the most respected creators on LinkedIn - Brianna Doe.

At the time, I was launching Limelight and trying to understand the creator landscape from every angle. 

And here I was, getting the chance to learn from someone at the absolute top of the game.

I remember begging her to join us as an advisor 🧙‍♀️

ME: “Please join our advisory board”
HER: “Ok, but only if I can add consistent value”

What struck me wasn’t just her expertise.

It was her capacity.

She walked me through everything she was running: 
- her influencer agency
- building her own brand 
- planning her own wedding
- managing big creator budgets

... and somehow still finding the headspace to WRITE A BOOK!

I remember thinking: holy hell, that is an insane workload.

Most people struggle to ship one big project. 
Brianna was shipping 5 at once.

Fast forward to today.

My copy of The Unapologetic Professional just arrived in the post!

This book will help many emerging leaders:
- build confidence.
- trust their instincts.
- and understand that mindset is the foundation of genuine success.

Brianna lives and breathes that philosophy.

Huge congrats on the book launch 🚀 

Grateful to call you a friend!

If you try to use influencers before you're ready? You'll waste budget, blame the channel, and walk away thinking it doesn't work. Here's the truth:

Influencer marketing only works if you already have:

→ A product people actually love
→ Real product-market fit
→ A defined problem you solve
→ An audience that talks about that problem

Without those? You're amplifying nothing.

We run a marketplace.
Anyone can sign up.
That's by design.

But honestly? We've said YES to too many companies that weren't ready.

They see the platform and think:

"Let's try 3 creators, 3 posts, and see if we get $100K in revenue."

That's not a test.
That's a lottery ticket.

And when it doesn't work, they blame the channel.

Here's the pattern I see over and over:

Early-stage founder.
No clear PMF yet.
Tiny budget.
Unrealistic expectations.
Zero commitment.

They dip their toe in.
Run one campaign.
Get mediocre results.
Then disappear.

The companies that WIN do this differently:

✅ Post–Series A (usually)
✅ Clear product-market fit
✅ Enough budget for real experiments
✅ Willing to commit for 3+ months minimum

They don't treat it like a hack.
They treat it like a channel that needs surface area.

Enough experiments.
Enough signal.
Enough time to learn what works.

That's when creators have something real to talk about.

That's when you get data you can act on.

That's when the channel scales.

TAKEAWAY:

Influencer marketing isn't a shortcut to product-market fit.

It's what you do once you have it.

And if you're not willing to invest properly?

Don't start.

You'll waste money, time, and belief in a channel that actually works, just not the way you think.

P.S. If you're pre–Series A and still want to try it? Fine. But commit budget like you mean it. Otherwise, you're just guessing.

This is from a podcast episode I did with Finn Thormeier, here’s the full episode on: 

- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/e7Cwr2Vt 
- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eZskqRQU 
- Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/efYr3Qnv

When a brand refuses to share their budget, I know we have a problem.
It usually goes like this:

Me: "What is the budget for this campaign?"

Client: "I don't want to tell you. You'll just tell me to maximize it or that it's not enough."

Me: "No. The budget decides the strategy."

→ It decides if we go wide or deep.
→ It decides if we chase the top 1% or the niche experts.
→ It decides if we do a single-channel or a multi-channel partnership.

In B2B influencer marketing, hiding the numbers leads to a generic strategy.

And usually, that generic strategy is just copying a B2C Instagram playbook:

Pay a celebrity with a million followers.
They take a picture on a beach wearing sunglasses.
Get a 0.5% conversion and you sell 1000's of product.

That works for sunglasses.

It does NOT work when you are influencing a product with $25k, $50k, or $100k LTV.

The top 1% of B2B creators are often already bought and sold. They post every day. It’s saturation. It’s noise.

So, here is the playbook we use:

1. Go Wide, Not Tall

The best ROI right now isn't the superstar with 500k followers.

It’s the "smaller" niche creators.

I’m talking about the 15,000 to 50,000 follower range.
These are the people with actual trust, not just reach.

2. The "Always-On" Rotation

Most companies try to mimic the "11x" style launch: Get 50 creators to post on the same day.

Sure, it drives a spike. You get a thousand demos, and it looks cool.

But the smarter play is Consistency > Intensity.

Here is the exact setup:

→ Hire 20 niche creators.
→ Assign them a rotation schedule.
→ Creator A posts on Monday.
→ Creator B posts on Tuesday.
→ Creator C posts on Wednesday
…

There are roughly 20 working days in a month.

If you rotate them correctly, each creator only has to post ONCE a month.

3. The Compounding Effect

This approach does two things that a big bang launch can’t.

First, it gives you persistent feed dominance. You aren't a flash in the pan; you are always there, showing up in the feed from different trusted voices, every single day.

Second, it cleans up your attribution.

When everyone posts at once, you have no idea who actually drove the result.

When you measure them?

You know exactly who posted on Tuesday.
You can track the website traffic spike on Tuesday.
You can see which specific creator drove the sign-ups.

MY THESIS:

In B2B, you don't win by renting the biggest billboard for an hour.

You win by showing up every single day.

Start with surface area. 
Go wide.
Experiment with 15k-50k followers.

And stop trying to sell enterprise software like it’s a pair of sunglasses.

PS. This is from a podcast episode I did with Finn Thormeier, here’s the full episode:

- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/e7Cwr2Vt 
- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eZskqRQU 
- Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/efYr3Qnv

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The Battle

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David Walsh

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taplio

The Battle

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David Walsh

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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);}David Walsh's LinkedIn Performance

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