Project 33

We help B2B SaaS companies build awareness, trust and credibility in their market, by turning their CEO's expertise into social content their buyers look forward to.

Founder & CEO

Reminders App

An app I built for myself to write reminders to myself and help me never forget who I am and who I want to be. Get it here: https://kllx7.glideapp.io/

Creator

Pavilion

Member

Exit Five

Finn's Book Club

A Discord community I started to create a space where books, ideas, and nuanced problems can be openly discussed without the fear of upsetting someone for saying the wrong thing. Had to put it on hold when I became a father. https://finnthormeier.gumroad.com/l/book-club

Finn Thormeier

I helped artists and entrepreneurs grow on Instagram. Eg. grew Timmy Ham's Instagram (@iamsloth) from 70k to 200k+ followers within 6 months and a total ad budget of $4,000 using an underpriced Instagram Story Ad approach.

Also used to turn a bunch of books into automated Instagram accounts, some are still up and running, eg for The Art of War: https://www.instagram.com/theartofwar_suntzu/

Freelancer

Save The Children Deutschland

Fundraised $40,000+ in 10 weeks, got 1 person close to breaking the record of most donors gained by a fundraiser in single day on my second day, traveled to 12 different cities across Germany.

Charity Fundraiser

Jacques'​ Wein-Depot Wein-Einzelhandel GmbH

Salesperson

Heidelberg University

Dropped out after 3 semesters. Studied Physics and Philosophy. Realized I was doing college for other people's expectations, not for myself.

Dropout

New Zealand

After high school, a friend and I decided to pack our bags, fly from Germany to New Zealand and spend 8 months backpacking NZ. Half of the time was spent living in hostels and working 3 different jobs, 15h shifts, 6 days a week: Picking grapes on a vineyard, extracting pollen at a pollen mill, washing crates at a production line facility. The other half went into traveling, sleeping in a camper van and creating content: Tongariro Northern Circuit, Milford Track, Routeburn Track, Whanganui Journey.

Work & Travel

Founder & CEO @ Project 33 | Helping B2B software companies with high ASPs drive pipeline by positioning their founder/CEO as a thought leader | Happy husband and father 😊

Implementing Founder-Led Marketing for B2B software companies.
Customers & results: www.project33.io

This has never happened. I'm our only salesperson (we're a team of 9) and my demo slots are completely booked out for the next 1.5 weeks. Here's the only thing I've changed in the last month:

Take Linkedin a lot more seriously. (again)

I know this sounds weird, because we do Linkedin and content for people. And I've been active on this platform for now 4+ years (posted my first Linkedin video in January 2018).

But over the last year or so, I've become complacent. I settled into a routine of posting every day around the same similar things, auto-scheduling content and engaging whenever it was convenient to me, sometimes not opening Linkedin for a couple days. 

To be fair, I also became dad 14 months ago, so I don't judge myself. Part of this was necessary so I could support my wife and be present with my daughter.

So what did I do differently?

1. Quality over quantity

I'm actually posting less often, not more. But I try to pack every post with as much value as possible, often struggling to fit everything into the 3,000 character limit. Every post needs to solve a problem and have clear non-obvious takeaways.

2. Spend a lot more time on hooks

I used to treat the first 2-3 sentences of my Linkedin post and the first 2-3 sentences. Now I treat them as the headline for the rest of the post. Sometimes I post the same thing 3x times with different hooks to understand what resonates. (a great hook can 10x your reach, everything else staying the same)

3. Get hands-on with my copy

My team helps me with my content. Tobias preps questions for me, interviews me 1x/week and our copywriter write the post based on my answers. In the last month, instead of just accepting the copy as is, I make a lot of changes and add things to it to fully make it my own. Or I write things fully on my own when inspiration hits (like this one). 

4. Stopped auto-scheduling + reply to comments ASAP

I used the auto-scheduling feature by Linkedin. Now, I press "Publish" on every single post myself. When I publish now, I stick around for 30-60min and try to answer every comment I get as soon as possible. It drives people back to the post and the second way of people who see your post, see that you replied to comments, which makes it more likely that they comment.

5. Engage with other people in my space

I built a list in Sales Navigator with ICPs and thought leaders in my space and I spend 15-30min on that feed every day, engaging with relevant people, commenting, leaving my own 2 cents, etc. Helps build relationships, understanding the platform, what's currently top of mind to people and my top comments often become the inspo for a full LinkedIn post.

Hope this post doesn't come off as bragging, we're a tiny company and still have lots of ways to go in so many areas, but wanted to acknowledge this win and what I think contributed to the progress.

What else should I be experimenting with?

Founder-Led Marketing | Founder, Project 33

What are some tips for writing effective hooks?

How can I increase engagement on my LinkedIn posts?

What are the benefits of Sales Navigator?

We recently helped a B2B Scaleup add $178k net new ARR in 10 months from LinkedIn ads & only $21k in ad spend (8.4 ROAS). Here's the exact 7-step framework we implemented:

CONTEXT:

- The company sells an insurtech product
- $20k ACV
- ICP is Heads of HR of remote companies with 10-200 emp


PROCESS:

1. Pick the most suited Subject Matter Expert (SME) in the company

- Usually that's the founder/CEO
- In this case it was their Head of Revenue
- Why? She has a lot of experience in the nomad and remote work space, so she could build a lot of trust with ICPs


2. Develop content framework that drives demand

- We focused on 2 main content pillars: Product & Thought Leadership
- Product: What are the main pain points the product solves? Have the SME speak to each of them and how their product solves it -> create demand
- Thought Leadership: What topics do your customers care about? Have the SME share their perspective, key lessons & insights -> build trust & credibility
- We sprinkled in some Company & Personal content to build rapport


3. Create a content engine to churn out weekly content

- We prepared questions for their Head of Revenue around our content pillars
- We interviewed her every 2 weeks for 1 hour to extract her insights
- Turned the recording & transcript of that interview into bite-sized LinkedIn posts
- Repeat bi-weekly for 2-3 posts/week


4. Determine best-performers

- Do monthly analysis with Shield to determine which posts/messages resonated most with buyers
- Main metric: "total weighted engagements (TWE)" = likes + 2*comments + 4*shares
- Best-performer = any post with TWE > 1 standard deviation above the average (you can use other thresholds)


5. Feed best-performers into targeted LinkedIn ad campaign

- Run towards 3 cold targeting groups
1. Top-down: target decision-makers with job title-based targeting
2. Bottom-up: target influencers with job function-based targeting
3. ABM: target a list of 50-1,000 hand-picked target accounts
- Retargeting layer: any website visitor, any LinkedIn company page visitor and anyone who engaged with the ads in the cold layer (50% video viewers)


6. Objective: in-feed consumption + wait for inbound

- LinkedIn campaign objective: Engagement
- CTA: Learn more
- Landing page: their product page (not a lead gen form, not a demo page)
- Tracking conversions: LinkedIn Insight Tag + UTMs + self-reported attribution
- We want to drive high-intent demo requests ONLY, not leads: by sending people to the homepage, we get people who are REALLY interested


7. Convert & optimize

- Total ad spend: $21,458
- Number of demos booked: 89
- Number of closed deals: 9
- Total ARR from closed deals: $178,972
- 38% of the demo requests were generated by just 1 ad, that's why you need a content engine to find new outliers


TAKEAWAY:

Building a strong organic play with an internal SME, then leveraging winners in targeted paid ads is a killer combination.

I've linked the full video + proof below.

Should your CEO post on Linkedin? My answer: No. Unless these 3 things are true:

1. You’re in growth stage, not early-stage

When you're early-stage, you're still figuring out your ICP, your product, your pricing, your positing, your unit economics, etc. No. 1 focus during this period should be product and getting to product-market fit. Posting on Linkedin can sometimes be helpful at this stage to get feedback on things, but most of the time it's a distraction.

When you enter growth stage, you've validated your ICP, you have successful customers, you know your unit economics and have a repeatable sales motion. Usually happens around the $2-5M ARR mark. That's when the #1 focus shifts from product to GTM. And that's also when this type of Linkedin CEO / founder-led marketing motion becomes an accelerator and feels like pouring gasoline on the fire.

2. You have CEO/audience fit

To attract your ICP and build trust with them, you need to share relevant insights with them. To share relevant insights, you need to have relevant expertise. If you sell to Heads of HR, your CEO needs deep HR expertise.

Conversely, if you sell to engineers and your CEO has never been an engineer, has no engineering background, doesn't speak their language or knows what matters to them because he comes from a sales background, what insights can he/she really share that will attract and build trust with potential customers? Not many. In this case, it might make more sense to have your VP of Engineering produce content on Linkedin.

Yes, it can still make sense to have your CEO talk about your company, your mission, where you're headed, announce new customers and partners, etc - kinda like a PR play - but you can do that with posting once every couple of weeks. In this post, I talk about what it would take to turn Linkedin into a revenue machine that consistently drives demand.

3. Your CEO can dedicate 60min/day to this

Even if you get help from an agency or your internal marketing team, to do this well, your CEO still needs to provide the insights for the content, review and post it, answer comments and messages (and fast), engage with other thought leaders on Linkedin, think about what he learned at his last conference that could be interesting to your audience, etc.

All of this takes time and bandwidth. Done for you, fully ghostwritten content, where you just tell your junior social media marketer to "come up" with content for you CEO to post and then automating/outsourcing commenting and messaging never works. Maybe it's 30 or 40min a day, not 60. But either way, it needs to be one of your CEO's top 3-5 priorities, not a sub sub sub thought.

Anything I forgot?

Here's the reason why people like Chris Walker can drive $10M revenue/year from his Linkedin & podcast while “personal branding experts” get 2-3x his engagement but almost $0 in real business outcomes.

The promise of "Personal Branding" has let people down.

The lie: Just talk about yourself & your journey and your company will magically grow.

The truth couldn't be further from it.

Hint: the difference lies in understanding the difference between getting likes vs driving demand. The idea that you can talk about yourself, post a selfie, and somehow (efficiently) drive business outcomes is insane.

Here’s the math:

- let’s say you write a heart-wrenching story about how you overcame your addiction and it goes viral
- you get 2,000 likes and 100,000 impressions
- given the topic, you will attract a super random audience
- some small percentage of them, let’s say 1% will happen to be ICPs
- 100k impressions * 1% = 1,000 ICPs
- just by chance, 1% of those ICPs will happen to be in buying mode right now
- given that the topic has no relation to the problem your product or service solves, you don't create future demand
- 1,000 ICPs * 1% = 10 inbound demos
- your viral post just generated 10 *qualified* inbound requests (and probably A LOT of unqualified ones)
- given that you built awareness but no thought leadership, your call closing rate will be industry average, let's say 10%
- Your viral post generated 1 paying customer

Compare that to a hypothetical Chris Walker post:

- talks about B2B demand gen and GTM
- doesn't go viral, but gets 400 likes and 40,000 impressions
- given that it's a very focused topic, he attracts a very focused audience of B2B GTM professionals with 10% being ICPs
- 40k * 10% = 4k ICPs
- 1% will happen to be in buying mode right now
- given that the topic has direct relation to the problem his company solves, he creates future demand beyond who is currently ready to buy
- 4,000 * 1% = 40 inbound requests
- given that he's building lots of trust & credibility and becoming to obvious go-to expert for what he does, closing rate is much higher, let's say 25%
- 40 * 25% = 10 paying customers

Another obvious difference is that viral posts are hard to manufacture and do consistently, while Chris has unlimited topics to talk about.

Yes, this is a HYPOTHETICAL example. I'm very convinced Chris doesn't generate 10 customers from every post that he does. One reason is that he sells a much higher ticket offer than the average personal branding consultant. If he were selling $1-3k retainers to anyone who runs a business, I'm pretty sure he'd be able to get that amount of demand.

I'm trying to compare apples to oranges here, which is impossible, but I'm hoping to highlight that amount of likes and impressions matters WAY less than talking to the *right* tightly defined audience and building thought leadership by sharing expert content instead of selfies.

What did I miss?

Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata, grew his company to 15M+ ARR in the crowded MarTech space while barely escaping the Series B trap and having 2 months of cash left at one point in 2020:

- Went from Software Engineer -> Product Marketing -> VP Marketing -> Founder & CEO
- Raised $56M+ VC money for Metadata
- Almost ran out of cash in 2020, then turned things around and grew 600% over the span of the next 2 years ($2M -> $12M ARR)
- Barely escaped the series B trap by noticing his flat growth line and quickly changing course
- Cut growth goal by ~50% and budget by 35% while focusing on retention, CAC and marketing ROI
- Built efficient demand gen playbooks using a Comparison Guide, LinkedIn convo ads, a "Closed Lost Email" template, and Clone CAC Arbitrage

Tomorrow at 12pm EST, I'll do a live Zoom Q&A with Gil to dive into these topics and more...

...eg the findings from analyzing $130M+ in Linkedin ad spend.

You can bring your own questions (BYOQ).

Register here: https://lnkd.in/eP9TPDnf

Chatted with a B2B SaaS founder yesterday who exited his company in 2020 for ~$50M. Here's the number 1 thing he's doing differently with his new company (started in 2023):

Focus on distribution right from the start.

In his words: "I was very naive about build, build, build and then they will come. With my new company, my belief is that you can't just keep on building and then hope for the market to come to you."

So what does he do instead now?

Put 30-50% of his time/focus into distribution (building an audience, going to industry events, getting the word out, talking to potential users, building a waitlist, etc)

This company is pre-product, pre-revenue.

In 2024, distribution is more important than just building the product.

Nathan Latka is another beast at this (see screenshot below). I've invited over 60+ SaaS founders and CEOs to my podcast and he is the ONLY person who ever asked me this question.

Their events and webinars are a masterclass in promotion and distribution.

Here's how I answered him:

- create 1-2 posts on Linkedin the week before to promote the event to my audience, eg. like this post: 
- create a Linkedin event and manually invite everyone who: follows you AND me + is a SaaS founder/CEO/head of marketing (usually around 200-300 people)
- promote it to my email list (only 350 subs right now)
- when we do the Zoom event, I also livestream that to my Linkedin, which notifies my connections (even those who didn't sign up to the event) which gets an additional 20-150 people to join live spontaneously
- afterwards, the recording gets published on our Youtube and Spotify + Apple (average YT video gets 100-300 views, average podcast episode downloads is 30 - I know, embarrassing)
- I usually publish 1 LinkedIn post afterwards with a clip/insight from the episode and a link to that
- I send guests 2-3 options for a LinkedIn post with an edited video and written copy they can post on their LinkedIn, here are 2 examples of that for Jason Fried and Greg Head:

Let's see if he says yes 😁 

“How do you know if LinkedIn is working for you?” Uhhh.. we ask people. SRA (self-reported attribution) is the #1 way for B2B companies to attribute pipeline to their marketing activities, yet I still get pushback from CMOs of mature companies ($5M+ ARR) when we ask to install it:

FOR CONTEXT

Self-reported attribution just means asking prospects “How did you hear about us” on your demo / contact sales conversion from. And making it a required, free text field (not a drop down). 

PUSHBACK

- “Our demo form conversation will go down if we ask this question”
- “People won’t answer it anyway”
- “We need to make it a drop-down so we can categorize deals”

LET'S ADDRESS IT

1. Conversion rate will go down

This might be true if you sell DTC or run a PLG motion with high-volume ad traffic to a landing page to free trial (in which case you don’t need SRA anyway because have the data). But if you sell $20k+ deals through a sales motion, there’s data from companies like Refine Labs that conversation rate won’t suffer. When a B2B buyer comes inbound, turns out it’s not an impulse buy and they have been evaluating you already for a while. And they book a demo because they trust you enough to hear out your business case. Asking them 1 additional question won’t suddenly make them change their mind. 

2. People won’t answer it (or lie)

Given the first point, you make it required. And turns out, most people will happily tell you the truth about where they found you (90%+). Those that don’t, won’t suddenly do it just because you give them a drop down or a pre-filled option, they’ll just take the first option and now you think you have accurate data when you don’t. 

3. We need to make it a drop-down otherwise we can’t categorize it

You miss out on a lot of super valuable data if you do this. We often get people to tell us the exact person who referred them or the exact post/ad that made them reach out. That’s invaluable to you. If for your reporting you still want to bucket answers into a couple categories, you can build a Zapier or Hubspot automation that categories SRA into pre-defined options. 

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

We currently book 30+ demos/month through Linkedin for our $60k ACV solution. 70-80% is organic Linkedin (my content). 20-30% is paid Linkedin (my best content run as ads towards ICPs and target accounts). Below is a screenshot of our Hubspot with self-reported attribution data.

TAKEAWAY

If you (only) rely on attribution software for a channel like Linkedin or podcasts, you're flying blind. If you're  not getting direct INBOUND from ICPs who *tell* you they found you there, it's not working. (and yes, this applies even for large deals, we've seen this work for up to $500k ACV enterprise deals).

Anyone know a good email deliverability expert? My company email has been landing in SPAM recently and I haven’t sent a cold email in 2+ years. Already ran it through an email deliverability tool and implemented the obvious SPF, DKIM, DMARC stuff (at least I think)

How to avoid the series B trap and scale B2B SaaS with Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata

Gil Allouche, CEO of metadata.io, grew his company to 15M+ ARR in the crowded MarTech space while barely escaping the Series B trap and having 2 months of cash left at one point in 2020:

- Went from Software Engineer -> Product Marketing -> VP Marketing -> Founder & CEO
- Raised $56M+ VC money for metadata.io
- Almost ran out of cash in 2020, then turned things around and grew 600% over the span of the next 2 years ($2M -> $12M ARR)
- Barely escaped the series B trap by noticing his flat growth line and quickly changing course
- Cut growth goal by ~50% and budget by 35% while focusing on retention, CAC and marketing ROI
- Built efficient demand gen playbooks using a Comparison Guide, LinkedIn convo ads, a "Closed Lost Email" template, and Clone CAC Arbitrage

Tomorrow at 12pm EST, I'll do a live Zoom Q&A with Gil to dive into these topics and more...

...eg the findings from analyzing $130M+ in Linkedin ad spend.

You can bring your own questions (BYOQ).

Register here: https://lnkd.in/eP9TPDnf

Oren Greenberg, Gil Allouche and 5 other attendees

View event: Avoiding the series B trap & $130M in analyzed ad spend

Avoiding the series B trap & $130M in analyzed ad spend

Taplio

Finn Thormeier's Linkedin Analytics

Finn Thormeier

What is Finn talking about?

Who is engaging with Finn

Finn Thormeier's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Finn Thormeier's Linkedin Analytics

Finn Thormeier

What is Finn talking about?

Who is engaging with Finn

Finn Thormeier's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Finn Thormeier's Linkedin Analytics

Finn Thormeier's Best Posts (last 30 days)