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August 6, 202651 min
Fibbler’s Founder Brand + LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads Playbook w/ Adam Holmgren
Adam Holmgren is the co-founder & CEO of Fibbler, a paid ads attribution tool that connects your Linkedin and Google ad accounts to your CRM and calculates influenced pipeline and revenue. They are bootstrapped, roughly 2.5 years in, and they just hit $1M ARR with a team of two. Before Fibbler, Adam was Head of Demand Gen at Rillion and GetAccept. In this episode, we talk about how Adam batch writes five posts every Sunday night, his three content pillars, the $10-15k/month Linkedin ads engine behind Fibbler’s growth, the 100-like threshold for turning posts into ads, cold vs retargeting frequency, and the pink lion mascot that became one of their best marketing assets. --- We discuss: * How Adam writes five Linkedin posts every Sunday night * The three content pillars behind Fibbler’s growth * Why almost every Adam post is an image post now (and why pure text posts stopped working for him) * His 100-like threshold to decide which organic posts get promoted into Thought Leader ads * Fibbler’s two-layer ad structure * The $100,000 ad-spend post that’s been running as an ad for over a year * Why the founder of an attribution tool ignores attribution for his own advertising * The pink lion mascot * Running B2B ads on Hulu & HBO Max through Linkedin CTV --- Connect with Adam: Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-holmgren/ Fibbler: https://fibbler.co/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ (do we want to switch this alredy to: Thormeier.co: https://thormeier.co/) Hope you enjoy!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
July 30, 202647 min
How to market to AI agents
Kevin White is the Head of Marketing at Scrunch AI, an AI visibility and agent experience platform just acquired by Sitecore. Before Scrunch AI, Kevin was Head of Marketing & GTM Strategy at Common Room, Head of Marketing at Retool, and Head of Growth Marketing at Segment, which was acquired by Twilio. In this episode, we talk about how to market when AI agents are your PRIMARY website visitor, the 8,000-token site Scrunch serves to bots, becoming AI’s default recommendation, how Kevin automated his weekly reporting with Claude Code, and more. --- We discuss: * The average website now gets 60-70% of its’ traffic from bots (source: Cloudflare) - and what that means for you * How to market when your PRIMARY website visitor becomes AI agents * The 8,000-token version of Scrunch’s website they serve to AI agents vs the 300,000-token version they serve to humans * Does the llms.txt file matter? * The next moat is becoming AI’s default recommendation and what to learn from products like Neon & Supabase * Is marketing’s new job writing clean and clear documentation? * Defining “LLM-led growth” --- Connect with Kevin: Kevin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevbosaurus/ Scrunch AI: https://scrunch.com/ Sitecore: https://www.sitecore.com/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Vector: https://vector.co/ Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/ Granola: https://www.granola.ai/ Claude Code: https://claude.com/claude-code TBPN: https://www.tbpn.com/ Marketing Against the Grain: https://marketingagainstthegrain.com/podcast Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast PostHog: https://posthog.com/ Torq: https://torq.io/ Hope you enjoy!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
July 23, 202653 min
This CEO cut his LinkedIn time by 75% using THIS Claude Skill (while improving performance)
Peter Caputa is the CEO at Databox (analytics platform, doing about $10m ARR) and ex-VP Sales at HubSpot. This is his 4th time on the podcast, which is the record. Since the first time I had him on the show about 3 years ago in Oct 2023, he has been extremely consistent on Linkedin, building his CEO brand. He recently posted about a Claude Skill he built that streamlined how he writes his Linkedin posts, cutting his time spent by 75% while improving his average post performance. So I brought him back on the show to break it down for us. --- We discuss: * Should every B2B CEO still be active on Linkedin? * Breaking down his Claude skill * How he built the skill * Every tool / connector the skill calls to pull in data * Running through it using a real Linkedin post example * The “charges” framework for writing hooks * AI writing vs AI slop --- Connect with Peter: Peter’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pc4media/ Databox: https://databox.com/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Show notes / mentioned in the episode: Databox MCP: https://databox.com/mcp Peter’s post about his Claude skill: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pc4media_writing-a-linkedin-post-used-to-take-me-2-share-7448480446147051521-IvYE/ Download Peter’s Claude skill: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15ldmkbyvOI0F13joRRvjPd9UQ71M3kb3/view Peter’s entire Linkedin performance history: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18c4tt8EjYOjxqCJylJ6Kigichv-57YdoqQ3-KrrKcUM/edit?usp=sharing AuthoredUp: https://authoredup.com/ Avoma: https://www.avoma.com/ Asana: https://asana.com/ TypeRacer: https://play.typeracer.com/ 10FastFingers: https://10fastfingers.com/ Hope you enjoy!! Let me know your thoughts / feedback This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
July 10, 202652 min
The most AI-pilled CMO in tech shares his Claude setup
Tom Wentworth is the CMO at incident.io, and the most AI-pilled marketing leader I’ve talked to. Before incident.io, Tom was CMO at Recorded Future, RapidMiner, Acquia and Optimizely. You can call that quite a track record. In this episode, I have Tom show and explain how he runs marketing from inside Claude Code, his “agency agent” that builds Linkedin campaigns autonomously, why engineers are taking over GTM, and his top advice to CMOs in 2026. --- We discuss: * How he runs his day-to-day as CMO now vs 3 years ago * Why 30% of his time goes into bug fixing * How he builds agents & Claude skills * Claude Code vs Cowork vs Clay * incident’s “Applied AI” team and why the next GTM engineer is a real engineer sitting inside the CTO’s org * The most impactful agents/skills/workflows his team built and ACTUALLY use * The one - and only - thing Tom would still hire an agency for * Don Jeter’s monster trucks vs Tom’s agents: comparing two playbooks * His top 10 pieces of advice for CMOs in 2026 * Why the CMO role might actually go away --- Connect with Tom: Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/twentworth/ Tom’s blog: https://tomwentworth.com/ incident.io: https://incident.io/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Granola: https://www.granola.ai/ Linear: https://linear.app/ Fibbler: https://www.fibbler.co/ Torq: https://torq.io/ Blog post from 2016: https://tomwentworth.com/2016/02/18/some-practical-advice-for-aspiring-tech-cmos-c4f2a69a09f2/ Hope you enjoy!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
July 2, 202651 min
How to run a successful ABX program
Trinity Nguyen is the CMO at UserGems, where she also leads their AI GTM function. UserGems is an ABM platform used by companies like Crowdstrike, Gong, Box, and our friends at Sendoso. And… THEY EAT THEIR OWN DOG FOOD (or drink their own champagne). Trinity has been running UserGems’ own ABX program for the last 6 years and iterated and improved on it every year. It now drives over 30% of their overall net new revenue growth.In this episode, we break down their 2025 ABX program that took 6,000 target accounts, converted 12% into Opportunities, and generated multi millions in ARR - and what she’s changing about that approach for 2026. --- We discuss: * The complete breakdown of UserGems’ ABX program that converted 12% of 6,000 target accounts into opps - 30% of net new revenue * How to build your TAM/SAM * Why they pick exactly 500 accounts every month * Why Clay is great for testing 3 signals and a trap once you’re running 40 * Why Trinity ran cold outbound herself - and tells every marketer to do the same for at least a month * Outbound vs ads for breaking into an account * Role of events in your ABX strategy * Why the SDR function HAS to sit under the CMO if you’re running ABX * The Chrome extension that 3x their meetings booked from cold calls * How to correctly do attribution for your ABX program --- Connect with Trinity: Trinity’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinitynguyen/ UserGems: https://www.usergems.com/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Outreach: https://www.outreach.io/ Pavilion: https://www.joinpavilion.com/ Hope you enjoy!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
June 25, 202656 min
This Linkedin strategy is BONKERS
Melissa Rosenthal is the co-founder of Outlever, where she’s Editor-in-Chief of its two publications: State of Brand and State of AI. Before Outlever, she was Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, EVP of Creative Strategy at Cheddar, and Global VP of Creative at BuzzFeed. In the 3 months since she launched State of Brand, they’ve hit roughly 1.5M monthly readers, and her own Linkedin went from 100k impressions per month to 4 million per week at the peak. In this episode, we talk about how she’s building her own newsroom, publishing 3-5 news stories every day, leveraging it to go consistently viral on Linkedin, her “media listening machine” behind every story, where AI fits into her workflow, and more. We discuss: - The complete behind-the-scenes of how she runs her two newsrooms for State of Brand & State of AI, to publish 5-6 news stories every single day - How it took Melissa’s Linkedin from 100k impressions/month to 4 million/WEEK - How to write viral B2B stories - Why she posts at 7pm and thinks “everything people say about how LinkedIn works is a lie” - Her media listening machine that surfaces news stories with viral potential in real-time - Where AI / Claude fits into all of this - The three legs of the stool of her media machine: news, interviews, and internal thought leadership - Why you should never aim to build a media company --- Connect with Melissa: Melissa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissarosenthal5/ State of Brand: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/ State of AI: https://www.thestateofai.com/ Outlever: https://outlever.com/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ Hope you enjoy!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
June 18, 202655 min
How to radically stand out w/ Don Jeter
Don Jeter is the CMO at Torq, a series D enterprise cybersecurity company (valued at $1.2B) that’s notorious for its “out there” brand, unusual visual identity, and bold marketing stunts. Their stunts include a 40-foot inflatable skeleton with pterodactyls firing lasers and a monster truck parked at their conference booth, a tattoo bus at RSA (99 ACTUAL tattoos done), CISO karaoke, hiring former pro-wrestling analyst Joel Gertner to name Torq the winner of the “Gertner Mystical Quartile”, Torq-branded urinal liners that their CRO carries in his pocket and deploys at will, and much more. Don has spent 13 years in cybersecurity marketing, at Symantec, Veritas Technologies and Pax8, where he went from Sr. Director of Marketing to SVP Global Marketing, helping the company grow from $5m to $1B in ARR, before joining Torq in 2023. We discuss: * How Don got his CEO to sign off on Torq’s crazy, MASSIVE rebrand (skeletons, monster trucks and all) * What it means to stop marketing, and start world-building * The Liquid Death thesis * What B2B marketers should learn from A24 (the movie studio behind Marty Supreme & Everything Everywhere All at Once) * Don’s test for good marketing: will this get our salespeople excited? * How he scaled field marketing from 3 → 90 → 150 → 400 events per year, and why Don is betting so heavily on in-person * Why brand and demand are the same motion * Where Don draws the line on AI use for his marketing team * What he’d do in his first 30 days as a new CMO * If Don could only watch one movie for the rest of his life, and he had to rewatch it anytime he wanted to watch a movie, which one it would be (he’s really into movies) * And, actually, more --- Connect with Don: Don’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goodmarketing/ Torq: https://torq.io/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Liquid Death: https://liquiddeath.com/ Vanta: https://www.vanta.com/ A24: https://a24films.com/ Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act”: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717356/the-creative-act-by-rick-rubin/ Hope you enjoy!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
June 11, 202657 min
How to operationalize going viral on LinkedIn
Tycho Luijten is one of the most viral people on LinkedIn right now. He rose to LinkedIn fame on April 15th 2025 when him and Steven van Marle published a video called “The Wolf of Wall Street… but then it’s B2B marketing.” - which went absolutely bonkers. I now sits at over 11,000 likes and a total of over 5 million impressions. Since then, they’ve cracked the code of going viral on Linkedin, and published many other skits, including: * Pulp Fiction… but then it’s B2B Marketing. * Suits... but then it’s B2B marketing. * What do you do for a living? B2B Marketer Edition. * And most recently, LinkedIn’s Next Thought Leader And in this episode, we’re breaking down their process. --- We discuss: * How the “Wolf of Wall Street” video came to be * The exact process behind producing one viral skit every 2 weeks * Why they do 1 “hero video” and 1 “lean and mean” video every month * How Tycho and Steven brainstorm and decide on ideas (and why they limit it to exactly 20min) * Criteria for picking the right people (aka employees) to feature in your videos * How much revenue & pipeline the viral videos generate * The separate process Tycho uses for his educational videos * Tycho’s rule for using/working with AI --- Connect with Tycho: Tycho’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tycholuijten/ Dapper: https://www.dapper.agency/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Steven van Marle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-van-marle-19039a242/ AuthoredUp: https://authoredup.com/ Corporate Bro: https://www.instagram.com/corporate.bro/ ClickUp on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clickup/ MyTechCEO: https://www.instagram.com/mytechceo/ --- Here’s their process behind producing one viral skit every 2 weeks: 1. Every two weeks, Tycho and his collegue Steven van Marle block off a 2.5h slot during the morning to brainstorm and flesh out a video idea 2. The meeting is just between Tycho and Steven, no one else 3. They usually go to a new coffee shop every time to get outside of their usual environment 4. The first thing they do is set a timer for 20min. During that time, in silence, they each brainstorm a bunch of ideas. They might come into it with some ideas in mind already, but now they need to write them down 5. After the 20min timer goes off, they each pitch each other their ideas. There’s a bit of back and forth 6. They now need to PICK an idea. That’s the one, no going back. They usually pick the one that they BOTH get excited about and where it feels like there’s an immediate back-and-forth of what could be done with it 7. Now there’s about 2 hours left in the meeting. The rest is spent on two things 8. First, writing the script. The script is everything. A good idea with a bad script is a bad video. They write it together, having rapport with the other person matters a lot 9. Second, they plan the shoot. They do two videos every month. One is a “hero video” with higher production and involvement of other people, and one is a “lean and mean” video with lower production and usually no other people involved 10. For the “lean and mean” video, which is often just recorded on a phone, they either do it right there, or they block off another 1-2h slot some time later in the week to get it done 11. For the “hero video”, they plan a proper shoot. Get a location, get other people involved and briefed, get props or costumes, etc. They make a list and an employee organizes everything. Then they block time to get the shoot done. For this type of video, they usually need to block off half a day or even a full day Here’s what they DON’T do: Wake up in the morning and hope they have a funny idea. Or go with any random idea that pops into their head. Or improvise. They block off time, they’re disciplined, they set timers, they force themselves to PICK an idea and run with it, they go through the effort of writing down the script word-for-word, the dedicate separate time to shoot and record each video Tycho has a similar process for his educational videos. He blocks off 2 hours every second Sunday to record 4 videos. He writes the scripts for those 4 videos the Saturday before. Records it with his videographer, which gives him two educational posts to schedule out every week Watch the episode for additional tips, an example script they wrote, and more. Lmk what you think! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
June 4, 202657 min
AWS Chief Evangelist on How to Evangelize Software
Jeff Barr is the VP & Chief Evangelist at AWS. He joined Amazon in 2002 and wrote the very first post on the AWS blog in 2004. Over the next 20 years, he published more than 3,000 blog posts and helped turn AWS into the behemoth it is today. In 2003, he was part of a brainstorming session at Jeff Bezos’ house with Jeff and Andy Jassy to come up with the ideas that became the foundational building blocks of AWS: S3, EC2 & RDS. In this episode, we talk about how to get developers to care about your product, the right way to do evangelism, and Jeff’s biggest lessons from writing 3,000 blog posts, traveling to hundreds of cities, and working directly with Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy. --- We discuss: * The correct way to evangelize software * How he got developers to care about AWS in the early days * How to pick the right audience to speak to * The “long chain of highly improbable events” that made him AWS’s first evangelist * Lessons from starting the AWS blog in 2004, writing it for 20 years and publishing 3,000 posts * The single most impactful “piece of evangelism” he ever did * The moment Jeff realized AWS would be big * The one thing Jeff Bezos could do that nobody else was capable of --- Connect with Jeff: Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbarr/ AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Some takeaways: * Jeff turned web services into a business the moment Amazon let developers embed their Associates ID and earn money from the traffic they sent back. A protocol becomes a movement when there’s money in it for the person adopting it. If you’re evangelizing software, find the line where using your thing pays the user back. * Audience size is the wrong filter. Jeff flew around the world to speak to 20-40 people at the first Japan AWS user grop in 2010. He thinks like a forester planting seedlings for a forest he won’t see for 15 years. Jeff’s actual line: “They were the right 40 people.” * You can’t fake the excitement. Jeff’s whole point is that developers smell inauthenticity in seconds - they see marketing-speak and decide this person is just repeating what he was told. So the job has a hard prerequisite: you have to be genuinely connected to the thing and actually believe it’s useful. * The payoff is on a delay you can’t predict. Jeff calls it the world’s slowest-moving earthquake - someone heard him speak at a 2013 road-trip stop, reorganized his whole career around the cloud, and years later showed up as an AWS employee. Most evangelism shows nothing for five or ten years. If you need it to move the number this quarter, you’ll quit before it works - which is the same trap CEOs fall into on Linkedin. * Watching Bezos taught him that intuition only earns respect once you do the work behind it. Walk in with “I had an interesting thought” and you get a “so? we all have those.” Walk in with the thought plus the data and the analysis, and you get attention. Jeff’s actual line on Bezos: “you couldn’t BS him.” The instinct is allowed - it just doesn’t count until you’ve gone and proven it. Let me know what you think! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
May 21, 202653 min
How to grow a newsletter w/ MKT1’s Emily Kramer
Emily Kramer is the founder of the wildly popular MKT1 newsletter with over 80k subscribers, where she writes long-form essays on marketing trends, strategies, and tactics for B2B startups. Before starting MKT1, she was VP Marketing at Carta from their series C through E, VP Marketing at Astro, which was acquired by Slack, and Head of Marketing at Asana, where she built their marketing team from 1 to 25 people. --- In this episode, we discuss: * Emily’s tips on building & writing a newsletter * How to promote your newsletter * How to get featured on other big newsletters * Where most of her subscribers come from (it wasn’t what I assumed) * What topics and formats work today * How much work it ACTUALLY takes to write a great newsletter * Substack vs beehiiv * Her writing and research process + how she uses Claude Code for it * The Figma MCP workflow she uses to create graphics --- Connect with Emily: Emily's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilykramer/ MKT1 Newsletter: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/ MKT1 (advising): https://www.mkt1.co/ --- Connect with Finn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/ Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for B2B execs: https://www.project33.io/ --- Mentioned in the episode: Kyle Poyar’s Newsletter: https://www.growthunhinged.com/ Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/ Granola: https://www.granola.ai/ Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/ Attio: https://attio.com/ Hope you enjoy! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.founderbrand.org
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