Adam Kitchen:

Okay, we're live on LinkedIn—episode three of Creator Journeys. I'm delighted to be joined today by the B2B marketing machine that is Chris Walker—someone who doesn't need too much of an introduction here, but Chris is the CEO of Passetto as well as the founder of Refine Labs.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Walker:

Adam, pumped to be here, man. Thanks for having me on the show.

Adam Kitchen:

For everyone joining live, good to see you all—looking forward to getting into this. Awesome, we're going to start with something, Chris, that I think is incredibly relevant, especially now, given how we're constantly talking about this new go-to-market play, especially in B2B. And this is something that I've seen a lot of founders struggle with, and I've heard you clarify on some podcasts, and that is like setting KPIs and metrics so that you have the ability to build momentum in the beginning when you start content marketing. It was lovely to know because, as we know, it takes time for this to compound and results to start to come in. How are you setting these types of metrics and KPIs so the C-Suite doesn't get disillusioned and can the program after three months, staying in this hamster wheel of MQLs?

Chris Walker:

So a couple of different perspectives here. The first one is I think that this is entirely dependent on stage—if you're sub-$10 million ARR and have an early-stage engine versus a company that's operating at scale, you're going to be doing these things differently. So that's like one caveat.

The next one, at any level, is that I believe that especially within marketing, marketing teams and marketing individual contributors get so caught up in the microdata—thinking about getting into an attribution platform and looking at how many people went to this blog and then did something else, being very, very in the micro of like, this email, this blog post, this PDF—and lose sight of the bigger picture, which is: is our marketing delivering pipeline and revenue at an appropriate ROI? And so, I'm pushing people at the top level and not even segmenting it into content marketing and events and digital, just looking at it against marketing investment and pipeline and revenue performance, and just using that as the core barometer of success as the primary metric. Founders get this, and early-stage companies get this—they are not caught up in likes and comments and email open rates—they're not. They're like, "Is this at this early stage? We need to have an effective engine. Is this stuff working in delivering pipeline and revenue or not?" I just feel like that has to be the primary indicator.

And then next, I think that the idea of tracking KPIs around content marketing, I don't think is necessarily the right strategy anymore. I think that we should be looking and tracking KPIs around the distribution of the content. You can have one piece of content, like a gated PDF, for instance— a lot of B2B companies use this—you have a gated PDF, but then you take that gated PDF, you present it in a webinar, you break it into a tile, you run LinkedIn ads against it, you send it through an email channel, you post it on SEO-optimized so that people will download it, and you're actually measuring the effectiveness against the distribution of that message rather than the message itself.

So I think there's a switch here where a lot of people measure the ROI of content, and I think we have to be content is something that we need to create for our business no matter what—we need product marketing content and thought leadership and things that enable our buyers to buy independently and enable our customers to be successful independently. We need to create that content, then we have to be able to get that content to our target customer in a way that actually is effective against the investment and things like that. And so, I've been shifting people to think around the effectiveness of the distribution rather than the content itself.

I think that's a decent place to get it started for right now.

Adam Kitchen:

Apologies, yeah. I think you clarified that extremely well, broke it down, and that is a nice segue, actually, onto the next part. Let's say you are starting from the beginning—how do you differentiate your content? I know this phrase goes around like content market fit, and everyone has this unique expertise, but it takes people a long time to find their voice, and I think as a result, a lot of people who start posting lose faith in the process and just end up stopping altogether. Do you have a specific framework or methodology that you follow to get people to find that voice quicker or recommend following?

Chris Walker:

So, the way that you differentiate in the era of AI, AI is very good at regurgitating existing knowledge, and you need to be in the business of creating net new knowledge by understanding your customers better than anybody else. And so, that's the way—that's at the highest level—how you differentiate from AI. Trying to just say, "Hey, AI, write a blog post about how to rank for an SEO term," that is existing knowledge. What are you bringing that's new to the table? Nothing. And so, you need to figure out what am I bringing in terms of net new insights and data and those types of things that are able to bring and create a unique perspective that can't be created through prompting AI.

I think that the number one thing in business is actually defining the problem that you're solving and having that very clear because it'll drive your roadmap, it drives strategic decisions, it drives who the actual person that's going to champion the sale is. I think that there's so much value in clearly defining the problem, and then how you get there, the product roadmap, your solution can continue to evolve as you get new insights and you go, but the North Star of the business remains the same. And if you pick the problem right—a problem that has a massive cost to business or a big opportunity to business that executives are already prioritizing and care about or are going to prioritize in the future when educated around it—if you have solidified that, then it comes down to execution.

From my SE over the past five years, I've had the luxury of being able to clearly identify large patterns in market problems that executives don't fully understand yet but clearly have declining business impact from because I'm in the work, consulting with them. I think that whether you're selling software or anything else, getting in with the work of customers, implementing your solution, looking into the roadblocks, trying to help break those roadblocks so customers are successful—I think that level of work is truly required today to drive a lot of NRR and differentiation. Software companies historically have said, "We don't want to be in the services business. Let's outsource that to an agency. Let's go find partnerships and have people that don't know what we're doing implement our tech," and we lose all the IP and the learning. So, I think that there'll be an evolving strategy within software businesses to have a profitable professional services arm, not just building customer success and building into the cost of the product—I think that we'll see a shift there purely for the feedback loop that you get on how to build a better product and how to truly solve a customer issue and drive results.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, I feel as though there's two instances where people are using AI here: there's the ideation part where, as you said, you're not really differentiating if you're just using it to rely on creative ideas, but there's also the workflow part to speed up efficiency. Would you explain a little bit about the processes on how you're using it to increase the volume of content that you create while maintaining that unique perspective on the market?

Chris Walker:

Here we go—here's the secret sauce. Over the past five years, I have recorded more than a thousand hours of audio and video content through my podcast, interviews, live events, webinars, speaking engagements, all these different things. So, those thousand hours then have written transcripts of everything that I've said over those thousand hours. Then we take those thousand transcripts, create a custom GPT around it, so we load all that into the library, we load SEO guidelines into the library and things like that, and then you can prompt the chat around things. For instance, list out all the questions that Chris has ever been asked on, you know, episodes, and then you can get all the questions. Then you could say, "Write a blog post that answers each of these questions based on this thousand hours of content," and all you're doing here is having AI work harder for the differentiated ideas you've already talked about rather than having AI create the idea—you're just having it give you the idea you've already said. It's an entirely different use of AI and produces high volumes of written content that reflect the core ideas that I've already communicated and said. That's the number one use case I see today as a long-tail SEO strategy. I'm not trying to rank for, you know, "B2B demand gen agency," I'm trying to rank for "how do we optimize our LinkedIn ads against pipeline production," long-tail 20 searches a month or something like that. But having a high volume of long-tail that gets someone there and then moves, I think that that will be a future SEO strategy as we continue to move into the ongoing commoditization. First, it was offshoring, where people just wrote a blog for 200 bucks for 5,000 words or whatever the stuff was—somebody in the Philippines regurgitating the other 10 blogs on the internet for you. Now it's AI writing blogs that are just commoditized information again, and I think that over time, Google will have to figure out how to continue to, like, "penalize" non—like, obvious regurgitated information and prioritize people that have net new ideas and non-obvious insights. So that is the bet that I'm making.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, a really effective way to get more mileage from your original content. And coming on to the next one—and this is tied back to the previous question—let's say you do have buy-in, you're ready to start posting, or you're starting from zero, and again, a lot of people get disillusioned, and they lose faith because they don't see the process out. How, if you were to start from zero today, would you quickly find your voice and pick up traction?

Chris Walker:

By picking who is the target person that I'm going to help, what type of company do they work in, what type of problem are they trying to solve—by picking an idea of who is the person that's going to get value from my information and then offering free hour-long consulting calls where I go on there and just help them with whatever they're facing, record my side of it, be able to look at the transcripts and what I said and either write content or take videos about exactly how I answered these people's questions and post that on LinkedIn.

Adam Kitchen:

Love it. Short and sweet, super simple.

Chris Walker:

What people try to guess or manufacture the ideas that are valuable to their customer based on what they hope their customer cares about, but it's a lot easier to just go in there and blindly help your customer and then see truly what they care about, what their pressing issues are. Can you actually help them? Do they log off your free consulting call after 15 minutes, or do they stay for the full hour because they find it valuable? And that eliminates a lot of the guesswork around what does my customer actually care about and do I actually help them. So, when you can see the light bulb go off live when you answer someone's question, you help them, and they're a CFO in a mid-market company, and then you can post that on LinkedIn with confidence. If this really smart person found it valuable, other CFOs that are like this or dealing with this will also find it valuable. I think that it gives you a whole different level of confidence when you go into social media distribution or other places like that by first starting one-on-one with your target customer.

Adam Kitchen:

So, you're essentially articulating the problems that you solve for your ICP, whether it's video, audio, any type of medium, and then using that to distribute into channels like LinkedIn when you're at zero.

Chris Walker:

When you're at zero, you're probably not sure what problem you're actually solving. So, by starting at just a consulting call level—what do these people care about, what metrics are they looking at, what are the most important priorities they have this quarter—and just taking that in, and then over time, when you do 10 or 20 of those calls, you see the pattern of what's keeping a CFO up at night at these types of companies, and then you can say, "Okay, I'm going to go and investigate this further, then identify the problem," then you spend a lot of time communicating and refining the message of the problem, then you build the core solution around it, and that you just continue to build from there.

Adam Kitchen:

And I've even seen you, Chris, mention that you sift through a lot of content comments on LinkedIn, and if you find them valuable, you will then create content around this, right?

Chris Walker:

Yeah, I used to do that more than I do now, to be honest. A lot of the LinkedIn comments are AI-generated spam at this point, and I think that LinkedIn should do something about it because it's not benefiting the creators or the users of the platform. But there's still valuable comments, and then being able to, when someone has a question or presents an objection or something like that, to be able to thoughtfully think about how am I going to answer this. An objection that somebody gives you in context or in a sales thing is just an opportunity for you to clarify the message—it's just pointing out a point of friction for you. So, you can treat it as a good thing, like, "Hey, I can learn from this, I can use this," or you can try to be defensive and say, "This person's trying to attack me," and I think just using it as a learning opportunity is better. And if you just can go back and answer it, a lot of that becomes clear fodder for the next piece of content. So, you can get a recurring loop, whether it comes from social media comments or Q&A on a live event or other things, where you're putting out information, you're listening back to what happened, and then based on what you hear back, that decides what you talk about next.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, like you said, there is a ton of saturation on that AI comment feature—it's making it really vacuous and hard to sift through. But this is tied into, I think, the posting-commenting versus doing other strategies. If you are starting from the very beginning, a lot of effort has to go into content creation from the beginning. How important is it to find people within your ICP and then comment on their posts as well? Do you recommend spending some time doing this or any other specific strategy to gain traction on the platform?

Chris Walker:

I think just having a dedicated strategy to be connecting with the people that are going to care and like your content, I think, is the number one. When you make a connection, it's a dual follow, accepting, so they follow you, and you follow them. And then if you're posting consistently, most likely, once they connect with you, they're going to start seeing your content in the feed, and then it becomes, "Is your content good enough for them to engage?" If not, you're going to get shown three or four times, they're not going to engage, they're going to take you out of the feed and put something else in. But having a dedicated strategy to get net new people, whether people are following you, which will probably take a longer time, or you proactively going to them, connecting with them, which gets you a follow—I think that that is a good way to start getting the engine running. I think the limit—it used to be 100 a day like five years ago, but it might be 25 a day now. So, proactively building your audience and then, obviously, the content creation side—you can't get away from that.

Adam Kitchen:

Would love to know, given the size of your audience now, that sort of relationship flips on its head, right? Where, like, people are coming to you directly, following you. You must get a lot of opportunities to partner up with other creators, people with big followings. Is this something that you're leveraging to grow your audience even more or just exploring monetization opportunities with?

Chris Walker:

Yeah, I've done a couple of these things in the past that have worked really well for me on an ongoing basis—so partnering up with Gaetano DiNardi when we did Demand Gen Live. We did about 100 episodes of that throughout the initial period of COVID in 2020 and 2021. And then I had a monthly recurring event that I did with Dave Gerhardt about content and brand and things like that, which paid off really well in terms of cross-pollinating audiences. Dave has an audience, I have an audience—we bring them together, and then some of the people that listen to me are now listening to Dave and vice versa. It can become a nice accelerant, especially when the messaging becomes aligned.

As a strategy that a lot of companies only think about, "Let me just go out and interview 10 creators," what happens when you do that is all you're doing is just promoting their point of view. And so, eventually, you need to develop your own perspective and communicate your own perspective to the market, and then use creators to build trust in other angles around the things that you already believe. At this point, my partnership on content is probably 10% to 20% of the mix, and when it happens, I'm bringing in someone that has a specific perspective that I believe my audience needs to hear coming from somebody else that also fits in line with a lot of the things that I believe. That's how I strategically partner with other creators. I did it with Tom Wentworth, the CMO of Recorded Future, last Thursday. Kyle Lacy's been on them. There's been, you know, Sydney Sloan, a CMO—there's been a lot of people that come on the podcast for those reasons. I'm going to start doing more CEO, CFO level too because I think that my audience needs to hear from that perspective as well.

Adam Kitchen:

And the medium is generally delivered over podcasts, right?

Chris Walker:

Podcasts, long-form YouTube videos, short-form LinkedIn, short-form—I used to be heavier on TikTok than I am right now, and I'm happy to talk about that a little bit, but I'm going to be booting up TikTok again probably toward the end of this year. We use YouTube shorts, we create written content for our website. Like I said, separating the content creation—the raw ideas—versus the distribution, one piece of content gets distributed in five different places, and actually measuring the success against not the top-level piece of content but where it was distributed, I think, is a huge unlock for people.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, absolutely. Before we move on to the next one, I would love to just know a little bit about how you view long-form videos specifically on LinkedIn before we go into other channel-specific content strategies. You've always prioritized, or at least for the last few years, these talking head-style videos that have a lot of deep context in them that go on for, you know, 3 to 5 minutes, even longer a lot of the time. How important do you think it is to go that deep into a specific subject? Because there's a lot of talk on that can harm the number of impressions and views that you get. I'm guessing you're just aiming for the people who want to buy, right, and really consume that information as opposed to the vanity metrics of, well, it's got more impressions.

Chris Walker:

It's the difference between trying to optimize and get the most reach possible versus the most business results possible. And it's not a perfect indirect correlation, but there is a correlation here. If you want to go for the 3,000 impressions and you want to get a post that'll go viral, you have to post something so generic, so well-accepted, so broad, that that many people would like it to boost it in the algorithm to get that many views. Therefore, you're saying nothing new, you're saying nothing original. Sure, people will see your name, but I've always been in the place where in whatever channel you are, use the limits of the channel to deliver against the business goal that you have. On LinkedIn, an organic post, the video can be up to 10 minutes, so why, every time, if the limit is 10 minutes, would we post something that is only 30 seconds when we're trying to tell a story that should be told in 3 and a half minutes? Use the available channel to tell the story—tell a complete story. Sometimes that will be 37 seconds, and sometimes that'll be 9 minutes and 59 seconds, which I posted before. Sure, if the video is longer, fewer people are going to consume the whole video, but the people that do consume it are going to see 10 minutes, not one second of an impression of a text post, which creates trust and depth and things like that. In this game that we have on LinkedIn today, trust, depth, unique perspective, non-obvious insights—that is how you win. It's how you've always won in content. The best bloggers in 2011 actually did blogging, actually did SEO, ranked for millions of things, wrote about it in long detail—10-minute videos from Rand Fishkin talking about SEO—it has always been depth and non-obvious insights that win in content. People have just lost that in the era of impressions and website traffic and things like that. I think partially because of the media company narrative, which skews people—a media company makes money based on impressions. They sell advertising on a CPM basis, they sell banner ads through Google, Trade Desk, or whatever, and they make money based on how many people hit their website or see their content. But in B2B companies that sell hardware, software, services, whatever, we do not make money based on impressions. We don't make money based on how many thousands of people go to our website—we make it when an account makes a purchase from us and gives us cash and closes a deal. That needs to be the North Star, not how many impressions we get. A lot of the time, like I mentioned, I think I have found them in my career so far as almost inversely correlated—my worst-performing posts, often from a metric standpoint, 200 likes or whatever nowadays, drive the most inbound DMs, inbound conversations, qualified customers. So, that's been a really interesting insight for me that I think you don't hear very often in the social media marketing type of guru space.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you're nailing that. So, no pictures of your dog or when you have a kid, right? Because I think there's been a bit of discussion as well, like, that's a top-of-the-funnel strategy to bring people into your network. But I think the pushback I've always heard, and I've seen you mention, is, well, what type of people do you want to bring in? It's pointless to just get attention for the sake of attention if you have a specific business objective using the platform.

Chris Walker:

Well, last Thursday, I posted a video with a new perspective of mine communicating that the real issue in B2B go-to-market teams is unit economics across the entire go-to-market. That post has received more than 200,000 views, many of which are somebody sees it, links it in Slack, sends it to an executive, and then the exact person that I need is now consuming a six-minute video about my perspective here. That one impression has so much more value than getting 10,000 random people to see your dog post. I get that gurus have this balance of post really broad stuff for reach and then work your way down into specific stuff later. The problem is that the people that do that strategy never work their way down—they never actually get into the expertise. They stay top-of-funnel impressions, vanity metrics the whole time. I'm just pushing people, especially in B2B target audiences—we need executives. Sure, you're going to get feed visibility, but the number one way to get the real valuable visibility is for somebody to see your video and then send it to the person that matters inside of their company. That is the number one way. We're looking for that internal sharing because in that thousand-person org, there are people that know this is the person in the company who's going to solve this issue for us and give it to them. That person is way more likely to consume the video when it comes through them versus when you show it on an ad on their LinkedIn feed. So, both can work—you should do both of them. It's not one versus the other, but we just need to recognize where the real value is.

Adam Kitchen:

100%. Yep, don't see many pictures of dogs being shared internally in my company's Slack channel, but definitely a lot of original thoughts from people. That actually brings us on to the next topic, and this is something that I think you might have coined originally—at least it definitely comes from you as far as I'm concerned—and that's this terminology around things like dark social, signal-based selling. How did you stumble upon this? Was this just something that you realized was gaining traction, and then you doubled down on the narrative? Or was this a specific strategy that you had of creating your own type of verbiage and then said, "Let's see how people resonate with this on social"?

Chris Walker:

So, no matter what business you're in, but really especially when you're in a services business, to build a big business, you're in the IP game. You need to build intellectual property and frameworks and potentially automation and technology and processes, and that's the business—that's the real business that you're in unless you're going to build a commodity agency and sell, you know, 150 bucks an hour for a designer or somebody like that. So, in a long-term way, you have to be invested in building the IP to build a real differentiated business—a core business strategy. So, when you're doing that, and you're actually looking at what businesses are doing and the problems that they have, it's a real opportunity to then reframe or communicate in a different way the problem that companies are facing that gets them a way to recognize something different. So, using strategic language is a huge thing, whether you're trying to differentiate within an existing category or a new category, using your own language, and then having it resonate to a level where your customers are now using that language internally in their meetings, coming back to you, and having a sales conversation. The number one thing way back in the day was actually the MQL hamster wheel. On our first calls, basically every single company that came in, the CMO would or whoever would be like, "My team's on the MQL hamster wheel." We've never had a conversation with them, we don't talk about that on the website, it's just communicated in content, and then through word of mouth, and they're coming back and using that language to frame the problem that they have that we clearly solve. So, I think that coining your own language is a great strategy. I think that it requires a really fast feedback loop between you putting stuff out and then learning from the market and putting stuff out and learning from the market and iterating. Sitting in an ivory tower, coming up with language, and then rolling it out into a sales deck I don't think is the right strategy and prone to a lot of misses. So, we need to have the humility and the patience to work the iterative process to find the problems and get to the language that we want.

Adam Kitchen:

Yep, absolutely agree. So interesting, actually, you mentioned a few times now, and I would love to just stop a second and ask about solving those customers' problems and constantly needing to speak to your own customers, whether you're in the prospecting phase, and using that and infusing your messaging so that when you go out with this go-to-market content strategy, you know deeply who you're speaking to. I'm sure, Chris, for you and many other CEOs, I saw a post the other day on LinkedIn, that once you come away from doing that work, sometimes you can lose perspective a little bit on the work going in the trenches, and it can take you away from that messaging. So, I guess my question would be, you've probably got a lot of responsibilities; you're not doing the client work like you used to, definitely not. How do you put systems in place to ensure that information still passes through you, and you still have a tie into that messaging so that you're able to articulate it when it comes to the market?

Chris Walker:

I think until you have a truly scalable business—a business model, sustainable business operations, consistent message, acquire a customer, deliver a repeatable thing, get a repeatable outcome, renew and expand—until you get to that level, which will vary by company, but it's not 2 million ARR, it's much farther along than that, the CEO must be in the work, understanding all those things. If you are going to own go-to-market—and there's some technical CEOs that are going to offload that to a COO or Chief Revenue Officer, but in many cases, it should be the CEO because you have the vision, you have the product, you allocate all the resources, maybe you have a megaphone, you're communicating both with the investors in the market and the team. So, you have this setup where a CEO is going to own go-to-market.

Up until that scale, I believe that the CEO should be marketing—they should be on events with their customers, they should be on events with prospective customers, they should be getting reps in the sales process, and they should be getting feedback around that. They should be onboarding customers or at least experiencing the onboarding experience of a customer. They should be checking in with customers over a specific period of time, collecting testimonials about what customers are saying, and the feedback. Also, participating in the renewal conversations about what the customer wants and looking at the full customer lifecycle because you're going to learn different things at different points. Why does a customer renew with us? What are they looking for over the next year when they renew? Is it different than what they were looking for in the first year? What is the vision that we're telling to get this customer to sign an annual agreement? How do the terms need to work? How do we price? Do we need a third offer at this high price tier, or are we only going to have these two offers? What is the message that we're—what is the real problem that we're solving that we're learning from customers and then bringing that back into the marketing message at the top of the funnel? There's just so many dynamics where staying in that environment until your business is truly "wash, rinse, repeat—let's do this over and over," which I think is probably like 30 to 100 people depending on your business, like at that level of headcount. I think that a lot of CEOs try to be out of the work a lot earlier, and through the telephone game, you lose insights that make it harder for you to drive the strategy of your company.

Adam Kitchen:

Love it, man. So, keeping a finger on the pulse until you get to a level of scale that justifies you obviously pulling yourself out of that. I would love to just understand, especially from what you're seeing in terms of visibility, reach, impressions, etc., on the platform, a lot of people are saying that it's not the same opportunity, specifically on LinkedIn today, as it was two to three years ago. And I know we'll come on to this in the next question—you've mentioned long-form SEO, YouTube shorts, diversifying your channel mix. Are you seeing it harder to grow than ever today on LinkedIn? Is that affecting your reach, your performance on the platform?

Chris Walker:

The dynamic curve of social media networks is the same for every network—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn—where the earlier that you're in, there's a point in time where there's a lot of people that look at content, and there's not a lot of people posting. That is the moment to get into it. Then, over time, more people post content, fewer people consume content, there's more ads in the feed, and the opportunity declines. Always, in social networks, two or three years ago was better than it is right now if you've reached that curve. So, yeah, undeniably, LinkedIn was a better opportunity in 2020 than it is today—undeniably. But it's not about whether it was better then than now—the question is, where does it sit in the prioritization of your business today relative to all the other places? I still think that a combination of LinkedIn organic and a targeted paid strategy remains a top-three strategy for companies as a go-to-market strategy—not a marketing strategy; this is a go-to-market strategy. How do we educate our customers? How do we get people that want to buy? How do we communicate our message? How do we amplify our happy customers and what they're saying about us? It's a go-to-market strategy—I think it belongs in the top three for companies still today, regardless of whether it was a better opportunity two or three years ago or now.

You still see people that are creating breakout businesses based on implementing new and either proven strategies or new and different. Adam Robinson has been doing basically the same thing as me, and he shamelessly talks about how he just copies the exact same thing that I'm doing, and I'm happy for him—it's working out for him. Then you have companies like Clay that are not doing the founder-led brand, that are doing a lot of micro-influencers—Noble's doing the same thing and doing a different strategy on LinkedIn to get the same outcome. I still think if people are figuring out how to make it work and drive pure business growth where there are still many people doing it, then you could too. You just have to be better now to win than you did two or three years ago. So, it's just about whether you think you can be a top content creator for your industry or for your target customer on LinkedIn. If you think you can, then you can.

Adam Kitchen:

Relative to other opportunities, I don't—like I mentioned, I look at the content and the distribution almost as one big thing. We came in here, and we recorded the content. It's going to take 5 minutes to make it a podcast, 10 minutes to make it a long-form YouTube video, a couple of hours to make all the LinkedIn clips, a couple more hours to make all the TikTok clips, and one hour of information now flows to all these distribution channels. So, while there's a cost of operating a new channel, and I think that you should be disciplined around when you introduce new channels, the incremental to add YouTube shorts just is not that high relative to the overall cost. So, I think that really focusing on just being able to create the information, make sure the information resonates with your customer, and then, from there, think about new ways to get it to your customer is a simple process.

Chris Walker:

Tell me a little bit about those other channels that you've alluded to a few times already. What else are you doing beyond LinkedIn, or rather, how are you taking the content that you create for LinkedIn and applying it to other channels? And I suppose a follow-up to this question would be, are you creating specific content for other channels, for example, YouTube, Twitter?

Adam Kitchen:

Content gets repackaged and reformatted for distribution. So, the same video that goes on LinkedIn is not going on TikTok—it's a different format, it's a different length, style, different hook, different captions. So, you're repackaging the content specifically for the distribution. But I'm not sitting down and saying, "I'm recording this video for YouTube," and I get that some people will do that, and it probably works better for them on YouTube. But I'm a busy executive, and I own three companies, and I'm not going to sit down for three hours and thoughtfully script and things a YouTube video so I can get 10,000 views. It's just not—it's not my strategy. So, I'm going to record the things that I'm already doing and share the content that I have and then be able to push those into distribution, which is just a much more effective use of my time. On YouTube shorts, that's a long-term play for me—we're not seeing that play out from a meaningful growth standpoint just yet. I'm very high on this repackaging using AI to create written long-tail SEO content, so I'll continue to talk about the things that we're learning there. Podcasts and YouTube long-form become great long-form assets—somebody that is going to listen to two to three hours of your podcast every week is incredibly more valuable than somebody that sees your LinkedIn post every once in a while. So, I think thinking about that amount of consumption is really interesting. Like, a social media network would measure basically how much time people spend on the platform—like, how much time are people spending consuming your content? I think it's a really interesting—it's not very measurable, but it's an interesting indicator of the impact. And then TikTok, I think, as I've gone through this another cycle—I announced my new company, Passetto, in January—I think that there are times in a business life cycle where the main strategy is to grind, figure out what customers need, build that solution, figure out how to message it, figure out how to sell it before you have your microphone on social media. Sure, you can do both, but I'm in a chapter—I'm in a season of my entrepreneurial journey where I'm figuring out what the next message is. So, I'm not as loud on social media, and I don't have big revenue targets or massive scale for my new company. So, I'm able to sustain that while I build something that the market really needs, that's differentiated. Then you go out with a message that works, that you can offer a solution to, and you start talking about it. I think that people should be conscious of where they sit in their business life cycle because there's a lot of people that are out there trying to build a personal brand that don't have anything that the market wants.

So, the timing and the investment allocation as a founder/CEO of an early-stage startup also matters.

Chris Walker:

So, it essentially just comes back to the prioritization framework, right? Like where your business is in terms of maturity versus what the opportunity is.

Adam Kitchen:

There's a million things that you can do as a CEO, no matter what stage you are, and so the number one most important thing is figuring out a process to filter through all the things that you could do and have some logic to decide these things we're not going to do and these are the four things that we are going to do, and this is the reason why. I think that you could break that into as a CEO, but you look at as a marketing leader or as a, you know, paid media manager in a big company—there's a million things that you could do. How do you determine based on business metrics what are the most important things that you could do based on effort, impact, cost, and other variables like that?

Chris Walker:

Out of curiosity, Adam, why haven't you pursued Twitter (X)? It seems like your audience would be there—your content would do that. Maybe it needs a bit of tweaking, but that would seem like the next logical move for me at least, and many of us, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot. Why TikTok or YouTube short over X?

Adam Kitchen:

I am mostly video-native, and I choose to play on platforms that are video-native just because it works for me better. When I write, the message that I am communicating requires a lot of context—like even the 2,500 character limit or whatever LinkedIn has sometimes isn't enough for me to get the point across and explain it in a succinct way where it doesn't get taken out of context. So, the risk on X, especially with the short-form character limits, is either you make stuff that nobody actually matters, or you don't have enough way to create context so that your stuff doesn't get misunderstood. So, for a variety of reasons on the limitations of that platform for creators, it's just not a platform that fits for me at the moment. So, that's the core rationale as to why I've deprioritized that place.

Chris Walker:

Makes sense. Definitely after leaning into your strength and prioritizing where you can allocate your efforts.

Adam Kitchen:

Epic. Thanks for your time, Chris. Just to finish—who else is creating great content, who you really admire at the moment?

Chris Walker:

Some of the things that I've been listening to recently—David Spitz is somebody that's creating content around public company SaaS financial benchmarks. I think he's paving the way in how we look at growth and investments in sales and marketing and things like that. I think his content is very differentiated and non-obvious, so shoutout to him. And also, a way to level up if you're a marketer, if you're a CMO or you're a CRO—I think that getting more educated on the total financial picture is a great level up. So, I think what he's doing is great. I think that what Clay and Noble are doing with this micro-influencer strategy is really interesting, so shoutout to them for sort of pioneering something like that. We'll see how it all plays out in the end, right? It's really, really hot and easy when you're giving someone 20,000 shares to be an advisor for you for free, and then you can post on their thing, but the question is does it actually sustain? Is there any short-term compensation after the 20,000 shares get diluted over six funding rounds? What do you own in the company? Some of these micro-influencers think they're going to be millionaires—they make like maybe 100 grand at best when it's all said and done with dilution, and that's even if the company reaches an exit where the odds are very low of early-stage companies. So, it sounds good in theory, and I know there's a lot of people that would be happy to do that—I'm not one of them for those financial reasons. It just doesn't—it's not a financially up—there's not enough financial upside for me. But I see how a lot of people would do it. My question is, does it sustain in one year when they're not getting paid, and they realize that it's going to be six more years until they maybe get paid, and if they get paid, it's not going to be that much? Will they still be so excited to market this company? That's what I wonder.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, definitely a very novel approach. The teams who completely taken over my feed at least, so yeah, full marks for innovation. I haven't seen it done before, at least at the level of scale and the velocity that they're doing it—super interesting. Well, Chris, thank you for your time. Where's the best place for people to follow you? Do you want to give your podcast or other places a quick plug?

Chris Walker:

Yeah, if you like the insights, the best way to get the most depth is on the B2B Revenue Vitals podcast, available on Apple and Spotify and other channels. And then I produce short-form clips on LinkedIn—you can follow me on LinkedIn, Chris Walker 171.

Adam Kitchen:

Epic, man. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks again.

Chris Walker:

Epic, thanks, everyone.

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