Adam Kitchen:

Okay, episode four of Creator Journeys. I'm delighted to be joined today by Jeremy Horowitz. He is a managing partner at Because Ventures, which invests in e-commerce as well as SaaS companies, and he's also the head creator at Let's Buy a Biz—the fast-growing newsletter that I love to read and I'm sure many people listening as well. Welcome, Jeremy.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Really excited to be here, really excited to dive back into the depths of how the creator economy works and how, hopefully, it's all a big smashing success for all of us. And thank you for the very kind words.

Adam Kitchen:

Awesome, man! Well, most of our previous conversations have been around e-commerce, but we're going to shift gears and talk a little bit about content marketing today. Specifically, how you're leveraging your personal brand and how you approach everything from content ideation to generating leads or whatever your objectives are. Speaking personally, I've seen over the last 12 months, your content has really become extremely well-defined, and it just feels as though you know exactly how to hook people in, how to tell a great story. Your format is always on point. So, I guess my starting question would be, after creating content on LinkedIn for probably five years now—probably about the same time as me—in the last 12 months, you've really gone up a gear. Everything in terms of the quality, how you resonate with your audience, feels extremely well-defined. So, just tell me, how did you stumble upon or discover this process to hook people in, really start to scale your audience, and drive positive outcomes for your personal brand?

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, so after four years of screaming into the void and stumbling in the dark—no, I'm kidding—but yeah, I think it all really comes down to really clearly defining what my audience was and really clearly defining what I wanted to accomplish. I think I've recently gone back and analyzed my past five years of LinkedIn performance. I basically took out every single post I've ever done and marked the performance in spreadsheets—how many views, how many likes, how many comments, what type of engagements did every single post get—and I categorized them by type of post. I have these pillars of content that I try to cycle all of my posts through while we experiment with some other stuff.

It was really interesting to see that there were three big phases of my LinkedIn content so far since I started posting consistently in late 2019, early 2020. The first was promoting the podcast that I was doing at the time called Messenger Mastermind, which was very e-commerce tips and tricks, very heavy. Then the second phase was kind of like my B2B SaaS career, where I was in very ecosystem-heavy roles, so it was very much about how to talk to e-commerce merchants but also how to talk to the partner ecosystem—agencies, technologies, everybody involved in what I would call the sphere of influence. A lot of my content was created around that.

I always like to think of it as what's really helpful content that people will actually take away and find value in, and then what's the just entertaining stuff—what's the stuff that's just going to get people to stop scrolling, engage with, and enjoy. In the past year, in the timeframe you mentioned, I really honed in on what gets a lot of engagement but also has a backend to it where people think, "Oh, this is really interesting." So, while I was looking at my content, I found that the most exciting was these fake takeovers—me pretending to work in M&A teams at big companies. That started when Because Ventures began pivoting from more VC-style investments to private equity-style investments. We were going to buy companies, and the whole Let's Buy a Biz brand, this whole content creation idea, actually started testing on LinkedIn before I built out the brand around it.

I would take the private equity memos we wrote to our investors and financial partners—I’m NDA’d up to my neck and can't talk about the private deals—but I would take the same structure of the documents we created and thought, "Oh, this is probably pretty interesting and people would learn a lot because it's something that not many people have access to." The second piece was, "How can I make this fun and entertaining?" Essentially, Let's Buy a Biz and what I'm now known for is these fake takeovers of public companies. Recently, we did one about Warby Parker, where we imagined taking the D2C darling, which has done poorly, private—how would that work? How do we then grow the brand? A lot of what we do is looking at the current financials of a business and asking, "If we were going to acquire it, how can we do something called EBITDA expansion?" which basically means making the business more profitable and making more money. I'm just creating a fun hypothetical version of that weekly, and I've now expanded that into multiple categories.

So, to answer your question, it was the perfect combination of what was highly engaging on social media and what actually served the business purpose I wanted to accomplish. I also went full-time on the private equity side, which caused this really interesting shift. The why behind all this, outside of me just having fun, is that it shifted from our existing network—my partner and I and the newsletter, which I started building out a little bit in this timeframe, was the main source of our deal flow. I would say, in the past year and especially in the past six months, my network, this external group outside of people we previously worked with, was maybe 10% of our deal flow. Now, LinkedIn has generated 80% of our deal flow, either directly or through people who have engaged with my LinkedIn content—partners, other types of people in the space who are now referring deals to us as well.

It's been this really interesting combination of a big business objective I was looking to accomplish, something I saw in the market that was super effective, and now I'm basically just a vehicle for these fun ideas. It's also a little bit of thought leadership. At this stage, when someone sells you their business, you kind of become—I always call it the babysitter or the uncle—you become the guardian of their very preciously held thing. It's also a little bit of KLT—know, like, and trust—getting to know, like, and trust Jeremy as the potential person who's going to take over your baby. It's presented this really interesting combination of many different things all at once, and it's just been a fun ride, now reaching millions of people every year through what I find are my crazy, out-of-the-box ideas.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, that's epic, man. It's so interesting to hear you talk about that inbound lead flow to you personally because I feel as though there is a bit of a stigma, and it does feel like there is sometimes on LinkedIn. It's like marketers speaking to marketers, right? People like myself, for example, clearly trying to sell services, and I think because of that, a lot of CEOs—whether it's SaaS companies, where there's not as much friction as there used to be, or people with different objectives like yourself—might have been hesitant to post because they don't want to get involved in that. But you've just clearly illustrated how it's completely transformed your access to opportunity. I think this is something that's coming up over and over again. You might not want to directly generate leads, but just posting and making yourself known gives you a huge amount of access to opportunity on LinkedIn.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, and I think that's a common mistake that everybody makes. I also did a lot of ghostwriting when I was at Daasity and Gorgias for senior execs there. I think the biggest mistake everybody makes is thinking it's a one-to-one correlation—people who engage with your posts become your pipeline. I know you've talked about this as well. What I actually find is the most effective are the lurkers—people I’ve never seen engage with my posts. They never reach out to me, comment, or even like or support comments, but then, out of the blue, I'll get a DM saying, "Hey, I've been following your stuff for six months. I love your content. We should meet."

The really interesting thing, and where I've now—I'm not sure if I was ever really skeptical of this, but this has completely killed that objection for me—is I've had investors reach out to me. We originally started the fund with our own capital plus a couple of family offices and private firms we’d worked with before. Just by sharing what I'm working on, what we're doing, and what we're seeing, I've had other people reach out to me saying, "Hey, I want to invest in this as well." It's not just the deal flow on the buying side. Everybody would think, "Oh, there aren't people with money just spending their time on LinkedIn." LinkedIn has just become YouTube, Instagram, Meta, or whatever other channel for this little sliver of the world of billions of people. Probably tens or hundreds of millions or billions of people—it’s just their new form of engagement.

I'm guilty of it too—I spend way too much time on LinkedIn. Instead of going to Meta, X, or another social media app, I'm going to LinkedIn first because it's how I think about the world. There are tons of other business-obsessed people doing the same thing. So, if you create highly engaging content that gets a lot of views—this is why I've started to actually—I think views are a vanity metric, but it's actually my core metric that I manage for all my content. There is some function of how many people you can reach and what that impact is on your business. Especially for organic content, to me, it’s the most important because what I've found is you never know what will end up happening with the people you reach. There will be no sign until the moment they reach out to you that you're really building a meaningful impact in that relationship. The constant question is, "How can you grow that reach as much as possible, and how can you use your content to find those people?" That's why I've really come in and narrowly focused on that—it's had such an outsized impact. I knew going in—I’ve worked in marketing my whole career, so I know this stuff—but it's really different when you see it come to the pipeline. I've had people from Fortune 500 companies that would have been a dream client I worked with before say, "Hey, let's have a 15-minute catch-up and talk." I never had an interaction with those people at all before, and now they’re the ones who—it's a very powerful thing for them to come inbound and start a conversation from that perspective versus chasing them.

Adam Kitchen:

I think that's such a key point to pause on for everyone who's listening. Jeremy, I've spoken about my personal experience on how my best deals have come from lurkers who never commented or engaged with anything. In fact, Magnet Monsters has worked with five nine-figure e-commerce brands, and four of them were inbound DMs from people who said they’d been consuming my content for over a year but never even liked a post. I think what you've just said is so important for people who get frustrated. Yes, some of those vanity metrics do equate to increased reach and visibility, but for people who don't get direct engagement, there is a huge segment of people who just consume but don't necessarily engage. I think for a lot of people, they need to have faith in that process because they quit before they get traction or see the results.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, I mean, I think it just comes down to a sheer math problem, right? If you just think about it—the numbers vary, but let's even be generous and say that 10% of any social network creates all the content that the other 90% consume. My guess, based on my own experience and from doing this for a really long time, is that maybe 20-30% of people are actually actively engaging—liking, commenting, reposting, whatever—with content. As I also noticed my own personal usage on other social apps—on Instagram, for example—I don't really use anything other than sending stuff to DMs with my friends and family anyway. There’s not a lot of engagement that I do, but I’m sharing a lot of content that way as well.

People like to think that LinkedIn is this magical B2B platform where human behavior is going to be super different, and everybody's going to be super professional. LinkedIn does have their thumb on the scale a little bit—they are curating more than other platforms do—but at the end of the day, people are going to behave the same way they do on other channels, and that behavior will permeate through. The other thing I think about now a lot is that a lot of the engagement I’m looking to drive isn't necessarily from the people I want to work with. To me, it's two things: one, it's feedback on my content. It’s that old Gary Vee quote that you don't personally read the comments—you read the comments to figure out what your feedback is. The second point is there's a proxy between—we've kind of figured out, reading the tea leaves on the algorithm, some sort of comment threshold that corresponds to different view amounts. To me, it’s about how I can consistently show up in people's algorithms. It’s probably too much of my ego here, but it feels good when people reach out to me and say, "Hey, I read your stuff every morning while I drink my coffee, and it's really great." I feel like every day, I work to deserve that spot in someone's day.

The thing you need to think about is a post that does even 20,000 views isn't going to get 20,000 likes and comments. If you get that many likes and comments, it’s going to go viral. But you need to understand it's a math game—you’re going to get exponentially more people to see your content than people who engage with your content. It’s a feedback loop. It’s nice when someone like the CMO of FIGS comments on my post, and I'm like, "Hell yeah!" I kind of know we're connected on LinkedIn. I wouldn’t call them a friend, but we know each other through LinkedIn—that feels good. But what's more important is the 15, 30, or 50 people who comment on a post—I know there are probably 17 other people like the CMO of FIGS who aren't going to engage with the post at all but will see it, consume it, and think, "Oh, hey, this was interesting." After probably 10 times of reading my content, they'll think, "Oh, that's the guy who says the crazy stuff about e-commerce." But yeah, it's all just a consistency game because I think if you're selling anything more than $100, it takes time to make that decision. The other big insight that a lot of people miss is that anything in business—because all business is marketing and sales at this point—you're not going to change someone's mind on a $10,000, $50,000, or even a million-dollar transaction in five minutes. You have to consistently do it. You have to consistently be in their ear so that they can go from unaware to aware.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, man, there are so many rabbit holes we could go deeper into from what you've just said. But a couple of things I think are important to call out—I think I agree with you, probably 10% create, 20% engage, and then there's that 70% who are probably sharing in the dark social, as Chris Walker would call it, in the Slack channels, the DMs, and word of mouth.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, word of mouth.

Adam Kitchen:

That's very important for people to consider, as opposed to solely looking at direct engagement metrics. I think coming back to what you said in the beginning, when you're trying to grow, just create the winners and look at your analytics. What performed well in the past is a good indicator of what will perform well in the future. Like you said, that’s the messaging your ICP or the audience you're trying to appeal to really loves. So just recreate new angles and formats and speak to those people again in the same way, rather than getting into that rut where you're so frustrated and expending so much energy trying to think of new angles when you might already have a winning formula that can perform extremely well again.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, the one thing I'd add to that is, let’s take Let’s Buy a Biz as an example, which is now this whole media brand, but it started as a category of content I call company analysis. I basically just throw my idea out there about, "Hey, this company is doing this, and I think it should be doing that." Then it turned into market takes, then into M&A ideas, and then into all these other things where eventually I figured out, "Okay, there is a format and a structure that works." It’s not just the same hook or content, but it's also a formula that now I've been able to use to write about a different company every week. The other important piece is that once you find your hit winning content, the repurposing and reuse are really important. But the other big thing I found—and this actually comes from my days managing SEO teams—is that you have your pillar content and your related content in almost a circle around the core.

What I found is not every Let's Buy a Biz post is a killer. The best one has done half a million views, the worst one has probably done 3,000 views. It’s a wide range. But the pillar as a whole is strong enough that it does a million views a year for me in content just by doing one of those a week. The important piece to hit on there is that once you find a winner, it's not just about repurposing it—it’s about figuring out what all the relevant things are that you can build upon. Most likely, you’ll hit similar or even higher success by diving deep into those quick pools. I think a lot of us spend too much time testing, iterating, and going too deep into the long tail versus, every time I've analyzed this—especially where social media is going to go, because I've watched this happen on Meta, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok—you’ll have absolute winners and nothingness. You’re going to get very, very low engagement, and a few things are going to go viral and be insanely successful.

It’s knowing which pools are deep enough that you can really go fishing in because then you can dive deep. I know if I write about Shopify’s quarterly earnings, it’s going to do about 20,000 views. There are certain posts I now build off of insights I find in the earnings calls. That's kind of my thing—my shtick on my brand. I’ll post about some lesson or data about the Shopify ecosystem. That data might get 50,000 or 70,000 views, and the other ones can do 10,000 to 12,000. So, it’s not just about repurposing the same thing over and over again. Now I've found this sphere of related content where that can add up to significantly more than the first hit I found. It’s also what I call the prune-and-groom system. You need to test a bunch of stuff, throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, prune out everything that doesn't work, and then build up as much of what does. It takes time. To your point earlier, this stuff doesn't—you don't figure all this out in a month. This has taken me six months, maybe years, of doing this. But last month, I did as many views as I did in all of 2022. It’s really honing in on, as you complimented earlier in the episode, how everything’s honed in. It's because I've constantly been tracking things. I've probably tested over 60 different content types since I've been doing this. It all kind of relates back to the same core things, like what I'm interested in, but eventually, figuring those things out and going incredibly deep there.

Adam Kitchen:

Yeah, I think you've absolutely nailed it. I'm going to come to two things related to that—the posting format, so how you create the content and what type, as well as the posting velocity to iterate and gather enough data to realize what those winners are. Let's first go to the type of content you create, right? For anyone listening, you can do video content, written long-form content, short-form videos, carousels. I always personally recommend people find something they're really good at and double down on that. For me, you've been exceptional at these medium to long-form direct response-style copy breakdowns. Tell me a little bit about how you settled on that format. I'm guessing you’re going to bring in some of the data and historical learnings you've already been over, right? That's given you this identity where, when you post, I already know without seeing your name that it’s from Jeremy.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, I tried everything else. Before all this, I ran a podcast for 162 episodes—that was audio, video. I've tested a bunch of short form, carousels, static images, and by far, in every way I measure, the written is the most successful. If I had to break down why, I’d say that usually my topics require context and data. One of my special skills that people enjoy, and what I’ve really tried to nail in my content, is taking a complex idea and making it simple. What’s something that’s sophisticated or complicated or hard to grasp in a headline unless you've learned about it? How do I make that simple? The way I structure all my posts now is, "What's a big, bold bet that someone can argue with to play the social media game, to get someone to engage?" It’s kind of like dessert first, so you eat your vegetables. What's something provocative enough that will get you to engage, but then break down a complex idea in a very simple, data-driven method?

I don't know—it feels like a lot of people care whether they're right or wrong. To me, what's interesting is the debate around the idea of how we become smarter about this thing. Maybe that's getting a little too meta and high-level, but that's what my aspiration for all of it is. But it's really hard to accomplish all of those things—well, actually, let me phrase it this way: I'm not a good enough designer to design a really great graphic asset that will represent that. That’s actually an area I’m actively expanding into now—bringing in a designer who can create charts, graphs, and other things like data visualization to make it more obvious, with some good copy. From a video perspective, it just comes down to—we're probably going to have to launch a podcast again, which comes down to the video infrastructure of editors, producers, and all those other things, which will come.

I personally really wanted to master the concept of putting my ideas down in words. I think that specific format really forces you to—it's really hard to BS intelligence in writing versus, I think, you can skate around that depending on how you position video and graphics. That was also a personal challenge to myself: could I master this skill set and get really great at writing? This is coming from someone who, in second grade, had a teacher who told my parents, "You should be pretty concerned about his English—we're not really sure how he's going to do in English in life." I'm a native-born American English speaker—that’s my primary language. So, it was also a bit of a challenge to myself to master that skill set because a lot of the Let's Buy a Biz concept—those deal memos are all written. I need to master that skill set to make the important business cases we need for the fund.

Adam Kitchen:

Yep, again, you're dropping so much gold. I think this is a nice segue into the next question because you've found your zone of genius in terms of how you churn out deliverables. Going back to looking at past historical data, one of the things that enabled you to realize how you achieved that content-market fit is that you have a very high volume of content to look back on and say, "This performed well; this didn't. Let's double down on this." I remember speaking to you a few months or weeks ago, and you said the biggest needle mover for you was increasing your post frequency significantly. Tell me a little bit about how frequently you were posting before, how frequently you're posting now, and what type of metrics and correlation you've seen with that increased frequency.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, so I'll just give the quick summary. When I started at the very beginning, it was completely all over the place and not consistent at all. It actually just came down to one of those 30-day challenges where it was something like, "You’ve got to post every day for 30 days and just get it done." For everybody who's starting now, if you want to take one piece of advice, that's the best piece of advice. Don't think too much about what you're going to post. Find 30 things you think are helpful, post them every single day. Eventually, I never really posted every day after that, but I started posting daily during the weekdays—Monday to Friday, every day, something went out unless something happened. I did that for a couple of years. I started toying around with weekend updates, which actually came from me just messing up. I would miss posting or scheduling during the week, so I thought, "Okay, we’ve got to get this out over a Saturday or Sunday." I found a really interesting trend—senior people or incredibly busy, high-performing people are usually more active on LinkedIn over the weekends. My high-level thought there is they’re probably too busy for social media during the week, but it's a business thing they do over the weekend—networking and all those other things. So, I started introducing weekend posts and did a bunch of experimentation there.

Starting in March of this year, we moved from—so, going into March, it was every single day of the week, Sunday to Friday. Starting in March, we added two posts per day—one in the morning slot, one in the afternoon slot, Sunday to Friday. It's been a really interesting experiment and challenge. We're still toying around with it—do we post exactly two posts every day? Is there a balance? There are a lot of trade-offs to that. First, just pure volume—it's been an incredible learning curve. Essentially, I had my steady-state content in the morning, and then experiments went in the afternoon. That was an interesting way we were able to learn a lot faster while maintaining core performance. We’re testing that now, back to one day per post, with the stuff we are very confident in—those core pillars that we know will do well. I’m in the middle of this test right now, so this could work or be a complete failure, and we go back to two days or one day. We're still figuring it all out.

What I will say is, when you post two things in a day, your first post, if it’s going to go viral, doesn't perform as well. I’ve found that there is some sort of rate limit that LinkedIn is putting on everybody. I assume this is true for every social platform. Everything that comes out of Jeremy's profile has a certain amount of juice, and the more shots you take, the more you’re using up your juice. We’ve started toying around with testing on days we don’t think will perform as well. What I will say is that when you post twice as much and your content is as good, that’s the big challenge—can you double your output? It was really hard for us to double our output while maintaining consistent content quality. If you can cross that hurdle, your average post does 5,000 views. On a five-day week cadence, that’s 25,000 views. If you can double that, you’re at 50,000. It’s kind of a function of, can we consistently post as much as possible? I’ve seen this on every other social platform—organic will continue to decline over time, which means you have to increase your volume to hit a consistent level. Definitely, over the past five years, I've noticed that stuff that would get 20,000, 50,000, or 100,000 views a couple of years ago is now getting 12,000, 15,000, or 20,000. But that being said, the increased volume was definitely a big needle mover—we started doubling and tripling performance from previous months.

Adam Kitchen:

Fascinating. Again, a lot to unpack there. I think what you said at the beginning is especially important for someone new to posting. Don't even think about whether it's going to perform or not—you just need to build the habit of turning up every day and throwing darts. It doesn't matter if they all miss because you're not even trying to hit the target at that point. You're just trying to get into the consistent rhythm of being disciplined to post. Then, on the days when you’re backing up some posts that might not be performing well, are you keeping a content repository? The way you described it, it sounds like a bit of a natural flow state for you. You wake up, I assume, maybe you have an allocation of time where you create, probably drawing from some type of repository of ideas. Then, are you going in later on and saying, "Whoa, actually, this performed quite poorly; I'm going to back this up and try to salvage some reach for the day"? Tell me about that repository if you have one.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, so I do. This has gotten pretty sophisticated over the years—it did not start here at all. So, for anybody who's just starting out and is like, "What is this guy doing?" I built this brick by brick over five years. What I do today is Slack has an auto-transcribe feature, so I have a Slack channel with my team in it. I should also probably go into that a little bit. I have a VA who helps me generally with stuff—think of an executive assistant, helping me plug a bunch of holes across different things. I brought on an editor recently. I wouldn't consider them a ghostwriter—all the ideas and thoughts are mine—but when stuff consistently went out with such bad grammar mistakes that I didn’t even understand what I was trying to say, I thought, "Okay, it's time for obvious help."

The process is that there's a Google Doc with a running backlog—any ideas, inspiration, stuff we think is cool, all get dumped in there. I record a voice note into Slack—Slack has this amazing auto-transcription feature. It’s not perfect, but it's pretty good. The VA takes it out of Slack into that Google Doc. Usually, there’s some back and forth where either I'm cleaning it up, it goes to the editor and comes back to me, or it just goes to the editor and comes back to me. We clean it all up, get it ready, and then now what we do is my editor and I—he’s really got my tone down after probably a year or a year and a half—will rework all the hooks for the whole week and then grade them. We have a scale of one to ten—one is, "Why are we posting this? This is not going to do well at all," and ten is, "This thing is going viral." Every week now, we grade every single post and try to predict performance—how well can this stuff do? Do we know what will do well on the algorithm and what won't? I’m now reprioritizing the entire week based on our scores. We haven’t gotten enough data back to figure out whether this is a good use of time or a complete waste, but what I'm really trying to figure out is—this is probably helpful for anybody starting out—I'm five years into this. I’ve done probably close to 1,500 posts, collectively almost 10 million views of my content, and I still don't know what performs well. I have a lot of data to make an educated guess, but if any content creator tells you they know perfectly, they’re lying because LinkedIn constantly moves the ball. I’m making an educated guess every single day that we post.

So, what we're trying to do is figure out whether we can become good guessers based on our experience of what will work and what won't. I'm not sitting in LinkedIn all day—I mean, I do spend way too much time on LinkedIn—but what we're doing now is taking those posts and scheduling them out throughout the week so it’s consistent. I think I post at 6:50 and 2:30 every day. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on—I can't be sitting in LinkedIn at those exact moments in time, pushing “go.” LinkedIn has an okay, not great scheduling feature, but we're basically planning the whole week out. Then, every week, we go back and ask, "Okay, what hit our expectations? What missed our expectations? Where should we dig deeper into? Where should we pull back?" This could be at an individual post level, an individual hook level, or literally a couple of words in a hook. We've killed entire things—I think I’ve done 100 posts in a content pillar that we decided to kill because it wasn't working at scale. Actually, here’s a great example: nobody wants to hear me give tactical advice, so I'm going to give it to you as much as possible. I post some insane thing like, "Salesforce Commerce Cloud is going to die." That does 70,000 views. I post the best insight, my most tactical, helpful stuff ever, and it gets ten likes, five comments, and 3,000 views. The data keeps me honest—it’s not just stuff I want to post, but stuff that’s actually helpful and people want to see and engage with.

That's why I think the 30-day challenge is good advice. You just need to throw stuff up at the wall and see what sticks. The big evolution for me—especially because I literally started on LinkedIn to promote a podcast that was all about super in-the-weeds tactical marketing tips—is funny to think about now because it was such a waste of time. Now that I have enough data, I see that nobody cares about what I think about that stuff, and it's not the right content for me and my personal brand and what it's ironically become. So, I think it's very important to always have some sort of feedback loop with consistency, so you don't have to guess, "Oh, is this because we didn't post for two days last week?" I can be honest—this content was not what people wanted to see, and I need to change my strategy accordingly.

Adam Kitchen:

Yep, excellent insights again, touching on so many important things that we're going to come back to at the end as well in regards to new advice for people starting out. I know we've covered a lot, but there are a few specifics we should go a little deeper on. Going to your adjacent LinkedIn content and daily posting, you also have your newsletter. Now, I know your newsletter lives on LinkedIn, and you had it set up on Beehive or another type of software in the beginning?

Jeremy Horowitz:

Beehive. It's on Beehive.

Adam Kitchen:

Got it, so you're publishing on both places, right?

Jeremy Horowitz:

Correct.

Adam Kitchen:

Are you just duplicating what you already put in the newsletter?

Jeremy Horowitz:

Same exact content goes out to both audiences at roughly the same time every week.

Adam Kitchen:

Tell me about your full process behind doing that because I've recently started doing the same thing with a separate newsletter for this new business. My theory—and I'd be keen to hear if it's the same for you—is I have to meet the consumer of the content where they are, so I'm just going to distribute it on LinkedIn. However, the pushback to that—and I'm sure a lot of people have this when they consider the importance of owning their audience—is I want to make my newsletter exclusive and incentivize people to follow me and build an asset I own off these social channels. Something made me really think about this this morning because last night, I was banned from LinkedIn for having an emoji in my name, which I had to change. This made me really reconsider, and I've also seen my follower count literally be halved overnight. After contacting them, they said they don't know whether it's going to come back. Anyway, long story short, it’s made me really think about building assets again off these social channels. I know nothing is indestructible, but yeah, just tell me—what's your strategy to promote the newsletter, get subscribers, and are you also sometimes in conflict about whether you should publish it on LinkedIn or migrate people to the website? Give me a whole 360 overview of how it’s currently set up.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, so I think about the LinkedIn newsletter as straight-up content syndication. To me—and you're an email master—people are going to sign up for the newsletter for all the add-ons and goodies. There are a ton of lead magnets if you want to subscribe to my newsletter on our website and just subscribe to Beehive. Also, no offense to LinkedIn, but their CMS sucks. My Beehive newsletter is highly engaging—I put a lot of fun GIFs in. I know that I'm talking about dense financial topics—each issue is almost 2,800 to 3,000 words—so I try to make it lively, fun, and engaging on Beehive. I have a bunch of P&L templates and other resources that people can sign up for. To me, that's the real differentiator and why I'm going deep there. Yes, it's one of these interesting growth things that I've just learned about over time—I need to become more dependent on the thing I'm trying to become less dependent on, and it's a very counterintuitive paradox.

There are three main reasons. One, I noticed when I manually went through a lot of my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers, it wasn't people who were also my Beehive subscribers. It wasn't people doubling up; it was people who, I believe, were sampling or trying the newsletter before they made the effort to move off of LinkedIn and let me invade their inbox versus their feed. Two, LinkedIn is just giving an algorithm preference right now. Carousels were hot, so we all did carousels. Short-form video was supposed to be the next big thing, so we all moved to videos. Newsletters are hot right now, and they're prioritizing them, so there's a benefit to that. Three, the 80/20 rule—it’s the insanity of entrepreneurship, but if something is working, put all your chips into the thing that's working. While I'm doing that, I'm also heavily investing in a website. I'm heavily investing in a lot of other things. I've been talking about this for two years—I'm eventually going to migrate all my content over to Twitter. You eventually need to invest in the scale to become less dependent, but I’m also not going to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Adam Kitchen:

So interesting, and this actually is another segue into my next question. If we could go a little bit deeper on monetization opportunities around personal brand content creation, it's obvious that you take this very seriously. But you've got a lot of other things going on, as I'm sure most other people do—managing business deliverables and looking for opportunities. How are you thinking of—let's not even say LinkedIn—let's say personal brand or content creation as a monetization vehicle or opportunity for you in the future? What are your overarching goals in creating, and also, what do you think you can use to monetize it in the future? If you're already thinking about that, which I’m sure you are, are you investing in anything like digital assets, courses, etc.? I would love to know a little bit more about your thought process and systems.

Jeremy Horowitz:

I've, in the past, gone way too deep into the research on this, so I'll just give the high-level TL;DR on how I've structured everything today. The beauty of media is that all media is sponsorable. You can sponsor posts, sponsor newsletters, or do integrated ads with partners. I’m doing some variant of all of those things right now because the dirty little secret nobody wants to tell you is that all the tools and all the things I have invested in cost money. While I am doing this as a business expense, I also am obsessed with the concept of negative CAC, which is probably a whole other conversation. To anybody who wants to create business value from a personal brand, negative CAC is actually my best answer. I could spend 25 minutes going into all the depths of negative CAC, and I worked for a brand where Kim Kardashian was the influencer—we sold phone cases. In e-commerce, the power of someone being able to drive their own traffic and not spending marketing dollars or partnership dollars to build a pipeline is the ultimate value here.

If you want to build—one thing I never understand is when people say, "I don't have time to post on LinkedIn," or X, or any social platform. I'm sure people are building good B2B businesses on Instagram. It’s your pipeline—you want to make more money, make more sales. You can put anything you want on the backend of that now. I mean, for free, in quotes, because I am spending some money, but I’ve built—I've looked at 150 deals in the past year. 90 to 100 of them came from my LinkedIn, so I spent zero dollars, in theory, to drive a ton of pipeline.

For us, the big monetization vehicle is the private equity fund. If everything works out in this field, you tend to make a lot of money and build a lot of assets. But people could monetize it in 16 different ways. Once you control someone's attention—this might be an important part to dig deeper into—creating quality content that influences people's decisions allows you to put any monetization vehicle behind it that you want. If you just regurgitate and put a bunch of crap out there that's just recycling AI content, that won't move a lot of people to do what you want them to do. But that’s what I find with all the people who reach out, wanting to sponsor my content or become partners. They say, "Hey, I really value your content," where now people are even asking to reach out to do equity swaps for advising their businesses, and I’ve taken a couple of those.

I think the thing is, once you learn about business, you realize you can monetize everything 60,000 ways to Sunday. What's really important is creating the audience yourself and just investing your time, which, yes, has some sort of cost. But actually, if you have a big budget, you can just pay a team to do it—I’ve also been part of that in the past. Really having that—yes, you can provide services, yes, you can provide investment. That’s where Horowitz and Cody Sanchez are probably the best examples of building an audience for investment. You’ve built your whole services business off of this. I know people who are doing 17 other types of businesses off of this as well—e-commerce founders that are running ads through their social profiles, driving back to their e-commerce sales. You can monetize it any way you want. I think it’s more about figuring out what your business is. It’s just marketing—what is your business? How do you get people to that business? Then, you’ll test enough to figure out how to make the most optimal profit dollar off of that as possible.

Adam Kitchen:

Absolutely, innumerable ways to leverage it as long as you're proactively building it. I love that concept of negative CAC—so powerful. Definitely going to get some post-show snippets of that one. That’s something nobody has said, but I think it’s so powerful and such a strong reason to invest. This is a compounding game that, over time, just accumulates in that type of scenario playing out. Like you said, that access to opportunity coming back to that—you only get that from being consistent. That’s actually going to take us to the final point, and we’ve dropped a lot of gems here on what people should be doing to get started. But let’s say a B2B owner comes to you tomorrow—give me, in 60 to 120 seconds, your advice for creating and just getting started posting on LinkedIn specifically.

Jeremy Horowitz:

30-day challenge. Break down every conversation you've had more than once—what is the helpful insight that you constantly repeat yourself over? I’ve done this now over five years, the number of times I’ve just posted something insane. Post 30 days of that stuff—you'll figure out what does work and what doesn't. Then create a simple spreadsheet—this was the type of content I was talking about. Export it, pay for a tool, whatever you want to do—just look at all the performance, stack rank it. What’s your top 10%? What’s your bottom 10%? Top 10%, invest everything into that—kill everything else. Usually, in that 20 to 50 percentile, there's something that’s a good idea that you just missed on. You can come back and visit that stuff later. If I had to start over again, which I have, that’s what I do every single time. It’s incredibly effective because it quickly teaches you what to focus on and what to invest in. I’ve seen stuff where, off the first post, people book a demo or a deal. I’ve seen stuff where it takes 60 days to get going and then it really picks up momentum, but just having that really quick feedback loop of breaking down what you think is important and interesting and what the audience thinks is important and interesting is the most important skill set here.

Adam Kitchen:

Yep, absolutely—consistency and discipline to get started, and then critically, I think it’s so important to just iterate on what the data is telling you. I’ve been guilty of this—you've clearly made it clear that you've been guilty of this. I see other people just end up going off in different directions and get frustrated because sometimes the answer is staring them in the face, and they're just not looking deep enough to focus and double down on that.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, and every time you do that, your greatest frustration is that you just didn't make the decision you knew you had to make earlier.

Adam Kitchen:

100%. Well, it's been a pleasure. Let’s finish on the quick plugs—the newsletter, we want everyone to subscribe. Tell us how.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Yeah, sure. The easiest way to find all of my content is just LinkedIn—Jeremy Horowitz, H-O-R-O-W-I-T-Z. The best place to find all of my content—I'm kind of just building out a repository of everything I’ve built plus everything I'm learning—is letsbuyabiz.xyz, “Biz” with a “Z” as well. Those would be the two best places to find me.

Adam Kitchen:

Epic, mate. Thank you very much for your time. This has been great, and I really appreciate it.

Jeremy Horowitz:

Likewise, always have fun, Adam. Cheers, man.

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