#216: Founder-Led Marketing Strategy: How to Scale Trust Without Becoming the Bottleneck (Adam Holmgren, Fibbler)

Get A U Beautiful B2B marketers before we get into the episode, a quick one for the in-house marketers listening. If you want 2026 to be the year that your marketing actually drives revenue in the business forward, and it's not just activity responding to random requests, while December is your window to do it, we're running the B2B incubator and express version starting the 8th of December. It's our compressed six week version of the program designed for very busy teams who want a real demand-gen engine in place before next year ramps up. You're going to learn the strategy, the templates, and the tools and join three live Q&As to keep you accountable. We start in December, we pause for Christmas, and we pick it back up in January, and you keep on demand access the whole time. Over 305 marketers have been through it, CMOs, marketing managers, demand-gen leads, and some now generate up to 70 to 80% of their company's pipeline using the system they built inside the program. So if you're tired of all the chaos that comes with being in-house marketer, and you want to plan that you're actually going to use in 2026, make the most of this December break. When you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com and apply there. Applications close at 28th November, and there are only 10 spots available. All right, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to the B2B Playbook podcast. Each week we discuss strategies and tactics to help B2B businesses grow online. Wear your host, Kevin and George, a couple of digital marketing professionals. We've waited through the noise and made the mistakes so you don't have to. The B2B world has changed, and you need to put your customers at the heart of your marketing. We'll cover how you can use our framework, the five Bs, to create a brand that customers are ready to buy from, love, and advocate for. We'll get insights from successful people in the industry and cover the latest trends to keep you on the cutting edge of the B2B world. If you're interested in B2B marketing strategies and tactics that work, then this podcast is for you. Subscribe to get the latest from the B2B Playbook first. Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with the buyer. Today we've got Adam Holmgren. Adam is the CEO and co-founder of Fibla. Adam took his own founder voice, he turned it into a brand and that has turned that brand into a distribution system that compounds and doesn't fade with time. It's been a brilliant transition and one that I'm excited for him to explore. So today is going to walk us through how to turn founder energy into repeatable brand and distribution engine, how to scale, found the storytelling across channels, and how to balance founder personality with company brand identity. Adam, we are so excited to have you over to you. Yeah, really good to be here. I mean, these are topics I'm incredibly passionate about, obviously. And things that I've already seen here that the pink light is all over the feed. And I'm sorry for that, but it's the way I'm trying to grow, right? But in this journey, I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Fibla. And we do LinkedIn ads attribution mainly and I've learned so much from growing that. We've been live for the past 15 months, I'd say. And I've learned so much in that journey that I really want to share with you today on both on how to build a personal brand that really works as a distribution engine, but also how to turn that into a company brand that people love. I think that's equally important. But before we dive into that, I want to really do some background. And I mean, most of you know this already, right? How do people actually buy on in B2B? They don't necessarily see an ad, click an ad, right, and go and buy. So I took these stats from a company called the Winter. That is a great survey company. And the key trend is obviously that buyers trust their peers more than anything and other people. 80% of B2B buyers prefer to buy from people. They know and trust. And I think this is crucial, right? People over companies is the general theme that we see here. And 68% of buyers have reached out to a vendor because of a personal post they saw. I mean, just a few years ago, I remember myself reaching out to a company called Metadata at the time, because I was following their marketing executives so much that thought they were doing a great job. I barely knew what they did, right? But I reached out to them just because I was interested. I think this is the kind of background into company, like people over company. And then the second part of the background is obviously like SaaS is incredibly competitive. Like it's crazy. I found a number somewhere that we have about 200,000 SaaS companies today in the world 2025 up from somewhere around 30,000 in 2024. And it's obviously the whole AI boom. It's easier than ever to create the software. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But and obviously it becomes a lot of chaos. It's very hard to stand out in a market that has a lot of companies. So the strongest lever, obviously, that you can use, that is yourself. So your own expertise, your own network, the things that make you unique. Because most of the time today, like very few vendors, if they're not allowable or something like that, have features that truly are a mode. Most companies have competitors that have the same features. And we need to find other things that are our mode in the market. And I think when you're starting a company or wanting to grow a company, you have to focus on yourself, your network, your expertise. That's kind of how to start something like that. And if you're selling in-sauce to sauce, organically thin is most likely the easiest way to go. We know that everyone is there. And it's a great first channel to start with. And to me, like being founder-led is not necessarily about just pushing content out from the founder. It is really about building trust, right? I really think that people buy into the kind of point of views and the views that the founder have before they even realize that they have a product. I think that's an extremely important thing to say. Like, yes, we push out content to, in some way, promote what we do. But we're also sharing value to build that trust. I'm going to talk more about how we do that later on, of course. So this was how I started. We launched Fibler 15 months ago or so. But I started posting on LinkedIn three years before that point. I didn't have a product at that point. I didn't have anything to sell. I just started posting because I wanted to learn and because I wanted to share what I was kind of learning at the time. And then you can see here to the right one of my first LinkedIn posts. It was very popular at that point to do tip of the weeks. It's not necessarily the post I'm most proud of today, but at least it was a starting point. And I mean, I think that was really what made us grow so much from the beginning. I had a network of almost 30,000 people already that I've been talking to for years, right? I have that trust. I have never sold them anything. So when I, now when we launched Fibler, I finally had something that could be interesting for them. It was, it was way easier. So if I, if I'm not clear, you should definitely start posting on LinkedIn. Regardless if you're a founder or if you're an exec or if you have to force your own founder to start posting, that's kind of step number one. And I mean, when we launched Fibler, I already had that trust. People were all listening to me and I just nudged them in our direction to try the product. And I think we got 50 paying customers or so in the first four months. That would never have happened without my network. And I see that as, you know, we have these 200,000 SaaS companies today. But there's so many that never even get off the ground because it's so hard to grow something from scratch. So this is kind of I would say a hack to get that first initial growth to build network before you even build a product. That's definitely my biggest tip. But then it stopped scaling. Founder led is great. Like my having my face behind something behind a product, it's great for a while. But at some point it will stop, stop scaling or at least stop growing as fast. That happened to us after about I'd say these first 50 customers. And then I started thinking about, okay, what, what should we do now? What is the next step? I thought this founder led thing, that's everything you read on LinkedIn, right? It should take us to the moon, but that's not the case, I think. And the first ceiling that we hit with my founder brand is obviously rich. I mean, yes, I have a network of almost 30,000 people. But we all know that the LinkedIn algorithm can be tricky. My network is pretty, pretty big in Europe since I'm European based, right? If we want to grow in the US, it might be, might be hard. So there's just, it's very, it's very hard to depend on a network. If you're not a person like Adam Robinson that has 100,000 plus people, right? And the second ceiling that we kind of hit was we were so dependent on me. Like if I wasn't posting, if I wasn't putting out campaigns, then we would see, I'm showing up, then we would see nothing, nothing coming into Fibre. And that's obviously dangerous. I want to be the main driver of the company, but the company also needs to be its own driver. Third ceiling is obviously brand ceilings. In the beginning, there were very few people who knew what Fibre was. They knew about me and they knew that I had a product for LinkedIn ads, but they had no trust in the company and in the company brand. Because I, you know, we haven't done anything with it. So that's also a realization. Like the brand is so, so important, also from a company point of view. So what I realized early on there, after our first 50 customers, the being founder led is not enough. It can get you off the ground. It's probably the best way to build as a company and get it off the ground. But once you grow, you also need other things that make people remember you. You need a brand that can live on its own. And I think we are well on our way to do that. And I'm going to talk about today and show you my framework for how you can do both. And these are kind of our results from doing so. I mean, we're obviously a very small brand in a very competitive niche, like the attribution category. And we are now, we now own around 6% or so of the share of search, which has been huge for us and being a big priority for us, of course, to kind of disrupt that market in a way. And these are things I think we should prioritize over necessarily being just founder led. So I want to introduce you to my own founder brand framework. So we're stepping away from being just founder led and we are focusing on both. So it's obviously we are going to keep the founder as the big distribution engine here because it's an insanely powerful thing. But pair that with a company brand building things that will also in comparison to that build the company brand. And I would say today, when I look at people coming into Fibler and so on, a lot of them have no idea who I am, which is great because they have heard of Fibler and they most likely see in this freaking lie on all over their feet and might be annoyed by it. But at least they know it and that's the goal. I don't want them to necessarily know me. But I think this is the ultimate way to both scale trust through the founder, but also have people remember you through the brand. If you're an in-house B2B marketer and you want 2026 to be the year that your marketing actually drives the business forward and drives revenue, well, December is your moment. It's one of the few times of year you get a bit of breathing room and it's the perfect window to build your demand generation engine. You'd be meaning to get to all year so you can hit 2026 running. That's exactly what we do inside the B2B incubator express starting 8th of December. It's our compressed six week version of the program designed for busy in-house teams. You get the strategy, the templates, the tools and three live Q&A sessions to keep you on track. We run for two weeks, pause over Christmas and then continue in January. And you keep full on demand access the whole way through. Over 305 marketers have now been through the program, including CMOs, marketing managers, demand-gen leads, content leads, and even full growth teams. And we're very proud to say it is the top rated B2B demand-gen course available. Some of them are now generating 70 to 80% of their company's pipeline using the demand engine they built inside the incubator. And across the board, marketers tell us the same thing that they finally feel in control of their plan instead of reacting to everyone else's. So if you're tired of the activity hamster wheel and you want to become the marketer who actually moves the business, head to the B2B incubator.com and apply now. There are only 10 spots in each group and applications close the 28th of November. All right, back to the show. And the first step of really doing so is obviously you have a founder, you have very clear content pillars. I think that's critical. These content pillars need to be aligned with your product. They should not sell your product. It's very, very important. It's not about pitching your product in every post. It's about talking about things that's related to your product most likely. And then, you know, sharing your point of view, giving value. And for me, as an example, I have a LinkedIn ads product. So obviously I talk a lot about running LinkedIn ads. How can you do that effectively? That does not have anything to do with my product necessarily, but it's adjacent to it, which is important. I'm talking about how to build a company in public. I'm talking about building brand like this. And then of course, ABM and attribution. Those are my four pillars. So if I post five times a week, which I am on weekdays, I want to have one of those every day. And so LinkedIn ads on Monday, building in public on Tuesday and so on. This is critical to set up a clear distribution and link with and content pillars. I mean, it is about giving value. I cannot stress that enough. If you start pitching your product, people will start to unfollow you. That will never work. The second part is, and what I obviously talked about before, what I realized is, I have a good audience in Europe. I'm European-based. I have been, you know, connecting with a lot of Europeans. And we started notice early on that we had very few customers in the US. So how should we then scale my message or my founder-led message to outside of Europe? And one way to do that, or maybe the most effective way today, I think, are using what we call folk leader ads. So now it's obviously extremely focused on LinkedIn. But I think it's one of the most efficient channels when you are a new SaaS company. folk leader ads are the most underutilized, the most powerful format that exists. But they require so much from you in terms of content. You need to create great content first. Otherwise, it will never, never work. So what we did and what I did early on is, like, I continue to post from my weekly pillars. And then we took my best organic posts and sponsor them to people outside of my network. And for us, that was mainly the US market, right? To kind of reach people, I would never reach organically. Which was huge, obviously. Today, we have above 50-60% of our customer base from the US. And I would attribute not 100% of that effort to thought leader ads. But a big portion of that is because of this format. I was already doing good content to marketeers. But this was a way to get it in front of more people that are not in my network. So if you haven't tried these, these are obviously super good. But there are also limitations that I found out eventually. They look and feel like me. They obviously have my head shot. The only thing that's added is a small promoted by Fibler Benism. That's it. There's no branded elements to this. There's no, you know, this was nothing. It didn't build brand at all. It just built my personal brand and maybe nudged about the product. So that was kind of the issue that we were looking at. So what we then did and what I believe is the biggest hack out there today is to combine thought leader ads with brand. And you've obviously seen this. It doesn't have to be a mascot. Not every company has a mascot. But you need to have some sort of distinctive brand asset for your company. And that can be colors. That can be how you write. That can be a mascot. That can be other objects. You need to have something that's easy to spot when you scroll in the feed. And that you will always remember. So what we then did was instead of just doing thought leader ads from me promoting myself, we continue to do that. But we added these brand assets everywhere. So we added this pink lion on all of the posts almost just to get it in front. So if someone was scrolling the LinkedIn feed, they would see this lion and they would immediately think hopefully he does have a name. His name is fibs super short for Fibler of course. But it made people when they were scrolling through immediately see the lion and then associate that with what we were talking about and with Fibler. This was kind of the starting point for this framework honestly. So we build trust through my authenticity. But we also build brand memory and have people remember our brand through these assets. So I think this is really the creative sweet spot I've found is that it engages like an organic post. I mean, these totally the ads they are seeing. I'm seeing CTRs between 10 to 20% compared to regular ads that are on average 0.04%. So it's of course crazy engaging when it is a personal post. But then we can also make the memorable as you can see here by just adding distinctive brand assets. Make people remember them. I just saw a question here what tools I'm using to generate is I do have a freelancing designer that generally helped me design these or they have at least helped me design this lion in a hundred different posts or so I probably have it in 500 different posts that I can add into pictures and so on. But some of the pictures I also have helped designing of course. But they're all AI made of course. But I'm just too bad at AI at this stage to do it myself. So something's you're good at and something's you're not that's good at. But this is really the the the center of this framework that I'm talking about. You have these organic posts. You make the memorable like a brand ad and then you scale it to paid media. It's it's it's the hack in 2026 to do to stand out from the rest. Let me promise you. But obviously ads is not everything. You cannot scale a brand only through ads if you if you don't have unlimited funds, right? So I want to talk a bit about other levers that are equally important in this framework I'd say. Ads and you know being found the lead is definitely definitely one part. But we found I would say two other levels that have been critical to our growth and that I think all companies should aspire to to do. Because it's thought leader ads are great because they they build trust and they create a lot of engagement brand brand things that we added. They make us memorable. But I think that a real brand you know grows when other people are talking about it. That's of course easy to say how do we get more people to talk about us. But there are ways you can make it easier. And I wanted to talk a little bit about how how we've done that. So the the first lever obviously that we're all looking for all the time is word of mouth, right? It's the biggest growth driver out there. And it's why loveable has grown so fast as they have. I mean they have raving fans that are posting about them. And we're not the loveable but I wanted to early on when we created the product I wanted to make sure that we kind of designed everything for shareability. I mean it should be super easy to share things since where data product we have a lot of dashboards and so on customer journeys. It should be super easy to to share and to for people to take the what they have and put it on LinkedIn as an example. And what we've done in the product as an example, we have these customer journeys. You can see one there from client boost. It's also our our dashboards that you can we have a screenshot where you can tap that to screenshot. And then you can also select to blur sensitive information. In other words, you can you can post it directly on LinkedIn. And we have already blurred things that you might not want to want to show. So this obviously made it much easier also for marketers that used us to post about it, which obviously has been has been huge for us. And because it's it's impossible to force anyone to post about it. It has to come genuine. They obviously have to like the product, but you can make it easy for them to do so. The second part that I would say was more luck than anything is that we we we we we became part of this kind of point solution trend. The people started posting their their tech stacks of various points solutions. And we were obviously a bit more price-friendly solution. So we started to get included in so many of these different things. For use cases, we didn't even know Fibler was used for, right? So I would say this was primarily luck. But it's still finding these things where people can post about you authentically is is so so effective. And the second part that I think has been I mean one of one of our other levels that have been really successful is how do we utilize? How do we do branded content that's also engaging? Because I we started working a lot with we we created this pink lion in the beginning, right? But how? And we started testing out different content pieces and different visualizations of that into ads as an example and into other things. But it never really engaged that well. We couldn't really find situations to engage with marketeers really. So I started doubling a little bit with memes that is obviously I knew that that was an engaging format from from before I've been running that for for a long time. But the issue with memes is again that they they don't promote the brand. They're just funny or engaging, but they don't give anything for your brand. So that's when we kind of started thinking about okay, how can we take popular memes in the world and make them Fibler branded? So hence the the meme branded content, right? And we have done so many variants of this. This is an example you can see here where we we take a popular existing meme. We put our pink lion into the center of it, right? But we also created into a situation like everyone can recognize here. You have a executive team hunting you down for ROI, like which all of us have probably have happened at some point. And you know, it's center of our product as well. So this is also something we've been we've been doing this I would say for a lot of different content pieces organically as well as everything where we can find a purpose of it. So these are also obviously very professionally AI made I should say, but it's still a lot of fun. So finding a way to take branded content and make it it should still be fun, but also make it memorable that has been the key here. So before we jump into more more questions here, I wanted to show the full kind of framework that I've run through here to kind of give you a more full picture. This is obviously I started out Fibler being just founder led. I didn't care about building the company brand because I had too much of an ego, I guess, into my own personal brand. But then I realized after a lot of feedback from from other people, like how important it is to to build a brand, a company brand in conjunction. So to the left that we have, you know, founder led is still incredibly strong. It's a great distribution and trust engine. I recommend setting up these clear weekly pillars. You have, you know, three, four clear pillars that you want to post about every week and then you rotate. It's important that you have some sort of consistency in how to post. You don't have to post every day. But maybe it's once a week and then you at least are consistent in that. You need to have a strong founder point of view. There are reasons why people like Adam Robinson are big on LinkedIn because they have extremely strong point of views. And that is needed if you want to stand out. Obviously personal stories, storytelling in different kinds, insights that you have kind of uniquely are or stronger than other posts. But I honestly believe that just being authentic is very, you know, being open when you know things, but also being open when you don't know things. I think are the most beautiful thing about LinkedIn. And then the second part I talked about is about being brand led, right? So how do we then take this trust engine, but add some sort of memorability to it? And I recommend, you know, you have to have some sort of distinctive brand asset. It could be a, could be a mascot as we have could also be your logo, your colors, but something that people can easily recognize. And ideally also something that creates some sort of emotion. And these are obviously things that you should have in everything. I think you can never brand something too much. You should have it in everything. People need to know the sender of something. And then the third one obviously is scaling this through paid media. I think it's still very strong. I started doing this very early on in the Fibler journey before we even had a lot of customers, right? It was we can always start with something. It's always good to reach more buyers. And for me, that is really taking the best organic content pieces, adding these branded assets on top and then getting them out. That is really the distribution and the reach end in here that that we're working with. And then obviously the last pillar of this and maybe one of the most important, but also one of the trickiest right is organic kind of momentum. So how do you get into a legitimate company? That is that is by people talking about you and not you talking about yourself. So getting some sort of word of mouth driven thing from your users of the product, ideally, maybe a community driven content where you work together with your users. Obviously social proof of different kinds, real use cases, customer led stores, all of these things where people talk about your company in a genuine way, I think are so, so powerful. And maybe not the classical case study, but instead, you know, very authentic and raw posts about your product is very key. So this is the kind of founder brand framework we've been growing Fibler with so far. This is what we will continue to grow Fibler with in the next coming years as well. And I honestly think this is this is how you also create a moat in the market. You utilize your founder brand, you're you're utilizing building a strong company brand, and then you're distributing it all over the place. So I get so happy when people say that this pink lion is all over their feed because then I feel like we are doing something right even if it is a bit annoying at times. I still think it's it's better to be a bit annoying than to be invisible. That's good. Yeah, that's it actually for me. That is all my learnings baked into baked into 35 minutes. Feel free to throw any questions in the in the chat here if you have. Fantastic. That was really, really cool out of I love that framework, the trust engine, the memory engine, the reach engine, the legitimacy engine. And I think the way that you sort of discovered these things for yourself, there's some real interesting, really interesting lessons there. Like I haven't thought about how to build that bridge between that founder brand and connect to the brand and the way you've done that is really, really clever. I'd love to ask with Fibs, what's your take on why people love Fibs so much or why people are talking about Fibs? That's a good question, right? I mean, I think in some regard these distinctive brand assets need to stand out. I mean, pink is a color that's obviously creating some sort of warmth. It stands out in a white bead. It's very, it's very in there. But then it's obviously also cute, cute lion, right? So you can't go wrong with that. And I mean, the story behind this lion, it's also a total, I would say, coincidence. I mean, we had our, we've always had this kind of pink lion logo. And then we had a kind of a design agency that helped us with our website. And then by chance, they made this 3D pink lion that I just fell in love with at the time, obviously, because I thought it was would be cool. And now we have it in, I mean, a thousand posters maybe that we can use in in different ways. And I've, you know, I've never, I've never had a mascot at a company before. So I've never, but I really see the how powerful it is now, because I, I would say more people know the mascot than they know Fibs are almost, which is maybe another problem I need to find a solution for, but yeah. Yeah, I'm wondering if you don't have a mascot, is it a lot more challenging to build that bridge from a founder led brand to doing that mean branded content as you've been able to do. And even, you know, founder brand content too, it just seems like having the mascot makes it a much easier bridge, because it's, it's quite distinctive and it's quite memorable. I would love to, you'll take all that. Yeah, yeah, I think it is much harder in general. I mean, you could use something like colors or sound as well, right? But, but it's very hard to be completed different when it comes to colors, right? There will most likely be another brand that looks just like you. So it's very hard to stand out in, in that way. So I think we need to find something different. Maybe it doesn't have to be a mascot. It could be some sort of object as well. But I think we need to rally around something. And sometimes it's also typography, right? People are, they're sketching things in various ways, could also work. I mean, I think there's, there's ways to do it. But I do think a mascot makes things easier when you can rally your brand around something that people get attached to in a way. And when at the point where your, your own personal brand, the growth there started to stall at around 50 or so customers and you were thinking about what do I need to do next? I'm curious, will you ever attempt to go more of the Adam Robinson route, which I feel is, you know, he has much more controversial takes for the sake of, you know, getting attention, I think. And I'm not making a judgment whether that's right or wrong, but I'm curious is that if that ever crossed your mind? I mean, I mean, yes, maybe a little bit, but I've also realized that I'm, you know, I'm from Sweden. We are extremely, we don't want to get people upset in general. We want to be kind of mediocre and average. So I'm, you know, I would, I would go around and carry too much anxiety if I ever did the post that he does. So I realized early on that I'm not aggressive enough to only be reliant on my brand. I think there's other ways to do it as well. But what it does, like being an aggressive, having an aggressive point of view, that will make distribution easier, right? It will have people that that agrees with it, but also disagrees, right? So it's, it's, it's both good and bad, I guess. Yeah. And if it's just controversy for its own sake, and if it's not tied to your own unique point of view, which is then tied to, I suppose the brand purpose, then maybe you're not harnessing all of the good energy from that and translating it into your brand too. I feel like what you're doing with fibs feels a lot more scalable, and it feels like you're going to be remembered. And you're not going to annoy or upset a lot of people because of a controversial point of view that you tried to have at a point in time just to get a bit of extra rage as well, perhaps. Now I think that's true. And I mean, I still think that it also, you have to be kind of authentic to, to who, who you're, I mean, I mean, you, it's very hard to, to be another character on LinkedIn as an example. See, I see here Vector's mascot. Yes, Vector's mascot and the pink lion here, they are best friends actually. So they are very, they're very interconnected, I would say. And the lion, I see a question here. What made me choose a lion? Also, very random early on when you're starting a company, you obviously want to find a name for the company. You want to, okay, what should it then look like? And the only thing I knew at the time was that I want to define a name that didn't exist. It shouldn't be anything else because that's, you know, it's easier to own that in that sense. That is how Fibler came about. And then I realized that there are actually some sort of, you know, character in the world that is named Fibler, that is sort of a liar, I, or whatever it is. So that comes up sometimes. But that was the start. And then like in terms of, I knew I wanted some sort of animal, but because I thought they, they, they, the examples I had a company called Consaurus an example, they have, they have dinosaurs obviously. And I think it's a great way to stand out. Lion was, that was purely, purely random. And a friend that is my designer friend that, that did it for me basically. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's very, very memorable. It kind of makes me think of, you know, a purple cow. I think it's Seth Godin's purple cow, right? And this is pink lion. So yeah, it's just, it's almost like a more fun version of that that just keeps appearing on my feed. And I see it everywhere. And I think it's really captured the imagination of a lot of marketers. And you can see it going in so many different directions. And yeah, Adam, I said it before, we're doing a tech check. I think Fibs has to have its own children's book coming out pretty soon. Exactly. Nobody's good, right? We, we have, we've been taking these plushies also, right? And having them to events because I mean, a lot of people going to events, they are parents, and they want to bring something home to their kids. So that has also proven to be a good, good way to, to think about it, right? Yeah. Yeah. And do you have some kind of rules or Bible forefibs around Fibs's character? What Fibs does do? What Fibs doesn't do to make sure that the brand stays consistent? Or is I wish I do, you know, I'm, I've been running this brand on the side for the last 15 months and had a full-time job and two kids. So no, there exists no documentation of what Fibs should be. It just lives in in in my brain, I guess, but there should be. That's actually great feedback. I should, I should create something like that. It's only because I've been sitting in on all these other sessions from this virtual conference that it came to mind Adam. I'm, you know, my strength in as a marketer has never been structure, right? It has been going fast, doing the next thing. So I, I probably need to hire more people that that like structure. And look, this is something you said, this is the first time that you've been able to work with the mascot, right? For a for a brand or a company in terms of justifying, found a brand content or even like branded meme content. Is there any advice for the market is listening as to how they can maybe get some buy-in? If maybe leadership are thinking, oh, this is a bit silly or I don't want to do this. Do you have any advice around that on how they should try and get a bit of buy-in and get started there? Yeah, I think like convincing a CEO or a founder so that they should start posting on LinkedIn as an example can be very difficult. So typically what I've done at almost all companies is to, to write for them in the beginning to also and then to kind of post things. And, you know, obviously with their intel and with their knowledge, but, but writing it for them. And then to, to like quite quickly show them like people are commenting here like they get very intrigued and a half people are interested in this. So like I think showing people how impactful it can be by just sharing your thoughts I think is one part that is very important. Then the meme branded things are harder because that's typically is going to feel for a more seasoned company very unserious and very, you know, they don't want to be adjacent to that. So I think the way to deal with that is most likely to talk with your buyers, right? And to have them understand that the buyers are, you know, they do enjoy content like this. They have humor. They are not gray on LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn might be a professional platform. We are still human, right? It's, yeah. But it is difficult, I should say. I mean, I've had a lot of ideas shut down over the years, but we continue to the next. We try again. And do you have anyone shutting down your ideas? Now Adam, is there an internal monologue trying to stop things from getting out? Or is it all just flowing freely? I mean, I think my co-founder, my CEO, he's obviously not a marketer. He's starting to understand market, marketer's a little bit now, but he is obviously, he don't understand what's going on almost at this point. I'm, no, it's free, free flowing. I just throw out things and then we'll see what sticks. Which is also incredibly, you learn so much from doing things like that, I think. Like you have an idea, you're able to get it out the next day. Maybe it flopped, but then you learn something from it, or maybe it works, and then you learn something from that. So I think it's incredibly powerful when marketing teams at any size companies are able to be very, you know, self-serving in a way and don't have to ask permission to do things. I think it's very, very critical. And, but I suppose your experiments that you're running, they're still fitting within that four step, four step framework that you shared as well around the trust engine, memory engine, reach engine, legitimacy engine. So it's still, it's an experiment, but it fits under one of those, right? You're not just totally going off on a completely random tangent. No, 100%. And I mean, I think that's also a good tip, right? I think a way to many companies, especially startups are, you know, trying to do too many things at once. I'm trying to do maybe one and two channels at most, because that's what I think a startup can handle, and it's easier to become known in one channel than to be across all of these channels. I think that's a big mistake, typically, that people are trying to be everywhere, because our buyers are everywhere, but it doesn't make sense, really, if you're not a big company. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Adam, thank you so much. That was such a terrific presentation. Some really interesting ways of thinking about how to bridge that gap from just that founder led brand to all the way to being a brand that people recognize, trust, and want to buy from when they have that real need. So thank you so much for sharing. I really, really appreciate your time. A quick note before you go, listeners, you can find more great content and get in touch with us at theb2bplaybook.com. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and our newsletter while you're there to get the latest news, tips, and resources from our playbook. We'll be back the same day and same time with another episode next week. Thanks for tuning in to the B2B playbook. Remember, success or B2B marketing starts with the buyer. (upbeat music)