As we grow DemandBird through the ranks and take market share, I know how this story goes. It's not my first time bootstrapping a company from nothing to a widely-known B2B brand. We're doing it yet again from humble beginnings. Each time, there's one group of people that I NEVER FORGET to appreciate: Those who believed in us - and especially, those who bought from us! - before we were a well-known product. If you did business with my marketing agency in 2017, or with Aware in 2023, or with DemandBird in 2026, you are identifying an up-and-coming product and a hungry team that will serve you with gusto, and I'm forever thankful to you for it. Thank you to the 75+ active DemandBird customer users who are with us now. Honored to serve you. -AB

I can't put an exact dollar figure on this mindset shift but I'm pretty sure it's helped me source almost $10M of revenue from LinkedIn and $15M of revenue total from companies I've founded: → Write and talk in a way that ANTICIPATES the criticism that others will likely have, of what you're trying to say. Sounds subtle. But I can pretty much guarantee that if you adopt this mindset, you will gently change almost everything about the way you communicate. Where did I learn to do this? Philosophy class. Great philosophers often call this 'being charitable' to someone else's point of view. Chris Voss calls it an Accusation Audit. If you read Ben Franklin's autobiography, he actually calls out specifically that the politicians and orators of his day all too often rely on big sweeping promises, or they say "With certainty, bla bla bla is true." And he says, well that's ineffective, because it's so easy for you to be wrong and everyone knows it. Just for fun... scroll up and look at the 'hook' of this post :) :) I didn't think about it, but I just subconsciously started with what I *can't* do (i.e. I can't "put an exact dollar figure on this") rather than what I guarantee or promise. Why? Because If I said "I guarantee you will make another $1M in the next few years if you do bla bla bla", you will likely think to yourself: No way, dude, that's bonkers, you couldn't possibly know that. So I pre-empt it. I tell you up front that I have no way to be exact about it. Now there's one less thing for you to disagree with. So if you disagree with me, it won't be with my promise, it'll be with my idea. That's good, it means now we can get somewhere. Count the number of qualifiers, caveats, hedges, if statements, etc in my content (and my sales emails, for that matter) and you'll see a stark difference between how I communicate and how the average joe selling something online approaches it. While you might have learned in marketing class to make big strong promises that you will increase all of your clients' revenue by 154.2% in the next 97 days... you might be shooting yourself in the foot if you do that. Are there exceptions? Well, of course. Any time you are ACTUALLY FACTUALLY CERTAIN of some claim or another: don't hedge it at all. Say it with one hundred percent certainty, if you are sure of it. If you're not? Don't pretend like you are.

The $50k+ budget corporate buyers on social media aren't posting carousels constantly. If ever. They're the ones who read your stuff but never like or comment. (Why broadcast their intentions publicly? No way.) They save your post or show up as an "impression". Silently absorbing 😎 Yes, you can call them a 'lurker', but that doesn't have a great connotation, so we'll just say, they're in Stealth. They're learning, processing, deciding. They don't have a reason to engage with you yet. So, why are they even logged into LinkedIn at all in between job searches? Well, a small but important part of their job involves keeping up with certain topics and trends. And they do that very well. But they know the moment they make contact with a vendor, they know they're "starting a buying process" which they're going to do only when they're darn well ready because of the risk that they get harassed until the end of time if they don't give a clear yea/nay on whether they'll buy. They don't need to comment on your post to validate their own thinking, they don't need to like it to signal to their network that they "agree", and they CERTAINLY aren't looking to build their personal brand, because to most Sr. Directors of SomethingOrOther at BigCo, a personal brand is a liability and not how they're going to move their corporate career forward (that happens internally and occasionally via job hopping, but not in public). They just quietly decide who to consider buying from based on the quality of your content and your presence in the market. But it all happens on their own timeline, not on yours. These are the people who DM you out of the blue one day saying "hey Alex, I love your stuff and been reading your posts for a couple years. Can we chat about working together?" And back when I ran a marketing agency, that kind of thing was the backbone of our revenue. Today, it still happens all the time, except people just sign up for @DemandBird online vs having to DM me to work on something. And these high-budget corporate folks, you won't know they were following you. But now when they've finally decided they need to buy something in your category? You're top of mind. So the worst thing you can do is get discouraged when a post gets 12 likes. The best thing you can do is stay consistent and keep improving and watching the smaller signals... the leading indicators that happen before revenue, like quality of discussion in comments, the number of offline Sends of your posts, people saying they sent your post to a colleague in Slack, etc. Perhaps you start repurposing and you broaden out from solely being on LinkedIn, to also publishing on LI + Twitter + Substack + website/SEO and build in multiples places. You genuinely never know who's watching. And what's happening in their head while they quietly absorb everything you put out there. I have $10M+ of LinkedIn-sourced revenue to prove it. And it all started with this message (name changed and email redacted).

I read 40+ books every year. I read history, philosophy, spirituality, business, anthropology, biography, memoir. (Not a lot of fiction, I grant you.) I like to learn. Reading also helps me be a better writer. Writing has always been a good skill for business. Not just on social media. I will always write. I write posts, memos, emails, poetry, cards to my wife, post-its, product updates, DMs, customer support Slacks, and Reddit rants. I recommend you read. And write. Not just because it'll make you better at social media. But because it'll make your mind better. You'll carry that with you for the rest of your life.

Theranos was already SO close to Thanos, nobody caught that srsly? smh

Trying to build traction on LinkedIn but nobody's reading your stuff? That's probably because you don't engage with others, you only post and ghost. Not gonna fly, folks. Get out there and make some friends 🤗

I've accrued an estimated $29,772 of earned media value (EMV) from my LinkedIn content in the last quarter. And I'm currently getting a 3.2x ROI on my EMV. I expect that to rise to 7.8x by this time next year. My philosophy is simple: 1. I create content only when I have time 2. My priority is serving existing customers 3. Word of mouth and social drive growth 4. As @DemandBird gets better, leads go up 5. Most of the magic happens in the DMs 6. Our post coach helps me be a clearer writer I'm coming up on my 10-year anniversary of generating revenue from LinkedIn... that's a LOT of wisdom :) If you're growing on LinkedIn, or managing LinkedIn for clients? Consider giving our product a try → demandbird.com

I wrote 282 LinkedIn comments in September. Zero of them were AI-written or assisted. In 2023, I began talking more ferociously about the importance of commenting. But today, the common 'wisdom' is that you should engage publicly for the purpose of getting more eyeballs on *your own* posts. Sure, that's one benefit. But if you think of it like a self-serving exercise in gaming the system just to benefit yourself, you won't have the effect you're going for. So if a LinkedIn guru tells you they write 500 comments a day, and you should too, just think twice. That advice is much more likely to overwhelm you than to help you. Before you buy an AI slop spam cannon tool to spew out 50x more comments per minute, remember what you are actually DOING when you engage with people on social media. Don't hurt your reputation in the process. The REASON to engage with people is to build actual connections both in the minds and hearts of people with whom you may want to do business. And also to learn and keep a pulse on your industry, for *yourself*. And that right there is the ultimate argument against automating your comments, with AI or otherwise: regardless of how 'good' the comments are (and let's be real, they will NOT be well-written): If you automate engagement, you won't remember what you said or who you said it to. Let's hope that comment thread doesn't come up in a real follow-up DM conversation, cause you'll just have no idea what's happening. Oops! To be clear, automating rote admin tasks with AI is an AWESOME use case for this technology. But when communicating with customers, friends, industry peers... leave your GPT at the door, please.

Some days you wake up and choose violence

One of many things I have in common with @Manderovic is that we're a little bit old school. We like to ask people when it might be the right time to follow up. What they love about their current vendor. When their contract is up. We think curiosity and active listening are unsung heroes of the world of sales and marketing, lost arts in an AI-obsessed world. And yet, those might be the skills we need more than ever. I've been 'closed-circuit selling' for most of my career, without calling it that. And then Adem and George gave it a name, filled out the system, and it's one of the best breakthroughs in revenue generation I've come across in a while. Thanks for having me on the pod, guys <3

Ok this is surprisingly annoying to do in 2026: GTM folks, what is the best way to build a list of B2B social media agencies (i.e. they focus more, or even exclusively, on B2B vs DTC)? Do I need @Oceandotio or is there something I can PAYG and plug into Claude Code? Right now Claude Code is trying to run this by rephrasing different Google searches which is capping my list functionally at <100 entries. I just want an API-based way to build this company web domain list, such that Claude can check each record to ensure based on its website that it indeed matches my criteria. Help!

Can't do this *every* month. But nice to see. LFG @DemandBird

What do you think folks, is this the right way to do LinkedIn? Is "ai giga slop" going to bring you any meaningful revenue whatsoever even if you can juice 250k views from it? As the gurus say... "Agree or disagree?" lmao. What a world we're living in.

Lord give me the confidence of PhantomBuster advertising LinkedIn scraping services… ON LinkedIn

I get +41% more FOLLOWERS from talking about my industry, than when I post about my personal life. Even though my personal posts get 2.6x more REACH. Doesn't that make sense, though? Work discussion creates more 'business value', whereas feel-good personal updates - while nice to read - don't cause people to dig deep. Personal posts make people go "Aw yeah nice Alex, great to hear it was your anniversary" but nobody is following me AS A RESULT of that. I mean, most likely not, at least... But here's the best of both worlds, if you can swing it: can you weave your own life experience into your industry commentary? *That* is where the magic happens, IMO. And by that I don't mean that you should add "P.S. I have a cat" at the end of your B2B Saales posts. But then again if you do want to hear about my cat, I'm always game. (Just wait until we have a kid, amirite??) Work is part of life and vice versa. You may as well develop the art of tying the two together.

LFG @DemandBird

About to migrate my second MagicPost customer of JUST TODAY ALONE onto @DemandBird, this is pretty fun

The VC world amazes me: 1. “We are only funding AI agent companies that can run your customers' whole life, sorry SaaS losers” 2. ⁠”If a founder uses their AI agent to email me, I will block them and mock them mercilessly on X. We want to get to know YOU... ” Dang am I glad to be a bootstrapper.