#75: Tom Orbach – The $23B Startup Meme Strategist

This is like the secret framework or playbook for using humor when you work at a startup or you do marketing for anything. It's taking an insight that everyone secretly agrees on and making it public. You don't need to be funny. I don't consider myself funny. I just know how to use humor.

Let's blow up the internet. From the basement to the higher net. Scrolling, tapping, man, we ain't done yet. Let's blow up the internet.

All right, let's talk LinkedIn virality, man. Tell me everything you know about going viral on LinkedIn.

Okay, that's a big question, but I think the secret, the real secret for going viral is to go to, to be unprofessional or anti-professional on LinkedIn. So, you know, everyone is like very corporate vibes and like very old-fashioned business world, like trying to wear a tie to work and like, you know, having a 9-to-5 job. Once you are a bit more anti-professional, a bit more casual, and talk about yourself and like preferring the life part of the work-life balance equation, and you don't like force yourself to use professional English and correct English, and you know, you try to be more casual, lowercase letters, just like Sam Altman on Twitter, using Wrong English on purpose is good. So be anti-professional. I think that's the most, uh, the most common ground of the most viral LinkedIn posts.

Yes, I love it. That's what I talk about all the time with LinkedIn is LinkedIn is starved for real human content, um, real personality. And so my best posts on LinkedIn are ones that have my face in it, ones with memes, ones that are silly. Anytime I go host an event. I post a photo after of me at the event and talk about what I learned, or, you know, posting a photo of me and my friends at some event. LinkedIn just doesn't have that content. It's sick of professional BS. And if you're willing to put yourself out there, you could kind of arbitrage on that fact that everybody's scared to like go be a real person on LinkedIn. And so I love that strategy, man. And, and yeah.

Totally. Using humor in general on LinkedIn works so well. Memes and I think the biggest— I work at Wiz, the cloud security startup or company nowadays. And I think our most successful posts were actually memes because we put a little watermark on the bottom right corner of the meme and then other pages that strive, like they really need content about cybersecurity or cloud security, they stole our memes. but it's good. It's a good thing that they stole them because they just published our own brand logo and it was great. So yeah, memes are like the easiest thing to share and it's relatable and people love them on LinkedIn.

Yes, I love it. I've been posting memes all over LinkedIn. It's so easy to share, 100%. And I love that little hack there. Brands, you know, social media managers, if you're listening to that, that's a really good, good hack there. You know, something as well as like with a brand page, nobody wants to hear your boring updates, but if you can manage to be funny with your brand, it builds your brand into something like, you know, that people actually look forward to. I talk about this a lot, this idea like every startup is now a media company. Founders are basically influencers, like there are creators at companies. It's not just the founder. Sometimes the engineers are the best creators, you know?

I totally agree. You know, we started a funny podcast, Twiz. It's like a cloud. Yeah, it's about cloud security and we're talking about real news and like threats and techniques for hacking the cloud and et cetera. But it's funny. We have two threat researchers who are hosting it and they're like really funny because they talk it about, they talk it with, casual language, and they talk about very light themes intertwined with the real cloud security threats. So, it works so well. And we actually feel like a media company now because aside from the podcast, we also started a newsletter with the same brand name, which is Crying Out Cloud. And we do a lot of stuff around that theme. So, yeah, 100% media companies are the way to go for any startup or tech company.

Oh, I absolutely love it, man. Yeah, that's, that's something that I've been having a lot of fun with this podcast too. So if you're listening, you know, I sometimes do Silly Startups where I just bring on guests who to talk about silly startup ideas. So I brought on, you know, Alex Lieberman, founder of Morning Brew, sold his company for $75 million, and to talk about goofy startup ideas. Right. And this is somebody who's typically in every podcast, very deep, very serious and was able to like be silly in this. And so I think people really are looking for more of that. And I love that. And so that actually goes into the LinkedIn song, I'm Better Than You. So Tom has a very viral song about LinkedIn, actually, really goofy song.

I'm ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-Twitter, VC, founder, TED Talk speaker, and thought leader. Forbes 30 Under 30, AI expert on the go. Donald Trump, astronaut, and a fucking CEO. You stupid bro.

You want to tell the world about this, Tom?

Yeah, I think I do it a lot. I laugh about LinkedIn on LinkedIn and people really love it. Actually, I think this is like the secret framework or playbook for using humor when you work at a startup or you do marketing for anything basically. It's taking an insight that everyone secretly agrees on and making it public. So again, you don't need to be funny. Like, I don't consider myself funny. I just know how to use humor. So I find an insight that everyone agrees on. For example, on LinkedIn, the insight is that a lot of people are very proud of themselves and they put LinkedIn titles that don't make sense at all. For example, a person who is ex-Meta, ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex- Twitter, X, whatever. And then he goes on with the full list of being a dad and a public speaker and a thought leader. And it's like, it's so silly because like, I don't care. Like, tell me what you do, man. Like, what are all of these titles? So I took this insight that people use LinkedIn titles wrong and I made it into a song. And the song is basically a rap song about a person that has all of these titles. So yeah, you can check out my LinkedIn to watch it.

This is so funny. Dude, memes are the best way to like, you know, show like a hidden inside joke or something that you understand. So something I talk about a lot in my book, Memes Make Millions, is I can't make memes about hockey. Like I just don't know anything about hockey. Like if you tried to offer me $100 grand, I could not make a single meme about hockey except maybe something about Canadians being really good at it, right? But like I could do startups, I could do VC, uh, anything in tech, right? But like I can't make memes about fashion, right? My wife works in fashion, but you have to understand the zeitgeist industry. And so you did that perfectly with LinkedIn by being on the platform. That's how you understand it. There's no like shortcut to just understanding an industry or a platform or like a hidden joke. Like by working in cybersecurity, you and your team are able to be funny. Like if I start, I can't make memes about cybersecurity. I don't know anything. Like I, I, I couldn't do it.

You know, so let me tell you a secret. We don't know a lot about cybersecurity as well. We've done, but my team, not necessarily. So this is, this is actually the second secret for succeeding, like, on social media. It's participation. What do I mean by that? So let's say you must make a meme about hockey or dancing or something that you don't know about. Then you need to outsource it to the community and allow them to participate in your posts. So, you, okay, so this is actually what we did at TWIZZ. We started a meme battle. We asked the public, the community, to send us memes about cloud security, and then we actually use these memes. So, when you allow people to participate, they not only feel important and, you know, they get flattered, they feel flattered and they get a lot of praise for being funny and et cetera, but you can also use their humor for your own sake. So, it works so well. So, it's like humor and participation is like the perfect combination.

All right, jumping into other things, uh, mini tools. Uh, I've, I've been seeing this trend too. Um, Tom wrote a really good piece about, uh, how a lot of startups are using mini tools as lead magnets. So like you think about like a lot of startups used to just give out crappy ebooks and PDFs, but now that the cost of building software is a lot lower thanks to AI and no-code, people can give out, you know, startups can give out mini tools, which then get you in the real tool. Tom, do you want to talk a bit about some of the examples that you've seen?

Sure.

Any cool ones?

So just to reiterate, mini tools, I think, are the perfect form for proving your capabilities. So if in the past, you know, content marketing was, okay, let's say HR technology of some sorts. So in the past content marketing, you wrote a lot of guides about HR and how to recruit people and how to manage and et cetera. This is like blog posts, right? And people hate them. Then you moved on to the second tier, which is free trial. So I want to showcase my capabilities and I want to show that I really understand HR with my startup. Then I'll give you a free trial, like enjoy it for 2 weeks. And people hate it as well because they don't have time for something they might not use in the future. And they don't want to put all of this effort and sunk cost in something that will not be worth it. So I think the golden tier, like this is the best scenario for showing your capabilities, is a mini tool, which is basically a free, no friction, no email collection, and no paywall, of course, that actually shows what you can do. So let's say you are an SEO platform, like SEMrush or whatever. So Take one of your features, take something that you do really well inside your platform and make it into a standalone tool. Transform it into a standalone tool and turn it into something that is free to use. No need for a signup, no need for like emails or paywall. And people would love it because it's free to use and it's really showing what you can do. Some famous examples are HubSpot with their website grader. And actually, they just launched the AI agents platform. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's a really good— so it's called Agent.AI. They actually took a lot of the things they do and they turned them into AI agents. So you can actually use HubSpot for free to do competitive analysis. Or to create memes, actually.

So it's like, I'm looking, dude, I saw Dharmesh, the founder of HubSpot, was hacking on this for like months. And yeah, I didn't know he was making a fucking meme maker.

So, so it's a, it's a perfect mini tool. Now HubSpot, I don't know like how, like they, they don't really do memes in the full platforms. I, I think they don't help you create memes. That's what you do, not them. But still, it's like a very good lead magnet because It's a lot of value for free.

So, yeah. Oh, wow. This is so smart. I love it. I'm actually going to see if they have like an API or something for the meme maker and see if we could check that out. What are some more examples of cool tools?

Canva is doing a lot. So Canva, they have a tool for color palette creator. So if you need colors for your brand, then you can just create them with Canva. And again, you don't need to sign up for Canva. You can just hop to the website. Usually it also have like a different domain name. So it's like not canva.com/something, it's like colorgradercreatorwhateverpalette.com. CoSchedule, the marketing tool that helps marketers schedule posts on social media and blog posts and et cetera, they created a headline analyzer. So in the full platform, they help you choose the best headline for your post, for your blog, stuff like that. They created a free tool just for this headline analyzing capability, and it's making waves. I mean, this is— I think I read an interview with the co-founder, and he said that this is the main source of leads currently. Like, this is the biggest channel they have right now.

Wow, that's so cool. I have a couple examples too. Tweet Hunter. They have something that's a tweet screenshotter. And so that's just a free tool that anybody could use. It's, and they, they actually bought a separate tool called TweetPick and then made it into a free tool, which became the lead magnet, which I thought was really smart. And so Tweet Hunter was created by the same company as Taplio, which is a LinkedIn scheduler, and they have their carousel maker basically, which is just a free tool. And yeah, I think this is so smart and I'm, I'm gonna be playing around and already have some ideas of free tools to give away with Memelord technologies to kind of show people.

Taplio also bought one of the things that I made in the past and turned it into a mini tool of their own. It's the viral post.

Oh, I didn't know that was Taplio that bought it. I knew that you sold the viral post generator.

So that's exactly what they did. Like with Twitter Hunter and with Taplio, it's like this is how they do marketing. They just do a lot of mini tools. So one of them is the Viral Post Generator. So remember how we said with humor, find an insight that everyone secretly agrees on and make it public? So that's exactly the Viral Post Generator. It takes the insight that everyone on LinkedIn is very cringe. They celebrate success that is non-existent and they are very excited about boring stuff. So I created a tool that you input what you did today. For example, I brushed my teeth and then the output is a viral LinkedIn post about it. So, it's like, I'm very excited and honored to announce that finally, after 20 days of trying, I finally managed to brush my teeth today and I highly recommend you do it as well. Follow me for more life-changing advice. So, it's like, you know, the cringe of LinkedIn is resembled that way and I launched the tool and after launching it, it got millions of users in less than a week. And Taplio reached out and they bought it for like exactly this reason, for making it into a mini tool that they can actually get more leads through.

It's so smart. I love it. I think a lot of startups are gonna be doing this more. Like I said, as the cost of building software gets cheaper and cheaper and time, you can just start throwing out more tools out there as lead magnets. And it's such a better lead magnet than, You know, a block, right? Exactly what we were saying earlier. Um, I, I love it, man.

I think the bottom line is don't talk about your expertise, but rather show it. So content marketing is not as good as you think if you can actually show it with a mini tool or something functional that people can experience your knowledge themselves.

I love it. Uh, I'm, I'm already brainstorming ways to be able to do this for Memelord Technologies. So right now it's. It's paywalled, but maybe start adding some free features to do that or some super funny ideas around that. Let's talk a bit about screenshot marketing. You wrote a cool post on that. I'm also a fan of screenshot marketing. I think it's really smart and people don't talk about it enough. So what's your thesis there?

So from my experience, there are 3 or 4 types of graphics that really catch attention and make people stop the scroll. And these graphics are like the holy grail of things that you can include in your social media posts and in your blog posts and whatever. So the first is nostalgic content. And I think you do it really well with all of your branding and, you know, the DVD screensaver that hops around. You saw the Coinbase ad from the Super Bowl? With the QR code. So it's exactly, it's on the same principle. It's like nostalgic content and people love like remembering old times and Windows 95 and the DVD screensaver. This kind of stuff really works. So nostalgic content is one. The second type of content that the graphic that really works well is oddly satisfying visuals. So I don't know if you know, but there is a huge trend on TikTok and also on Reddit now oddly satisfying content, which is like taking slime and smashing it with your hands and it just looks nice. Or if you take a knife and you cut soap, a bar of soap, it looks really nice. So people love it. And the third type of graphic is screenshots or private chats, if you may say. I think people love peeking into other people's lives. Whenever you see a screenshot of an iMessage conversation or an email or something like that, you immediately feel like, I get this rare opportunity to see exactly what type of messages this other person gets and how do they write messages to others. Because it's a very private thing to have. And I think on the same lines also, if you take a screenshot of a calendar, for example, it's also, it's a very private thing to have. So if you share screenshot of a conversation or of your calendar or something like that, even if it's fake, it's still going to get a lot of attention because people are very nosy and it's one of the ways that they can get a peek into your life.

Dude, it's funny, there was this New York photographer who did this exhibit actually where he went around New York and, you know, secretly took photos of people who were texting and Um, and you know, he didn't show their face. He blurred out any like, you know, names and stuff.

But you saw the screen, you saw actually the text on this. Oh my God.

It was so good, dude. It was so good. It was, um, I saw it in, in some magazine or, or, uh, maybe it was a gallery or something in New York. And, um, it was so fascinating. Like I was sitting on the subway yesterday actually, and I look over and there are two girls sitting next to each other. They don't know each other, right? And one girl is just looking at what the other girl is texting. Like she needs to know. And her and I make eye contact and she just looks so ashamed. She's like, ah, I knew, like, you know, everybody, everybody's intrigued, you know, they're intrigued by a little eavesdropping. And so I've done this with screenshot marketing where, you know, taking a screenshot of my calendar when I have a big calendar event. I did that literally yesterday cuz I spoke at NYU and, and just took a calendar event and like, you know, that was the headline to like get people hooked. I've done that when I have calendar events with big podcasts. I, I've done it with, uh, text messages with friends. Um, I also think like a good point to be made here is like, you don't know how much content you have just sitting around in your potential screenshots, your text messages, your emails, uh, you know, all that stuff. So, uh, screenshot marketing, I'm, I'm very bullish on it.

Yeah, I think it's really smart.

I love it too.

So, you know how sometimes on legal cases at court, the tech companies, they have to disclose a lot of communications from their own teams? For example, you see emails about Mark Zuckerberg saying he's going to kill Instagram and stuff. It's like, it's things that got there because of courts. Like, this is how they got public because the courts, the judges demanded the internal communications to go out. Now, The actual internal communication, it looks like text, but people actually go and design them to look as if they were actual emails or like with the Gmail logo and like the headline and everything. And these images go really viral on Twitter, X, and LinkedIn, and et cetera. Like it's like it got leaked, but it wasn't really. It was like a court-mandated disclosure. It's really funny to see how people just take these texts from the proceedings and they put them into a design that looks like an email and it goes really viral.

Dude, I mean, there's that account where it's like big tech emails and all it is is just screenshot of big tech emails and it's just fascinating.

It's fascinating. And the secret is that these screenshots are fake. It's like the text is real. The text is 100% real because it was what the court received. The original form of these emails are actually just text-based, like from Steve Jobs to whatever. And then text. And when they design it to look like an email, it goes viral because again, screenshot marketing, it works.

It's so smart.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about meme marketing. So meme marketing at Wiz, you guys have done that, gone viral. Yeah, let's talk about how you've used it.

So sure. So again, I think the secret is humor and participation. So we actually outsource a lot of our meme operations to our audience and the community, and we ask them to create memes. And they love it because it makes them feel smarter and funnier, and they get a lot of praise from the public. And we actually make it into a campaign, like, okay, so first comment here with your memes, and then we do, okay, so now vote on your favorite meme. And each one of those posts gets a lot of traction because people want to win. Also, we do it internally. We get a lot of memes from employees. And when we have the memes, we just slap our watermark on them and we publish them and people love it. And again, the secret is that it's not only good for our own LinkedIn page or social media pages, it's also good for other pages because they steal the meme and they republish it and it's perfect for us. So, yeah, I think that It's a great hack because you actually like, you give free content to the bigger pages. There's one page in the cybersecurity field called the Cybersecurity Hub. They have 2 million LinkedIn followers and they keep stealing our memes. And it's amazing. I love it because our logo is there and like they even tag us sometime thanking us for the meme. So it's really good for our growth. So when you have memes, yes, people will steal it, pages will steal it, and it's amazing.

I learned that on Instagram when I was, I was going super viral with these funny subway videos where I would read offensive books on the subway, um, and, uh, these accounts would repost it. And, you know, my wife was like, oh my God, aren't you upset? I'm like, no, like, that's, that's good. Like, I don't care that they're, you know, reposting it. Like, That's my video getting reposted. It'll lead back to me. People comment, they know, you know, my face or whatever. They see it going viral. So it's actually, it's good. You don't need to make money directly from them stealing your content. Like, that's part of it.

And I love it, actually. I think I saw your Subway videos a few years ago. I didn't know it was you. So it's amazing.

Don't tell anyone, but return of the Subway reader. I've got a funny video coming out very soon.

Nice.

Yeah, it's going to be fun. I think that is something that's beautiful about memes is just the remixability in general. So if you could tap into it and something that I've done personally on Twitter is some of the big meme accounts, they just respond to DMs and you could just ask them to repost your stuff like they'll do it. They are all just like hungry for content and they're happy to repost your stuff and And they do it.

So I do it too. And I have a little secret here or a little piece of advice. When you actually outreach to those accounts and you DM them and you like send them your content and you want them to share it, tell them that you created this meme inspired by them. Like they inspired you to create this meme. Once they feel inspired, like the admins or the moderators of these big pages, then they actually feel like, oh my God, like I'm so important. Like, because of me, this guy created this meme. So they will share it. So tell them you were inspired by them. It works every time.

I love it. I love it. Let's talk a little bit about events. You wrote a post about that as well. How have you guys used events at Wiz? And are you bullish on events as marketing? What's your thoughts?

Yes. So what we do is reinventing the game every single time. So, you know, you go to a conference and there are a lot of booths and they all look the same and they're very boring. And like, even if you try to be creative, you end up just being like boring again because you just have, again, the same booth structure and everything looks the same. So what we do is we create experiences inside the booth that are very weird, if you may say, but it's a good thing. For example, on the last big cybersecurity conference, which was RSA in April, we created Wizmart, which is like a supermarket of cybersecurity products, but it looks like a grocery store. So, we created cybersecurity cereal and milk and soup and like chocolate bars. And we did all of that. It actually transformed our booth into a supermarket, and people loved it because every single item in the supermarket was cybersecurity related. So, it was a lot of work creating all of these items and thinking about jokes we could incorporate, et cetera. But it works really well because when you create an experience in the booth, in your event, when you create an actual thing that people can explore, they stay longer in your booth. And when they stay longer, it looks like you have dozens or even hundreds of people in your booth 24/7, all of the time. And like, people want to read all of the fine print of the supermarket items that we created. And suddenly, like, so many people hang out around our booths. It's like the perfect social proof. So again, create experiences in your event. And make them feel like there are a lot of Easter eggs to explore. This is my biggest advice here.

I love that. I've been to these conferences where booths are empty and they look so sad. It's like that science fair project that is just not getting any attention. So that's really smart, is give them a world to explore. I also like the reinventing everything from scratch every time. I love doing that with events. So for Product Hunt, when I was, when I was head of growth there, we did a rock climbing demo and literally rented out a rock climbing gym, hung the screen with like rock things, like hung it on the wall, had founders present there, like totally random. Another event that I've done with jam.dev was a bug horror story night where we had engineers tell their biggest horror stories because it was around Halloween. And so, you know, engineers from Amazon and Twitter, they just told their horror stories. And super fascinating and super fun. And so, uh, I love it.

It's like, it's, it's so unexpected. And I think right there and then you, you leverage the secret combo of humor and participation, right? You allow founders to tell their horror stories and it was funny and unexpected. So yeah, this is exactly what marketers should do. Totally.

Yeah. And people are bored of just networking and drinks and happy hours. Like I don't go to those anymore. I'm not hosting those. One of my best events I hosted was a ping pong startups and venture capital. And so I hosted, you know, 150 people to go to a bar, play ping pong, um, and, and just hang out. And, and it was so much better than just standing around drinking. Like, I, I, nobody wants to do that anymore.

Exactly. And then when you have photos of the event of people playing ping pong, like it's so weird. So it's like, it's perfect for social media and for inviting people for your next event. When you do stuff that are unexpected and different, people love them and it's. Actually the same for LinkedIn that we talked about before. So, you know, if everyone is serious, you post memes. So it works because you're different and you're unexpected. So that's it.

I'm curious, something I've been thinking about a little bit is, you know, going the opposite of where people are. All right. For example, direct mail. No startups are really doing that. Like, have you guys experimented with that ever? Just like direct mailing everybody in Silicon Valley?

Yeah, but it's okay. So it's kind of, we do it, but we focus on gifting. For example, if we have a big package with some amazing swag that we created, so we're going to do it, but not just like direct mailing to everyone in Silicon Valley. And the challenge with gifting is getting the addresses from the people you want to ship it to, because we don't want to just ship it to the office of a company that we target. We want to actually get it to the CISO or the actual person that we're targeting. Not a lot of people would happily give you their address. So that's the difficulty. So that's why we don't do a lot of direct mailers, especially not like widespread, but sometimes like targeted gifting works really well for us.

Yeah. Oh, I got to tell you about this, this marketing tactic that I've been doing. I haven't written about it yet. I'm going to write about it soon, but I think you'll like it. So I bought these stickers and they are a Doge sticker and it says basically, if you're reading this, scan me for free memes. And so what I've been doing is been— and it's a QR code and I've been putting them wherever my dog goes pee. So on poles. And because dogs pee on the same spot as other dogs, you know, people, people hold like they wait there.

Oh my God, that's genius.

And I've been getting signups from my dog. My chief marketing officer is my dog. And so, you know, all across New York on these poles that smell like pee. Also, if you don't have a dog, while the dog is peeing, it's very boring. You just like stand there, you just wait and you either check your phone. So the sticker and I've been getting signups and yeah, my dog is my CEO.

That's genius. That's genius. Because you actually—

I got the idea from Starbucks, dude, because Starbucks, my dog pulls me into Starbucks because he recognizes the smell and he knows he's getting his pup cup. And so this is just the exact opposite. It's just following the dog. Yeah.

Wow. It's like finding those moments where people have to wait in the same spot and it's very boring and catering to them at those moments, giving them something to do. It's genius.

Wow.

I love it.

I do think similar, like waiting around, like the subway is like you're waiting around bored. I don't know how those subway ads perform. I have no idea, but I'd be intrigued.

I think my guess is that they might not perform really well because there is no internet in the subway. So even if I see, wow, a very cool startup SaaS, I want to try it. I will not remember it for later. And if I'm not trying it right now, I'll never try it.

So yeah, definitely. If there was internet in the subway, it'd be a game changer. 100%. Any bullish tactics, any marketing tactics that you're really bullish on for 2025 coming up?

Okay, so I think a niche in the mini tools market is mini games. So many companies are now doing games. And I think I just got hooked with LinkedIn's new games also. Like I play them all the time. Just simple web games inside their websites or in a special landing page. And it's so interactive and people love them because it's very fun in the middle of the day and it's usually branded and it makes sense story-wise or brand-wise. They enjoy spending time on the website suddenly. And it's great for SEO because Google sees that a lot of people spend time on your website and it's good for retention. Like people come back for these games. We actually did such a game at Wiz. We have a little sensor figure, like it's actually like part of our product. So we took the figure of the sensor and we made it jump over cloud services. Now, if you're in cyber, you'll get a laugh from this game and you'd love it because you need to actually identify which cloud services are real and which are fake. And it's like the dino game of Chrome, of Google Chrome. So this sensor jumps over and we see people spend so much time on this game. And it took us like a few hours to develop it because it's such a simple game. So minigames are, I think, the hottest trend right now.

So dude, I'm literally messaging, um, somebody that I talked to a while ago who, uh, they build minigames on the internet around like Zoom and different, uh, different stuff. And we talked about building a meme game a while back and, uh, never really like You know, we kind of just—

which is so funny.

Oh, we should do it. We just lost touch. So I just messaged him right now. And if I could build that as like a mini game for Memelord Tech on its own page, and then it goes back to, you know, Memelord Technologies and maybe also it's, you know, we work together obviously, and it's a partnership that could be really cool. That's, oh, that's a crazy idea. That could be really fun.

Cool.

Another tactic I'm bullish on is generally just praising people, especially famous people on the internet. Like, praise them. All the thought leaders you admire, the influencers, just praise them from your company account, and it increases the chances of them talking about you or noticing you or just like loving you back. So just praise, praise, praise people you admire. Like, it's, it's that simple, dude.

It's so true. Like, it won't happen immediately all the time. Like, So example, 3 years ago, 4 years ago, when I was first starting on Twitter, had a few hundred followers, I was listening to a podcast with Alex Lieberman, founder of Morning Brew. Right. And I just write a post about Alex and he ends up liking and retweeting it. And, you know, he responds to a DM. But, you know, I tried getting him on the phone, but it actually took 3 years of like me growing and like, wow, you know, him seeing my stuff, me, engaging, and then I just had him on my podcast a couple weeks ago. And so stuff like this doesn't happen immediately. It's the same thing with, uh, the Sahil Lavinia, the founder of Gumroad. Like when I was first starting out, you don't need to get the recognition immediately. You don't need to build this immediately. It's a long-term game. And a lot of people who are really famous on the internet, very, very successful founders, they have their guard up. They really do, I think. And they know a lot of people want shit from them. They know the game. And so if you're, if you're doing it out of a genuine place and you're not trying to like just get something immediately, if it's real, if you really enjoyed this, if you enjoyed this podcast clip, just share it and like, don't be annoying, but just share it. And you don't need anything immediately. Just playing the long-term game of it is how you build like real friendships, not not just like, you know, a hack or anything. And so I love that. And I think it's a great, great advice and good way to like meet people too. I've met some amazing people doing that.

Yeah, totally. 100%. I think most people think about big names like Alex Lieberman or influencers in general. They think about them and they immediately tell themselves, okay, I need to pay them like an influencer to notice me. But that's not the case. You build a long-term relationship just like you said, and it works so well.

It's just human connection at the end of the day. Like, realizing Alex is just a normal person, you know, all these people are just— we're just normal humans. We're not that different, you know. Maybe he grinded really hard and whatever, was successful with stuff, but, um, we're all, we're all just humans. We're all just human people on the internet. Um, so building those, those connections is, uh, it's a long-term thing.

One tiny piece of advice I can give about that is to find the channel where is more quieter for them. So if they are very active on LinkedIn, they probably get hundreds of messages per day. But if you outreach to them on their Instagram, for example, then the likelihood of them responding is much higher because they don't get a lot of messages there. So like when you get hundreds of messages on one platform, it's easier to just shut it down and not reply to anyone and etc. But when you go to the channel of, the quieter channel where they don't get a lot of traffic, try there. It works.

Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic advice. I really love that. I have somebody in my world like that who's really, really TikTok famous, but they're just getting started on Twitter. Super easy to contact. All great advice, dude. I think these are all the main topics I wanted to cover. Where can people find you, Tom? Where can they, uh, and read your work? I would love you to talk about that a bit because you have some really amazing pieces that people should check out.

Thanks. So first, marketingideas.com. Marketingideas.com. That's where I share most of my advice. It's a Substack newsletter. Uh, 25,000 people, uh, marketing leaders already follow it. So it's once a week, very quick, uh, practical advice I share there. And also follow me on LinkedIn. Tom Orbach, that's my name. Find me up, look me up. I would love to connect with you. But I think marketingideas.com is where most of my followers are.

Nice, nice. Appreciate it, man. Marketingideas.com, what a domain. Killing it.

Cool.