Founder, P33 | Executive Thought Leadership Agency

Helped 50+ B2B tech companies build their Founder/CEO Brand and implement Executive Thought Leadership Programs for LinkedIn. Customers, results & process: project33.io

About me:

I'm Finn, 29, grew up in Bremen, Germany, studied Physics & Philosophy in Heidelberg for 3 semesters, dropped out of college in 2017 because I was doing it for other people, flew to New York with no plans, documented the journey on Linkedin, Instagram and Youtube, and started my first company (Project 33) on the back of having grown a small audience. We're a small remote agency that helps B2B founders & execs create thought leadership content for Linkedin.

In my free time, which I try to have as much as possible of, I read (fav author: Nassim N. Taleb), write, run, lift, code (currently building an app), cook, make Youtube videos, turn books into Instagram accounts, grapple (BJJ), and travel (lived in NYC, Cape Town, Bali, Minsk, CMDX, Lima & Antalya so far). In December 2020 I married the most beautiful woman in the world. In January 2023, I became dad to the most beautiful baby girl. We currently live in Berlin, Germany.

Finn Thormeier

People forget that *high engagement* usually means *easy to engage with*. What's easy to engage with? Short posts, selfies, black/white takes. 

That's the real reason why there's so much of that stuff on Linkedin.

So when your local Linkedin influenster who gets hundreds of likes on every post and whose main product is a $99 course tells you that this is the kind of content your NEED to create, remember:

In B2B, inbound/customers/conversations with VPs+ often come from high trust. 

What builds high trust? Deep insights, balanced/nuanced takes, complete breakdowns - aka stuff that can't be skimmed in 3 seconds.

Top LinkedIn ghostwriting agency for CEOs, founders & execs -- Founder at Project 33 and Host of the Executive Brand Podcast

I discovered Louis Grenier a couple weeks ago - how did it take me so long?? This man grew his LinkedIn to 39,000+ followers and built a successful solo-consulting biz while breaking ALL the rules of LinkedIn the "gurus" want you to believe in:

- Bright orange profile pic
- Uses the F word ALL the time
- Spent $8,500 to produce a YouTube (!) mini-series to market his services
- Wildly mixes his post formats
- Regularly includes links in the post copy
- Publicly ROASTS his sponsors
- Pays zero attention to the algorithm

Dave Gerhardt called him the french Harry Dry

If the all LinkedIn Gurus were right, Louis should be nowhere near where he is today, getting nowhere near the results he's getting.

Want to learn how he does it?

This Thursday at 11am EST, I'm doing a live Zoom call with Louis to ask him about his approach and how, you too, can Stand The F*ck Out. We'll include audience Q&A, so you can bring your own questions.

Join us here: https://lnkd.in/dQ7J9vXh

I strongly believe almost all companies who currently do great marketing, I'd eg. list Clay, PostHog, 37signals, have some version of this mindset when it comes to brand. Here articulated by Chris Evans, co-founder of incident.io. 

You gotta have taste, take some risks, have fun, think about the customer, and just trust that it will all somehow, in the end, benefit your company. You can't measure it and you shouldn't even try. Almost by definition, if you could measure and attribute brand marketing, it would be called demand gen.

In prepping for a podcast episode, I was reading a CEO's Linkedin content today. What stood out to me: I actually LEARNED things. It's crazy that this feels like a rare experience these days on Linkedin.

The posts weren't formatted with tons of bullet points and 5-part lists and one-line paragraphs.

The hook was just a regular sentence that didn't feel "optimized"

The overall posts and topics didn't feel engineered - no trend jacking - just grounded lessons from 10 years being in the industry.

The average post of this CEO got 20-40 likes.

There's plenty of people in his space that are getting 10x that.

But he was talking about marketing fundamentals, lessons learned, deeply thought-out takes or rebuttals on current trends, and I actually found myself taking notes, rethinking certain decisions of mind, doing additional research to fully understand his point of view.

Maybe because of this, when I looked at the 20-40 people who did engage, many were CMOs, VPs, CEOs, and a good amount of lengthy comments, people who actually, read, internalized and responded to the post with their own thoughts.

This is much rarer than it should be.

So much of content is performance. Probably my own included. Trying to fit some template. Trying to stick to some "best practices". Optimized and engineered for engagement, which is often a race to the bottom.

My sense is that this CEO has his own quality bar. Decides what to publish based on what *he* deems insightful, not what the algorithm is nudging him towards. Maybe I'm wrong here.

We should normalize publishing content we feel PROUD of, in the style that feels like ourselves - that's the bar.

My podcast episode with Jessica Gilmartin is live!!! Jessica has an insanely impressive track record: CMO at Calendly, Head of Revenue Marketing at Asana, Head of Product Marketing at Google. Today, she advises founders and first-time CMOs through $100M ARR on marketing, GTM strategy, hiring and org design.

And last week, she joined me on The Executive Brand podcast.

What we cover:

- Why CMO + CRO combo roles usually fail
- Why companies now hire CMOs from smaller, scrappier startups
- Where AI is truly useful vs pure hype
- Why random acts of marketing kill momentum
- How Calendly moved from viral PLG to focused enterprise ABM
- The real reason CMOs only last 18 months
- Why taste, courage, and focus still matter more than tools
- And much more

Listen here:

-- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/grQb6kgv
-- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpBmkJWg
-- Apple: https://lnkd.in/gXPSpKEU
-- Substack: https://lnkd.in/gBeDP56X

Some of my takeaways:

1. We’ll replace most of our day-to-day work with AI in 5-10 years. But right now board members are mandating AI adoption without specific use cases. The reality is AI is making teams 10-20% more efficient and that it works as an enabler, but not as a replacement. The best use cases she’s seeing are data enrichment for lead prioritization, competitive research for product marketing, and using LLMs as synthetic customer panels

2. There are three paths to CMO: via product marketing, via demand gen, and via brand. In B2B, 50% of CMOs come from product marketing, 50% from demand gen, almost none from brand. That might be an opportunity

3. CEOs keep hiring the wrong CMO. They want a unicorn who's great at both strategic messaging (product marketing) and growth (demand gen). It’s like finding an engineer who's great at backend AND designing beautiful interfaces. Hire for your actual problem/bottleneck right now, not the one you’ll have at $100M

4. Attribution is broken and that’s okay. You’re getting 70-80% accuracy at best. Jessica’s approach is to use the 80-20 rule. Get directionally correct data so teams understand where they can make impact and then work from there. The bigger issue is that companies wait too long to implement basic data and reporting infrastructure

5. Random acts of marketing kill focus. At Calendly, Jessica pivoted the entire team to one thing: repositioning for enterprise customers. Marketers hate focus and they want to sprinkle seeds everywhere. But the winning strategy is making big bets, being explicit about trade-offs, and ensuring no one goes off track

Reminder: your most interesting thoughts are those you want to keep to yourself.

LinkedIn Playbook with Jess Cook and Joshua Perk of Vector 👻

Ghalib Hassam

Account Manager @ Kurogo | We create thought leaders through personal branding

I’m the Head of Content at Darkroom.

My job is helping the people inside the company share what they already know without turning it into performative content or forcing anyone into a creator box.

I’m building an internal thought-leadership motion across LinkedIn, X, Substack, and TikTok by putting structure around good thinking and making it easier to create content consistently.

Before this role, I spent a few years deep in LinkedIn, working closely with founders and operators, asking a lot of questions, and turning long conversations into clear, useful content.

What I noticed pretty quickly was that the people with the most insight are usually the least interested in posting. They don’t lack ideas. They lack time, systems, and a clean way to translate what’s already in their heads.

I come from an engineering background (master’s in engineering), which probably explains how I think about content.

At Darkroom, that shows up as helping leaders find their real point of view and designing content systems that work across platforms.

I’m especially interested in founder-led and expert-led content, and in building internal content engines that feel sustainable.

Always up for a coffee chat. Feel free to hit me up.

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Finn Thormeier

Ghalib Hassam

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The Battle

Finn Thormeier

Ghalib Hassam

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Finn Thormeier's LinkedIn Performance

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