Want your dream clients to slide into your DMs? Or reach 3-5x more audiences without lifting a finger? Fully DFY content repurposing to make you a LinkedIn Ninja | The Office-Themed Account

First principles approach to marketing, content, and founder branding.

Harshith Varma

2 months ago, I walked into Stanford University Graduate School of Business with a rough idea of what to expect. 

Last week, I walked out with a clearer sense of how much I'd been leaving on the table.

My background has been in marketing, specifically for B2B SaaS and service businesses. That's where most of my thinking has lived. 

So when I first came across the curriculum, subjects like finance, regulatory frameworks, design thinking, and strategy felt like electives. Sure, they sounded interesting but I assumed they were not really relevant.

That assumption didn't survive the first few weeks.

We typically develop fluency in one or two functions and quietly treat everything else as someone else's problem. It works until the cracks show. 

These functions bleed into each other constantly, and operating with command of only one of them means making half-informed decisions everywhere else without realizing it.

What the program gave was enough of a foundation across each domain to recognize when a decision has dimensions you're underweighting. The way you think about a problem changes when you have more than one lens to look at it through.

Then came the venture project with Senmiao "Samuel" Sun, Lauren Koepke, Suvinai Jiraboonsri, and Galaktion S.. It was in biotech, a space I had zero prior experience in. 

When you're building something credible in a vertical you have no history in, you're forced to rely entirely on frameworks and first principles. It turned out to be one of the more valuable parts of the whole experience.

There's something about being on the Stanford campus that's difficult to articulate without sounding like you're overselling it. I'll be back for sure.

What made it all special was the quality of the professors teaching it. They brought in decades of deep experience in their field. Learning from people at that level is a genuine privilege that you don't fully appreciate until you're sitting in the room.
 
Huge thanks to Professor Yossi Feinberg, Kelsey Carlson and Jiaying Feng for this experience!
 
Grateful for this one.
 
For now, back to building.

Founder - H2H Copy | $2M+ in revenue generated through organic LinkedIn

The Mr. Beast-ification of B2B content is finally happening!

For Wispr Flow's Android launch, Tanay Kothari offered 5 people a Porsche 911 GT3 RS if they could get their AI voice dictation app to make a mistake. Each challenger pushed harder than the last. The product held up every time. 

And this isn't a one-off stunt. 

WisprFlow also has a UGC program, reportedly built by a 19-year-old, that has generated over 500M views in 60 days. (Separate post on that later) 

It's entertaining, it compounds, and it's product-led. That's a hard combination to pull off in B2B.

We've already seen the early wave though. 

Tycho Luijten, Sam Dunning, Todd Clouser, and Tim Davidson proved that B2B content doesn't have to be boring. 

But Tanay just raised the bar quite a bit.

The obvious caveat: this playbook works when you have a product with a bold, falsifiable claim at its core. Not every startup does. But if yours does, a feature launch doesn't have to be a boring announcement. 

Well done, Wispr Flow and Tanay!

I *genuinely* believe I have one of the best jobs in the world.

Every week, I get to talk to founders 1:1 to understand how they built their businesses and how they grow their clients' businesses.

Their clients include some of the LARGEST retailers, hypergrowth start-ups, mid-market and enterprise tech companies on the planet. And I get to understand how they think about solving problems at that scale.

And over time, I've built a fairly good understanding of

...What it actually takes to build a successful product-led company

...The marketing foundations that need to be in place long before you worry about tactics

...How enterprise sales actually work from the inside

And I'm pretty sure all of this is gonna come super handy in the future.

This is the kind of knowledge that takes most people years of trial and error to accumulate. I'm getting it directly from the people who've already figured it out.
You genuinely cannot learn this stuff from a course or a book.

On top of that, I know exactly who to reach out to when I need help in a specific area. I've spent enough time on this platform to know who the best people are in any given domain. 

And getting paid to do all this??

That's kinda insane when I stop to think about it.

I also get to work with extremely talented folks like Jeff Odarve and Navya Shree, and do all of this while traveling wherever I want.

Is it hard? Yes. Absolutely.

As you scale, things break. I'm scrappy by nature, and scrappy has limits.

But when I zoom out and look at the full picture, the people I get to learn from, the teammates I get to build with, the freedom to do it all on my own terms, I feel nothing but grateful.

I don't know how many people get to say their job genuinely makes them smarter every single week.

I get to say that. And I don't take it lightly.

(Well, we *finally* tried skiing for the first time this weekend at Tahoe! Only regret is not having tried it sooner)

LinkedIn is perpetually 14 business days behind Twitter.

Emergent just hit $100M ARR eight months after launch. One of the fastest companies to ever do it. And nobody on LinkedIn is talking about it.

But yeah, let's all *still* talk about PayPal CEO hiring a ghostwriter for $200k because it's not quite self-serving and is super insightful.

Meanwhile, the algorithm is out here surfacing posts from 2 weeks ago and destroying whatever little organic reach creators are left with.

It's a weird dynamic. The platform keeps shooting itself in the foot by disincentivizing creators.

Anyway. If you want to know what's actually happening in tech, go spend 30 minutes on Twitter.

And if you're active on Twitter, let's connect!
https://lnkd.in/gCFBfaAr

I'm SO done with Bay Area startup events man.

Every single time I explain what I do, I get the same blank stare. 

And I'm not talking about one awkward conversation - this has been a pattern. At this point I've tried every possible angle and framing. Doesn't matter.

I've tried explaining it as distribution strategy - how if nobody knows you exist, your product doesn't matter. I've tried the top-of-mind angle - how your prospects need to think of you the moment they have the problem you solve.

I've even broken it down into pure revenue terms with actual client numbers.
Still nothing.

I used to think it was the curse of knowledge - that I was too deep in this world to explain it simply. But that's not entirely true.

And look, this isn't me saying I know everything or that I'm too good for these rooms. It's just basic market fit. Matthew Hunt posted about it yesterday:

"Stop trying to convince people who don't care about the problems you solve.

Preach to the choir.

Sell to people who already know they have a problem. 
People who are actively looking for a solution.
People who want to change."

The frustrating part is that good events DO exist. I had a great time at Sculpt last year! (Bruno Estrella/ Clay - bring it back faster please?)

But they're almost never the ones you find scrolling through Luma. The ones worth attending are private, invite-only, and nobody tells you about them until you already know someone inside.

Request: If you're in the Bay Area and you actually know of events worth attending, please drop them below or send me a message. I'm genuinely done wasting evenings making small talk with people who've never heard of founder branding.

There has to be a better room somewhere.

I just finished reading Paul Graham's 4,288-word essay on taste. It was published back in 2002, and I think it's more relevant today than it's ever been.
 
Taste is the word everyone is using right now. It's also the word nobody can quite explain.
 
I've been thinking about it for a while now — long before I read that essay. Writing 2,000+ posts for founders will do that to you. You start noticing things you can't un-notice.
 
Once you accumulate enough reps, your eye develops an intolerance for what's off.
 
And the more you feed it with great content — really great content — the sharper it gets. Your standards keep getting higher because you now know what great looks like. Once you've seen it enough times, anything less becomes harder to ignore.
 
Graham puts it well: "As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that."
 
Even Ashley Lewin recently wrote a great post about it. She defines taste as pattern recognition built through fundamentals and repetition, specific enough to name what's off and why.

That said, knowing what taste is and actually developing it are two very different things.
 
Jeff Odarve and I have started blocking time each week just for this. We look at what's working in this space, understand the mechanics behind it, and ask how we can take it further.
 
We want to be the absolute best in our space.
 
And we'll do whatever it takes to get there.

📧🧲 Adam Kitchen

Co-founder at Content Army 🪖 Helping B2B leaders scale thought leadership, creating world-class content engines in less than 1 hour per month to predictably grow sales | Klaviyo Elite Partner & D2C Agency Owner

I've been a DTC email marketer for over 18 years. Owned my own eComm brand for 2 years. Over the last 7 years, I've built Magnet Monster to be a global retention marketing agency that's created strategies for brands such as Wild, Waterdrop, Abbott Lyon & Laura Geller + 300 others. We've achieved Klaviyo Elite Status (top 0.2% of agencies) & continue to deliver exceptional work for our clients.

We pioneered many of the leading retention strategies commonly deployed today in our industry and have trained hundreds of other email marketers through our flagship course, Monster Email Marketing: https://magnetmonster.com/email-marketing-course

I also built my agency exclusively off the back of content marketing on LinkedIn. I built a course sharing the exact strategy I deployed to generate over $10m in sales: https://magnetmonster.com/b2b-content-that-converts

I publish two Newsletters weekly:

Weekly Retention Strategy: https://magnetmonster.com/newsletter
Personal Growth & Life: https://adamkitchen.kit.com/


I love meeting other entrepreneurs and great humans and learning from them. Schedule a call if you want to chat: https://calendly.com/adamkitchen

We help eCommerce brands to scale profitably with bespoke email marketing strategy and world-class design.

Adam Kitchen

It's my personal mission to save every DTC brand money I audit this year by suggesting to burn down their points-based loyalty programs.

If you still think they're a magic bullet for retention, please DM me and I'll show you much more cost effective and efficient ways that actually move the needle and aren't fluff!

🧲 Adam Kitchen

Founder @ Magnet Monster 🧲 - Klaviyo Elite Partner & Retention Marketing Agency for D2C brands

I'm not sure WTF chatGPT just gave me from this prompt but...

We're running another agency / B2B services dinner this Wednesday in central Liverpool - 7pm.

There will be steak - but I won't be morphing out of the table like this (sorry to disappoint).

8 people confirmed so far, 4 spots still available - message me if you want to join.

When people claim DTC agencies are dying, it makes me laugh.

Over the last three months, one thing has become abundantly clear to me:

Agencies are the gatekeepers all tech desperately wants to partner with, and the trusted advisors the majority of brands rely on to grow.

Will the business model change?

Absolutely.

But we're not going anywhere any time soon, so get used to it ✌️

Let me help you to drive over 20% more revenue from email flows in Klaviyo.


1. Add an immediate post-purchase upsell for first-time buyers. If you get this right, 1-3% of people will convert and buy again immediately. That gives you a giant head start in offsetting CAC and increasing LTV.

2. Add transactional touchpoints across every step of the customer's order being delivered. 10-20% click rates straight back to your site. What do customers do when they land on your site? They browse and buy again.

3. If you're only using one channel with your existing strategy, simple add SMS/WhatsApp then Direct Mail, in that order. Replicate the existing touchpoints for customers who aren't engaged with email.

4. Add an automated customer service check-in around 14-30 days after the customer's first purchase to ask if the product met their expectations. Harness as many qualitative insights as possible to show you where the gaps are in your product to get people buying again.

5. If you feel like you need to drive more revenue from flows, don't add net new flows; simply go back and re-optimise your Welcome Flow, Abandoned Cart, Post-Purchase & Browse Abandonment. 80-90% of flow revenue come from these 4 and is where all your leverage lies.


_________________


I audit at least 10 accounts personally every single month. 

These are the 5 areas of opportunity I can almost guarantee are sub-optimal before even looking inside the account.


#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

1st to 2nd purchase - the ULTIMATE challenge every retention team needs to solve.

Tomorrow, I'm sharing all my best strategies.

> How many emails/SMS should you send
> What content to include
> When to drive CTA to repurchase
> When to turn to discounts
> How to create a powerful feedback loop when people DON'T buy so you can improve future acquisition


Covering all with Kathryn Wright from Antavo AI Loyalty Cloud right here, Live on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eBPnKibk


See you there 💪

If your email marketing is showing signs of stagnant engagement and placed order rates, try this:

Once a month, run a competition.

Ask the customer to submit UGC and engage with your emails.

🧲 You'll improve inbox placement
🧲 You'll collect more media assets
🧲 It's fun!


Try making email a two-way communication channel and you'll be shocked at how effective it can be.

You know... like the way it was originally designed?


#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

Some of the lowest-hanging fruit I see in every DTC brand's Klaviyo account we audit: transactional flows.

You need these set up for:

> Order confirmation
> Order shipped
> Out for delivery
> Shipment delivered

At the very least (I often go as high as 7 touchpoints)

When have you ever heard a customer complain that they receive too many updates about their order?

You would be shocked how many repeat sales these flows drive!

I often see north of 20% click rates that sends a ton of traffic back to the website.

And what do customers do when they start browsing?

That's right, they buy again.

Plus, these emails help reduce support tickets.

If you don't have them set up yet, you are leaving a ton of money on the table and stretching your customer support team.


#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

I'll let you in on a secret: all Magnet Monster's clients are launching their WhatsApp programs on CoCo AI - not Klaviyo.

"Wait, Adam... aren't you a Klaviyo Elite Partner?"

Yes, but here's what matters most to me:

Getting my clients f***ing incredible results.

& Jeremy Horowitz' is helping us get ALL core flows built and live within 48 hours, with campaigns sent within 72 hours.

That speed, support & tech is unparalleled.

And it's what we're going to cover in this special LinkedIn Live.

🧲 How to start collecting WhatsApp consent and scaling your list asap
🧲 The core flows you need to set up on day 1
🧲 How to leverage agentic WhatsApp
🧲 How to use WhatsApp as an adjunct to email & sms campaigns


No fluff, pure strategy.

Join us and LFG 🚀

Alex Paraskevopoulos, Tom Seebold and 7 other connections attending

Start & Scale your DTC WhatsApp Strategy in 48 Hours

5 DTC Subscription Metrics Killing Your Growth (and how to fix them with email marketing)


1. Subscription Take Rate 

The % of customers who purchase on subscription vs make a one-time payment.

➔ Why is this important? 🧲

Subscribers have a 2-3 X higher LTV than one-time customers.

Therefore, it’s critical to incentivise as many customers as possible to start subscriptions.

➔ Email Strategy 📧

*Highlight cost savings of subscription vs a 1-time payment
*Push habit formation as a reason to subscribe
*Include dynamic subscribe-and-save blocks in your emails


2. Churn Rate

The % of subscribers cancelling every month.

➔ Why is this important? 🧲

If you can’t retain subscribers, CAC is unsustainable, and growth verging on impossible.

The unit economics of your subscription business will collapse.

➔ Email Strategy 📧

*Fix the “Upcoming Order” emails to highlight flexibility (skips or changes are better than cancellations)
*Drive product activation to build habit formation in customers
*Offer gifts at the 2nd order to prevent churn


3. Payment Failure Rate

The % of subscribers who churn involuntarily through actions such as expired cards or insufficient funds.

➔ Why is this important? 🧲

I've seen as high as 30% of active subscribers churn this way and it's preventable.

This can cost you tens of thousands of MRR, and it's typically the easiest churn to improve!

➔ Email Strategy 📧

*Set up between 5-15 retries (yes, that many)
*Trigger automated card update emails (70% of recovery happens this way)
*Incentivise retention through gifts & discounts


4. Lifetime Value

The monetary value from each customer after you subtract variable costs.

➔ Why is this important? 🧲

Most brands are terrified to contact customers in case they churn.

But they’re leaving a massive amount of profits on the table following this strategy.

➔ Email Strategy 📧

*Cross-sell customers who reach order thresholds where churn is less likely (3+ orders)
*Offer incentives to buy more product upfront
*Cross-sell in your Upcoming Order Emails


5. Reactivation Rate

The % of customers you win back each month.

➔ Why is this important? 🧲

These customers once liked and trusted your brand and remain a critical lever to scaling your subscription MRR.

➔ Email Strategy 📧

*Smart segmentation of cancellation reasons: go granular and personalise the winback sequences
*Recommend alternatives if the customer has “too much product” (the 2nd most common reason for cancellations)
*Leverage Direct Mail to win back historical high LTV customers with new offers



____________


Subscription Revenue Plateaued?

DM me for a Subscription Audit and we’ll unlock your next level of MRR growth.

Scale Your DTC Subscription brand with Email Marketing

Want to scale your SMS & WhatsApp list?

> Do this every single month (once per month)

Send a plain text email to your followers with an exclusive offer when they subscribe to SMS or WhatsApp.

3-5% of your list will subscribe.

I've even seen as many as 10% of the audience subscribe.

That's it - stupidly simple and rapidly builds your database of subscribers.

We put so much emphasis on pop-ups and new customer traffic (rightly so) that we forget about our existing customers, whom we missed getting consent from.

This is the easiest way to close the gap.

Create a plain text email now and set this up in less than 15 minutes.

You'll get a spike in hundreds of new subscribers.


#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

The most overlooked part of retention is how much of an impact CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) impacts our work.

You can have the best flows, campaigns and omnichannel strategy, BUT...

If somebody was:

> Brought in on the wrong messaging
> Ordered too much product (or too little)
> Games the subscribe-and-save offer, then instantly cancels


Then a lot of your strategy & tactics won't move the needle on LTV.

That's why it's critical to develop a close feedback loop whereby you collect and monitor qualitative insights from both your best (and churned) customers, and then continuously use this to improve your front-end offering to new customers.

A strong retention agency will point this out from their initial audit rather than promising they can fix things with a new post-purchase flow.

People stay when they've bought for the right reason to begin with. 

Flows & campaigns are just complementary to what should already be a solid foundation.


#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

If your DTC subscription retention program is designed to make customers forget you exist so that they auto-renew, then I'm sorry, it's close to being a scam.

Do you think Spotify or Netflix are scared to send you an email in case you churn?

Or that you log into their portal to use the apps?

No, because they know the value they're offering is incredible.

You need to design your subscription program with exactly the same type of obsession and creativity.

A subscribe-and-save widget is the bare minimum.

You need to be thinking about tiered rewards, gifts and stacking offers to maximise LTV.

Every order renewal should be met with delight and excitement by the customer, not fear and trepidation.

It's a terrible way to build brand sentiment, and it's a strategy that has a very clear ceiling on it.

Put yourself in the customer's shoes, and delight them at every order, seeing it as an opportunity rather than inevitable churn.



#ecommerce #shopify #emailmarketing

A maturing DTC brand is always going to see a decrease in "efficiency metrics" such as click rate and Revenue per Recipient (RPR), which can lead you to pursue the wrong strategy that harms your ability to generate revenue.

Example: in year 1 of business, you acquire 10,000 customers.

You send to most of these customers and have strong CTR and RPR because your active customer database is shallow.

By year 5, you may have 200,000 customers in your database, of which you email 80,000 each week.

A significant portion of those 80K customers may be considered "lapsed", but it doesn't mean you won't try to win them back.

CTR and RPR are now down significantly. But total revenue contribution from the channel? It's up massively.

That's why it's important to move away from % and to total volume of clicks/revenue generated from your list over time.

It's not always this simple, and there's always a bit of nuance, but generally speaking, this is why I shun tracking these metrics.


#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

Generate 20% more revenue from every email campaign you run for your DTC business.

How?

Retarget people who click the emails but don't convert with a plain text follow-up within 24 hours.

That's it - that's the whole strategy.

Simplicity scales.


#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

If you run a DTC subscription business, you'll want to read this.

It's no exaggeration to say that email marketing can completely transform your retention.

Attacking the infamous Order 2 churn, as well as scaling LTV of your existing subscribers, this newsletter is full of practical strategies.

Plus, we've got a guest appearance from Ben Sharf & Cameron Wind at Platter on where it all begins: optimising your PDP to generate MORE subscribers on the first purchase.

Dive in.

I just dropped an insane 5-step strategy guide on scaling DTC subscription brands with email marketing. If you're trying to grow your MRR, you need to

Open article: How to Scale DTC Subscriptions with Email Marketing by 🧲 Adam Kitchen • 4 min read

How to Scale DTC Subscriptions with Email Marketing

6 Klaviyo strategies you can implement in less than 24 hours to double your email revenue.

Sound like clickbait?

It's not.

Read this newsletter and I'll show you how.

P.S - Somebody needs to help me with the prompts for these thumbnails. I suck!

I took 2 weeks off. But I'm back with a banger today. Yes, the title is designed to get you to click. But the truth is, these 6 things can be implemen

Open article: 6 Klaviyo Strategies to Double Your Email Revenue by 🧲 Adam Kitchen • 1 min read

6 Klaviyo Strategies to Double Your Email Revenue

taplio

The Battle

Harshith Varma

Adam Kitchen

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreHarshith Varma's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAdam Kitchen's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Harshith Varma

Adam Kitchen

Followers

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);}Harshith Varma's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAdam Kitchen's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreHarshith Varma's LinkedIn Performance