College teacher turned ghostwriter | Scaling founders, coaches, and consultants to $100K+ /mo | Writing to build wealth and better self | 98,000 on Twitter (X)

Taylin John Simmonds

3 years ago, a friend lent me $40K to pay off my debt. So I could focus on business.

2 years ago, I offered to pay it back. He said no. Reinvest. Pay me later. 1 year ago, first payment. 

Yesterday, I paid him back!

Find the people who bet on you before it makes sense. Then spend your life proving them right.

College teacher turned Substack ghostwriter | Thoughts about craft, ideas, and AI as a creative partner (not a replacement) | 2B impressions | $4M+ revenue generated | All in on Substack

One pattern I’ve noticed in all the people that inspire me: They live a diverse life.

They layer unrelated skills. 
Read widely. 
And have friends you'd rarely see together. 

A rich life isn't only about money. It's about the range of experiences that made you who you are.

Stop calling yourself a content creator. Content creators chase algorithms. You're cultivating a body of work.

You're not in the content game. You're in the depth game.

And depth doesn't scale. It compounds.

I'm noticing a quiet rebellion against balance. 

People who disappear into their craft. 12, 15 hours a day for weeks. Then step back completely. No guilt. No routine. No splitting the difference. Full immersion, then full recovery. 

Seasons, not schedules.

You don't actually want to stop working. You just haven't found work worth your devotion.

The goal isn't to do less. It's to care so deeply about one thing that everything else becomes noise.

Find that thing. Then you'll never need convincing to start.

Everyone's trying to escape work. Fewer hours. Passive income. Early retirement. That's not freedom. That's avoidance.

You don't want to do less. You want something worth pouring everything into. Work that's worthy of your full attention, your full energy, your full devotion.

Find that first.

If AI is speeding up your writing process, you're using it wrong.

AI should slow you down. Stress-test your ideas. Pressure-test your arguments. Find the angle that actually matters before you write a word.

The bottleneck was never your writing speed. It was your thinking clarity.

You don't need 100 clients. You need a handful of the right ones and the devotion to serve them so well they never want to leave.

No empire. No team of 30. No "scaling to seven figures."

Just craft you're proud of and a livelihood that lets you live well.

A book you highlighted but never practiced is a book you never read.

Understanding doesn't live in the notes you took.

It lives in the choices you made differently afterward.

A life-changing habit I picked up recently: Fifteen minutes of breath work before work.

The breath brings me out of my head and into stillness. A stillness that makes creative work feel effortless.

Your best work is hiding behind the ritual you're skipping.

The real value in the AI age isn't what you know. It's who you can inspire.

Give them an aim, a compelling reason, and the next small step when everything feels overwhelming.

If you want to matter in the AI age, don't just share knowledge. 
Lend direction.

You're behind because you've never given 100% of yourself to the thing you care about.

Subtract everything that isn't it. Give it everything you have. Not 40%. Not most days. Everything.

You've never seen what happens when you actually commit. Find out.

Matt Swain

LinkedIn for Founders & Execs

I’ve built my career as a creator, thought-leader, author and entrepreneur who helps executives and founders evolve their online presence into genuine influence. I’ve had the privilege of working with global icons such as Wim Hof, Steven Bartlett and Arthur Brooks, and collaborated directly with LinkedIn to shape the conversation around digital content, executive-led brands and how social influence can drive commercial growth.

At the start of 2024, I founded Triangle Branding, an exclusive B2B thought leadership agency built for category-leading founders and CEOs who want to turn their ideas into influence. We help them build human-led digital reputations by using their own personal voice to drive commercial impact through LinkedIn-first content, strategic storytelling and demand-generation systems. 

Over the last 18 months, we’ve helped clients raise over $100M, land deals with companies such as Sony, Nvidia and Virgin, had 100 million eyeballs on clients’ content and generate meaningful inbound opportunities by building executive-led brands that people trust.

--

We've generated 1,000,000+ views in the first 6 months with four C-Suite Execs at a 150M ARR leading B2B SaaS platform. 

We've generated 5,000,000 impressions and 40,000 engagements on a leading Harvard professor - with them becoming a LinkedIn Top Voice.

We've helped an energy leader book qualified conversations with SVP's at Walgreens, Starbucks, Mars, GSK and Lidl. 

We've helped agency owners generate organic engagement & MQLs from leaders at THG, Uber, Heineken, Estée Lauder, Samsung, Lavazza, L'Oréal, Tony's Chocolonely and more. 


www.triangle-branding.com

Founder of SOCIAL CLUB

Founder and Manager of SOCIAL CLUB - an exclusive social media community where members manage over 328 million followers. 

If you're an influencer or brand who wants to connect please get in touch. 
If you're interested in investing/sponsoring/collaborating please email on matt@mattswain.co.uk

Every marketer needs to hear this (direct intel from LinkedIn):

I sat down with Jae O., LinkedIn’s Head of Measurement & Ads, to introduce LinkedIn’s latest series - B2B Over Bevvies, sharing the latest B2B insights direct from LinkedIn! 

For the first episode, we debunked the 3 biggest myths killing your results…

Let me know what you think in the comments! 

P.S. Check out how LinkedIn’s measurement solutions can help you deliver outcomes over optics —> https://lnkd.in/measuringROI

LinkedIn for Marketing #AD

I’ve seen a lot of LinkedIn advice lately that’s frustrated me. 

The thing is – we all want LinkedIn to be a place for original thinking and interesting ideas – not AI slop and surface-level takes. 

Yet so much advice is about hooks, formatting and the latest algorithm trends, as opposed to substance, original ideas, interesting anecdotes, and genuine insights.

And from my visit to LinkedIn NYC last week, my takeaway is: LinkedIn wants more original, compelling, journalist-style content: thoughtful pieces that only you could write. Posts that add value, spark interest & conversation, and feel creatively different. This very much aligns with Triangle's approach when we're working with leading US companies on their thought leadership presence (always nice to hear!). 

Also, it was great to finally meet Luiza Cocito and Gianluca Russo in person after working on projects together and seeing each other’s content online for so long. Big thank you to the team for the warm welcome to NYC, the very cool office tour, and even a trip up the Empire State Building observation deck.

Stay tuned for a video from the visit too!

Being honest, we didn’t hit our growth goals for February. 

I hired a key growth lead at the start of 2026 – it took 4 weeks to interview & train them. They were getting ramped up – and then they suddenly quit 2 weeks in. It was a key role, and being honest, I’d overlooked some key aspects in the recruitment process. I saw what I wanted to see. We needed someone quickly and the reality was, they just weren’t a good fit. And I paid the price in the end. 

In that situation, you can do one of two things. 1) get frustrated or 2) get to work. I chose the second. And I’ve been busy searching for talent, 100s applied, interviewed 25+ people last week. And now we’ve found someone better & more aligned, who started with us this week. We’ve upgraded our onboarding process, more incentives, and more checks early on in the process. 

It set our growth back by six weeks, but we’re now in a great place as we head into March.  

And a reminder of some important lessons in the process too:

— Even when the trajectory is up, there will be weeks that test you. 

— When something unexpected happens, you just have to put the work in & take action. 

— Focus on true alignment with your team and clients – don’t try and shortcut this.

Landed in New York and went straight to The Met. I’m starting to think seriously about the kind of art I want to collect one day.

When I was younger, paintings never used to interest me, but over the past few years, I’ve become obsessed with different creative pursuits – movies, theatre, music, and art. So now, whenever I visit somewhere new, you’ll find me in different galleries. 

Thomas Merton said, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” and Giorgio de Chirico said, “each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere.” When you find a good painting that speaks to you – it forces you to reflect, pause, and feel something you can’t put into words. It has a life of its own. It’s a still image and yet it has motion, tells a story, and reveals something about yourself.

I’m in exploration mode, seeing what pieces resonate & speak to me, and there is no better place than the Met to get inspired about what I’d like my future collection to be.

Someone pushed back on me last week about LinkedIn. 

"If this works, why can't you show me a %?"

"Surely it all comes down to conversion rate," they kept insisting. 

I disagreed.

LinkedIn isn't an outbound machine you can reduce to a single percentage. 

It's an ecosystem. 

There's the content building authority and trust. The profile converting cold visitors before they've replied to your initial message. The network compounding month after month as the right accounts are being added. The signals telling you who's warm and who's paying attention. 

And yes, outbound – but that's one piece. 

Some of your best prospects won't respond to your first message. They won't engage with your posts either. But four months in, after consistent exposure to your thinking, your proof, your credibility – they come inbound. Ready to book a call. 

By tracking outbound conversion rate, you're measuring one segment of a much bigger system. 

So when you're not booking enough SQLs to hit your targets, the issue isn't automatically the outreach. Across multiple B2B clients, the bottleneck is rarely conversion rate. It usually sits deeper, in how you're positioned, in the quality of accounts entering your network, in whether your content is building buyer confidence, or in whether your profile reflects the level of deal you're trying to win. 

It's worth stepping back and looking at the system as a whole. 

Happy to walk you through how we structure it.

It was 10pm and I’d just been to see Michael Jackson on Broadway, walking down 7th Avenue, I had a proud moment. It felt surreal that we’ve grown Triangle to the point of taking on NYC. 

I still remember being a solo freelancer juggling multiple projects, figuring it all out with just a couple thousand in the business bank account. We’ve come a long way since then! 

It’s one of the things you have to experience to understand - but the buzz, energy, ambition, pace, drive, is infectious here. You feel it walking down the street, in every conversation, it lives in the air. 

Yes, it was a productive time with clients on shoots, coffee conversations and strategy pitches. But my big takeaway from the trip is thinking bigger and moving quicker. Taking the NYC mindset into everything we do.

Founders who post 10+ times per year generate 33% more leads.

LinkedIn shared this stat with me directly during a meeting with their team in LA last October.

Ten posts per year.

That’s the bar for a measurable lift in lead generation. They also shared that founders who post consistently see higher deal size and shorter sales cycles.

Yet many still use LinkedIn for company updates instead of using it to generate revenue.

Company updates don’t build pipelines. 

You need strategic content that moves someone from never having heard your name before to having the level of trust needed to sign high-value contracts.

And this content already exists. You just need a system to extract it. 

Think of the last sales call you closed. You handled the objections, built trust, proved you could deliver, and you created the moment that made them sign.

That is validated messaging — now you just paste the transcript into Stanley.

Stanley already knows your existing LinkedIn content, your voice, how you think, what you've posted about. It extracts the strongest ideas and structures them into posts built from insights that have already converted.

Because if you said it on a sales call that closed, it works. 

If you've been wanting to post more consistently and generate more leads, but don’t want to add hours to your week, this is the system that makes it happen.

Stanley turns conversations you’re already having into content that supports your pipeline.

Try Stanley free → https://lnkd.in/ecEBMT-r

#Ad

Turn sales calls into original content in minutes...

If you want to start conversations with senior decision-makers on LinkedIn – you need to pattern-disrupt with a human-first approach. 

Everyone is getting 10+ salesy messages a day. So you need to make yours cut through and be the one they actually respond to.

Most companies know who they want to reach to influence pipeline.

But they end up creating content for the algorithm instead.

If you care more about ROI than impressions, this one is for you...

630,000 impressions in the first month.

That's what we generated for a Harvard professor who came to us with no LinkedIn presence and a book launching in March with Penguin.

Here's exactly how we structured the work across three deliberate phases.

Phase 1: Authority building (foundation)

In the first month alone we generated 630,000 impressions.

Her posts quickly started attracting long, thoughtful comments from senior executives at large organizations – Chief People Officers, Heads of HR, L&D Directors, and Org Development leaders.

By now we're well over 1 million impressions total. That rapid visibility positioned her as the go-to voice in her domain and created the trust layer senior buyers need before they even consider a conversation.

Phase 2: Strategic integration (connective tissue)

Most agencies would stop at impressions. That’s where the real work started. 

We’re now coordinating across Harvard Kennedy School, Penguin Publishing, and her PR agency to align every moving part of the launch. 

Content, messaging, and partnerships are being stitched together into a full launch strategy. This includes planning a LinkedIn webinar, developing launch assets, and ensuring targeted visibility to influential leaders who can amplify her reach. The professor trusts us to lead this because we think beyond posts – we think in systems, partners, and decision timelines so the March launch hits maximum impact. 

We’ve since expanded the scope to include newsletter & email list content. 

Phase 3: Revenue activation (where real ROI lives)

The end goal was never “visibility.” Every action we take serves a business objective. 

As the content compounds, we’re actively tracking engagement from heads of people, heads of learning & development, and other senior decision-makers at major companies. We're building the pipeline for $30,000 workshop facilitations and keynote speaking gigs.

Post-launch, we'll leverage the book success and her strengthened public profile to convert that engagement into booked conversations. 

This is the difference between content creation and a LinkedIn ecosystem.

A few years ago I was experimenting with LinkedIn after seeing the impact of content while working alongside Steven Bartlett.

I had a sense the platform was underutilized. Within a couple of months of posting, I had my first truly viral post with over 20 million impressions, and following that, an inbox full of enquiries. It’s fair to say, I’d proven my point – LinkedIn was powerful.  

Over time, a pattern started to emerge. While I was freelancing across startups – consulting, writing, podcasting, and working on influencer marketing campaigns – the same question kept coming up in conversations with founders and operators: “How does your LinkedIn content do well – could you do the same for me?” I leaned in. LinkedIn stopped being just one part of the work and became the center of it. That focus eventually evolved into Triangle.

In the early days, I was interviewing clients, writing the content, scheduling posts, creating assets, doing admin, and everything in between. In the trenches – figuring things out, working out how to craft content that captured the client's tone, insights, ideas, what drove results, and immersing myself in different industries. This is now the operating knowledge that’s embedded in how Triangle runs.

60+ clients later, and things are very different now. We operate with a full team building LinkedIn ecosystems for companies, all designed around commercial outcomes. Our average client has 20+ years of experience in their industry, so the work is about authentically capturing their ideas and insights – then turning that into the right positioning, buying signals, outbound activity, and content that helps generate 6-figure conversations and contracts through LinkedIn.

I still think back to that first post and where it all led.

I'm proud of what Triangle has become – and very excited about where we’re heading too!

Last week, we ran a launch for a client that reminded us of something simple: senior buyers assess leadership before they assess product. 

Their company's page update reached 853 people, with 10 reactions and 5 reposts.

Not that impactful. 

But across the 4 leaders (COO, CPO, CRO, CMO) we work with to build their authentic content on their personal pages, the reach and engagement looked like this:

→ 88,305 total impressions
→ 1,040 total reactions
→ 59 comments
→ 47 reposts
→ 47 saves
→ 126 sends

100x the the reach & engagement. 

While data proves time-after-time that reach is significantly higher coming from leadership, it's not the only upside. 

When brands post from company pages, people see this as promotion. But when executives speak consistently, it signals internal alignment and conviction that reduces perceived risk for buying committees evaluating long-term partners. Meaning greater trust, market authority and in turn impactful commercial outcomes. 

- - -
If you want to turn your Execs into thought leaders to build visibility, trust, authority & MQLs – happy to share our learnings.

The content you need to generate a million dollars for an eight-figure budget holder is structurally different to the content most agencies provide.

Here is what I mean.

Right now, the entire marketing conversation is dominated by: Should we use AI? Should it be story-based? What format cuts through? What tool wins?

These questions completely miss the point.

The actual question is: what is the outcome you are trying to achieve – and does your content move you closer or further away from it?

When your end outcome is a seven-figure deal with five decision makers across a complex buying committee, the strategy looks nothing like a typical content playbook.

The focus shifts to progression:

1) How do you move a buyer from awareness, to recognition, to credibility, to commercial trust?

2) How do you build a deliberate sequence of touchpoints that supports long evaluation cycles and high-stakes decisions?

The real value of a content partner at this level is not creative execution, but the ability to design a journey that moves a defined buyer through stages of conviction – from cold, to curious, to confident enough to commit.

AI or human? Funny or serious? Story-led or data-led? These are tactical choices.

At Triangle, we are not interested in debating tactics. 

We are interested in whether the content works for your commercial goals.

Everyone talks about winning clients. Nobody talks about retaining them. 

We've just hit 24 months with one of our clients. 

And no – that wasn’t driven by a long-term contract.

We want to work with clients on a long-term basis, but we don’t force that commitment at the beginning. We invest early, we focus on delivering tangible results, and we prove our value as we go. Retention, for us, is a byproduct of performance.

This client came to us with 800 connections. Over two years, we've helped him generate 30M+ views, grow to over 10,000 followers, and position himself as a credible voice in a complex, regulated industry. And driven real commercial outcomes, including recently signing a seven-figure government contract that came directly through our work on LinkedIn. 

These metrics tell part of the story. 

But honestly, retention comes from becoming a true strategic partner inside the business.

Over two years, we learned how he speaks, how he thinks, what he's aiming to achieve. And as his business evolved – new strategy, bigger team, higher stakes, more scrutiny – we adapted alongside him. 

We're now so aligned that most of the work happens without calls. That's what a good long-term partnership looks like in practice. 

At Triangle, long-term partnerships are everything. We pride ourselves on delivering results, building deep relationships, and growing with our clients – and that's why we’re able to retain clients for 2+ years. 

–
If you’re looking for a partner who will embed into your business, adapt as you grow, and focus on commercial outcomes, book a call to see how we’d approach your LinkedIn.

Last week, M&S announced Gillian Anderson as its Chief Compliments Officer on LinkedIn. Here are 4 reasons why you should pay attention: 

1. LinkedIn was used as the main stage for a mainstream celebrity partnership – even though Gillian had no real platform here beforehand. She had only a few hundred connections and had never really posted before. She wasn’t a LinkedIn creator or influencer, which makes it all the more interesting that M&S still made LinkedIn a core part of the campaign and used her popularity & mainstream profile to drive attention here.

2. The campaign was built for LinkedIn, not just distributed on it. This wasn’t just a brand reposting campaign assets onto LinkedIn, after the fact. The platform itself became part of the idea, execution, and storytelling – with Gillian updating her profile with the new title. And stemming from LinkedIn at the core – the partnership was leveraged into commercial ads, and a bigger PR conversation. 

3. It shows a more imaginative, brand-led use of LinkedIn – a sign LinkedIn is evolving from a corporate distribution channel into a creative brand channel. Campaigns like this show how much more LinkedIn can be, and the direction it’s moving in. (Interestingly, over the last few weeks, we’ve had 3 multi-billion-dollar companies reach out to have conversations about creative ways they can be using LinkedIn).

4. It highlights the compounding value of senior leaders building on LinkedIn over time. Because when they've spent years becoming trusted voices on the platform, as M&S leaders have, moments like this become much more powerful. They are not just extra distribution channels; they bring credibility, context, and attention that help the brand own the conversation, deepen the association between talent and company, and make the whole campaign feel bigger than a one-off activation.

Main takeaway: There are so many opportunities to use LinkedIn creatively and cut through. Exciting times ahead for the platform! 

What did you think of the campaign?

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The Battle

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