🎥 Don’t be famous, be relatable

June 20, 2025

In partnership with

It’s official, y’all. Follower count is overrated.

I repeat: if you want to get attention online, you don’t need to have tons of followers.

I’m not alone in saying this, either. The (polarizing) influencer, Gary Vaynerchuk, has been hammering this point for months. Since I don’t follow ol’ Gary (sorry, Gary), the lightbulb went off when seeing what was happening with Alex Lieberman (founder of Morning Brew) and his team at storyarb.

They launched an internal marketing competition, where employees would take to LinkedIn and see who could get the most views.

It worked incredibly well, turning into lots of revenue for their business.

And it wasn’t because of the founder’s prior fame, either.

Lieberman has 180,000+ followers, but he was completely upstaged by one of his (pretty much unknown) copywriters, Sarah Suzuki Harvard. She has a mere 2% of his followers, but she’s getting more impressions. At the time of Lieberman’s post, she had earned 907k post impressions in 23 days, despite only having 4,400 followers (that’s 206x, in case you’re wondering).

I could write a whole newsletter on the reasons why I think Harvard’s crushing it, but I think there’s a bigger theme at play here: the TikTokification of social media.

In this newsletter:

• How the media game has changed, and what that means for you

• Step-by-step plan for turning your LinkedIn into a customer farm, from someone who’s actively doing it

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Weekly Insight

The shift to interest-based content isn’t limited to LinkedIn and TikTok. 

Think about the platforms you spend time on. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook… everywhere audience size used to be the biggest indicator of someone’s ability to show up in the feed. 

I’ll bet you’ve seen a higher number of small accounts pop up lately. I know I have; I've seen more videos with view counts in the tens or hundreds get recommended in the past month than in the previous 10 years.

For one simple reason:

Everyone wants to be TikTok.

TikTok is easily the most popular media platform, and it’s largely due to their interest-based content recommendation algorithm. It understands what users are interested in, then shows more content like it.

Done correctly, this algorithm gets people to come back, and keeps them on the app once they are. Time on platform = money for media platforms so, naturally, others want to cash in on this.

I find this change fascinating and would love to explore it further, but hey, we aren’t here to talk about gigantic social media companies’ product strategies. We’re here to talk about how you can benefit from the change.

For the first time in social media history, your budget matters less than your relevance. Small businesses that understand their audience deeply can now compete directly with Fortune 500 companies for attention.

Think about what this means for your marketing strategy.

Instead of needing $50k for paid ads or years to build a massive following, you can solely focus on creating content that resonates with your specific audience. The algorithm will do the heavy lifting of finding people who care about what you're saying.

Sarah Suzuki Harvard's success isn't an accident—it's a demonstration of the new rules. She's not trying to appeal to everyone. She's laser-focused on speaking to copywriters and marketers, and the algorithm rewards that specificity by putting her content in front of those exact people.

The playing field has been levelled. The question is: will you take advantage of it?

Intent to Action

I started my career in social media marketing (shoutout to Yelp, lol), but social can still feel overwhelming to me at times. 

What to post. When to post. How to track impact. How to convert traffic… you get it.

I wanted the most up-to-date advice on best practices, so I called in back-up. The rest of this section is a guest post from Evan Knight, 2x founder who generated more than $1M in pipeline from LinkedIn… in a single quarter.

Take it away, Evan. 👇🏻

Hey, Evan here.

Let me start by saying I am not a social media person… but 2 years ago, social media (specifically LinkedIn) changed my life.

In 2023, I was running a B2B startup and noticed that every time my co-founder posted on LinkedIn, it would generate new business for us. It was strange, because he had less than 5K followers.

We chose to double down on social and it just kept working. So I leaned in further.

I started Thoughtful, an agency that builds thought leadership content engines for founders and executives—because I believe that social media is still one of the biggest untapped opportunities for founders and digital entrepreneurs in 2025 and beyond.

Here’s the exact playbook I used to exit my last startup, and build $1M in pipeline for my new agency in its first quarter ever:

🟢 Step 0: Document your narrative

If you and your brand don't have a crisp, differentiated POV that your audience cares about, you're dead on arrival. Document your company’s origin story, and take note of the stories you always tend to tell prospects on sales calls. Distill this and you have a great start.

🟢 Step 1: Choose a subject-matter expert (SME)

You need an internal thought leader so the messages you’re putting out there don’t fall flat. This is usually your founder. They’re both your source material and distribution engine (more on that in a sec).

🟢 Step 2: Optimize the founder’s profile

Treat your LinkedIn profile like a landing page. Use your founder’s profile, not a company profile. This is the #1 mistake most businesses make. 

People follow and trust people, not brands. And most social platforms algorithms heavily prioritize personal pages nowadays anyway.

🟢 Step 3: Define content pillars

Start with your best hypothesis of what will resonate with your ideal customers. Unless you’ve done content in the past or paid for a bunch of marketing research, this will likely be an educated guess, and that's okay—a big benefit of creating content for your ideal audience is you will very quickly learn what works and doesn’t work.

Broadly speaking, pillars that tend to perform well are:

(a) Step by step workflows to generate the result your audience wants 

(b) Contrarian takes, failures and vulnerabilities

(c) Sharing research, survey data and test results that no one else has access to

(d) Celebrating wins like revenue milestones, client results, team growth, funding, etc

BIG caveat: the pillars that work for each person are individual to them and their unique personality and experiences. Thus, some deep introspection / questioning / research is necessary. (though still not as necessary as just getting started)

🟢 Step 4: Commit to consistency

Post at least 3x weekly. 5x is better. Nowadays, algorithms care about volume and consistency. Without it, you will see near-zero results. 

You need to find a way to make this frequency feasible for a minimum of 6 months. That can mean carving out a portion of time, hiring a fractional SMM or using an agency like mine. Whatever gets it done consistently.

🟢 Step 5: Create audience-relevant content

Sit down with your founder bi-weekly and interview them. Ask them questions based on your content pillars. Extract their hot takes, POVs and stories from the trenches—record it all with a tool like Riverside. 

Next, turn it into two weeks of content. Video, written, carousel. Experiment to find what works for your audience and fits your founder’s voice. 

⚠️ Again, this process is a lot of work, so be sure to carve out team time or agency support for this, or it likely won’t get done. ⚠️

Note from Simon 🙋🏻‍♂️

If you’re doing this on your own, you can build a custom GPT to act as your content sparring partner. You won’t get as high quality of questions back, but it can help you think/talk through your ideas.

🟢 Step 6: Grow your network

Follow members of your target audience, thought leaders in your space and even your competitors. Engage with all of them. You’ll become visible to their audiences and known as a voice in the industry.

🟢 Step 7: Comment

Commenting + posting makes you 25x more visible than posting alone.

🟢 Step 8: Have conversations

Reach out to people that engage with you, especially if they’re your target customer. Maintain genuine, mutually helpful relationships with people over the span of years. Keep in touch. Give advice. Ask someone how their business is going. Don't sell or expect things back. Ironically, this is where you’ll start to see revenue generated. 

Bonus: on most platforms, people you message with will be more likely to see your content in the future. 👀

🟢 Step 9: Layer in paid ads

Take your top organic content and use it as ad creative. Use custom audiences to re-target people that engage with your organic content and visit key intent pages on your website. The brand that is known and trusted is the brand that gets chosen when it’s time to buy.

🟢 Step 10: Measure success

Direct 1:1 attribution is very difficult with social media, unless you invest in a $5K/mo tech stack. 

Simplify it by going back to basics. 

Asking people why they got in touch on sales calls (or your signup form) is one of the highest fidelity signals we can get for free.

🟢 Step 11: Learn & recycle

Social media scales when content, engagement and conversations live in a single feedback loop. Treat it like a system rather than random acts of posting, and the results will compound.

Note from Simon 🙋🏻‍♂️

If you want to learn more LinkedIn demand gen strategies give Ev a follow. If you’d like to find out more about getting your LinkedIn presence done for you, feel free to check out his website.

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Closing Thought

You don’t need a ton of followers. You don't need to go viral. You just need a system that keeps you at the top of the feed for your target audience.

Your competitors are probably still obsessing over vanity metrics while the algorithm is literally handing you their customers on a silver platter. Don't let that opportunity pass you by.

Y’all let me know that you want to dig into finding (or clarifying) your ideal customer profile, so next week is all about it. 

See you then.

PS: I had a lot of fun putting this edition of The Progress Report together with Ev. Did you like the level of detail? Enjoy the partnered content? Feel strongly about the added length? Let me know.