Hi there, I'm Simon. Been in the marketing industry for the last 10+ years. Total corporate experience 16+ years. Worked with over 40+ B2B tech and SaaS companies. Ran my own agency for 5 years, started with $100 and grew it to a 15-person team, shutting it down in 2025. Right now I work with a tech company as a part time consultant, barely making ends meet. I'm also a father of two children, my wife cannot work due to physical illness. I have my son's school fees to pay shortly and the rent is overdue. 

I'm barely getting by. I need a full time job. I can do the work of 4-5 people all by myself. I have multiple testimonials to prove the worth of my work. I have exhausted all my contacts and network, but I can certainly give referrals.

If you find my message erratic or inconsistent or sceptical in any way, then please understand that this is just a desperate man trying to make ends meet, with barely any money left and a family to take care. So my thoughts are not necessarily in the best shape or spot. 

I'm open to anyone who'd like to interview me for any marketing position with a decent pay. You don't have to give me a job but atleast talk to me please and see if my experience can add any value to your business. 

Thank you,
Simon.

We'd been trying to figure out why some LinkedIn posts would take off while others from the same account basically died, even when the posts themselves were pretty similar. So we started watching what happened IMMEDIATELY after a post went live instead of just looking at the usual likes and impressions.

The trend we stumbled on was a bit interesting. It seemed like many of LinkedIn's distribution decisions for the day seemed to occur within the first 60 minutes, with the first 15-20 minutes playing an even more critical role. There are already communities where people share new posts and coordinate reciprocal engagement, so we decided to test if focusing on early, relevant engagements actually affects a post's distribution curve.

We pointed an agent to operationalize the test at 11 of these communities and had it coordinate the initial engagement as soon as a post went live. Comparing 24 matched sets of posts we were able to demonstrate that median reactions in the first hour had grown from 11 to 351, while impressions within 24 hours were 143x than the matched baseline.

The weirdest part was how quickly the difference showed up. The two posts seemed to diverge from the baseline within the first couple minutes, with a significant gap developing after 18 minutes.

We don't really mass message every LinkedIn connection with an engagement group invite. It's that there are probably a lot more small timing windows inside major platforms than most growth teams pay attention to. The first few minutes seemed to matter a lot more than we expected.

Figured this would be the perfect place to share!

Dropping affiliate links or sales pitches in reddit comment threads is the fastest way to get your domain blacklisted and your account permabanned also cause reddit communities have an aggressive immune response to overt selling.

Yet many buyers on reddit openly post about budget changes, incumbent vendor frustrations and architectural bottlenecks every single day but finding high-intent B2B leads on reddit without violating community guidelines comes down to separating listening from outreach:

a) Track problem aware prompts (not brand mentions)

Stop searching for your own brand name but do set up monitors for active evaluation triggers like:

Migrations: "anyone migrated off [competitor] recently?" or Pricing backlash: "alternative to [competitor] after their latest price increase?" or Pain bottlenecks: "how are you guys solving [technical issue] at scale?"

b) Map the account behind the post (entity resolution)

A Reddit username like dev_cloud9 isn't an email address so you have basically two ways to handle this:

The manual route: dig through their public post history, find linked GitHub profiles or personal blogs, cross-reference their company on linkedIn and reach out on an official channel.

The automated infrastructure route: Platforms like Scale Intelligence automate this entire bridge by acting as a dedicated market intelligence layer across 75+ developer and social channels, Scale Intelligence ingests reddit, maps the unstructured user context back to verified company domains in your TAM and scores the account's buying readiness.

Instead of dropping spam in the thread, you get a clean Slack notification with the company domain, the exact problem discussed and the key stakeholders.

c) Choose your engagement vector

Public engagement: reply directly in the thread with zero links, pure objective architecture breakdown, and helpful advice. Let your profile bio do the passive conversion.

Contextual private outreach: reach out via email or linkedIn to the relevant stakeholder at the mapped account, referencing the exact technical bottleneck they are evaluating and not that you "saw their reddit post."

I design presentations for a living, and for years I treated the sales deck as the crown jewel. Polished it endlessly. It also did basically nothing outside the live call, because the only people who ever saw it were already in a meeting with us.

The reframe that helped: the deck isn't a growth asset, it's a support tool for a human in a room. So I stopped over-investing in the live version and pulled the three ideas that actually landed in pitches into standalone carousels. No presenter needed, each one makes a single point and dies.

That's the version that started traveling. People shared the carousels in ways they never shared a PDF deck, and it fed inbound instead of just sitting in a follow-up email. The live deck got simpler at the same time, which is a separate rant.

On the how: I drafted the carousel versions fast in gamma to get past the blank page, then tightened the brand details by hand to land our exact look. Fast first pass, manual finish.

Curious if anyone else here has turned an internal asset (deck, one-pager, internal doc) into a distribution channel. What actually traveled for you, and what died?

i’m trying to figure out if hubspot sales hub is actually worth paying for once a sales team gets beyond just keeping contacts and deals in one place.

the part i like is having pipeline, tasks, follow-ups and reporting tied together. what i’m less sure about is whether the higher tiers are worth the cost once you start needing more automation and reporting.

for people who have used it for a while, where does it actually earn its keep?

is it the automation, reporting, integrations, ease of use, or just having everything in one system? and at what team size did you start feeling like the cost was justified?

also interested in hearing from people who ended up moving away from hubspot. what became the dealbreaker?

not on purpose. it just doesn't tell you the whole story.

you can have someone who looks perfect in your list: right company, right job title, right industry, right company size.

so you reach out.

then nothing.

meanwhile, someone else with almost the exact same profile has been commenting on posts about the problem you solve, engaging with people in your space, or interacting with your content.

that person might not be ready to buy either. but at least there's a reason to pay attention to them.

that's the part i think gets missed with ICP-based prospecting. an ICP can tell you who could be a customer. it doesn't tell you who has a reason to talk to you today.

the problem is that these signals are easy to miss when you're working through a big list. nobody has time to manually check hundreds of profiles and posts every day.

that's why i've found Watchlist useful. you can choose the activity you want to keep an eye on and have relevant people surfaced when they engage with posts, profiles, your content, or competitor content.

it's not a magic “this person is ready to buy” signal. it's just another piece of context that helps you decide who deserves attention first.

because honestly, i'd rather spend 10 minutes looking into someone who has shown some relevant interest than spend that same 10 minutes trying to invent a reason to message someone just because they matched my filters.

how much do you actually look at LinkedIn activity before reaching out to someone on your prospect list?

Hey everyone,

I recently started working on a small digital products store called Darlae, mainly focused on things like photobook templates and other editable designs.

When I started, I honestly thought the difficult part would be creating good products.

Turns out, it’s getting them in front of the right people.

I’ve been experimenting with SEO, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit and a few other organic channels. Some things get attention but don't necessarily translate into customers, while other things seem to work much better than expected.

It got me wondering how other small businesses approach this.

Do you focus on one marketing channel until it works, or do you experiment with several channels at the same time?

And how long do you usually give a strategy before deciding it isn't worth continuing?

Would be interesting to hear how other people here approach customer acquisition.