Episode #94 Nobody Gives a Sh*t About Your Startup (Until This Happens) | David Walsh on B2B Influence

You’re building a startup. You’ve got the vision, the product, and maybe even some funding. But here’s the problem: nobody gives a sh*t. Until they do.

In this episode, David Walsh (3x SaaS founder, raised $33M+, CEO of Limelight) breaks down why getting people to care is the hardest — and most overlooked — part of go-to-market.

From burning cash to firing 40% of his staff, Walsh shares what actually matters in early-stage growth, how B2B influencer marketing is the next unfair advantage, and why consistency—not charisma—is the cheat code for founders who don’t want to die broke and irrelevant. 

Follow David - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dw1232/

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

We could not do this without you.

See how Sendoso can help increase pipeline, ROI, and customer retention.

We are also proudly supported by Pursuit Sales Solutions - Where Hiring A+ Sales Employees is NOT a Pain in the Ass!
https://pursuitsalessolutions.com/revenuereimagined

ZoomInfo is also a proud sponsor - check them out here!

🎁 Lastly, we have a gift for you! We’re tired of seeing people getting critical GTM components wrong. Need help with your ICP, Buyer Persona, and Value Prop? Tired of the shitty “resources” people “give away” to gain followers?

We’ve developed a tool that creates your basic GTM Foundations (ICP, BP, abd Value Prop) for you. Snag it here.

Transcript

This is Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined, the podcast where we dive into all things revenue. Each episode, we bring you the top founders and go-to-market leaders to challenge how you think about growth and help you bridge your biggest go-to-market gaps. I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zwizinski. 

As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time and we're grateful for you choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes and tactical advice on how to bridge your GTM Gaps. Let's get to it. 

Welcome back to another episode of Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined. With us today is David Walsh, who is a three-time B2B SaaS founder who has built and sold a watch brand, an e-commerce company, raised $33 million for an HR B2B SaaS product before finally launching Limelight, which is a B2B influencer marketplace, which is a space that is super hot right now. David, welcome to the show. 

Man, I am so fucking ready. I got so much talk, man. 

Let's go. I love it. 

Let's go. I love it. We were chatting a little bit before, but you've got through so many iterations of different companies. What is one of the biggest challenges that you've seen from a go-to-market strategy when you're starting up a business? What's that one piece of play that you're like, I wish this was easier and it's just not? 

Oh my gosh. Dale, getting people to give a shit. 

You go out and building things? Internal people or external people? I don't like to interrupt, but external. Tell us more. 

Listen, you've got this vision. You're an entrepreneur. You're building something from scratch typically. You have this idea that you want to bring to market, and then you want to go and explain it to people. The truth is nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares. They're like, yeah, that's kind of cool. If they're your friend, they'll tell you it's great. 

But if they're not your friend over time, you have enough of those conversations, you realize actually you've built the wrong thing. Or people don't care enough about this to really go and build it. So the challenge that I see a lot of people have is getting people to care and giving up before actually meeting that momentum, getting that momentum. There's always an inflection point where most companies and most entrepreneurs just give up because they've tried it so long and they're just getting pounded with nos every single day. And then finally, something clicks. So, Jay, I'll touch your question. Getting people to give a shit about what you're doing. 

I'm so happy you said that. I literally just got off the phone with a rep. So we're working with a company and they've done really good. They're ramping. They're getting people. And I had a conversation with the rep. And he's like, how come we're not closing deals? I'm struggling with closing the deals. 

And so we start going through the process. And it's probably because you're probably in the wrong buying persona in ICP. Your value proposition, they get it, but they don't get enough of it. It's not like, okay, for $100,000, I can make $101,000. That's not enough to make people change. 

You've got to have a big enough value gap there. And I said to him, you need more marketing and awareness because you guys are educating too many people. And it's that give a shit factor of like, people should be like, I need, you know, limelight. I need, like it just comes off the top of your head versus like having to educate them for such a long period of time, which I think is what you're saying you got to educate. 

Yeah, you also just got to have a lot of conversations. Like if you can't just listen to a handful of people and then make decisions, like data is what you need to rely on. So going out and having conversations is... 

So many founders fuck this up. I'm sorry. But it's like they hear one thing, one negative piece of feedback, or conversely, one like you need to do this and it's from someone loud and it's like, holy shit, Dale said we need to do this, so we're going to go build this. Is this loud or is this important? And I think this is whether you are a baby company or even really big companies. It's like, oh, we got to get the CRO on the phone because a customer complained and didn't like this. It's one customer who complained. Like is this one customer or is this a subset of 100 people that are complaining? Like you don't have to get the CRO on the phone because you had one big customer that got a little bit angry. But when it comes to giving a shit, how do you change that? Because like market awareness is important, right? 

You know, TAM, SAM, SOM, all of these wonderful acronyms everyone want to talk about. But at the end of the day, I'm a believer and please prove me wrong. People give a shit when you're solving pain. If you're not solving pain, they don't give a shit. So if people are giving a shit, aren't you just not solving the pain? 

Man, like there's so much I could talk about. I'll start with saying like you have to be able to influence people, you know? Like as an early stage gender, you have to have charisma. You have to be coming to the call with energy. You have to be able to influence them and persuade them. And whether or not you're solving an immediate problem for them or whether or not they buy into your vision is also important. 

So a lot of people get very like, you know, obsessed when the immediate reaction isn't, I need this right away. Well, then start telling a bigger story. Start uncovering. Start asking more questions to figure out what is this that you actually need to solve that if I go and build it, you'll actually use. So asking questions, listening more than talking is really important as well. 

I've had experience with Limelight. I think you guys are doing something super cool where you're bringing companies together with influencers to create, at least from what I've seen, meaningful campaigns versus the typical bullshit of, oh, let's just go find someone who has 10,000 followers or 100,000 followers and get them to post. But there has to be a moment, especially in this space, because I feel like it's really crowded, right? Like there's a good amount of people who are doing or trying to do what y'all do. 

Some with software, some with like Google Sheets on themselves. Like, oh, I do influencer marketing and I connect you to the best brands. Take me back to a moment where you felt everything was out of control. So we're building Limelight and there's this moment where it's like, oh, shit, we're not going to, we ain't going to make it. Our go to market is fucked. 

What you mean today? 

Like you're just talking about what I felt like today. No, most recent time I felt like that was November. I was going to give up because with startup companies, you're constantly iterating, right? And just to be clear, like I had this big idea and thesis that the future of marketing is personality led. People want to follow people and there's all of these creators like yourself, Adam and Dale, that have created content, created trusted audiences, but not on brand partnerships in B2B and it's relatively new. It's nascent and companies are spending a shitload of money on all of these paid ads and getting worse results. Well, why not partner with a group of creators in an authentic way that can drive better return on ad spend? So, you know, bringing it to market 

took a lot of time and a lot of energy and efforts. And I didn't know if this was going to work, you know, back in Q4 of last year, even as soon as like three or four months ago, we had run a load of campaigns with companies that were sort of investing in this, but then, you know, weren't really committed for the long term and just had some bad experiences. And then I was like, OK, I actually don't know if companies are going to come back and spend more money on this channel unless we can demonstrate that it's adding value and driving revenue. And so we just had this inflection point in December, I would say, so three or four months ago, with everything just started to become easier and more and more companies are thinking about doing this. They're seeing their competitors do us and they're starting to think, should we be doing this too? So it's a fun space to be in. I agree with you. It's really new. 

I don't agree with you in that it's competitive. I actually think, you know, we're tracking about 17 agencies that have just popped up doing this over the last 12 months, which is great because it grows the industry and grows the segment with more and more people entering. It just means that there's more and more people wanting this. 

But I believe those 17 are good. Yeah, I'm just saying you can probably count them on one hand. 

Yeah, either three or zero. No, I actually know a few of the CEOs and I have a lot of respect for them. Not every agency is a good agency. I'll also say, like, some of them have pivoted into this with no idea about B2B influencer marketing and they're just seeing it and they're like, okay, we should try this, but they don't have any domain expertise. So that's how it works. 

So one of the things that's interesting is this space, as you're saying, it's kind of new. It's kind of like this place where if you're going to B2B and people are like, we got to do outbound, we got to do the traditional ways you're doing sales, this becomes like a non-traditional way for most people to do sales if they live under a rock for the last couple of years. So they get into this mode of a different channel, which in our world, in some of these go-to-market strategy gaps, is like you're back at a stabilization mode. You don't know how to build a foundation. So how would people go about thinking about B2B influencer marketing the right way so that they can test and taste it so then they can go build a foundational element of it? 

Yeah, really great question, Dale. The first thing I would say is like educating companies and brands, the moment I get on a call, I'm explaining to them that this is experimentation. You want to run as many experiments as you can, and you need to make this authentic. We want the creators to be using your product, be aware of your product, and be able to tell stories of solving a specific problem. 

They have to use the product, they have to like your product, and they have to be able to tell a story about your product. 

That's the holy grail. I didn't say it exists all the time. But that's the ultimate goal, right? We want them to be able to tell an authentic story about solving a specific problem using your product. And it has to be creative, right? It can't be corporate jargon. 

I work with some of the biggest companies in the world, like Alibaba, HubSpot, Zero, some publicly traded billion-dollar businesses. And they're coming at this being like, okay, so we have this corporate mandate. This is what we want the creators to say. 

It's like, no, no, no, no. You cannot tell the creators and influencers how to do their job. Their one job is to copyright and create stories, and you need to let them have the creative freedom. So to answer your question directly, number one, it's make it authentic, get them to use the product, make sure that it feels trusted. Number two, make sure that you're not telling them what to do and what to say. And number three, come at it with an experimentation creative mindset. Like try do this at scale and run as many experiments as you can and be okay with failing here and there with the goal of like learning. Because it is a new space and we're starting to see a lot of value come from this when you do it the right way. Maybe last thing I would just say is consistency. Don't just come at this and say, I want to do one post with this one person, that's it, we're done. 

It's like, no, no, no, no. You want to form a relationship with a trusted thought leader who's a subject matter expert, who has a trusted audience, who's going to be the face of your brand long term. That's the way you need to think about this. 

Well, and if I just jump on top of this a little bit is the, it's not just about following in social media or social stuff. We get pulled into conversations probably on a daily, weekly basis on tech, work in tech, the things that people are doing. Like we just spoke to a company yesterday as a team on revenue operations, strategy, you know, numbers from the top down portfolio companies. And like if we're going to start using it and putting it into practice within our world, and we usually will test it with some of our clients. Like, hey, you know, if you want to work with us, you got to test it out, we got to make sure it's working, we got to test with our clients. It's not only the B2B influence that you have from a social media perspective, but then, you know, we're working with companies on tech stack analysis, audits, reviews, what's working, what's not working. And that is a full time job. 

Like, like the, it's changing so quickly. So I would caution customer, caution companies as they're doing this, don't just look at social media following, but look at influence outside of the social media realm. 

So Dale, like follower account on LinkedIn matters this much. And if you're not watching 

this, you should say that again for those who aren't watching following follower account on LinkedIn, Manage is what percent? Zero percent. 

Nobody should care about the size of your following. Meaning, I've seen people with 200,000 followers get 5000 impressions a post, and I've seen people with 10,000 followers get 10,000 impressions a post. Engagement is the thing that matters, which comes from quality of content. 

Kind of like without bound, response rates are the only thing that matters, not opens. 

And exactly results versus fabricated metrics. 

Yeah, I think that's in everything. When you look at building a company and listen, I don't want to shit anyone when they're shit on anyone when they're down, but like this is being filmed around the time of the article about a 16 z and 11 x. And you know, when we talk about results versus fabricated metrics, and I do think this is a broader trend in B2B SaaS where people exaggerate their metrics a wee tiny bit. I think this is a appears to be a very egregious case of doing such. But you're only hurting yourself at the end of the day, whether it's funding that you get that you're going to lose because you're going to get sued, whether it's bullshitting about your response rates or whether it's I have to get this person because they're going to get sued. Because they have 20,000 followers or 200,000 followers. It's not going to help. 

Short term mindset is not a good thing in business period, you know, and I feel sorry for the guys that love an extra C or where like I had two calls with investors today. And I have been building software companies for 10 years. This is my third company. And I realized that startups are sprints, back to back sprints. 

You can move as fast as you possibly can in short sprints. And in the run up to an investment round, that is the most intense period in time. We're going to be going out to raise money next month. And I only care about revenue right now. And I'm making some, cutting some corners, thinking about how do I make sure that we get enough traction? Because the truth is my job as CEO is to make sure we don't run out of money. And you obviously direct the company and do everything else, but it's mostly to say we don't run out of money. 

Well, guess what? If you flat line revenue growth, you're going to run out of money. You know, because you're not going to be, especially if you're burning cash and raising money and, you know, building software which requires engineers and a lot of money. So I feel sorry like in the sense of like it's important to have a longer term mindset, not a short term mindset, everything you do within business, but ultimately you need to be able to move quickly and generate enough revenue and enough traction and momentum to attract venture capital investors who are looking for that 100x outcome. And that's part of its storytelling, part of its growth. You know, there's a lot of learnings in this, but going back to like one thing you said Dale, you know, I think of influencers not just about the reach that they have, it's about the content that they can create. 

Like user generated content is incredibly powerful. You know, so I looked at, we were just doing your investment deck literally yesterday. So I went deep into the market and tried to pull out industry trends, right? And I looked at B2C influencer marketing and I said, okay, of the total spend in consumer paid ads, how much of a percentage of that is going to influencers and user generated content? And right now it's 27%, meaning 27 cents on every single dollar spent in consumer paid ads is going to influencers and user generated content. 

Well, guess what? We're in B2B. It is less than 1% right now. 

now. But the budgets that people spend is maybe 5x consumer products. So my big best around Limelight and the direction that we're going is that the portion of paid ad spend that goes to user-generated content and creators is going to dramatically increase over time. 

It's going to go from 0.5% to 20% in the next five years because it works. People want to follow people. The consumer mindset has changed. 

You do not want to find a follow-up corporate brand. You want to follow a person. And part of that is like how do we find more people being able to tell authentic stories and create content? And then people will reallocate ad spend to those channels. We see it today. We see it happening every single day. It's an exciting space to be in. 

Let's face it y'all. Hiring sales talent is a real pain in the ass. Getting a player is key to bridging your go-to-market gap. But it's harder than ever. If you're not actively engaging passive talent, you don't stand a damn chance. That's why at Revenue Reimagined, we trust our partners at Pursuit to help our clients find the best talent fast. If you're looking to strengthen your sales team, go check them out at PursuitSalesSolutions.com. People buy from people. 

That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part? Gifting doesn't help to be expensive to drive results. Just thoughtful. Fondosa's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I let sales for a Synthoso competitor and I could tell you, no one does gifting better than Synthoso. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit Synthoso.com. 

It's what you just said is so true and I feel like we have this conversation with every founder. Listen, do you need your corporate LinkedIn page? Yes, you do. You need proof that you exist and you're real. But no one, and tell me I'm wrong, but no one is coming to take a demo or buy your product because they saw the great post from your corporate LinkedIn page. They're coming because the founder or the great sales rep who has mastered social selling or the revenue leader or the customer or any combination thereof is my opinion. I think that corporate page where we have a CEO now who's like, well, I won't post, but we can post from the corporate site. You're better off not posting in my to be honest. Yeah. 

Well, Adam, let me add another layer to that. I actually think that all companies should not just expect, but they should enable and provide resources for their employees to create content, meaning it shouldn't be a KPI that they're held against and they're punished if they don't want to create content. That's not what I'm saying. 

What I'm saying is they should invest in the brands and the personalities and the audiences of their team members, because ultimately it grows their own company and their own audience. And I think that mindset has dramatically shifted. 

Two or three years ago. You've pioneered this, right? Exactly. 100%. Has anyone done it great since? Is there anyone that's doing a really good job at that? Employee advocacy. Without telling them, I'm going to piggyback, without telling them, hey, here's the repost button and you could post this post, this post or this post, because that's not what we're talking about. Let's be very clear. 

Yeah, 100%. Well, let me get, let me tell you, I think the future job opportunity that people listening to this should think about is I think there's going to be a massive opportunity to come in as a content writer for your team members to tell stories through their own personal channels. And I'm seeing this today, meaning while it's like a training and content writer, copywriter that actually talks about creating stories in a, in a, in a personal realm. So I actually think that that is a big opportunity for a lot of companies to have a team member who helps the other team members create content and get out of their comfort zone. Because let's just be honest, like we probably create much more content than most people listening to this right now. And the reason you and I do, Dale just asked me to write his post. 

Yeah, we'll have to. He asked the AI to write his post, so we'll just, we'll put it on the never. 

We're all getting help from somewhere, you know? But that's the goal, right? That's the thing. It's like, okay, what do we hear most about not creating content? Number one, I don't have the time. Number two, you know, I don't know what to write about, and I'm worried that people care what care, what they, what they, I'm worried about people, what people think of me. And number three is I'm not going to be consistent. So I think that that's going to change and it's going to change pretty quickly with tools, resources, but most importantly, like alignment and incentives from your employer. And I'll leave you with this. 

What would I rather do? And I'm currently hiring for salespeople right now. So if you're a salesperson watching this, PM me on LinkedIn, only if you have a good account. But my point of this is, is what would I rather hire? Would I rather hire somebody with 500 followers on LinkedIn, who's an average, you know, B plus, you know, salesperson, or hire somebody with 30,000 followers on LinkedIn who creates content every day that might be a B minus salesperson today? Well, guess what? I'm going to hire the person in the audience, 100%. 

So it's interesting. What you just said contradicted to what you said earlier, because you said follower accounts don't really matter. But I can tell you as someone that hires a lot of people, the first, I don't care about any resumes, by the way, like don't send me a resume. I go to LinkedIn. I do check follower account a little bit, but then I go right to the post and I'm like, OK, what are you posting? Who are you engaging with? What's that engagement look like? Does it align with the ICP you're selling to today? 

Because it's going to shift and change, right? You're like, not everyone can just have a personality out on LinkedIn or any other social media content that's not aligned to what they're selling. So I find it, I find that super interesting because I don't care too licks about anything that you're doing on your resume. 

You can make up all sorts of stories. But I do really care that you are truly genuinely engaging. And it's not just like, hey, thumbs up or like 100 percent. 

And they're like, you know, some hashtag like I back on Adam's content today. But I get tired of posting. I comment on you post like eight times a day. So it's like once a day. 

My favorite is when I post and someone immediately is like post in the comments. I can help you with your lead generation service. 

Autoblock. Goodbye. You know, David, what are you other interesting things that you were saying, though, because I think this is a hidden part of B2B influencers that will will go faster, further eventually. Yes, you have to be a good content writer. Like a lot of people, the very first blog I ever wrote was for HubSpot, and it was based on a college journalist. 

They had journalism majors that would interview people and then they would write the content for them in their voice. And then I look at it as a perfect spot on. They would just post it. But but if we go like the next level deeper, so content writing, I think that's the easy one to figure out. But back to what a lot of things that we do, like we actually end up with budgets in our customers. Like forget about like having influence on content. Like we know how much money people are willing to spend on X number of tech for X thing. And so like if if companies figure out how to partner with people that have that end up, I don't know if I would call it budget authority, but with huge influence in making decisions, because the content writers may not be making have influence make decisions. But I can tell you in all the customers we work with, we have influence on the buying decision, like, and it can happen in three weeks. So what may have taken you four months to try to sell? 

We can do in three weeks. And so like that next level will be very interesting to figure out if B2B companies can figure out how to get to that level. 

I can give you an example. We have channel partners have become a huge opportunity for us, meaning agencies or marketing agencies, paid out agencies, content creator agencies have started to refer customers to us because their job is to come in and think of like, how do we get a better return investment? How do we grow your company? You know, what are the different things that we're not doing right now? 

And for most of the companies out there, they're not doing influence or marketing. Yes. And so it's a new thing. So actually channel partnerships have become huge for us, you know, where marketing agencies are introducing customers because they're the same ICP and the same buyer. Another channel partner that's growing tremendously organically is VCs. 

I have inside partners, best of your partners, M13, you know, Andreas and Harwitz giving capital to companies to grow ultimately. And then seeing us and saying, well, why don't you have people talking about you? You know, why don't you create this kind of flywheel of content and create this reach and awareness. So channel partners have come to us because most companies come to help a business and consultants come to have a business to help them either grow or be more efficient, save them time, money or, you know, be more efficient. So I think our service offering helps companies grow and that helps us, you know, align incentives with others, you know, that can be partners with us. So big opportunities for sure. Yeah. 

So where's the future of influencer marketing going and where does it stop? So in the next, let's say six to 12 months, because I think predicting any further than that is really, really hard and that might even be hard. Where is B2B influencer marketing going? And then ultimately, where does it just plateau that it stops? 

I like to get inspiration from industries that existed already. So I look at consumer influencer marketing and I say, okay, what are the trends that happened there? And saturation was a big one. You know, it went from my Instagram feed being my best friend, posting a picture themselves in New York City, a Times Square, to being like this influencer trying to sell me a supplement for food. And now it's just saturated with that, right? So I think your news feed is going to see more and more brand partnerships, creator content. What we're trying to do is make it more transparent. Because what exists today is people are posting content and actually not even telling you that it's paid content, right? 

So I think part of it is more content, fingers crossed, better quality, not just cookie cutter templates, you know, actually educational content. I went to the LinkedIn headquarters in San Francisco Wednesday last week, where I met with the leadership team. We talked about influencer marketing, what we've built. I showed them behind the scenes and everything that we're doing. And I basically said, guys, like this is going to happen. Meaning this is happening right now and it's going to happen more and you better be involved because if you're not, it's going to get out of control. 

It's going to be wild. I met with a VP of product for the whole of the consumer product and her number one problem was I don't want my news feed to be saturated with, you know, salesy pitches from influencers and content. And I said, okay, then get involved now because it's going to happen if you're not involved and you don't set it up the right way. So that's your question. I think it's going to be more saturation, hopefully higher quality content because LinkedIn really care about educational content. They do not want sales pitchy stuff. And so I think it's going to be more frequent, more often, higher quality, but that's my fingers crossed on, I'm not that much. 

We'll see. I'm not convinced. Why are you laughing now? I just think LinkedIn is a cesspool of things, but, um, and I've seen a lot of, I've known a lot of people inside of LinkedIn and I've known people like I remember back in the day when Coco was there, like trying to like meet these modifications and it's just like deaf ears. 

So well, LinkedIn is Microsoft. Um, you know, at the end of the day, I think we have to recognize that. 

I think we'll let it be clear that LinkedIn care most, the things that care most because it's all about Microsoft revenue is monthly active users, daily active users, constant engagement, constant people seeing value from the product and coming back more frequently and more often. 1% of people post content on LinkedIn. Me, I'm on LinkedIn 20 times a day, way off more often than I should be. 

Majority of people in the United States and globally, I don't even look at LinkedIn within a month. So their goal is to try and get that broader group of people to come and adopt and be using the product and seeing value from it. Part of that is jobs, which is where they started out with, right? 

Publishing job and seeing job opportunities. Part of it is educational where they start thinking thought leadership content and like actually learning something from the platform. And part of it is networking. 

Like people come here to actually just verify that somebody's a real person. So they're thinking about it from those three lenses, like how do we drive monthly occurring, monthly active users and daily active users and penetrate more of the market that don't use LinkedIn. And I would argue that part of that is education and like actually coming and learning something. And I think creators, not just influencers, like actually think of them as creators can help create great content that engages people that actually people learn from. Not all influencers and creators are created equal though. 

Ain't that the truth? So does LinkedIn continue to grow and continue to expand? Are we going to see LinkedIn alienate their user base by changing the feeds to what the feeds are becoming where you go on and it is like Instagram. And it's like every third feed is an ad and like, I can't even find what I want anymore. I'm done. Hence why so many want to own their own audience. 

Yeah, I don't know. You know, hopefully, hopefully I want to see value and continue to come back to LinkedIn. But, um, they move slowly. And so I'm at the front door knocking down the hatch, trying to be involved, trying to help where I can. But the product is broken today and, you know, improvements that they try to make sometimes break it even more. So, you know, they have to take an experiment to mind sesh. 

Honestly, here's the truth. They have to reward the people that use the product. Yep. 

You know, that's it. And what's happening right now is they're not rewarding the people that are using the product. Sometimes people use the product frequently and they get less return on investment, less results, and that's just not the way it should be. And I think they're aware of that. I've spoke with the leadership team. I think they're trying to make improvements, but it's just going to take time. Cool. Then so much to think about 

so much that you shared so much. Don't hurt yourself. You're going to have a chance to touch. I, I'm trying, man. I'm trying. I only had half a coffee today. It's hard. Um, David, let's, let's do some rapid fire. Um, before we wrap it up here, what a, what's the hardest leadership lesson that you learned? 

The thing that's tricks, the thing that I would focus on, the thing that I remember the most, the most difficult thing is letting go of 40% of my stuff because I grew too quickly, hired too many people, didn't have product market fit, spent too much money, was going to run out of money and burn all the capital I raised. 

And so I had to fire 40% of my stuff, sat down with 25 people back to back 15 minute meetings and let them all go. That was the most challenging thing. And I'll never make that mistake again. 

Which hits the next question I was going to ask. So I was going to ask what's the mistake you still regret, which sounds like that one. Um, but I'm going to ask you a different one. What, what if you lost everything tomorrow? What, what would be the first move you'd make? Like let's say your LinkedIn followers put on the zero. Now what do you do? Oh. 

My God, my follower count that I've just, that I just like spent years trying to build. Um, you know, I try to stay in the real world with things that actually matter, right? The online digital world that I live in is just to help me make money and help me grow my business. 

Doesn't define me. So I think it's more important to think about, like, have fun outside of work. Um, my purpose and my life is built around my job. And what I do on a day to day basis, I find a lot of satisfaction from that. I enjoy us. I like solving problems. But you need to have a life outside of work. 

And so, you know, if everything went to shit today, I'd probably be in the exact same space, you know, maybe a little bit less happy and a little, a little bit more upset, but probably feeling a little, a little freedom as well. All right. 

You're a revenue leader who's listening right now. You're, you're drowning. You don't know where to start when it comes to B2B influencer marketing. You don't know where to start when it comes to any type of influencer marketing. What's your single one piece of advice, the most powerful piece of advice you can give them right now? 

If I'm a revenue leader and I want to focus on influencer marketing, I think focusing on consistency is the number one priority. Don't take a short-term mindset and say, I'm going to dip my toe into this. 

I'm going to try it once. Or I'm going to tell my team to post content for the next three weeks and then forget about it. You have to create consistency. You know, show up every day. Show up consistently and then good things will happen. Don't have a short-term mindset like everything else in this world. 

I love it. Absolutely gold. I think that that is the perfect way to look at things. Anything nine times out of 10 with a short-term mindset, you are not going to succeed, do not be penny wise and pound foolish. David Walsh, Limelight, thank you so much for joining the show. We appreciate it. Have an awesome rest of the day, man. 

Dale and Adam, thanks for having me. Excited to do it again soon. 

Thanks, David. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

As we say at the end of every show, give more that you received. Reach out to someone today and offer your assistance. 

Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter at revenue-reimagines .com for your chance to win today's giveaway. Member only exclusives and actionable tips delivered directly to your inbox. 

We would really appreciate if you head over to your fair podcast site, drop a five star review and share your fair episodes with your network. Until next time.