🔴 How LinkedIn changed my life

From nutrition coaching content to cracking LinkedIn ft. Tommy Clark

Author

Francis Zierer
September 27, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes

Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.

Today’s guest is Tommy Clark, creator of the Social Files newsletter and founder of Compound Content Studio; a B2B social media expert. He started out making Instagram and YouTube content for his nutrition coaching business while still a college student in 2018, but never set out to build a career in content. Just over six years later, he has an agency on track to make over $1 million this year.

In this issue:

  • 🏀 How playing college basketball led to dominating LinkedIn

  • ✍️ Tommy is hiring a content writer for his agency (links to apply below)

  • 📐 A few of Tommy’s rules for posting (scroll to the ‘Steal This Tactic’ section)

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Tommy or watch it on YouTube.

Less than a year after graduating college with a nutrition degree, Tommy Clark was hired as Head of Social for Triple Whale, a B2B SaaS product built for managing marketing data. He hadn’t even applied for the job — he’d just sent a Twitter DM to the company’s CMO introducing himself and complimenting the company's work.

Rabah Rahil, the CMO, replied the next day asking if Tommy was looking for more work, and one month later, Tommy was working at Triple Whale full-time. He kept freelancing on the side, and by April 2023, his freelance income had eclipsed his full-time salary; it was time to leave. Demand for Tommy’s freelance work far outstripped his availability, so he began hiring help and started an agency almost accidentally.

Compound Content Studio, Tommy’s agency, now has eight employees and is on track to bring in seven figures in revenue this year. And he just turned 25 this month.

Athletic content and an athlete’s approach to content

Tommy didn’t start creating content in earnest until near the end of his freshman year of college, in 2018. His dream at the time was to become a doctor, and he was working towards a biology degree, but he got “super into sports nutrition” while playing college basketball and changed course.

“I started helping my friends out with their diets and that was decently successful. And then I was like, you can actually build a business around this thing. Cool. I want to start doing that.

That was my first exposure to content because I had to get clients for [my nutrition side hustle] outside of just immediate friends and family. And I saw that everyone had an Instagram.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to create an Instagram for this. That's when I started watching Gary Vee’s stuff and other marketing thought leaders and whatever to learn how to use those platforms.”

That Instagram account is now mothballed, but Tommy also started posting to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The latter platform proved the most effective — he started posting to YouTube in April 2019 and would post 91 videos over the next 19 months, stopping by November 2020. The account still has 2.32k subscribers and the videos still get views — one has racked up 46k and has been commented on as recently as seven months ago.

Tommy’s first full-time job after college was as a content strategist for the Nutritional Coaching Institute, which he left after a year and a half to join Triple Whale. This was his in to professional marketing — he never took a single marketing class in college. He studied internet “marketing thought leaders” and tested their ideas with his own content; this is how he got the job; personal content as proof of work. It’s clear-eyed, DIY careerism.

It does not seem to be a coincidence that Tommy has experienced his successes as quickly as he has and comes from an athletics background. He’s not the first person we’ve featured in Creator Spotlight with this kind of background. A sets-and-reps, learn-from-your-mistakes-and-go-again approach to content creation, regardless of specific platform or medium, all but ensures improvement and audience growth. Repetition compounds, on YouTube as in the gym.

Means to an end

Tommy, to be clear, is not a creator for whom the content is the product. In his early days, his Instagram posts and YouTube videos were purely a means to attract customers; the same is true of the newsletters, videos, and Tweets he sends out today. It’s just that the service has changed from nutrition coaching to social media content strategy and production.

In 2020, Tommy was one of many people with newfound time on their hands to start a newsletter on Substack. The first issue of Tommy Talks Marketing was published on October 28, 2020, when he was still in college and figuring out marketing on his own; he wasn’t an expert, nor did he present himself as one. That wasn’t the point:

“It was more about networking and potentially getting a job versus getting customers or clients, or even really growing an audience.”

In the spring of 2022, shortly after joining Triple Whale, Adam Ryan, co-founder of the media company Workweek, approached Tommy about working together. Workweek’s model involves identifying talent producing content for a specific, business-focused niche (social media professionals, in this case), using a recommendation network and paid advertising to grow their audience, then selling ads against that audience while paying the creator a flat fee and a percentage of ad revenue. Tommy’s newsletter had around 500 subscribers at the time.

Social Files, as Tommy’s newsletter was rebranded under Workweek, added subscribers by the thousands. The email list is over 17,000 strong today. But a few months after leaving Triple Whale, Tommy and Workweek made a decision to part ways:

“The short answer is that the best way to monetize my newsletter was through the agency, not necessarily through ad sales.

We weren't selling a ton of ads and it didn't make sense for them to keep trying to. But it was really good for lead gen and for the agency. So it really just made more sense for both parties. Like, okay, I'm going to use this as a media property for the agency to get leads there. Very amicable. It was, honestly, the best move for both of us.”

A graphic from Social Files.

Building an agency, or Compound growth

Tommy “already knew from the beginning,” when he joined Triple Whale, that he wanted to start his own business at some point. He just thought it would take “five or ten years versus one-and-a-half.”

“Because Triple Whale was so successful on social, I started getting a lot of inbound from other companies asking, ‘Hey, do you do any consulting? Do you do any freelance work?’

I had time on nights and weekends without impacting what I was doing in my day-to-day. So I was like, yeah, why not? Like, let me get the reps in.

From there, over the course of five or six months, kind of accidentally, I built up this client roster. It got to a point where I was like, ‘Okay, I have these clients, I have this full-time job, I have no time left, something has to give.’”

By the time he left Triple Whale, Tommy already had an operations manager on contract to help with administrative work and posting client content. He hesitated to hire someone to help with the content production; that was his specialty.

Upon leaving and announcing he was taking on new clients, Tommy was flooded with inbound and immediately hit capacity. He labored for over two months, “and then the cracks started to show.” He was burnt out but still “terrified to hire,” waiting another two months before bringing in a head of content.

“I should have hired the head of content as soon as I knew I wanted to build the agency.

If you want to build an agency, just start building the team and systems from day one, because you're going to need them at some point. And the longer you delay that, the more painful it is.”

Today, Compound Content Studio has a team of eight full-time employees. Soon they’ll number ten — they’re currently hiring a content writer and a content editor. Tommy says revenue is on track to break seven figures this year; they’re showing no signs of slowing down.

New topic, same commitment to the YouTube thumbnail game.

Tommy is clearly well-suited to the entrepreneurial lifestyle; running a rapidly growing agency isn’t enough. Over the past few, he’s been teasing a new SaaS project on Twitter. He was tight-lipped but said he’s been working on it for a few months with a technical co-founder who had been working on it for “quite some time” before.

“I had the itch to get into the SaaS game, but I just had no bandwidth to do it as a solo founder. I wasn't really actively trying to get into it, but the co-founder fit was really strong, and the product was high-quality

Selfishly, I wanted to be able to run a marketing motion for a company without really needing client approval. No layers, just me. I can do whatever I want, full creative freedom. It's very fun.”

Connect with Tommy on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Social Files.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

🎙️ There’s more to the story. In this week’s podcast:

  • 🤖 Tommy’s hot takes on AI and scheduling tools

  • 🧰 Tommy’s system for reliably producing great content with his founder clients

  • 🤝 How Tommy connects his personal brand and business brand

A few of Tommy’s rules for posting

We asked Tommy a few questions about how he approaches social media. We’ve summarized a few of his answers here — listen to the podcast for more detailed answers.

“Start with cadence” 

“I would post daily or as close to daily as you can. With LinkedIn in particular, I’d recommend five to seven times per week. As close to daily as possible would be ideal. LinkedIn is interesting, actually, in that if you post too much it can hurt your performance. So you’re not really going to want to post more than twice in a day.”

“The most important thing is the idea”

“If the idea is not good, it's not going to do well, no matter how you package it, no matter what little hacks or tactics you use. The idea has to be strong.

Lean on your own individual stories. You don't want to post generic fluff that anyone else could post. Like, you should be able to look at your posts, without looking at the profile picture or the name, and be able to confidently say ‘This post could only come from me.’”

“Make sure the hook is strong”

“The post could be really good, but if those first one to three lines are not, you're kind of screwed. Put extra effort into those first one to three lines. Think of it the same way that a YouTuber thinks of their title and thumbnail. Like, you've heard MrBeast or Ali Abdaal say that the title and thumbnail are the most most important parts of the video. If that flops, doesn't matter how good the rest of the video was, because no one's watching.

Same thing with your LinkedIn content. The meat of the post could be fantastic, but if no one clicks ‘see more,’ because that first one to three lines is not good, it doesn't really matter.”

  • Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the podcast hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

    • This week we’re joined by Joe Weisenthal, cohost of Bloomberg’s popular Odd Lots podcast. We discuss what ZIRP meant for a generation of businesses, the impact of the Fed’s rate cuts on both startups and everyday people, Lina Khan, whatever happened to yuppies, selling out, and more. It’s a good one.

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