Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Forgot to hit “schedule” on Monday morning. So here we are Tuesday afternoon. The show goes on.

Just got back from a few days NYC. Spent some time with a few team members for an unofficial Compound offsite. Crashed the Unify NYC office. We’re a remote company, and always will be, but IRL work with the team often has me reconsidering. Lol.

Today’s essay is a heater. I want to give you an inside look at how Adam Robinson runs his LinkedIn content strategy. He’s used the platform to grow from 0 → 100K+ followers and scale his companies to a combined $25M ARR.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Adam Robinson’s $25M LinkedIn playbook

How this SaaS CEO became the poster child for founder-led content

In 4 years, Adam Robinson went from having zero clue about LinkedIn as a content channel to becoming the poster child for founder-led content.

His companies do a combined $25M in ARR. His most recent startup, RB2B, scaled from zero to $1M ARR in 16 weeks—largely off the back of Adam’s LinkedIn content.

This all started back in 2021, in the Triple Whale office in Austin. My CMO pulled me into a meeting with Adam. He was brainstorming ideas for growing Retention.com, then GetEmails.

I convinced Adam to start ripping content on LinkedIn. And I was fortunate enough to work with him during the first year of his posting journey, helping him scale from 0 → ~25K followers on LinkedIn. We did a lot right. And got a lot wrong.

Today I want to break down what makes Adam a force of nature on LinkedIn. So you can apply these frameworks to your own founder-led content motion.

Love for the game.

Growth on LinkedIn—or any social platform—doesn’t happen overnight. Consistency is what allows content to compound. Adam’s been in the content arena four years now.

It’s hard to stay consistent with something you hate doing.

Sure. You could grit and bear it for a few weeks. Maybe a few months, even. Eventually, the house of cards blows over.

Most founders who want to grow an audience on LinkedIn do so because they want to increase revenue for their startup. Smart! Problem is, when you're only looking at the lead form every week, the energy shows up in the content. Your audience can tell.

Also, what do you think happens when your calendar fills up with a few extra team meetings? Or you have to prep for a board meeting? Or literally anything that adds an ounce of friction to the content creation process?

You use that as the excuse to go dark for a bit. Founders who lack a genuine interest in content are always looking for an ‘out.’

Adam didn’t have this problem. As soon as I convinced him “Dude, you need to be posting on Linkedin,” he was all in. To this day, he reports spending more than 20 hours per week on LinkedIn. And he’s been at it for four years.

Is it shocking that his LinkedIn content is doing well?

It’s silly to expect outlier growth without outlier inputs.

Finding Content-Market Fit.

When you're building a startup and you hit product-market fit, you know. Everything gets easier. People refer others you your product. It spreads without you having to force it.

Same idea applies in content ‘Content-Market Fit’ (CMF) makes everything easier.

CMF occurs when you have overlap between the topics you're uniquely qualified to write about & the topics that your ideal customer cares about.

Adam struggled to find this early on.

When I started working with him in 2022, he hadn’t launched RB2B yet. He only had Retention.com, which sold into DTC brands.

Adam was a SaaS guy. He’d bootstrapped and sold an email marketing platform in a past life. He’d never run an ecommerce brand before.

So, whenever we’d create content around ecommerce growth, it’d do okay. We’d have a few posts go semi-viral. We even experimented with some meme content.

But it didn’t hit the way his content today does because they lacked specific anecdotes & data.

His building in public updates, on the other hand, over-performed from day 1. In these posts, he’d share all his metrics direct to the LinkedIn timeline. Revenue, churn, etc—hyper transparent.

The problem with ‘building in public’ was that the audience it attracted consisted of SaaS founders. He built a nice community, but he couldn’t sell them his product.

Adam also had tons of war stories from scaling then two, and now three SaaS companies from $0 to $1M in ARR. Gold for a SaaS audience. Duds in DTC.

You see what was happening? Adam has a certain set of topics that he is uniquely qualified to talk about. But at the time, those topics translated into LinkedIn vanity, not revenue.

How’d Adam solve this?

He went the nuclear option and launched a new company. RB2B—the B2B version of Retention.com. The new product allowed B2B companies to deanonymize site visitors. Same thing Retention did for ecommerce brands.

Except this time, CMF was present from launch. RB2B hit $1M in 16 weeks. 9 months in, the company is at $4M ARR.

The takeaway here for you is that ideally, you want to be founding a company in a category where you have existing credibility—if you want to speed-run Content Market Fit. For most founders, this will be the case. You typically won’t hard pivot into a totally unfamiliar industry. If you do, just understand that it will take you longer to get traction.

One more note: certain audiences are more active on LinkedIn. Selling into a hyper-active audience amplifies CMF.

One of those audiences? SaaS founders and GTM leaders. They live and breathe LinkedIn, since they also get a lot of their customers on the platform. You see a similar trend with marketers, agency owners, etc.

Using tactical polarization.

It’s not a secret that polarizing content travels farther on the social media timeline. The battle for attention in 2025 has turned into a total war.

Lukewarm takes about agreeable topics get your content buried. You need to stop the scroll.

Adam gets this. He leans in.

One example?

Back in early 2024, Adam started posting content coming after 6sense—a competitor to RB2B that also identifies website visitors.

Adam then received a cease and desist letter from 6sense in the mail. Plenty of founders would have shut up and moved on. Adam?

Posts the letter in its entirety to the LinkedIn timeline. The post goes nuts.

In a post mortem of the shitposting campaign, Adam wrote “Everybody on LinkedIn hates 6Sense, so it lit a fire I NEVER expected.”

Now. This is an extreme example. I don’t think every founder should make that level of polarization a mainstay in their content—neither does Adam.

He also wrote, “On one hand, you might look at this and say, social media loves it [shitposting], so DEFINITELY. You would be correct about social media loving it. The problem is you run the risk of ruining your reputation. So if you do, it BETTER be worth it.

Polarization is a spectrum. And if you look at Adam’s other content, you’ll still see it to a lesser degree.

Most of the hooks he writes have some degree of polarization and Negativity Bias. Check out this one from last week:

“You’re not Steve Jobs. You’re not Travis Kalanick. You’re not Parker Conrad. And that’s OK. Instead of wasting years chasing VC funding and "massive" exits, most founders should focus on one goal: bootstrapping to $3M ARR. Here’s how I grew my first $3M ARR startup into a $25M ARR SaaS with $12M in profit (without giving up control):”

You’re not Steve Jobs. You’re not Travis Kalanick. You’re not Parker Conrad.

Adam comes out the gate strong. Then softens the blow with “And that’s OK,” and transitions into the main point of post—how to scale a SaaS without giving up control.

Another example:

“99% of salespeople think the next generation of $1M/year earning AE’s are current entry-level sellers at top-tier startups learning the ropes as BDRs. They’re wrong. The next generation of 7-figure sellers are aspiring YouTubers:”

They’re wrong.

See how Adam comes out swinging in his hooks, and then pulls back once he’s got the reader to stop scrolling?

Safe content gets ignored. Extremist content gets you ridiculed. Adam dances on the fine line in the middle.

I will say, having credibility in your category also makes polarization easier. Adam’s “polarizing” takes are coming from his experience bootstrapping to $1M time and time and time again. The guy knows what he’s doing. And his opinions come from experience.

The key with tactical polarization is to go far enough to get attention, but not far enough to torch your reputation.

Think like a content creator.

I talk to a lot of B2B founders. Most of them want to position themselves and their companies are more “serious.”

They’re thinking like a $100M CEO. Great for running a high performing corporate machine. Not great for creating compelling content. This is how you end up with stale corporate slop on your timeline.

The fix?

Develop multiple personality disorder. Half joking. In all seriousness, you can have the “$100M CEO” mindset. But you also need to develop the “10M subscriber content creator” mindset.

How would a viral Twitter thread boi craft this hook to maximize virality?

How would a YouTuber with 10M subscribers use a visual to increase click through rate?

How would a LinkedIn “personal branding expert” format this post for maximum readability?

If you read that last paragraph and cringed—I don’t want to be an annoying content creator—you're not going to make it.

You're framing it as “cringe” and “annoying” and “unserious.” And you're going to get lapped by founders like Adam.

Lean in. Use polarization. Take a stance. Spend the extra time on your hook. Spend 20 hours instead of 2 crafting your content. Have the videographer follow you around to get B-roll for videos even though it makes you super uncomfortable at first.

Think like a content creator.

Savvy founders in 2025 treat content creation as a core GTM skill, not a distracting side project.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• Brutally Honest LinkedIn Advice From Alex Hormozi by Tommy Clark 🎥

• How to Go Viral on LinkedIn: A Year in Review by Carilu Dietrich 📝

• The Communication Playbook by Dr. Julie Gurner 📝

• Pavilion Breaks $10m Revenue using New Growth Playbook by Sam Jacobs 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.

More from Social Files:

• Read the rest of my essays

• Work with my agency in 2025

• Try my LinkedIn content writing SaaS

• Steal my founder-led content templates

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark