Growth Playbook? 🚀 | Thousand Faces Club

Are you someone who’s curious to dig deep into product-led growth or content market fit? In one of our Fireside Chats, we caught up with Maxim Poulsen, a growth hacker and LinkedIn creator with nearly 12K followers, to understand growth hacking and marketing.

Today, we’re sharing that conversation with you. 👇

But, First, Who’s Maxim Poulsen?

Now, let’s dive into this conversation.

Thousand Faces Club: You have more than 11K LinkedIn followers. Is there a playbook you follow for growth?

Maxim: One of the biggest misconceptions people have before creating or building a community is they have to be experts in certain domains. But when experts speak, they choose a high-level path and don’t necessarily explain enough to help their followers comprehend the core concepts. And I think by not being an expert and being passionate and interested, you can well very find your place as a creator in a community and build in public. I also read a lot of newsletters, blogs and follow other creators and podcasters — as I learn or make sense of new things, I write about them. Writing helps me breakdown abstract concepts into a more organised format. If you’re creating on LinkedIn, four things matter: consistency, quantity over quality (dish out content and learn from what’s working), variety (offer your readers some diversity), and write about stuff you like so you don’t get bored. Also, I will release a series of posts and a Notion document with all my learnings on creating on LinkedIn that anyone can download and read.

Thousand Faces Club: Have you found your content market fit as a creator?

Maxim: I think so; it’s never black or white just like product-market fit. You think you’re going in the right direction and at some point, you probably think you’ve got it figured. But then you go past a certain point and you explode — it takes a year or two to fetch 10K followers, and then it takes 2-3 months to get to 20K followers. Today, I realise people are consuming my content; for instance, I ran a poll to ask my readers if they read my posts every day and about 50% of them responded. I’ve indeed built a community and a part of me believes that if I stop posting for a week, people might wonder where I’m gone. As a creator, I’m still discovering topics I love writing and re-writing about. So finding that fit is an ongoing journey!

Thousand Faces Club: Can you tell us about Growth Talks podcast and your process?

Maxim: There are quite a few growth podcasts out there, but they all discuss high-level strategies like 400% general growth instead of talking about day-to-day growth or people who work in the growth. It felt like an everyday Joe who works in the growth lacked a voice, and growth isn’t just about strategy — it’s also about execution. I know brilliant people who work in growth, make tons of money and bring growth to their companies, but aren’t at those levels where they are considered thought leaders. Through Growth Talks, I wanted to give them a voice and a platform to share their stories.

Check out an episode here. 👇

Thousand Faces Club: How do you think solo creators can position themselves?

Maxim: See, everyone will ask creators to pick a niche, write only about that, and specialize in it. I follow this LinkedIn creator, Luke Matthews, who wrote a piece on how we recommend early-stage creators pick a niche. His argument was how do you know what your niche is? It could be a huge mistake if you're going down a path that isn't yours. For that, you'll need your top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel content that allows you to experiment and grow. We submit a hypothesis, measure the outcome, and determine if it's successful. That’s how a creator can find what works for them and their readers.