Anthony what's your backstory?

I originally wanted to be a high school English teacher. The college I chose required you to major in both English and teaching. When I was close to finishing my English degree, the church I was attending offered me a full-time role as a technical director — provided I could speed up the completion of my bachelor's degree.

I dropped out of the teaching program and fast-tracked the English degree. Unfortunately, during that time they got a candidate with far better credentials and ended up passing me for the role.

Since I was about to get married, I needed to find a job as soon as possible. Having worked extensively for churches in music and production roles, I applied to various larger churches in my area and found a fit at a "megachurch" in Chicago.

I worked at that church for the next five years, jumping from department to department. Eventually, I earned a master's degree in theology and became a pastor. I spearheaded the revamping of an existing Sunday night service, preaching regularly and leading a team of roughly 75 volunteers.

My wife had been commuting to and from the suburbs of Chicago for her job in her family's greenhouse business. It was roughly 2.5 hours in the car every day. As we neared five years of this arrangement, we decided to move back to the suburbs where I (somewhat ironically) ended up taking a job at my home church that had passed me up before. This time, I would be leading the launch of a brand new campus as a pastor.

The year was 2020, and the impending pandemic put all new campus launches on hold. My role pivoted, and I launched a fully online Zoom-based service called dotChurch, which had about 100 attendees meeting weekly.

After working in professional ministry for roughly 11 years, I needed a change of pace. A former boss connected me with a software development agency based in Greenbay, Wisconsin for an entry-level sales role. Despite having over a decade of promotions and raises, the role was still a pay increase (there's not much money to be made in church ministry, as you might imagine).

Here it was that I cut my teeth in startups, SaaS, and B2B. I met my cofounder at the same company, a product manager and veteran of startups named Robert Kaminski. The agency helped us to incubate what eventually became FletchPMM — a product marketing consultancy aimed at helping tech startups figure out the best way to position their product and then showcase that positioning in a rewritten homepage.

What does FletchPMM do and how did you come up with the idea?

The agency we worked for primarily offered custom services that combined varying degrees of product management, development, and design. This created challenges with scaling efficiently. Robert and I were tasked with creating a service that was more "productized" and could be delivered repeatedly to the same target customer. During the same time, I started to post on LinkedIn as a way to uncover what type of service offering would resonate.

The market started to pull us towards both positioning and homepage rewrites based on the content we were producing. As we built an audience, people started to reach out to us more frequently for help with their positioning. As we started servicing more and more clients, there was a growing level of confusion when people visited our parent company's website. "I thought you did product marketing... this looks like software development?"

We realized that the new service didn't make sense living under the agency brand, so we formulated an agreement that let us split off as an independent consultancy. Since then, we've been able to work with over 300+ venture-backed companies on their positioning and homepage messaging.

How did you get your first 10 customers for FletchPMM?

The first 10 customers (and, honestly, about 95% of our clients) came inbound through LinkedIn. Our primary go-to-market strategy revolves around thought leadership content—specifically, content that highlights the problems we solve and the unique way we approach those problems.

We’ve developed a distinct visual style and aren’t shy about sharing our opinions and frameworks, often for free. The depth of our posts tends to generate organic engagement, which the LinkedIn algorithm rewards with essentially free distribution. On average, we reach between 11 million and 12 million people per year, posting 3 to 4 times a week.
This steady flow of content results in a large pipeline of potential clients. Right now, we work with around 13 to 17 companies a month, charging between $7,500 and $10,000 per project.

How do you ensure your service meets the needs of your target customers?

The content we posted on LinkedIn was our primary gauge of what people wanted. We tried to rely on the market signals (comments, re-shares, DMs, connect requests, etc.) related to different ideas we would post about to determine where we should focus. There were tons of different ideas along the way that we could have focused on (we briefly toyed with becoming PLG pricing experts, Slack community managers, and about 50 other businesses we could have started). But the more we posted about positioning and homepages, the more people were interested in working with us.

This proved to be beneficial in that the output (a rewritten page) was highly visible and shareable, which raised our credibility. All our work was publicly vet-able — people could self-identify whether they liked our style or not. And because we were so highly focused on a hyper-narrow offer and target segment, we became extremely refer-able... and our process was able to become so much more powerful and efficient from the hundreds of reps with companies in similar situations.

How did you reach your first 100 customers?

We have a pretty robust content flywheel.

1. We work directly with founders, testing and adjusting our framework.
2. We gain deep insights from the projects that we, in turn, convert to posts on LinkedIn.
3. We share these posts, which demonstrate our expertise and speak to other startups facing similar problems
4. These startups reach out to us for help, and the cycle continues.

In addition, we also share our frameworks and points of view on countless podcasts, newsletters, webinars, and live events for people in our target audience.

What distribution channels did you try that didn’t work?

Before focusing on LinkedIn, we tried a pretty robust cold outbound strategy. We created "ecosystem maps" — diagrams outlining the different types of companies and technologies within a given industry. The idea was to use these maps to secure meetings with executives at those companies. While this approach consistently generated calls, we didn't yet have a clear offer, so we weren’t able to close any customers.

We also built out a large video series... before we had any way to distribute it. We simply hosted it on our former agency's website and shared it with a relatively small email list. This also did not result in any business. It was only once we started using LinkedIn organic content that we landed real business.

What was your strategy to grow on Linkedin, and how effective has it been for lead generation?

Wes Kao, the founder of Maven, recommends making two types of content 1) Super-Specific How, and 2) Spiky Opinions. The first category is sharing extremely relevant step-by-step guides on how to do our exact process.

We have adopted an open source approach to our expertise — give away the insights/approach for free, but sell the implementation. Several companies will not work with us because we've told them exactly how to run our process. But there's also a very large group of founders who do not have the time to do our process themselves and decide to pay us to do it since we've already earned their trust by showing exactly what we would do.

The goal is to provide content that is so valuable that people would pay for it — a principle we've validated by selling a Notion database of all of our LinkedIn content for $50 (we've made roughly $50k from this sidecar product).

The second principle of Spiky Opinions is to share your contrarian points of view on things many people take for granted as truth. For us, we have many of these better to start narrow, than go broad... even as a venture-backed startup, "you should lead with product capabilities rather than product features," "you should message to the 'champion' in an organization on your homepage rather than the buyer," and so on. These strategies help our content to be more differentiated and memorable and are the main driver of why the algorithm continually pushes us out to the world.

How did you choose $10K as your price?

We've slowly increased our pricing over the last few years. We started at $3,000, then upped to $5,000, then raised to $7,500, and most recently got to $10,000. For a long time, our goal was volume — we wanted to run as many projects as possible with early-stage companies to build out the framework and make the process as robust as it could possibly be. We didn't want the price to be prohibitive, which is why we kept it sub-$10k for so long. However, we are now debating on continuing to increase the price and simply taking fewer projects overall (which would allow us to keep healthy margins but give us time to expand our service offerings).

‍What specific tools have been most helpful in growing your business?

We rely on several pieces of software to run our business.

• ‍Calendly is our main scheduling tool and is how we book all of our sales meetings.
• ‍Airtable is our CRM and where we keep track of all our client engagement, both pre-and-post sale.
• ‍Figma is where we make all of our designs for LinkedIn along with how we run all of our client workshops.
• ‍Slack is where we communicate with clients.
• ‍Signal is how we communicate internally as a team.
• ‍Notion is where we manage our content calendar, and where we share our content database with customers.

Who are some experts to follow to learn how to grow a business?

For service businesses, I would recommend David C. Baker (specifically his podcast 2Bobs) and John Warrillow (specifically his book Built to Sell). For founders of software businesses, I would recommend checking out "Lenny's Podcast" and First Round's "In Depth" podcast.

What drives you to do what you do?

I love seeing things grow. When I was 11, my brothers and I started a band. By the time I was 14, we were selling out larger venues in town—and I was hooked. From then until now, I've been obsessed with growing starting, and growing new things. Whether it was the church services I was a part of or music projects, I love leveraging content to help build audiences. My current band has ~110k monthly listeners on Spotify, and I have just as much fun growing that as I do with FletchPMM.

Any quotes you live by?

"Everyone's a clown... until they're not." - Michael Steinheiser

Any promotions you would like to add for Founderoo readers?

If you'd like to work with us and you're part of the Founderoo community, we offer a 10% discount on our main service.

Anything you want to add?

My first band

An interview from a former Fletch client

Your links + socials

Anthony Pierri LinkedIn

Robert Kaminski LinkedIn