🎶 I wanna go where the people are… (a LinkedIn story)

Get this: I'm using LinkedIn.

Wait, wait, before you hit unsubscribe (or call in the hostage negotiators)… hear me out.

This is about growth, for Noko time tracking.

We've always grown by content marketing (ebombs) → word of mouth. Bottom up. So we'd get large customers because someone who worked there, usually a developer, would find Noko, realize they love Noko, and advocate for it internally at their employer.

That's a powerful path. Word of mouth is the strongest type of marketing there is.

It's also slow.

One of my goals for growth is to reach those decisionmakers — agency owners, mostly — directly. Save myself several steps and hopefully lots of time.

But they're hard people to track down.

I never did find a watering hole that was full of agency owners. Instead of clumping together for my benefit, they're sprinkled across various skill-oriented watering holes (design, dev, biz).

Over the years, I had accepted that… just the way things are.

Last summer, I caught up with a friend. He's an entrepreneur too, operating in a very different space. And, he told me, he uses nothing but LinkedIn.

The results he gets with it are simply incredible. Connections, buyers, partners, investors… he's found them all, not just for his company, but for his girlfriend's company, and his clients' companies.

Admittedly I was still skeptical. His business was not like my business. My way — ebombs and WoM — has always worked for me.

And I'd always said that avoiding LinkedIn, with its rat king of recruiters and business-boomer memeposters, was chief among the benefits of owning my own company.

But he convinced me I was wrong.

He wields LinkedIn like a knife: Precision targeted work to achieve specific results. He doesn't engage in the usual LinkedIn nonsense, or even post much at all; he has a very specific strategy. And he's coaching me to do it his way.

So here we are.

After several months of building my network with his help, I'm about to host my first event. (That's LinkedIn jargon for "webinar.")

I'm going to talk about a new Noko feature that agencies will love: tracking and reporting on internal and external hourly rates, a powerful tool for profitability.

And quite a lot of the folks who RSVPed are agency owners.

How about that.