Welcome to this week's episode of startups for the rest of us. I am your host, Rob Walling. As you well know,

each week on the show, we cover topics related to building and growing startups using an ambitious,

yet a sustainable approach. This is episode 518, and today is an experimental format. It's a format. I don't

believe, if I recall, we've never done, but it's more than 10 years, so you know, you can't quote me on that. In essence, we get about, I would say, 20 cold emails and pitches a week for guests and potential guests wanting to come on the show. And my memory is that we have had exactly zero of those cold pitches on this podcast. It's just too overwhelming

to go through them. And frankly, most of them are so far off topic that it's just a sea of

conversations that would not be relevant to the startups for the rest of us audience.

This week may mark the first time that I've ever had someone on who has cold emailed, and this is a LinkedIn ads expert named Anthony Blatner. And in fact, he didn't call email. He called LinkedIn Outreached me. And the reason I was intrigued is I like talking to specialists in their area. So Facebook ad experts, Google ad experts, LinkedIn ad experts, someone who

really knows their space and knows how to how to engineer it and do it well. I'm always intrigued

by their knowledge. And so I started talking with Anthony a little bit. I actually listened to a couple

other podcasts that he was on and realized he knows what he's talking about. He actually runs

an agency called Modern Media. It's at Modern Media. Dot I-I-O. And as I started thinking about it, I thought, you know, I could bring him on and have

the same general conversation that he might have on any other podcast where I say, who do LinkedIn

ads work for? And how should you target them? And general question number three. And we could run

through it. And that would be a fine interview.

But I started thinking, you know, what if I brought a startup founder on the show who might be considering doing LinkedIn ads or is going to be doing LinkedIn ads soon? And had Anthony basically do a

live back and forth conversation, like a real, almost like a real client consultation. And so that's what I did.

So I reached out to a few founders I know. And as luck would have it, John Samuelson, a co-founder of

Scatterspoke, which is the company that I interviewed last week. So I interviewed John and his wife,

Colleen, about them starting Scatterspoke, which is an online agile retrospective tool.

And so we got to talk through their story last week.

And then he was available to do this and he had considered LinkedIn ads.

And it just seemed like it made a ton of sense to just piggyback this week's episode with last week.

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