Sergey Uh I see you have uh quite a big following on LinkedIn. For someone you have 27,000 uh for someone like me who's obviously uh dreaming about inbound um lead generation, right? So that that people start, you know, booking calls with me uh just knocking on my door and inquiring about my services. uh is there some sort of a path way to increase the organic growth on LinkedIn and if you maybe can tell how you have acquired uh so many followers and in in what time frame. I'm also interested to know.
Roman Um that's a very complicated question. I'm going to continue saying that um because it really depends on your goals and your resources and how well you can stick to your positioning. Um I I just give a workshop actually on setting goals and metrics and kind of uh reverse engineering the the two. Um, and I think it really depends. Like in general, if there was one core thing that helps you figure it out long term is really sticking to your niche and making it as specific as possible. Um, so I'm almost like avoiding the first question, so I'm just going to go into a second and maybe this helps answer the first and so please feel free to ask me any followup. Um, and the reason I'm saying this is because, um, I might have 27,000 followers, but the timeline of it is stretched across the last, I want to say 5 years. So, I actually started building my audience when I was fully employed uh, as a growth marketer at a recruitment SAS company here in Helsinki. Um, and I built it alongside being employed for completely different purpose. I was uh posting just about personal branding and then for over a year I was helping uh young marketers like myself build their personal brands on LinkedIn. I did a bit of coaching. I hosted workshops. I was basically practicing. Um and I grew basically from about a thousand because I had a bunch of random connections like everyone else at the beginning uh to about 15,000. But when I then I quit my job and I realized that uh young marketers cannot afford a lot of things understandably. Um and I was about to start my business full-time.
Sergey So this first spur in uh the followers account came from predominantly educational content. Is that correct?
Roman Oh 100%. Educational can make different Yeah. So, so it was completely different audience. I think it was education but it also was a lot of entertainment like I was collaborating with a lot of people in the space. I was doing a lot of events, collaborations u like going to workshops and really just honestly commenting and staying on the platform for hours like I was just building those connections. Wow. Um, no. But if you had to ask me, uh, and I had to ask myself that, was that bringing me any revenue? At the time, I was not thinking about it. So, no. But when I quit my job and I start like I had to think about generating revenue because all of a sudden I made this big decision to quit my job and become a soloreneur. Um, I had to figure out the different markets that could afford my services. And in the beginning, it was just founders and CEOs. like I was not focused on climate um even though I wanted to and for about 9 months I was just experimenting with a bunch of stuff. after 9 months only is when I really just put climate tech in my headline and I started sticking to it and it's been uh almost two years now I think since I've been predominantly focused on climate tech and I'm so glad that I stuck with it because I had so many moments where I just doubted if it was working because of outreach results or my content was deep uh or I was seeing dry spell months or my revenue was not growing as fast as I wanted. Um, but I think at this point I can safely say that uh sticking to it has helped me get to where I am now because now uh 40% of my um business comes from uh referrals. Another 40% comes from inbound and the rest 15 20% is like a mix of different just conversations like what was the second source? Not much inbound. Oh. So they reach out to me and uh they asked to work with me and uh I've noticed a steady increase in it. Um, and I think a lot of it is thanks to my positioning, a ton of content that I produce and also, uh, just getting better at understanding the audience cuz I started getting some clients on climate and tapping into their networks gradually helped me understand what they do, their space better, uh, engage with the right people as well, start conversations in the DMs. Like, it's a it's it's, you know, the phrase death by a thousand cuts. This is like a growth with a thousand bricks, you know, you have to put in like thousands of mini steps in order to get there. Uh especially if you enter the space that you're not as familiar with because when I entered climate, I was passionate about it, but I didn't really know the industry that well. That's why it took me nine months to just get there and then another maybe year to uh confidently say, "Yeah, I'm going to stick with it." and another year to well where I am now I'm pretty much at a capacity uh and I'm thinking of building a new vertical.
Sergey Well, it takes balls balls to to really stick to something that uh does not signal you know uh uh success um in the first month two three four.