Roman Pikalenko: LinkedIn Growth for Climate Tech Founders — Ghostwriting, Audience Building & Newsletter Strategy | Be Yourself Podcast

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RomanPikalenko

Europe's Leading Climate Tech Ghostwriter on the LinkedIn Mistakes Founders Keep Making — and How to Build an Audience That Actually Brings Investors, Talent, and Customers to You

38 minutes

LinkedIn · Climate Tech · Ghostwriting · Personal Branding · Newsletters

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About This Episode

Why Every Climate Tech Founder Needs to Be on LinkedIn — and Why Most of Them Are Getting It Completely Wrong

Roman Pikalenko is one of Europe's leading climate tech ghostwriters, based in Helsinki. He works with Series A founders and executives to attract capital, talent, and customers through LinkedIn content strategy. He grew his own audience to 27,000 followers over five years — first in personal branding, then pivoted fully into climate tech after nine months of experimentation. Today, 40% of his business comes from referrals and another 40% from inbound.

In this episode of Be Yourself Podcast, Roman breaks down the most common LinkedIn mistakes founders make: relying on AI to generate content without the foundational skills to course-correct, staying silent during early R&D out of fear that competitors will steal ideas, and only starting to invest in LinkedIn when they're already fundraising — instead of 6 to 12 months before. He explains why sticking to a niche, even when it feels like it's not working, is the only path to sustainable inbound growth.

Roman also makes the case for newsletters as the most underrated tool in a founder's marketing stack: they convert seven times better than social media, they remove reliance on algorithms, and they let you build direct relationships with your most engaged readers before you ever ask them to buy anything.

Why LinkedIn is the single most important platform for climate tech founders

Investors, top talent, B2B customers — all the key decision-makers are there, and organic reach is still healthier than anywhere else

The biggest LinkedIn mistakes founders make — and how to fix them

AI as a crutch, hiding during R&D, starting too late — and why posting something imperfect beats posting nothing

How Roman grew from 1,000 to 27,000 followers — and why the first 15K barely mattered

The practice round, the pivot to climate, and why sticking to a niche for two years is what actually worked

ICP profiling and why "selling to everyone" kills your growth

How to treat niche selection as a time-boxed experiment — and when to pivot vs. when to persevere

Why newsletters convert 7x better than social media — and how to start one that actually works

Own your audience, remove algorithm dependency, and build direct relationships with your most engaged readers

About the Guest

Roman Pikalenko — Climate Tech Ghostwriter, LinkedIn Strategist & Solopreneur Based in Helsinki

Roman Pikalenko is one of Europe's leading climate tech ghostwriters. He helps Series A founders and executives attract capital and talent through LinkedIn content strategy, and has grown his own LinkedIn audience to 27,000 followers over five years. He started as a growth marketer at a recruitment SaaS company in Helsinki, built his audience on the side, then quit to go full-time as a solopreneur.

After nine months of experimenting with different niches — cybersecurity, Salesforce consulting, wellness coaching — Roman went all-in on climate tech. He gave himself a three-month experiment: reach out to 200 potential clients in climate tech, and if he didn't land a single one, move on. Within a month he had his first client. Two years later, 40% of his business comes from referrals and 40% from inbound.

Roman currently works at near capacity on LinkedIn ghostwriting and is building a productized vertical — a series of workshops for marketing teams inside climate tech companies who want to develop in-house ghostwriting expertise. To reach him, find him on LinkedIn and mention this podcast.

Expertise

Climate tech ghostwriting, LinkedIn content strategy, personal branding for founders and executives

LinkedIn Audience

27,000 followers — built over 5 years, starting in personal branding, pivoting to climate tech after 9 months of experimentation

Business Model

40% referrals · 40% inbound · 15–20% outbound/conversations. Near capacity on LinkedIn work, building a productized workshop vertical.

Clients

Series A climate tech founders and executives. Past clients include atmospheric water generator companies, wool-based insulation startups, and food tech angel investors.

How to Work with Roman

Reach out on LinkedIn and mention this podcast. He is very responsive — especially if you're building something in climate.

Key Quotes

It's a growth with a thousand bricks, you know, you have to put in like thousands of mini steps in order to get there.

Roman Pikalenko

You will own your audience meaning uh you will not be subject to your social media algorithms.

Roman Pikalenko

All the key decision makers, if you're fundraising, all the investors are on LinkedIn. If you're looking to hire top talent, they're all on LinkedIn.

Roman Pikalenko

Episode Chapters

0:00 On This Episode 0:42 Who's Roman 1:08 The Climate Founder LinkedIn Gap 2:56 How Big Is the Climate Tech Market? 5:41 Founder Personal Branding Mistakes 11:14 Growing a 27K LinkedIn Audience 17:32 Does the Wrong Audience Still Help? 21:23 Know Your Customer or Fail 25:45 Climate Startups vs Big Polluters 27:53 Why Newsletters Still Matter 32:19 The Newsletter Playbook for Founders 35:34 Ghostwriting for Beginners

Full Transcript

BTW: This episode of the Be Yourself Podcast is produced by Beverly Media. Also on the show:
James Lawler — 25-Year CIA Officer on Recruiting Foreign Spies & Spy Psychology →

0:00 On This Episode

Roman All the key decision makers, if you're fundraising, all the investors are on LinkedIn. If you're looking to hire top talent, they're all on LinkedIn. If you're looking for B2B customers, and honestly, even B2C, there are different ways to target B2C market, you can do it with LinkedIn quite efficiently. It's one of the best platforms on social with the organic reach, which is tanking right now, but still remains to be rather healthy compared to something like Facebook. And uh because it's a professional network, you can actually see who is engaging with you like for example Sergeyenko and not Beast Master 69, you know, so it's much easier to make connections.

0:42 Who's Roman

Sergey Hey everyone, welcome to the Be Yourself podcast. The podcast on expressing our true selves. Today my guest is Raman Paleno who is one of Europe's leading climate tech ghost riders. He help founders series A founders and executives to attract capital and talent and mostly do this through LinkedIn. So Roman welcome to the show.

Roman Thanks for having me man.

Sergey Uh is that something that climate tech uh founders need? Do they need to uh kind of get better at LinkedIn?

1:08 The Climate Founder LinkedIn Gap

Roman Yeah. So there are two ways to answer this question. One is uh aspirational, one is practical. Aspirational um means if you look at how much the uh the opposite side spends on marketing and the opposite side is basically companies that uh promote greenwashing, fossil fuel back companies, fossil fuel companies themselves. Um the climate companies uh don't nearly have as much exposure. So in my opinion, the more they do, the more they can push their narrative uh which is more helpful to the planet. Um and LinkedIn is one of the efficient ways to do it because a lot of the key decision makers that bring the most impact to their business are on LinkedIn. Practical um let's just say what I what I just mentioned uh all the key decision makers if you're fundraising all the investors are on LinkedIn. If you're looking to hire top talent, they're all on LinkedIn. If you're looking for B2B customers and honestly even B2C, uh there are different ways to target B2C market, you can do it with LinkedIn quite efficiently. It's one of the um best platforms on social with the organic reach which is tanking right now, but still remains to be rather healthy compared to something like Facebook. Um, and uh, because it's a it's a professional network, you can actually see who is engaging with you, like for example, Sergeyenko and not Beastmaster 69, you know, so it's much easier to make connections.

2:56 How Big Is the Climate Tech Market?

Sergey Yeah. Well, I'm definitely an advocate for LinkedIn as well. Even though even though I'm still cracking the code, you know, as far as outreach goes, my my results as far as uh you know, um closing deals or finding people through cold outreach is is not superb at this at this moment. But I'm going to tell ask you a little bit more about the climate uh tech u companies market. So can you tell us more about how many companies are born right now in this area? Is it a hot market and what's going on globally in this business area?

Roman Right. So it's kind of difficult to answer in a way that it's a very diverse space. So think about any um hardware or software technology out there that is with a purpose of uh helping the climate or sustainability right so if you look at for example US versus EU market you'll have completely different answers um the main challenge that they face though is communicating simply the value of their work hence you know working with someone like me because any technical field tends to be very uh jargon field and uh there's a big segment in climate tech uh where the founders and technology is very much sciencebacked so it's not like an AI software platform um a lot of it could be a completely novel technology so first of its kind one of my uh clients is pushing commercial atmospheric water generators and if I tell that to someone they're like what the hell is an atmospheric water generator and another client has a wool uh based insulation and while everyone knows what the wool is no one really knows how exactly it works. So like a lot of those companies they are tackling they are challenging the status quo. For example uh for the wool client of mine uh they are basically uh facing off an industry that has been using polyisterin packaging for 70 years. seven decades of business basically being the same. And so the challenge uh here is obviously the product like the product needs to be awesome but we all know that products don't sell themselves. You have to really go out there and spread the word. Um and I just think they have it harder because they have to explain it more and uh simplify it even more. And that's a harder skill to get than like explaining fitness coaching.

5:41 Founder Personal Branding Mistakes

Sergey Okay. So, and they resort the resort is not a good word. They decide to work with people like you who have a deep understanding of the platform. Um, and you also have a deep understanding of the of of their market. I understand. But still uh is there still a lot of things that people some basic things that people do wrong? Like for people like me I try to you know win on LinkedIn myself as a founder. Is there still a lot of things basic things that you see founders just do wrong that can be fixed like that? If you can maybe give us few few free tips of advice that would be cool.

Roman Well, number one thing is of course the use of AI. AI is still to is still believed by many to be uh a thing that will fix everything. But to be honest, it's just a tool. Um it's like, you know, believing that when Photoshop came out, uh people thought that graphic designers will become obsolete. But in the end, it's the uh top 50, top 20, top 10% graphic designers that had the foundational skills who knew how to become 10 times better with Photoshop uh that became more in demand. Um so it's like this overlines and thinking, yeah, I'll just talk to Chad GPT and I will create content. I genuinely believe if that helps you produce something from nothing on a consistent basis, that's great. That's an upgrade because right now a lot of people are not posting anything. It's better than nothing, let's say. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So, if every climate founder listening uh to this goes and starts posting three times a week using Chpt and it's not perfect, that's way better than doing nothing. Okay. Um but then you know the question of quality comes in and uh keeping up with all of it because what AI cannot do is course correct when something goes wrong. It cannot explain why certain things are not working. It cannot uh adjust the strategy for you because that's a foundational skill that a person normally would have a consultant like myself uh who happens to know how to write as well. Um and that's sort of the value of working with a ghost rider. Another thing that people tend to uh get wrong is just not seeing the value in uh building their uh online visibility. I think there's a lot of fear especially in early stage companies um about uh not wanting to talk about their um work because they're too early stage and competition is just going to steal everything which in my opinion is fair to a certain degree. Um but one could also argue if uh someone can just copy paste everything you're doing your product is not good enough so you should work on that. And the secondary uh part to it even if you're deep in R&D and developing like a carbon capture technology you don't have to share like the blueprints to everything you do on a daily basis but you can talk about your own journey you can talk about the problem that you're solving and you can start building connections with other people in the space before you need them because what a lot of people uh tend to do is they only look at LinkedIn uh last in it when they need it. They only start investing in it when they start fundraising, not 6 or 12 months before. And so they, you know, like it's a common thing in any startup space. Um, pitch your uh slide deck to 200 investors and get one yes. That's like fantastic. That's the industry average. I think that's I think you could definitely increase the number of yeses or at least interest if you start being proactive about it uh long before which is timeconuming and which is why people work with someone like me.

Sergey Are you talking about building in public in a way? In a way, yeah, I think it will be abs so cool to have more especially those uh technologies that are rooted in science uh climate scientists in general. I think it will be really cool to have more of them on the platform because I think the platform right now, LinkedIn specifically, uh is full of topics on AI uh recruitment obviously because that's how LinkedIn started. Um, and then just like how to win on LinkedIn to the point where even if it's a climate person like an investor who gets some success in LinkedIn, then they stop talking about investments or industry updates. They start talking about how to grow your audience on LinkedIn, which is to me a bit weird because that's not what you actually do. Yeah. Um, and there are plenty of like personal branding people out there, so it just becomes a little more saturated.

Roman Yeah. people uh forget about the their identity a lot of times when they hit the success. I I I actually read about this yesterday that people a lot of times just change what they've done because of the early success, change the narrative and just start, you know, playing more to what people actually want them to talk about while speaking about their successful whatever.

11:14 Growing a 27K LinkedIn Audience

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.

17:32 Does the Wrong Audience Still Help?

Sergey So you're saying that let me get it this straight. So you're saying that your first 15,000 even though they were not related to uh climate uh tech they still helped you. So you would recommend people to build any type of audience although you know I have a friend who who's got a a huge Indian followings and people from uh third let's I don't know if they're going to take offense to this but third world countries I I personally don't connect with all these requests coming from India and Pakistan just because I don't want to have a bunch of following from these countries. So, u but but you're saying that your first 15,000 still helped you even when you pivoted and started uh kind of uh building this new vertical working in the in the in the climate tech.

Roman Yeah, in a way because basically the first 15,000 followers or that that journey from 1 to 15 was the practice round. Uh practicing in terms of content creation and building connections like just how to behave on a platform. Um also I think if I did not go through that phase I wouldn't have met uh a friend Matt Barker who is the one who recommended that I try ghost riding in the first place. Wow. He gave me a lot of advice on the pricing positioning and he said that uh my writing was at a good enough level that that actually made sense for me. Um and when I actually quit my job and I announced that I'm going fullon on ghostriting um I got a couple of leads as well. And so that following while they had nothing to do with climate that definitely helped me in a way uh with that transitional period of the first nine months cuz I had initial clients who had nothing to do with climate. I had a guy in cyber security. I had a guy who was a salesforce consultant, a construction scheduling firm. Um I had a wellness coach. I had a fitness coach. And then eventually when I decided to go into climate, it's not that um I sat there week over week week wondering if it's going to work or not. I actually when I decided to make that decision to to go into that direction, I treated it as a three-month experiment. I told myself, I'm going to go all in and try to reach out to 200 people in climate who are my potential target audience. talk to them and if from that within three months I don't land a single client then this niche doesn't work for me and then I just move on to something else. Uh within a month I landed uh an angel investor in food tech which is a subsegment of climate and that basically was enough for me to validate the whole thing because I also had a nice arrangement with her. I I give her a discount because I was new to this industry in exchange to just having calls with her about the industry, interviewing her about her experience investing. Uh she eventually connected me to someone and like that did not lead to the uh work but it led me to understanding the industry deeper. So you almost have to kind of get obsessed at the same time as well about the niche and not just say for example right now I am targeting uh 5 to 20k MR fitness coaches and uh sit there and wait for them to come to you. You have to really understand the behavior of what are their day-to-day problems. Uh and if you don't find people who might and start talking to them um and right now AI actually helps with a lot of it.

21:23 Know Your Customer or Fail

Sergey You know, I had Chris do on my show. Uh he's one of the worldrenowned uh brand strategists and coaches and he I love Chris. He emphasizes the importance of doing a very deep ICP uh I ideal customer profiling and I saw him master class and this is obviously what you're saying that you understand how much they earn you it seems like uh you both guys agitate for a real deep understanding of your ideal customer, right? And and why why do people don't do this more often? Because we want to sell everything for everyone. I guess that's the the reasoning, right? And we think that we're going to sell more because the market is bigger, because the sheer number of people is bigger, but that's a mistake, right?

Roman Well, that's that's the reason you just said it yourself. people think that they need to be broad in order to sort of cast a wide net and see what sticks and it can work in certain scenarios and I would even you know if something hypers specific has not worked for some reason or you feel discouraged you could cast a wide net and see what sticks but um you have to treat everything as an experiment so like I said I treat it as a three-month experiment so if you want to go wide go wide but give yourself a specific timeline give yourself a specific goal And if it doesn't work, move on. What I think people uh struggle with is they switch between niches too often. Like I have so many friends like between the one and 15,000 followers. I made a lot of friends in personal branding space and I talked to a couple of them now and they're like pivoted for the fourth time. They were coaches. They ran communities. Then they had a service which I thought was successful. Then they abandoned it. They now they're life coaches. and they are doing short form Tik Toks. I'm like just stick to one thing, man. Obviously, if nothing uh none of it is, you know, resonating with their soul. I get it. But, um I could not like I would go insane. I would I would make a bet that uh that's because not because not resonating with her soul, but because uh the the the um my monetary result did not did not follow. And so you're saying that you got you got to you got to persevere just a little bit longer. Just when you think that that that the experiment is over, just stick with it just a little bit longer and see what happens. That's the best case scenario. Obviously, if you have to pay rent yesterday, that's a different conversation. Yeah. Um because I I I I was proactive about it. So when I was still employed, I started freelancing on the side and uh I was actually doing account management for one of my friends clients. So he was ghostriting for that cyber security company and I would log into the uh founders and the executives LinkedIn and I would uh leave comments and send DMs on their behalf. So I was like a glorified VA in a way. And then um my friend decided he doesn't want to go stride anymore and he went into coaching. He gave me that client and that was my first ghost riding client. That's how I started. Then gradually I found another one and another one and there was churn obviously. So when I quit the job though, I was making about 70% of my full-time salary with just my side hustle. And if you follow Justin Welsh, he actually advocates for that to be the most sustainable strategy. uh because quitting cold turkey and having no recurring revenue is way more painful.

25:45 Climate Startups vs Big Polluters

Sergey uh my audience and every I think every audience love the stories about David against Goliath and uh it seems that with your startups and the founders that you work they are all going against brands or companies that actually uh harm the climate a lot. So, um, what is the conflict between the climate focused companies and the big big large uh brands with deep pockets that actually pollute our our uh climate?

Roman Well, if we're talking about values, then it's simple as that. People don't want to be buying from Coca-Cola because they know there's a lot of uh bad associated with it and even waste and people don't really want that. But uh the lack of alternatives is a problem or awareness of the alternatives and so uh that is sort of the conflict sometimes. Um I think in my client's case most of the time it's not the specific brand that they're going against but it's rather than uh rather an outdated industry standard. So uh my water tech client um they are basically offering uh decentralized distributed water systems. So, let's say there is a forest fire or there is a tornado. It sweeps through your uh city in Texas and it knocks down the grid. Uh the city gets water shortages. All of a sudden, there are water rations and water is the basic human need. Like you can't survive without it for more than 3 days, I believe. And so what they offer is something that given that you have the humidity, enough humidity in the air, you could deploy it as a backup and then just not worry about going thirsty. Um but the but the industry standard is basically the utilities, the slowmoving industries that have uh basically normalized the fact for a lot of people in especially big cities that well why would you want to get something like that? Water is cheap. You get it through your tap. So it's like this almost thinking that we're used to uh that is uh in need of decoupling sometimes. Mhm. If that makes sense.

27:53 Why Newsletters Still Matter

Sergey Yeah. We have roughly 10 minutes left but I want to talk to you about something the the advice that you have given me when I reached out to you. We were talking about the power of newsletters. Just yesterday I was talking to a few OGs and uh I have a like a mastermind group and folks from the US told me that I asked them do you still you like open newsletters read newsletters to is to which to my surprise they they said no like empathetically no and I'm like really so because Raman actually uh told me that in order to build a community or uh group of lawyer followers, newsletter could be could be a great asset. So, can you make a case for newsletter and maybe you can give us uh some tips on how to start uh and what is how to start the newsletter, right? And what the mentality should be as someone launches a newsletter.

Roman Okay. So why you should start is uh you would own your audience meaning uh you will not be subject to your social media algorithms. So if you're someone who is very active on LinkedIn right now, you are very aware that the reach is garbage. Uh I have 27,000 followers and I feel like I have two because my reach uh tends to be so like high and low. It it's crazy. Um, and so it removes the reliance on the algorithm and it also creates more intimate relationship with people because then you speak to their inbox directly rather than on social media. Um, I think it also if you're feeling creative, it gives you space to go more long form. Um, especially in climate space, a lot of people like are visionary founders. They have a lot of interesting concepts they want to break down. LinkedIn has a very u severe in a way 3,000 uh character limit. Uh on email you could go like 10,000 words. You can write a mini book if you want. Um how to start a news slayer is um just like anything um with positioning. The more specific you'll be the better in terms of who you help and also in terms of what you deliver. So you I think just saying something like sign up to my newsletter, no one will care. But if you say something like um if you are an early stage climate tech um CEO or co-founder and you're struggling to build visibility for your brand before you even need it. Every Monday I share strategies that I'm using with my series A climate startups uh that you could use yourself. So you could almost like pick an audience that you work with, target uh those that are a step below um and share the strategies that you are implementing and learning at the same time. I think what makes it more valuable regardless of how you do it is making it tangible. What makes it tangible is to give them something um they can use. So like talking about mistakes that people make, sharing a template, they could use a guide. Uh almost think about it as a subchapter of a of a book. You know, if uh if you were to be published, would you actually write it? Um my newsletters tend to be I think around 2,000 or a,000 to 2,000 words. Uh just because I go a little more in depth. Um, and then frequency like once a week I think is a standard. Lower than that um is good if you really just want to start but the golden uh golden beginning is once a week. There are newsletters that do it every day. Uh and I think that uh something I will eventually do but when you do that uh and you publish every day um I think there's also an expectation that your readers will not read every day. It's more of a volume game. But email also too like why email is good. Email converts way better than social media. Oh, seven times better according to some studies.

32:19 The Newsletter Playbook for Founders

Sergey Wow man. This is very symbolic because after we've spoken four months ago about starting new maybe something like that. Finally, today I'm going to set to send my first campaign and I've started it and I've created it on Kit with Kit. It's got a free uh f the t tier like up to 1,000 subscribers and uh I'm going to create the landing page in a way that you just outlined. So if you are struggling or or if you are hesitant on how to start a podcast and if if you don't know what are the benefits of podcasting, I'm going to give them some stats that podcasting is overcoming the world uh capturing the media. Netflix is uh um collaborating with Spotify to try to compete with YouTube on podcast. So, I'm going to give you give them all the reasons to believe and I'm going to also let them know that I am a I am I'm someone who's walking the walk, not not only doing the talk, right? And if they recognize themselves in this description, in this landing page, I have a higher chances of them uh signing up for a newsletter. And what I do next, I feed them with practical advice on the weekly basis. Not expecting them to buy anything. Not I'm not pushy, right? I'm just giving them practical value, but there's always uh like if you want to work with me, so this is the way how it work like in in my uh estimation, right?

Roman That's that's a good that's a good start. Yeah. And I think uh once you establish that trust and especially if you start getting feedback um when you do decide to bit to go a bit harder on sales I think it's important to actually be direct sometimes. So um what you could always do let's say on Mondays you send the educational um email and you always have a PS if you want to work with me that's great. Um, but let's say in Q2 you want to push your sales and you want to get like one or two more customers. I don't think it's going to hurt. You send a shorter direct sales email, let's say on a Wednesday separately from your newsletter. And what I think was is really interesting about email marketing is because how deep you can go because you can gather like you're using kit so you can gather a lot of engagement data in terms of who's uh the most active reader. Yeah. and then you can create uh put them in a segment and only target the very active people with your uh sales email further down the line. So you're actually increasing the conversion rates and increasing open rates. Um and that's something that LinkedIn can do. Um that's why that layer while it's complex um I find very interesting.

35:34 Ghostwriting for Beginners

Sergey Yeah. Well, finally I'm going I'm going to do this. Thankfully to you, man. Um, do you want to do you want to say do you want to let our audience know how uh what are the project that you're mostly interested right now? Uh what is the maybe the easiest entry point they can try out your services even understand the value of working with a ghost rider? Something that the audience um can can do as far as cooperating with you.

Roman Mhm. So uh at the moment I am near capacity uh but not at a capacity yet uh for my LinkedIn work um which means that I'm starting um I'm actually start I've started planning a new vertical for my business which is productized vertical. I have no plans on going into an agency mode. Um I just don't want to run an agency. It's too stressful. uh unless all of a sudden I get like 50 people asking me to work with me then maybe it will change. Uh that's not the case right now. So I'm thinking of um building a digital product uh but first validate that idea through a series of workshops and the audience for it will be marketing teams within those series A climate techch companies or even just early stage founders simply because they have more time than someone who is who raised series A. And the goal uh for the marketing teams is to build the in-house expertise uh for the ghost riding because I have a lot of prospects who tend to think that they want to, you know, give it a go themselves. They don't really want to outsource it for one reason or another. Uh I personally think it's best to outsource at the beginning and only very large companies have the resources to pull it off inhouse. But if they want to do it, might as well give them the resources to go and execute the best they can. And if it doesn't work, then they can come always and ask me for actual uh collaboration. And so that's what I'm working on in terms of project. Um how people can work with me. Um there's my website, but honestly, if you just reach out to me on LinkedIn and mention this podcast, uh that's that's as simple as it gets. I'm very responsive. Um yeah, especially if you're someone cool be building climate uh I want to work.

Sergey Cool. That was Raman. Thank you man and have a great day. Thank you for the conversation, your time.

Roman Thanks for having me, Saki.