Most founders don’t fail because they can’t build. They fail because they build the wrong thing, for the wrong customer, at the wrong time.
David Walsh learned that the hard way.
Before Limelight, he built and scaled an HR tech company to 250 customers, 75 employees, and over $30M in funding. On paper, it worked. In reality, he walked away with a different takeaway: he had optimized for the wrong metrics.
Headcount. Capital raised. Internal complexity.
Not customers.
That realization shaped everything he did next.
Why He Started Over
After exiting his previous company, Walsh asked a simple question: If I’m going to spend the next 10 years building something, what problem actually excites me?
The answer wasn’t HR tech. It was marketing.
Specifically, he saw a growing problem: customer acquisition costs were rising, traditional channels were saturated, and marketing leaders were under pressure to do more with less.
At the same time, something else was happening quietly.
People were paying more attention to individuals than brands.
Executives. Operators. Niche experts. Builders.
They were creating content, building audiences, and influencing buying decisions—especially in B2B.
That’s where Limelight started.
The Real Insight Behind Limelight
The idea sounds simple: connect brands with creators.
But the deeper insight is this:
B2B marketing is shifting from company-led to personality-led distribution.
Instead of relying only on ads or outbound sales, companies are starting to invest in creators who already have trust with their audience.
Walsh didn’t guess this. He validated it.
He interviewed over 100 B2B content creators
He spoke with 20+ heads of marketing
He tested whether brands would actually pay for this
Only after that did he commit to the pivot.
That’s a step most founders skip.
What Limelight Actually Does
Limelight is a marketplace and operating layer for B2B influencer marketing.
It helps companies:
Find relevant creators in their niche
Manage partnerships and communication
Track performance and attribution
Tie content engagement to pipeline and revenue
That last part matters.
In B2B, attribution is messy. A buyer might see a LinkedIn post today and convert months later.
Limelight’s approach goes deeper than surface metrics. It tracks who engages with content, enriches that data, and connects it to actual sales outcomes.
In one case, a client generated $25M in pipeline and $8M in closed revenue using this approach.
That’s the difference between “brand awareness” and something a CFO cares about.
What Most Founders Get Wrong About Product-Market Fit
Walsh is blunt about this.
Most founders think they have product-market fit too early.
His rule is simple:
If customers are willing to go through friction just to use your product, pay attention.
He shared an example where a customer manually downloaded leads from Limelight every day and uploaded them into another system.
That’s inefficient. It shouldn’t happen.
But it’s also a strong signal.
If someone is willing to do that consistently, the product is solving a real problem.
That’s closer to product-market fit than any dashboard metric.
The Shift in Founder Mindset
One of the biggest differences between Walsh’s first company and Limelight is how he thinks about growth.
Before:
Hire fast
Raise aggressively
Scale teams early
Now:
Stay lean
Stay close to customers
Prove repeatability before scaling
He’s also far more focused on distribution.
At Limelight, LinkedIn drives around 90% of revenue.
That didn’t happen by accident. He made a deliberate choice to build in public, post consistently, and turn content into a growth engine.
For early-stage founders, that’s a clear lesson: distribution is no longer optional.
Why Smaller Creators Win in B2B
One surprising insight from Limelight’s growth:
Bigger audiences don’t always perform better.
In B2C, you often need massive reach to drive conversions.
In B2B, the math is different.
Deal sizes are larger ($25K–$100K+ lifetime value)
Buying cycles are longer
Trust matters more than reach
That means a creator with 10,000 highly relevant followers can outperform someone with 500,000 general followers.
Niche beats scale.
The Hardest Part of Building Limelight
It’s not the idea. It’s not even the product.
It’s prioritization.
Walsh is balancing three different stakeholders:
Brands
Creators
Agencies
Each group has different needs. Each could justify its own roadmap.
With a small engineering team, every decision matters.
That’s the reality most founders face: not a lack of ideas, but too many.
Where This Is Going
Walsh believes most B2B companies will eventually run a creator-led growth motion.
Just like they use CRM for sales, they’ll need infrastructure for creators.
Limelight’s long-term vision goes beyond influencer matching. It’s moving toward a full AI-native platform for:
Social listening
Content creation
Performance tracking
Creator management
If that plays out, this isn’t just a new channel. It’s a new system of record for marketing.
Final Takeaway
There’s a clear thread across Walsh’s journey.
In his first company, he chased scale.
In his second, he’s chasing alignment.
Build for a problem you care about
Talk to customers before you build
Stay close to the user as long as possible
Focus on distribution early
Don’t assume you’ve figured it out
He started by sending free watches to influencers in his first startup.
Now he’s building infrastructure to pay them millions.
Same underlying idea.
Different level of execution.
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Chapters:
00:01 Introduction to David Walsh & Limelight
00:45 David’s Background: From Ireland to Tech Founder
02:06 First Startup: Building and Selling a Watch Brand
03:10 Scaling an HR Tech Company to $30M+
04:28 Education, Marketing Focus, and Early Career
06:45 Lessons from Not Having a Technical Co-Founder
09:50 Why Technical Leadership Matters Early
10:31 Founder Mistakes: Hiring Fast and Raising Too Much
12:33 What Product-Market Fit Really Looks Like
14:28 The Early Vision and Pivot to Limelight
16:32 Validating the Idea with 100+ User Interviews
19:59 Building a Creator Network and Growth Flywheel
20:17 What Limelight Does: B2B Influencer Marketplace
21:46 Challenges with Agencies and Market Strategy
24:10 Pricing Model and Budget Expectations
27:00 Solving Attribution in B2B Marketing
33:39 Brand vs Performance Marketing Debate
36:37 CPMs, Content Strategy, and ROI
38:09 Vetting Creators and Building Marketplace Supply
40:56 Supply vs Demand and Marketplace Dynamics
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:19):
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have David Walsh on the mic. He’s a three-time founder, a former high-level rugby player from Dublin, and the visionary CEO behind Limelight, the platform effectively building the operating system for B2B creator-led marketing. Matteson, an HR tech company to over 30 million in funding and moving from Ireland to LA. How’s that move going? We’ll have to talk about that. He’s now pioneering how enterprise brands like HubSpot, Clay, and ZoomInfo turn social engagement into measurable pipeline. Just last saw Cobra. He won the 1 million euro SaaS stock Europe competition after what he describes as a few too many peers entry decision. Let’s dive in. Thanks for coming on, David. Awesome, Brian. Yeah, you really amped me up there. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. I’m your number one hype man. I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?
David Walsh (00:02:06):
Yeah, I mean, you touched on some of the highlights. Maybe I’ll go from beginning relatively quickly. So from Ireland, but lived in the US for the last 12 years, always wanted to be in tech as an early stage. You know, 19 year old, I told my dad that I wanted to run a tech company by 25. And, you know, I think a lot of people laughed. He didn’t laugh because he was probably like, that’s going to happen if you set your mind to it. Emigrated to the US, landed in New York, lived in New York for five years, came up in I would say sales and also had a degree in marketing and then did a master’s in marketing. Worked in big tech, also worked in early stage startup companies, moved to Los Angeles seven years ago. My wife actually got a job at Netflix. So we decided to move to LA for one year. And now we’ve been here for seven years. I just moved down to Orange County and love it here. I also have a four-year-old son. And then from an entrepreneur perspective, this is my third company. My first was a watch company. So I manufactured a watch from scratch in 2017. Used influencers to grow it. So you had the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders wearing my watches, which is my claim to fame. Knew a bit about how to grow brands.
Brian Bell (00:03:07):
On the back, it’s like they turn it around. It’s like, here’s David’s phone number. Yeah, well, it’s amazing what you can get.
David Walsh (00:03:13):
If you give people free watches, they’ll do a lot of different things. And so we just had this hyper growth strategy of finding niche creators on Instagram and sending them watches essentially. And they just became this content engine. Ended up selling the company in 2019. And I started a HR software company, scaled it to 250 customers, 75 employees, raised $30 million. Ended up selling it to a consulting business. I was like, what do I want to do for the next 10 years? And I was like, I really want to make sure whatever I do, because building businesses, as you know, incredibly stressful and you’re all in and you’re nonstop thinking about the business, said, I really want to be passionate about the space that I’m in. Most of my career was HR tech, talent acquisition, job advertising. And I was like, I really want to sell to marketing leaders. Like that’s what gets me up, marketing and branding and that type of thing. Got very deliberate on that, launched Limelight. What we do is we are influencer marketplace for B2B. So nobody had done this for LinkedIn. We decided the future of all marketing is going to be personality-led, and it’s going to be people following people, executive content, employee advocacy, influencer content. And so we started with this thesis of let’s help marketers identify creators and influencers, but business-focused content creators. So think of them as people with the newsletter, podcast, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn presence, have built large audiences posting content regularly, haven’t really done brand partnerships. We built a marketplace to help them be matched to the right brand partnerships and ultimately get the companies a new distribution channel that’s more effective and get a better ROI. So long answer there to my background and happy to go into more detail on kind of the highs and the lows.
David Walsh (00:00:00):
I would call them like influencer advisors. We give them a few shares. We get them to be part of the program. We get them to advise us on the product delivery, and then they helped us exponentially grow. So I have this army of creators who are engaging on my content, who are part of the journey, who are on my investor updates. And that’s been one of the most impactful things. In fact, if anyone’s listening to this right now, that’s starting out and trying to build a product and thinking about distribution, go to influencers, go and, you know, attract them to become part of your journey. Now it was easier for me because I was building a product that would get them paid. So often I was putting these influencers that were on my advisory board at the top of the search results. So they were getting more inbound and more demos or sorry, more like performance proposals to get paid for brand partnerships. So it was self-fulfilling and it became this flywheel that helped us grow. For context, I started at 2,000 LinkedIn followers. I’m now at 41, 42,000. LinkedIn is our number one driver of growth. I’d say 90% of our revenue comes from LinkedIn.
Brian Bell (00:01:19):
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have David Walsh on the mic. He’s a three-time founder, a former high-level rugby player from Dublin, and the visionary CEO behind Limelight, the platform effectively building the operating system for B2B creator-led marketing. Matteson, an HR tech company to over 30 million in funding and moving from Ireland to LA. How’s that move going? We’ll have to talk about that. He’s now pioneering how enterprise brands like HubSpot, Clay, and ZoomInfo turn social engagement into measurable pipeline. Just last saw Cobra. He won the 1 million euro SaaS stock Europe competition after what he describes as a few too many peers entry decision. Let’s dive in. Thanks for coming on, David. Awesome, Brian. Yeah, you really amped me up there. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. I’m your number one hype man. I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?
David Walsh (00:02:06):
Yeah, I mean, you touched on some of the highlights. Maybe I’ll go from beginning relatively quickly. So from Ireland, but lived in the US for the last 12 years, always wanted to be in tech as an early stage. You know, 19 year old, I told my dad that I wanted to run a tech company by 25. And, you know, I think a lot of people laughed. He didn’t laugh because he was probably like, that’s going to happen if you set your mind to it. Emigrated to the US, landed in New York, lived in New York for five years, came up in I would say sales and also had a degree in marketing and then did a master’s in marketing. Worked in big tech, also worked in early stage startup companies, moved to Los Angeles seven years ago. My wife actually got a job at Netflix. So we decided to move to LA for one year. And now we’ve been here for seven years. I just moved down to Orange County and love it here. I also have a four-year-old son. And then from an entrepreneur perspective, this is my third company. My first was a watch company. So I manufactured a watch from scratch in 2017. Used influencers to grow it. So you had the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders wearing my watches, which is my claim to fame. Knew a bit about how to grow brands.
Brian Bell (00:03:07):
On the back, it’s like they turn it around. It’s like, here’s David’s phone number. Yeah, well, it’s amazing what you can get.
David Walsh (00:03:13):
If you give people free watches, they’ll do a lot of different things. And so we just had this hyper growth strategy of finding niche creators on Instagram and sending them watches essentially. And they just became this content engine. Ended up selling the company in 2019. And I started a HR software company, scaled it to 250 customers, 75 employees, raised $30 million. Ended up selling it to a consulting business. I was like, what do I want to do for the next 10 years? And I was like, I really want to make sure whatever I do, because building businesses, as you know, incredibly stressful and you’re all in and you’re nonstop thinking about the business, said, I really want to be passionate about the space that I’m in. Most of my career was HR tech, talent acquisition, job advertising. And I was like, I really want to sell to marketing leaders. Like that’s what gets me up, marketing and branding and that type of thing. Got very deliberate on that, launched Limelight. What we do is we are influencer marketplace for B2B. So nobody had done this for LinkedIn. We decided the future of all marketing is going to be personality-led, and it’s going to be people following people, executive content, employee advocacy, influencer content. And so we started with this thesis of let’s help marketers identify creators and influencers, but business-focused content creators. So think of them as people with the newsletter, podcast, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn presence, have built large audiences posting content regularly, haven’t really done brand partnerships. We built a marketplace to help them be matched to the right brand partnerships and ultimately get the companies a new distribution channel that’s more effective and get a better ROI. So long answer there to my background and happy to go into more detail on kind of the highs and the lows.
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Brian Bell (00:04:48):
Yeah, I see here you have an MBA from UC Davis. I would love to know about that decision. Davis is an hour away from me, so I just thought I’d ask. University College of Dublin. Okay, I just assumed UC Davis, sorry. So that’s my California-centric brain. But yeah, tell me about that. Do you actually use the MBA as a founder? Or in hindsight, do you feel like that was worth it?
David Walsh (00:05:09):
So I went to college, did commerce, broad degree, didn’t know what I wanted to do. Got exposure across everything from marketing to accounting to strategy and all of the different boring stuff. And I decided that I loved marketing, went back to college after completing my commerce degree to do a master’s in marketing. But truthfully, Brian, I was in the US at the time on a student visa. And the best way to get back into the US and stay in the US was to go and do another degree. And because in Ireland, at least we have a very strong ties to the US. And if you graduate from a degree, you can get a J1 visa. So I went back to do a master’s partly because I wanted to do more marketing and understand that and get the certificate that said I was smart. But really it was to get a visa to come back to the US. So I still use that. I have a master’s degree to feel important, but the reality is it was more to stay in the US.
Brian Bell (00:06:00):
Nice. Yeah. And that’s a very common path that I see with founders and folks, which I think is such a smart thing for the US. Like, hey, come get a graduate degree and stay. Well, you know, it’s kind of cool.
David Walsh (00:06:09):
Actually, Brian, my college reached out to me a couple of years ago and we’re like, hey, we’ve been following your journey and like, we’d love you to be part of our alumni program. And then the MBA group at university college at Dublin asked me to become a mentor. So now I get to mentor an MBA student every year who’s completing an MBA and doesn’t know exactly what they want to do and I help them with kind of career advice and you know my own experiences and I loved it this is my third year now and I have a new mentor got assigned to me a couple of weeks ago we met for our first meeting and I just I just get a lot of joy from that like you know you can build businesses and put your head down and be stressed all the time but the rewarding part is being able to give back to others
Brian Bell (00:06:48):
Yeah, I kind of joke that an MBA is maybe business administration. That’s what it stands for because a lot of folks in MBAs don’t like getting MBAs are really smart. They’re A type personalities, very driven, but they really don’t know what they want to do after they get that MBA. So it’s like maybe business. So you raised a ton of money for Matheson. Maybe you could walk us through that journey and kind of lessons that you’re taking away and applying to your current startup.
David Walsh (00:07:12):
Yeah, I mean, well, firstly, I would say the two things that I wanted to do different this time was number one, I didn’t hire a technical co-founder in my last company, and I just thought it was a huge mistake. I had to build a product, you know, offshore, then bring it onshore in a hybrid model, and then ultimately ended up rebuilding the whole product from scratch after two years and spending millions of dollars of building it. And so I never wanted to do that again. So I said, let me hire an amazing co-founder and CTO. Spent six months trying to find the right person. I won’t go into too much detail. You can ask me more as we go. Formerly at Uber, and he’s just been a phenomenal hardcore coder. And we’re just shipping products a million.
Brian Bell (00:07:47):
I recall that from the pitch deck. He was like a top coder, like a top 1% coder. And like, how important is that? And because this is something I argue with founders about when they pitch me. I already know how I got on the call if you don’t have a technical co-founder, but it has happened because I take so many meetings, I’m so nice. But, you know, I tell them like, hey, the first thing you should probably do is get a technical co-founder. It’s like, well, no, I could just like, you know, pay the offshore devs and like, why was that so painful? And what would you say to founders listening out there that don’t have a technical co-founder?
David Walsh (00:08:16):
So one caveat before I answer that, I think that the game has changed over the last six months. So I still think a technical co-founder is a requirement and it’s something you should invest in. But you can build products way more sophisticated than ever with these new AI tools and coding agents. I still think it’s really important to have somebody that knows how to build infrastructure and can identify blind spots. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and ultimately vibe code everything and then ever hire a technical team. I think that’s going to blow up at some point, especially if you’re building for the enterprise, which is what we do, right? We focus on HubSpot, Webflow, ZoomInfo, some big companies, right? They need to have enterprise grade code bases and like suck to compliance and other things so truthfully like I feel like building software when I started two years ago with this new business is expensive right like and you’ve got to think about how do I get this off the ground how do I build an MVP and I said like okay if I go and hire an agency and I got quotes by the way because I spent six months trying to find the right technical co-founder kissed a few frogs along the way the hard thing was like if I hire a technical co-founder that’s a hardcore coder he will build a product for me now we had to commit and get married and do a big equity share so we spent some time getting to know each other and make sure that we were the right fit and that we matched each other’s blind spots and ultimately it was a success in the end he was awesome his only requirement was at the time I had a team of maybe four engineers and his only requirement was that I fired the whole team if I was to hire him because he wanted to build it again from scratch that’s like okay so to the founders out there listening like technical co-founders are awesome right like in the end of the day I’m a business side like my mind is on the marketing the branding the finance the operations I need somebody to rely on that I trust to be able to execute and build a product and infrastructure the right way so that we don’t have to go and rebuild it again so I would say always invest in technical leadership at the early stages ultimately it doesn’t have to be the perfect person from day one right you can evolve and hire more people over time but you definitely want somebody that knows what they’re doing
Brian Bell (00:10:14):
Yeah, I often say that a business is fundamentally two things. You’re like making things and selling things, right? So who’s making things on the team and who’s selling them, right? And it’s very rare you have a world-class person in both of those domains. Can happen, but you’re better off having a division of labor. I think you can just do more and de-risk the startup dramatically by doing that. What other lessons do you take away from scaling Matheson?
David Walsh (00:10:38):
Yeah, I mean, all the founder mistakes that you can make, you know, decided that the things I wanted to focus on was how many people I employed and how much money I raised. And we did both of those things really quickly. And look, we were in a space that exploded in 2019. Diversity recruiting was where we were focused. And part of that was because I had built a indeed the large job site. When I was there, I came up with this idea, which was a marketplace of international talent. And so I ended up evolving that into this HR software company that was mostly talent acquisition. So I think like I had it backwards and now my mindset has changed quite a lot. It’s how do I keep the team as lean as possible and raise as little as possible to stay in control for as long as you can. And now at some point you scale exponentially and you need capital to grow. Don’t get me wrong. I think that’s absolutely critical. But to start off with, I think the focus is on users and customers more than ever. So I got a bit disconnected in my last company, I would say a few levels of management away from the user base. And I just like was making decisions with not enough information around the strategy. And you know and I’ll give you a story like an example we had a recruiting product and we had like a policy and procedures product and that was like a scoring system of talent acquisition processes and we moved away from the recruiting product and I felt like that was something I wanted to do aggressively and I probably did it too aggressively and then you know we realized that actually a lot of our customers really needed and wanted the recruiting product and we had kind of ripped it out or less focused on it less resourced for it so I think like the learnings are you know hire a great technical co-founder be the spokesperson for the brand from day one and be open to just building in public which we can talk about it have I done that with this company and stay as close as possible to your customers for as long as possible and when you think that you had product market fit you most likely don’t so don’t you know go hire a ton of people and then end up reducing your runway and increasing burn too quickly make sure that you build it sustainably
Brian Bell (00:12:33):
I love that and I’d love to tug on the product market fit thread a bit I mean how do what would a founder know you’ve done this a couple of times now how do you know you have product market fit what does that feel like on the day to day
David Walsh (00:12:43):
So I’m super critical of our own product and business all of the time. That’s my mindset. It’s this can be better. This isn’t good enough. And that’s the mindset I take every single day. So I would start by saying, I still don’t think we have found product market fit per se. We’ve had some success and we’ve got great companies using the product. But you need repeatable motions and something that’s stable and you need it for a period of time that you can say, okay, if I resource this and put money into growing this, it’s going to repeat the same function over and over again. And so product market fit changes, right? And it changes with the market. Sometimes you’re in control, sometimes you’re not in control. I think the things that I would look out for is our customers pulling the product from you right are they logging in doing things that are inefficient and I’ll give you a story one of our enterprise clients was going into limelight every day and downloading leads right they were actually downloading leads and then uploading them to their system every single day and I was like if they’re willing to do that painful of a thing every day then this is the thing we need to continue to build on so I think there’s constantly you’re evolving constantly you’re staying close to your customers and ultimately you just want them to be coming to you with requests versus you building features for them without validating that they need this and it solves a problem now there’s many other facets of product market fit but that’s the one I would focus on to begin with at least make sure you’re close to customers and they’re asking you for things and you’re not coding things before you know they’re getting asked and truthfully my CTO is giving out to me right now even just yesterday because I asked him to build three features and not enough people are using it so I’m learning every day too
Brian Bell (00:14:16):
Yeah, I love that. So Limelight, let’s talk about that. I mean, it didn’t start as Limelight. You actually did pivot. Maybe you could talk about the original vision and what caused the pivot. And when did you know it was time to pivot versus persevere?
David Walsh (00:14:27):
yeah that’s a really great question so i started with this thesis as i mentioned originally which is i want to focus on marketing leaders in b2b so i know build build b2b software for marketing leaders and the thesis was simple they need more efficient ways to grow right customer acquisitions costs are going up digital ads are more expensive it’s more saturated than ever how do we create a new growth mechanism for these people who are given a budget and the budget is sometimes now decreasing every year and they’re expected to deliver results so they’re constantly under pressure to figure out where the growth mechanisms so we started as Bundle which was a referral software for B2B companies so influencing your own user base to introduce more customers and I started building that infrastructure the payment processing the referral infrastructure and then and I started posting content on LinkedIn every day as part of this when my last company I didn’t speak publicly about the brand and this time around I went the opposite direction I actually went way too over the top with building in public from day one and because of that I started creating content I realized there was an opportunity to build for the creator economy in B2B there was thousands of individuals who have built large audiences that we could build a product for and help them do brand partnerships and so I pivoted into it because I became a creator myself now the thesis of marketing leaders need more efficient way to grow was still the same right it was just they didn’t just grow from their own users who might be influencers they grew from our network of influencers so I said I thought that the tapping into that audience growth would be more beneficial and it would help us scale quickly because when you put ten thousand dollars into the back of a creator you know into their back pocket every month they love you and they help you grow so before maybe for founders and other people listening to this you don’t just pivot immediately without data to support it so we did a ton of research we went out and I interviewed 100 B2B content creators I DMed them all on LinkedIn and emailed them and I said jump on a 15-minute call with me I want to meet you I want to understand why you create content why you haven’t done brand partnerships after doing 100 interviews I realized okay there’s an opportunity here and then on the brand side I did the same thing I went and met with 20 different heads of marketing and I said here’s the mock-up simple mock-up would you buy this product they said yes we said okay it’s time to move you can either pivot now or pivot in six months might as well try this and go all in and so that’s what we did
Brian Bell (00:16:39):
Yeah, I love that. And I talked to lots of founders who were just starting. And a question I’ll ask is, how many people have you talked to have you validated the problem and i mean you very much did that i mean talking to over 100 b2b creators and 20 corporate brands you really validated hey there’s an issue here and it’s surprising to me how little customer discovery where did you learn that skill because you’d already built a startup how did how did you know to do that so it’s
David Walsh (00:17:08):
It’s founder one-on-ones. Like if you don’t go speak to your users and understand them, you’re going to build the wrong product. And I’ve done that before, build products with this, you know, without speaking to users. So I made the mistakes in the past and I felt like, okay, this time I need to get it right. Now, truthfully, I was building, I was creating content on LinkedIn every day anyway. So I was really passionate and interested in this space, which made the conversations as enjoyable you know for me as they were potentially for that person right which was I was learning they were learning and I was just gathering data so it didn’t feel like you know your typical I have to do a hundred meetings and you know it’s going to be a drain and I’m going to be interviewing these people like if as if you’re hiring them it was like I’m learning a ton and I’m fascinated by this and like everyone’s coming at it with slightly different perspectives so I think I learned a ton very quickly recorded all of the calls with Read.ai which was our note taker emphasized that downloaded the transcripts uploaded them to LLMs went deep into okay what are we actually hearing here what are real quotes from these potential users and I just loved it right and I think we did well by doing that Brian the last thing I would say is like one of the most important decisions I made at Limelight was I hired 25 of the best B2B influencers I had met through the interview process in Discovery and I made them I would call them like influencers influencer advisors we give them a few shares we get them to be part of the program we get them to advise us on the product delivery and then they helped us exponentially grow so I have this army of creators who are engaging on my content who are part of the journey who are on my investor updates and that’s been one of the most impactful things in fact if anyone’s listening to this right now that’s starting out and trying to build a product and thinking about distribution go to influencers go and you know attract them to become part of your journey now it was easier for me because I was building a product that would get them paid so often I was putting these influencers that were on my advisory board at the top of the search results so they were getting more inbound and more demos and or sorry more like proposals to get paid for brand partnerships it was self-fulfilling and it became this flywheel that helped us grow for context I started at 2,000 LinkedIn followers I’m now at 41, 42,000 LinkedIn is our number one driver of growth I’d say 90% of our revenue comes from LinkedIn it’s been really successful for us just given the space that we’re in
Brian Bell (00:19:29):
Yeah, I love that. For someone who’s never heard of Limelight, explain the model. How does this marketplace work for both brands and creators?
David Walsh (00:19:37):
The, we decided with this idea of like, let’s make available ad space. Let’s pull available ad space has never been, I suppose, like what’s the right word like people have never been able to identify creators at the scale that we wanted to so simply put Limelight is a B2B influencer marketplace we have end to end creator management so we help them find creators organize them through a CRM and then measure the results we also added social listening so you’re constantly tracking leads that are being generated from the content partnerships because in B2B the buying journey is a little longer and there’s many touch points so we have to collect enormous amount of data and the theory was like let’s just create available ad space that hasn’t been available before and give it to these brands to be able to buy this ad space almost in like a programmatic way but using influencers and creators and if you’ve never done influencer marketing and this is brand new and you’re just listening to this it’s super messy it’s like the most messy process in the world because you’re dealing with human beings right so communication negotiation contract content review there’s all these like inefficiencies in it so we tried to build a system that can help them align brands align all of that and ultimately if they’re spending a million dollars on paid ads every month take 10 of that put it to creators and influencers instead of hiring a big agency who are going to charge you a black box percentage fee use our product and you get way more transparency in a scalable motion that allows you to do this without hiring a ton of people
Brian Bell (00:21:21):
Yeah, totally makes sense. And, you know, marketers constantly struggle with attribution. How do I know that that LinkedIn post actually resulted in a closed win opportunity? How do you kind of address that in the platform?
David Walsh (00:25:41):
Yeah, it’s tough. Attribution is so challenging, especially in B2B, right? So we would typically say, look, you have to have the standard things in place. You have to have UTM links that are customizable. You have to have self-reported demo attribution. You’ve got to measure your website traffic as content goes live. But no matter what, some people might read a newsletter or read a thing that they see on the newsfeed and then go elsewhere later on, not be in market and then come in market and not tell you where they came from. Right? So because there’s many touch points and longer sales cycle, it’s harder to identify. What we focused on is obviously all the standard stuff, which is like being able to measure impressions, engagements, reactions, click through rates. But we went one level deeper where we started to track everyone engaging on the content and enrich those leads and show the brands who their ICP like the job titles the person the company that is engaging on the content and then tie that all the way back to the sales pipeline and the revenue pipeline so what we’ve done for one of our big brands I won’t mention who but they were beta testing this product with us over the last few months they’ve generated 25 million in pipeline and 8 million in closed won business from just tracking influencers and their employee content seeing who engages on that content enriching those leads and then verifying that those leads were convert when they convert that there was touch points so the ultimate holy grail for us is to make b2b influencer not just brand based it’s performance based we want to unlock the paid ad budget at a lot of these companies and to do that we’re collecting a lot of data that supports that it’s a good investment and ultimately just driving leads
Brian Bell (00:40:39):
Well, David, thanks for coming on. Learned a lot. It’s always fun when I have a portfolio company on and I’m proud to have invested. Thanks for letting me be on the journey with you and wish you all the success in the world.
David Walsh (00:40:51):
Brian, you were one of the fastest decision makers when getting involved in the round. We met on Wednesday and I think you told me the next day I’m in and I just love that level of commitment and kind of validation. So great to have you involved.
Brian Bell (00:41:05):
Yeah, I appreciate that. And you’re actually, you know, my wife’s company, your 360 AI is using you guys and they really like you. And I think there’s at least one or two other Team Ignite portfolio companies using you guys, but we should definitely make a stronger push there.
David Walsh (00:41:18):
Yeah, well, don’t judge us on the product today. I’m very critical of our product. I think we can automate a lot of the workflows. I think a lot of it’s somewhat manual today and that’s what we’re excited about in the short term. Awesome.
Brian Bell (00:41:28):
Well, thanks so much, David.
David Walsh (00:41:29):
Thanks, Brian. That was awesome.
