Safe Doesn't Scale Podcast Por David Walsh arte de portada

Safe Doesn't Scale

Safe Doesn't Scale

De: David Walsh
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"What's the ROI?" Those three words kill more creative marketing ideas than bad execution ever will. Not here. Safe Doesn't Scale is a weekly podcast for marketing and growth leaders. We’ll be interviewing Heads of Marketing, Unicorn Founders, and Revenue Leaders at B2B companies to prove that the riskiest marketing campaigns drive the biggest returns. While brands are burning $500K on LinkedIn ads that are generating zero demos, there’s someone out there who closed a $2M deal they sourced from a meme. Host David Walsh, Founder of Limelight, breaks down real examples from brands spending less and converting more by leaning into creator-led growth, unconventional distribution, and campaigns that make traditional marketers panic. You’ll learn: How growth leaders sell “unsafe” ideas to the C-suite How to attribute sales pipeline to content, creators, and social signals Why the campaigns that feel uncomfortable often drive the most revenue No e-book downloads. No buzzwords. This show is for marketers with a chip on their shoulder who are tired of playing it safe. We celebrate the campaigns that make legal sweat and sales teams crush quota. Because marketers who don't take risks won't exist in 2027.Copyright 2026 David Walsh Economía Gestión y Liderazgo Liderazgo Marketing Marketing y Ventas
Episodios
  • The Best Influencers Aren't Influencers (with Max Nimmo from CreatorWorks) | Ep. 21

    The Best Influencers Aren't Influencers (with Max Nimmo from CreatorWorks) | Ep. 21
    Aug 6 2026
    The Best Influencers Aren't Influencers. B2B teams will happily pour money into paid social for a year before asking it to prove itself. Give a creator program three months and one post, and the same team wants pipeline by Friday. That double standard is quietly killing a channel before most companies have run it properly once.ㅤDavid Walsh, founder of Limelight, sat down with Max Nimmo, who started CreatorWorks a year ago and now runs creator programs for B2B SaaS and AI companies. They get into what a creator budget actually has to be, why organic content on its own stopped producing results, and how to turn creator posts into thought leader ads without blowing up your rates. You'll leave with a number to benchmark against and a clear view of where creator content sits in a go-to-market motion.ㅤMax came into B2B from gaming, where he ran campaigns with YouTubers and Twitch streamers for brands like Activision Blizzard, then moved to the performance side building marketing mix models for influencer spend. He brings both halves to this conversation: the creative relationship work and the measurement discipline that most influencer programs skip.ㅤGuest BioMax Nimmo is the founder of CreatorWorks, a creator-led growth agency for B2B SaaS and AI companies, which he started in London a year before this recording. He spent his early career in gaming influencer marketing, working with YouTubers and Twitch streamers on campaigns for brands including Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty, before moving to the performance marketing side and building marketing mix models that measured influencer spend against paid media. At CreatorWorks he runs a small team supported by an automated middle layer, managing pods of five to 10 clients across LinkedIn creator programs, thought leader ads, and intent tracking. Before he founded the company, he hadn't logged into LinkedIn in about five years. He describes the version of himself that stumbled into the industry as someone playing video games 16 hours a day at university with no idea what to do next.ㅤWhat We CoverWhat creator-led growth means: Max separates the sponsored post everyone recognizes from the wider motion he sells. Organic creator content sits at the foundation, then thought leader ads, engagement tracking, and signal capture turn it into a loop rather than a one-off campaign.Why organic alone stopped working: Partnerships that rely purely on organic reach aren't producing the results brands expect anymore. Max is direct that impressions and CPM are the wrong scorecard, and that consistent results now require going beyond organic.From Call of Duty to LinkedIn: Gaming adopted influencer marketing early and understood creator distribution before anyone else. Max traces the line from managing campaigns with Twitch streamers to building marketing mix models to landing in B2B, where product creation is commoditized and distribution is what's left.The 10/80/10 agency model: The first 10% of any campaign is human strategy. The middle 80% runs on agents, workflows, Airtable, and Claude Code. The final 10% is a human check before anything reaches a client or goes live, which is how a very small team supports a pod of five to 10 clients.The real budget floor: Max reverse engineers from the number of creators, pieces of content, and data points needed to see results in three months. That lands at 10 to 15K per month as an absolute minimum for LinkedIn, before ad spend or usage rights.The measurement double standard: Nobody expects one Meta ad or one event to generate a flood of leads, but a single creator post gets held to exactly that. David adds that sales cycles often run six to nine months, longer than most companies have even been running influencer.The B2C playbook mostly transfers: Roughly 80% of what Max ran for D2C brands is what he now runs in B2B. The differences sit at the back end: tying content to a CRM, routing intent to SDRs. He calls the wider "you can't apply consumer playbooks here" argument rubbish.The best influencers aren't influencers: Founders, analysts, investors, and people doing the work day to day carry the most influence, and none of them think of themselves as creators. That changes the working relationship, because they need real input on hooks and formats rather than a brief and a wave goodbye.Reading the algorithm in real time: Max uses Favikon to find top-performing posts and creators, then collects CSVs from creators because LinkedIn's own reporting doesn't give enough. He describes a creator with over 100,000 followers whose lead magnet posts suddenly couldn't clear 200 impressions.Big creators versus small creators: David's experience is that brands reach for the largest names by default and get worse outcomes. Max pushes back on the binary: different creator sizes serve different jobs and should be measured on different things, but budget forces a choice.Usage rights get negotiated on day one: Thought leader ads run about 3X ...
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    29 m
  • The $50,000 Floor Nobody Tells You About Before You Try Influencer (with Stephen Titus from Faved) | Ep. 20

    The $50,000 Floor Nobody Tells You About Before You Try Influencer (with Stephen Titus from Faved) | Ep. 20
    Jul 16 2026
    Most B2B teams have already run their influencer test. Four or five creators sitting dead center in the category, twenty or thirty thousand dollars, a handful of posts, and a quiet decision that the channel doesn't work. The test was never big enough to prove anything either way.ㅤDavid Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with the co-founder of a competing marketplace to argue about where creator budgets actually break. You'll walk away with a spending floor, a reason to buy creators outside your category, and a straight answer on what AEO changes about influencer content.ㅤStephen brings four years of running flat-fee creator partnerships at scale, a bootstrapped P&L that forces him to care what brands actually renew on, and a blunt estimate of how little of B2B advertising currently reaches creators at all.ㅤGuest BioStephen Titus is co-founder and CEO of Faved, a marketplace connecting brands with creators for flat-fee sponsorships. He runs it with a team of eight, more than 30,000 creators, and hundreds of brands, and has deliberately kept the company bootstrapped after raising venture capital for earlier ventures. He and his co-founder are engineers who first met the world of influencer marketing by accident: they built a productivity smartwatch straight out of university, ran a Kickstarter, and discovered that niche communities could drive volume that paid media couldn't. Multiple failed startups followed before Faved. He now works with consumer brands in supplements and cosmetics alongside a growing roster of AI and software companies.ㅤWhat We CoverTwo founders, two watch companies: Both David and Stephen started watch brands and backed into influencer marketing the same way.Why flat fee, not commission: Stephen's case for making creator deals more transactional and merit-based.The sin of raising VC too early: Investors became the customer, and the actual customer got ignored.Bootstrapped as a forcing function: Revenue as the funding model ties the platform's goals to the brand's goals.The real competitor is an agency: Not platforms. Mostly no-name agencies and headcount.Alignment before spend: Awareness, clicks, qualified interest, or sales. Pick one before the budget moves.The $50,000 floor: Below that, on one platform, across 20 to 30 creators, you learn nothing.What the first 50K actually buys: One or two creators worth doubling down on with the next 50K.Go non-obvious on category: A CRM should be buying performance coaching and freelancer creators, not just sales creators.AEO, SEO, GEO: Stephen's view that it's all the same job with a new front door.Trust beats topical match in LLM answers: Why a running creator mentioning HubSpot can outrank a sales creator.Consistency over spikes: Monthly baseline spend, or your competitors take the share of attention.B2B is under 1%: Stephen's estimate of creator spend as a share of B2B advertising budget.ㅤResources MentionedFaved: Stephen's flat-fee creator sponsorship marketplace.Limelight: David's B2B influencer marketplace, discussed as the friendly competitor.Luma AI: Named as one of the AI brands running creator partnerships.Notion: Cited as a brand reaching prosumer audiences through creators.Skillshare: Example of an advertiser running a known playbook that just needs tooling to scale.Brilliant: Named alongside Skillshare as a scaled creator advertiser.HubSpot: Used in the example of trust outranking topical match in ChatGPT answers.Kickstarter: Where Stephen's first company discovered the power of niche communities.ㅤSafe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.
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    31 m
  • 68% of Executives Say This One Thing Would Make Them Hit Their Numbers (with Sangram Vajre from GTM Partners) | Ep. 19

    68% of Executives Say This One Thing Would Make Them Hit Their Numbers (with Sangram Vajre from GTM Partners) | Ep. 19
    Jul 9 2026
    Most B2B companies are running inbound and outbound because they're comfortable, measurable, and feel like a spreadsheet they already know. That's exactly why the motion that creates the biggest deal sizes and longest customer relationships stays chronically underinvested.ㅤDavid Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with Sangram Vajre, co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, to get into the real mechanics of go-to-market: how teams lose alignment, why partner-led motion outperforms everything else, and what it actually takes to build content that 175,000 people read weekly.ㅤSangram has been in the rooms where these decisions get made. He ran marketing at Pardot through a $2.5 billion Salesforce acquisition, co-founded and scaled the ABM platform Terminus to over $100M in revenue, and now runs the go-to-market research firm he built from zero to ~$10M without raising a single dollar.ㅤGuest BioSangram Vajre is co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, a data-driven go-to-market analyst and advisory firm he built alongside Bryan Brown, Lindsay Cordell, and Judd Borakove. Before GTM Partners, he co-founded Terminus, one of the companies that created the ABM software category, and before that ran marketing at Pardot through its acquisition into Salesforce. He's the author of three books on B2B go-to-market, including MOVE, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller co-written with Bryan Brown. He's spoken at UNBOUND (formerly INBOUND) for ten consecutive years and hosts the GTMonday research newsletter, now published as Run on GTM OS, with over 175,000 subscribers.ㅤWhat We CoverWhy marketing is a silo of silos: The graphic designer, the demand gen manager, the ABM lead, and the social team often have no shared understanding of what they're collectively trying to accomplish.Renaming meetings as a GTM alignment tool: A "marketing attribution meeting" signals the conversation is about justifying marketing's existence — rename it "pipeline velocity" and the whole orientation shifts.How Henry Schuck runs alignment at ZoomInfo: He replaced weekly executive meetings with a daily 9 AM go-to-market session: no decks, no status updates, just the team watching how decisions get made in real time.68% of GTM executives say clarity would make them hit their numbers: When given a list of external pressures, nearly 68% of executives said clarity on their own go-to-market strategy would matter more than fixing competitors, AI, or macroeconomics.The six go-to-market motions and why partner-led wins: Of the six motions GTM Partners tracks, partner-led produces the largest deal sizes and highest business value — and is chronically underfunded because it takes the longest to build.The Salesforce and Bombora playbooks for partner-led growth: Bombora skipped building a sales team entirely, embedded its intent data inside Terminus, Demandbase, and 6sense, and took a revenue share on every deal.Story first, content format second: The CEOs who build the strongest brands are the story — what works for successful creators isn't the posting cadence, it's that they have something real to say.How GTMonday grew to 175,000 subscribers without paid ads: GTM Partners wrote original research every week instead of blog posts, and one day 600 IBM employees subscribed because someone dropped the link in an internal Slack channel.LinkedIn as an LLM and the case for commenting over posting: Comments on high-followership accounts can generate more impressions than standalone posts — for anyone starting out, commentary is a faster path to visibility.The bet on GTM fractionals as the next wave: Sangram's thesis is that operators in their 40s and 50s who feel disrupted by AI are sitting on their most valuable asset: two decades of judgment that AI execution can now amplify.ㅤResources MentionedGTM Partners: Sangram's go-to-market analyst and advisory firm, home of the GTM Operating System framework.Run on GTM OS: GTM Partners' weekly research newsletter with over 175,000 subscribers, formerly published as GTMonday on Substack.ZoomInfo: B2B data and intelligence platform whose CEO Henry Schuck recently changed the company's Nasdaq ticker from ZI to GTM; mentioned as a GTM Partners client and daily alignment case study.HubSpot: B2B CRM and marketing platform mentioned as an example of a company that scaled by making partners central to its revenue motion.Bombora: B2B intent data company that grew without a direct sales team by embedding its data inside ABM platforms and taking a revenue share.Demandbase: ABM platform mentioned as one of the partners that distributed Bombora's intent data.6sense: Account-based marketing and revenue intelligence platform, also a Bombora distribution partner.PartnerStack: Partner relationship management platform David Walsh considered building before launching Limelight, and a current Limelight integration.impact.com: Partnership and affiliate management platform mentioned alongside PartnerStack as a reference ...
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    37 m
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