Finn Thormeier - Founder & CEO, Project 33

I’m writing a case study for myself. Why?

Because we eat our own dog food.

Let me explain:

In 2017, I dropped out of my college and decided to document my journey and share it on different social media platforms.

As I grew my following on LinkedIn in 2018, two business owners independently from each other reached out to me and basically said: “Hey, these videos you put on LinkedIn are pretty cool. Can you do this for me, and I’ll pay you money for it?”

That’s how Project 33 started.

Me and a friend trying to create LinkedIn content for business owners (we eventually broke up and I started from scratch, alone, six months later).

Since then, it has been a continuous process of:

- systematizing how we create content for customers,
- delivering results more reliably, and
- understanding B2B companies and their sales processes better.

We now use the exact same process we use for customers on ourselves. I record 8 videos every month with Jay, I filled out our own onboarding questionnaire, our video editors and copywriters create my content, and we then post these videos on my LinkedIn, on our Project 33 LinkedIn page, on our company Youtube channel, and in our email newsletter.

In 2022, we’ve grown to 8 people through this content.

And here are some of our results:

➡️ Revenue

As a bootstrapped company, we did $100,000 in cash collected in 2020, just over $250k in 2021, and if we stay where we are right now, an estimated $500-600k by the end of this year.

Most of our revenue growth came from the content we posted.

➡️ Sales

Our sales cycles are comparatively short for a ~$30,000 B2B solution: We close most people within a month and 1-3 calls.

It’s mainly because people already know and trust us from our content before they hop on the first call with us.

Roughly 70% of our customers come directly through our content or referrals.

We now started adding a couple of other channels, like Facebook ads and cold emails to our outreach strategy. But even, for example, the ads we’re running and the emails we’re sending use the same videos we post on LinkedIn.

➡️ Hiring

We found half of our team members through our content because they were following me or someone on the team on social media.

They already knew who we were, had seen our processes, and understood how we operated, so the cultural affinity was very high. This made the hiring process very easy and short.

➡️ Product improvement

Using our own processes for ourselves allows us to address the inefficiencies. We don’t always have to wait for our customers to tell us if something is not working.

And it’s skin in the game – we practice what we preach.

When I bring in our 1st salesperson or our 2nd creative director, I will make sure that they use our process to create their own videos, too.

We’re obviously very excited about the process we’ve built. We’ve used it for ourselves and continue to use and improve it.

That’s why I’m writing this case study for ourselves.