I like to think I'm ambitious.
That I can overcome any obstacle because I have the skills and tools to do so, even if it's so painful I'd rather give up within an hour.
Which is why it hurt so much to leave my previous job. It gave me the footing not only in my marketing career, but in Helsinki as whole (I was an immigrant). Thanks to that job I felt stability for the first time in my life.
I was so grateful.
And yet I was leaving it.
I resisted it till I couldn't anymore.
By January 2023 it'd been almost 2 years of me growing my own personal brand on LinkedIn.
To me that looked like:
- 100s of LinkedIn posts published online
- About 12 young marketers I helped 1:1 to do the same through 3 coaching programme attempts
- Roughly 13,000 followers and great engagement on my account
- Dozens of great people I met along the way; some became my friends, some mentors, others were stepping stones on my journey
But I had to start working my way out of the company I worked for.
I was a growth marketer at a recruitment SaaS startup.
That meant rapid marketing experiments every 2-4 weeks. I learned A LOT. Ads, web copy, website optimization, managing OKRs, social media marketing, SEO, and about 5 more hats because why shouldn't an in-house marketer do 10 people's jobs, right?
I'm not complaining by the way.
It was my first proper job and it felt great.
Eventually, though, none of my ideas were met with the level of enthusiasm I got used to. "Not enough budget", "Not a priority", "Doesn't fit the current OKRs", "We'll try it in the next quarter".
There were some internal problems. Perhaps company's goals were blurry. I'm not quite sure to be honest with you.
But I was 24yo and I heard it all.
It meant one thing...
...My ambition outgrew the company's capacity to fulfil it.
So on March 8, 2023, I took my manager, Rémy, out for lunch.
I picked a spot he particularly liked.
A nice Italian restaurant by the train station. The kind that's fancy enough that a junior employee could afford and still classy enough for serious conversations. I felt like a genius.
But I was also veeery nervous.
Rémy and I became good friends over the 2 years of working together.
He was a great manager, equally ambitious, and understood what made growth marketing awesome. It perhaps helped that he was French and one more foreigner in a Finnish company. Can't help it if I felt some sort of kinship, okay?
So, holding my breath, I blurped it all out:
"I'm quitting and starting my own business."
Silence.
Then a smile.
"I kind of expected this", he said.
"Really?", I wondered.
"Yeah. It makes sense. I mean of course it sucks because I'll miss working with you, we got a ton of projects, and another person on the team is going to be taking leave in a few months...but I'm really happy for you."
Even writing this I'm not sure how to express in words the level of gratitude I felt in that moment.
One of those blurry but clearly good memories, you know? Where details are fuzzy and clear at the same time. No? Just me? Maybe it was all the red wine at noon I drank nervously.
Anywhoooo...
It took me 9 more months before I embraced climate tech.
Just so you know, this isn't a perfect story of a perfect start of a perfect guy.
F*ck no.
Once I quit and had my final leave, the following months I dealt with some of the biggest trials by fire in my career (at that moment):
- I had the most acute case of the Shiny Object Syndrome. I believe I invested about €10,000 throughout the year in about 3 comprehensive coaching programs, 5 different self-paced courses, and a few 1:1 consulting calls. All of them were great. None I truly committed to.
- I was still transitioning from account management to 100% ghostwriting. I actually started doing A LOT of VA-style work, primarily doing engagement on LinkedIn for various accounts. I'd log in their profiles, reply to comments, leave new comments, manage DMs, send connection requests, and report back to my client. I had quite a bit of fun with one of my clients because we share a type of crackhead energy and humour so it was rather easy. But at one point I was doing this for 5 accounts + myself. That was too much.
- I had very little confidence in myself. It showed on sales calls. I questioned my positioning every month. In fact, I switched from target founders and executives → 6-figure founders → tech founder → back to 6-figure founders → sustainability tech founder → back to 6-figure founders → until.....
Until I had enough.
There's a recording somewhere in Premium Ghostwriting Academy around Christmas 2023 where I ask Cole, one of the founders, yet another question about my niche.
"You know the answer, Roman."
At that point it's been 5 months since I joined and I binged the whole curriculum and attended every workshop and live call. But I didn't really act on any of it. Yet.
On that call, I was asking Cole if going into climate tech would work for me after all my jumping around.
And once I heard Cole say the obvious, it somehow clicked in my brain.
"F*ck it, I'm just gonna do it."
Seriously, I've had people reference that recording to me so many times. And for a good reason.
Right after the call I made a plan that got me into climate tech
This was my situation:
I half-assed a bunch of niches that weren't really niches. I had commitment issues. I was afraid to fail.
So I put my growth marketing hat on and turned into one big experiment:
Part 1: My extremely simple test.
Reach out to 200 people in climate tech within the first 3 months in the new year. If I landed even ONE client, that niche was validated and climate tech was safe to claim. If not, I'd move on to the next.
Part 2: Remove all distractions.
You know those end-of-the-year purges you do where you unsubscribe from all the crap emails and leave all the group chats that bring you zero value?
I did that and dialled it up a notch. At that point I had almost 17,000 followers with barely any on climate tech space. And my feed was still full of personal branding content and influencers.
I manually removed close to 500 connections just to keep my network from getting diluted more.
Part 3: The ultimate binge.
For those who don't know, PGA has a massive repository of content and workshop recordings.
These guys, after 3 years are still running 6-8 workshops per week. I had to know everything, especially in the outreach department.
So I gamified it.
I played the recordings at 1.5x speed while playing The Finals on my Playstation when I had no work. The flow of the game kept me locked and since there's no story or anything specific to pay attention to part of my brain was listening to the workshops and another part was gorging on the dopamine.
I attribute most of my knowledge and experience I got from PGA to this method.
Within a month, I landed a serial angel investor in food tech as a LinkedIn ghostwriting client. Which instantly proved I could do it.
My bar was low, but that was on purpose.
What I'd do differently in those 9 months if I started today
Now, mistakes are only mistakes if you haven't learned anything new and acted on them.
I had plenty of both.
Which is why if I were to go at it and quit my job tomorrow, I'd approach my ghostwriting and finding first 3 clients very differently:
- I'd purge 1,000 people from my network instead of 500 within the first 30 days
- I'd go to at least 2 climate tech conferences in person within the first 6 months
- I'd max out my connections at 150/week every single week. At my current acceptance rate of about 32%, nine months of that is about 1,700 new quality connections. All potential prospects.
- I'd attend Ship 30 by Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole as early as possible and start writing my email newsletter the way I do today.
- I'd build one lead magnet every 3 months to grow my email list.
- I'd talk to at least 5 new people in climate tech every single week.
And I'd stop dicking around and actually commit to PGA from the start.
I joined in July 2023, resisted the whole thing, basically wasting 6 months, before going all in.
It's easy to look back at when I started and say I could've or should've done this or that. I'm grateful for the lessons and struggles I went through.
Without them, who knows? Maybe I would never have:
- Published a book on climate tech storytelling
- Worked with 3 LinkedIn Top Voices in climate
- Ghostwritten for a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder and a UN-ITU chairman
- Gotten to do public speaking in Amsterdam
- Gotten to my first 6-figure year in revenue
- Or gained the insane freedom I have in my life
I hope this was at the very least entertaining for you.
And if you learned something useful, let me know!
I've never actually written that part of my life in such detail before.
Talk soon,
Roman
P.S. My origin story is chapter 4 of the book, next to the six other stories every climate tech founder should be telling. If you haven't grabbed it yet, it's here: From Invisible to Investable
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help:
1/ Use my Climate Tech Post Vault → my 55 most reused LinkedIn post templates. The posts behind them pulled 13,321 reactions, 2,187 comments and 999,365 impressions.
2/ Buy your In-House Ghostwriting OS → An all-in-one system for solo marketers and small marketing teams in climate tech companies to create, launch, and grow a system for building their CEO’s personal brand on LinkedIn.