How ASK BOSCO tracks founder-led LinkedIn content as a distinct CRM attribution category | John Readman

**John Readman** (0:00)
I knew exactly what car I wanted, I knew exactly what spec, and we had the money. How long did it take me from walking to the show and to be naturally able to talk about buying the car? It was a physical hour sat there.

**Brett** (0:14)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, the show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, we're speaking with John Readman, founder of Ask Bosco. John, thanks for being here.

**John Readman** (0:51)
Thank you for having me on, Brett. Excited to get into this.

**Brett** (0:54)
Of course, super excited as well. I want to talk about your company, what you're building, how you're building it. But before we do, let's talk about your LinkedIn. So we were just chatting a bit pre-interview, 25,000 followers. I'm guessing that didn't happen on accident. Take us behind the scenes on what the strategy looked like to get to that follower count.

**John Readman** (1:09)
Well, I think the big thing for me was I've always been interested. I think this came from my father. My father ran his own business in the local city, and he would go around and I thought everybody in the city knew him, but they didn't. But he just had a way of talking to people, remembering their names, keeping hold. I just thought, it's quite interesting how you can get on in business, remembering people you've worked with, connecting them. So I used to run this pre-LinkedIn spreadsheet of people, whether it be customers, whether it be former colleagues. So when LinkedIn came along, this was amazing. But the first problem was there wasn't anybody else on LinkedIn. I was one of the first people, certainly in the UK, if not the world, first few thousand on LinkedIn. I was so excited about this thing. Then over time, I've just made an effort to not only connect with the people I actually physically meet with, talk to, have engagement with, meet at conferences with. I also regularly post both videos, content, whatever's relevant, get my team to repost, get people to like, share, follow. I'm always learning. I'm fascinated about. I think that LinkedIn's got so many opportunities that they're not leveraging. I could help write them a paper on how they could do better. But it's been a purpose and I speak at a lot of events. The last slide is connect with me on LinkedIn. If you and the QR code will go up, I've got my own QR code, just go straight to it, as I'm sure lots of people have.
It's just been a thing and I enjoy the conversations I actually have. The other big thing, I think, if anybody is listening, the people listening to this is the easiest way to increase your visibility on LinkedIn is actually commenting meaningfully on other people's posts.
I know that takes effort.

**Brett** (2:53)
In terms of business impact, how do you think about the business impact that you've seen? I'm sure there's some ways that are hard to quantify, but for the things you can quantify, what does that look like for you?

**John Readman** (3:02)
The business impact for me for LinkedIn, so I went through a phase on LinkedIn of qualifying who wants to connect with me and challenging why they want to connect with me, which is a good tactic sometimes because most people are trying to sell me outsourced dev services or recruitment or whatever. If they've got a good picture, a good story, they look like an interesting person, I'll connect with them. I'm not overly egotistical about, I'm not connecting with you. But I once had this inbound thing of, I want to buy SEO services from your agency.
And that's often people trying to actually sell you white labeled SEO service for some random country. And so I was like, oh, can you just qualify exactly what you're talking about? I don't just want to connect with random people on LinkedIn, I value my network. Anyway, they were the head of global digital marketing for one of the world's largest print on demand businesses called Vistaprint. And he needed SEO for 14 countries.