... what happens to your business?

Oh, we've seen, like, 10X the amount of traffic to multiple brands' websites and their content because they actually distribute it.

A brand came to us a few months back.

They had a white paper that they created.

It was, they, it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, design, stats, surveys, all of this stuff, and they promoted it once on LinkedIn, they got, like, six leads.

The right approach is to do what I just said and then distribute it and start to amplify it, et cetera, and from that, you're just going to see the leads start to trickle in.

We've had one example where we created a piece of content for a client, and instead of taking the traditional route, we distribute it, we amplified it, et cetera.

What was your biggest win in 2026?

Kind of what was the trigger for it even? Had you seen Reddit, you know, providing results for folks or what?

Yeah, so back in 2018, I wrote a book called Cracking the Reddit Code because marketers were so afraid of this channel.

And I was a Redditor first and foremost, and I believed that you could actually do marketing on Reddit correctly if you understood a few nuances.

So for the last few years, I've been working closely with Reddit, working with brands, helping them do marketing on Reddit.

But one of the things that has recently changed is how dominant Reddit is in the search.

And when Google and Reddit announced a partnership right before their IPO, it led to a path in which Reddit started to dominate the SERPs.

So the search engine results pages in Google, where for the vast majority of bottom of funnel and middle of funnel queries, I was noticing that Reddit was showing up.

Right.

... what would you do? If you, if you had a limited amount of time, limited, like what would you actually do?

Yeah.

Great question.

So the first thing I would do would be probably open up Claude.

I'd add a connector to something like Ahrefs, Profound, AirOps, et cetera, so I can gather some data, and I'm gonna use that data to give me understanding of gaps that exist on your current website.

Specifically, though, I'm gonna focus on bottom of funnel, so I'm gonna be looking at commercial and transactional intent queries.

So look for gaps from a search perspective.

How do you judge it?

... what's the starting point of what, what you would re- recommend to someone?

Yeah.

So the first thing you need to do is do research into your buyers.

I think every good strategy, every good marketer recognizes the importance of research.

You're going to understand the queries, the questions that your customers have.

And along the B2B buyer's journey, there's going to be a lot of different questions that get asked.

At first, they might be asking, "How do I solve a certain problem?" Then eventually they might be asking, "What is the best solution in this category?" Or, "What is the top solution in this category?" Or if they're a little bit more savvy, they might get very descriptive, and they might say something like, "My company is an XYZ that solves ABC problems, and we have 500 staff members who need to be able to achieve X, Y, and Z by this date.

... to find out what to do?

general terms and not about me, correct? Right.

Exactly.

And then we cross our fingers and hope that maybe that piece that we created was so good that someone will pick it up, that maybe someday someone will read or watch or listen to the thing that we created.

And it's going to go viral, that someone's going to share it.

Someone's going to sign up for our podcast.

Someone's going to subscribe.

Someone's going to become a member of your thing, whatever it might be.

it mean at the level where you now operate as like the CEO of distribution.ai and the leader of this 50 person team?

[laughs]

I think we live in a world where it all needs to be rooted in a cross-organizational shift that needs to happen.

Whoever, whoever oversees marketing and comms, they need to come together as a unit and as a group and say, "We believe that our people are one of our greatest assets, and one of the best things that we could do for these individuals, both professionally and from a capitalistic lens in driving revenue and shareholder value, is to probably elevate some of the key stakeholders publicly on social." So how can we do that? Well, marketing understands marketing, and the PR comms folks know what they can and shouldn't say.

You bring both of those individuals to the table, and then you create shared metrics, metrics that might seem a little high level at first glance, like impressions, reach, growth, et cetera, but they'll also trickle down into the metrics that matter a lot, where it's like pipeline, revenue, and sales.

So if we are seeing an increase in pipeline and source deals associated with so-and-so's LinkedIn or so-and-so's X account, then maybe we have a signal that the personal brand work is actually working.

So for me, I think you need to bring leadership together to determine the goals and the objectives, and then you create an engine where you're providing those individuals with content and the, the resources they need to show up.

Now, when it comes to the execution side, I like executives who can create their own content.

How are you measuring ROI beyond the vanity metrics to be able to get a stronger picture of, of attribution?

Right? [laughs] Like-

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, though, like for the listeners, Google recently came out with this-- They had a session where they were talking to the industry, and they said there's two types of content: commodity content and non-commodity content.

Commodity content is like five tips to get into sales, five ways to have a great onboarding experience, five colors that you should make your buttons if you want to invoke emotions of happiness.

But non-commodity content is content that requires research, analysis, and actually doing the hard thing to bring it to life.

So, for example, if I'm running a website about running shoes, I'm going to create a piece that talks about how I ran for 20,000 kilometers, 20,000 miles with five different pairs of shoes, and this is what I found.

Yeah

Okay.

I haven't been blocked in the last three years.

I've been good.

I've been-- I've, I have learned the game of Reddit.

I don't get banned anymore.

But when I first got started, I took a bunch of my blog content, submitted it to a technology subreddit, and I got banned so fast.

And I was a great...

Um, so how do you, let's say you're Geico, let's say you're TruGreen, how do you start a subreddit and keep it from being like nonstop posts like, "Geico's the worst"?

... a little bit more comfortable not being anonymous on Reddit?

Yeah.

So Reddit was built for people by people, so to speak, right? Like, when people go on Reddit, they're looking for feedback from other people.

They're very anti-corporate.

Redditors hate brands.

They don't have-- There's subreddits that literally are anti-brand, and they call out brands.

[chuckles] Lots of improvements have happened, like Reddit is way less hostile to businesses today than it was when I first got started.

[laughs]

And he thinks that's key for all of us.

It is, a h- 100%.

So especially in the service side, at least in my experience, especially in the early days of growth, people buy from people.

And because they are able to see and connect with me as a human, they are more likely to buy.

So I think I made the right decision in terms of building up the Ross Simmonds brand, if you wanna call it that, at the same time developing the Foundation brand.

Now we're going into an interesting period where we are trying to elevate the brand of Foundation because, again, not every client is going to work with Ross, and not every client is going to have an interaction with me.

Maybe at the beginning for a short period of time, but I'm not gonna be the person they work with long-term or consistently.

And yes, even if you think you have a common name, it is possible to claim it back for yourself.

How does love for the craft change business outcomes? Yeah.

Yeah.

So I have always had this belief that content has the ability to shape culture.

When you think of your own beliefs, you think of humanity, society at large, a lot of the worldviews, the perspectives, the ideas that we have as humans are shaped by content.

Whether we're talking about historical texts, whether we're talking about the stories that our parents tell us, whether we're talking about the stories that we read, the movies we watch, the content that we read in school, whatever it might be, It's essentially content that has influenced our world perspective and views.

And when you can get excited about a certain topic, you don't go through it in a way that's kind of stagnant.

You're just lit up about the exploration of an idea, of a concept, of a story, of an industry, of a niche.

What's your advice?