The AI founder turning digital events into dollars

In July, a guy by the name of Arturo del Rio Jr. liked 3 of my LinkedIn posts. Naturally, I was intrigued. Then came his DM: 

So I pulled up his profile to see who he was. His headline read: CEO | 4x AI Founder | Innovating AI Since 2016 | Follower of Jesus Christ

He had no idea how good his timing was.

I had just spent the past 48 hours analyzing a 3-day virtual event called The One to Many Challenge.

Lara Acosta, one of the biggest names in personal branding on LinkedIn hosted the event. More than 5,000 people registered. This was no ordinary webinar and I wanted to watch the mechanics unfold first hand.  So I signed up and attended all 3 days, which lasted over 7 hours. Each night I wrote my client a summary based on the transcripts and slides.

My client is Richard Moore, founder of Art of Sell, a B2B sales community out of the UK. He had recently started selling the same way Lara had. One to many on a live webinar.

By the time Arturo's message arrived I was well-versed in her tactics. Everything from the registration form, her WhatsApp “Inner Circle” nurturing group, the email drip sequence and the countdown page. All of it. I took the time to map it all and sent Richard a deck that summarized the process.

Then a stranger turned up selling Stacked Growth, an event growth engine for B2B.

Days later, I hopped on Zoom with Arturo and his colleague Joel, Vice President of Customer Success.

Stacked Growth is an  AI-powered event generation, registration, automations, and analytics platform.

You feed it your website and your LinkedIn profile, and it researches and suggests the webinar topic, writes the session script, creates the deck and builds the landing page. After the webinar, the event replay page allows registrants to rewatch it. The transcript and the questions asked by participants get sorted into 4 groups: 

1) Never showed

2) Showed and dropped off early

3) Stayed through

4) Asked a question

Lakeside Growth is the other half of the business, and does AI-powered inbound and outbound lead generation.

A couple of minutes into our call, Arturo told me why the company exists. I'll come back to that.

Forty minutes in I told him the thing no salesperson wants to hear.

I told him flat out, "I'm not your ICP."

I had never done my own webinar.

Then I asked him the question I ask in every discovery call.

"How are you guys getting in front of your customers?" Arturo was saved by the bell. We ran out of time and agreed to meet the following day.

We hopped on another Zoom the next afternoon and this time he answered my question by sharing his screen.

"I'm getting them all through here." He was pointing to the Lakeside growth platform.

Every single customer, all through outbound. All of them. 

Then he walked me through a live campaign, and I recognized it, because I was smack dab in the middle of it.

Lakeside Growth sends the connection request and then waits an hour. The system enriches your record for an email and a phone number. That’s exactly how he knew I was based in Colombia before we ever spoke. Then the system views your profile.

Arturo continued, "it'll go like your last 3 posts." Next a semi-personalized video message gets sent that has Arturo on camera with the prospects LInkedIn profile in the background. Then a follow-up email on day 3 and a voicemail on day 5. That’s what you call multichannel!

The 3 likes on my content were not actually from Arturo.

They were step 4, on a timer. The message doesn’t read like AI slop and feels incredibly personalized.

Somewhere in those two calls Arturo and I noticed we're both Hispanic. He mentioned he had Spanish roots, and every one of his greetings opens with "What's up brother?" What's not to like about this guy? Now we have a running joke where Joel tells me he wasn't sure the team would last that long without seeing me, even though we'd just spoken.

Across the first two calls I had been running reconnaissance on Stacked Growth. With each meeting I quickly realized this platform is exactly what Richard needed for Art of Sell.

So I wrote him a brief, and he agreed to meet Arturo. I finally got the two of them together on a call.

The night of Richard's masterclass, I went through the comments in the Zoom chat, matched every name and every question against what got answered live and what was missed.

Several people had asked buying questions during the webinar and nobody caught them.

That took about two hours of my evening, even with Claude. The whole time I kept thinking about the story Arturo told me about in our first call.

One of Lakeside Growth's clients ran a webinar. The president of L'Oréal showed up, attended the entire session, and even had typed a question into the chat.

Nobody noticed for 3 weeks.

Arturo heard about it after the fact, the same way I just had. "I lost my mind," he said. "So how do we solve for that?"

The Stacked Growth platform exists because of that afternoon. Somebody senior had given up an hour in his busy schedule, stayed till the end, and asked exactly what he was stuck on. No one noticed. The presenter was presenting, the chat was cascading, and the warmest signal in the whole funnel went unanswered.

Arturo, Joel and I kept finding reasons to get back on Zoom. By the middle of August we had been on 6 calls together, and the count is past 10 now.

On one of those calls I brought up his own content. I mentioned I'd gone through his entire LinkedIn feed, and he beat me to the conclusion.

"The biggest bottleneck oftentimes, and not even by bounds, is me personally."

He kept going.

"I'm doing posts, and I'm sending my things, and doing a video with my son, and unbelievable amounts of meetings come from that, never mind our outbound."

And then said something and I immediately knew I could help.

"And this is terrible, but it's true. We've been able to get away with sucking at social."

By his own account he posted consistently for about a year. And those posts brought in more meetings than his outbound did. Then they launched two new products and he no longer had time. He stopped posting.

I built him a detailed diagnostic and walked him through it on the call.

11 sections in total. 

I analyzed all 189 posts on his personal profile, the Company pages for Lakeside Growth and Stacked Growth, all 5 case studies and the website.

Two things stood out.

His personal posts beat his business posts by about 4 to 1. Faith and family run 31 to 98 reactions. Product and service posts run 5 to 23. The median across all 189 is 9, and 45 of them landed at zero.

Terry Booysen, a CEO in South Africa, wrote him an unprompted 300-word endorsement naming both companies and describing exactly what the work did for him. It went out on a Company Page with 304 followers and got one reaction.

One section of the diagnostic includes the L'Oréal story. I even included a sample post in his voice that's ready to publish.

He's got all the proof he needs. He's never posted any of it.

Richard signed with Stacked Growth, and we're building the first masterclass now.

I've written 5 issues and they normally end the same way. I usually tell you what I'd fix and the founder goes back to their life. You never hear how it turned out.

With Arturo we're still deep in the build, so this one gets a part two.

He told me the best story in his business in the first few minutes of a sales call. The only reason you know it is that I happened to be on the other end.

A founder's best content is usually already made. Most of it is sitting in a podcast from March, a sales call from last Tuesday, or an email written at 11pm to a client who needed convincing.

You've already said it well. All you have to do is find it and post it.

- Antonio

P.S. Arturo's situation isn't unusual. Most founders I speak with already have plenty of content that never gets published. If that sounds like you, hit reply and I'll tell you what I'd publish first.