Andrew Wilkinson

I get criticized a lot.

When you have a big following, that's just part of the deal.

But as of a year or so ago, I run a public company. I have shareholders and have to listen to them—even the little ones.

And I do. I look at almost every reply I get on social media.

My favorite critique is that I've lost the plot.

That I've forgotten Tiny and I'm becoming an "influencer threadboi"—distracted by podcasts and writing books instead of running Tiny.

I'll often get replies like this:

"Get back to running your company, you tool."

"Wow, I thought this guy was a great investor, but now he's just a podcaster."

They don’t get it.

Let me explain:

About 15 years ago, when I was running Metalab, I wrote a blog post.

The online shoe company Zappos had a terrible website. Bored one night, I wrote a funny critique and suggested a bunch of ways they could improve it.

What happened next was crazy.

Someone posted it on HackerNews, then it went viral on Tumblr.

Suddenly, my inbox was overflowing. Dozens of the world's top companies had seen the article and wanted to work with us.

Shortly thereafter, Metalab hit an inflection point. We went from being an unknown agency working with startups to getting contracts with companies like Walmart, Apple, and Google.

Most agencies, I realized, had to spend huge sums of money to get this kind of deal flow:

Hiring PR firms. Running advertising campaigns. Sponsoring conferences. Spending tens of thousands flying around, shaking hands with people.

But in one manic night, I wrote a blog post and got the same result. For free.

Best of all, this one blog post kept delivering. For years, people would reach out to Metalab saying they’d seen it.

So, I kept at it. I started blogging more. Tweeting. Going on podcasts. All that stuff.

And you know what happened?

My "opportunity surface area" increased. Suddenly, everyone knew who I was at conferences. Opportunities came to me.

My online presence became a magnet for good things.

So when we started buying businesses, I doubled down.

But let me digress for a second...

Private equity firms and holding companies—Tiny's competition— are terrible at marketing themselves.

Let's start with the names.

For some reason, they choose names for their firms that either sound vaguely sinister—like “Maverick,” “Cerberus,” or “Grey Wolf”—or dull as rocks, like as “Jones Street Capital Management,” “Silver Oak Equity Group,” or “Pinnacle Equity.”

Their websites are even worse. They're covered in cheesy photos of finance bros in suits, black and white stock images of skyscrapers, and absolutely plastered with confusing finance jargon that seems designed to confuse founders.

Oddly, their whole brand is designed to appeal to two sorts of people:

1. Potential investors and LPs
2. Their colleagues in the industry

But here’s the insane part: the one person their website should be targeted to—business founders—have no clue what any of the stuff they talk about means.

AUM? EBITDA? General partner? Dry powder? Liquidity?

Like, dude, I run a company. I know three numbers: revenue, expense, profit.

It's like trying to make a hip D2C skin care brand for women but using a 1998 DreamWeaver template + overweight men as the models.

It's insane.

I remember getting emails from these firms, and I wouldn't even know how to engage.

Emails like this:

Dear Andrew,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Chadwick Bowmont Jr, and I am a Partner at Blackbeard Capital Partners, a private equity firm founded by a group of former Goldman Sachs alums. With over $3 billion in assets under management, we specialize in supporting midmarket companies like yours that are poised for significant growth.

At Blackbeard Capital Partners, we typically structure investments to align incentives across stakeholders, utilizing a combination of minority equity investments, LBOs, and add-on acquisitions. Our goal is to provide the necessary dry powder to fuel your growth initiatives while driving operational efficiency. With our track record in executing roll-ups and carve-outs, we believe there are significant opportunities for value creation, especially if you’re exploring a dual-track process or considering strategic liquidity events down the road.

We would love the chance to discuss how we might work together to help you achieve your long-term goals. Let me know a convenient time for you, and I’d be happy to set up a conversation.

I would just hit delete. It looked like a form letter (it was).

It turns out these private equity firms have a problem:

They have no deal flow.

Founders don't know they exist!

So what do they do?

They pay an army of junior staffers to send terrible cold emails like this, or they pay investment bankers and brokers between 1-3% of every deal they bring them.

Why are the emails so terrible? Because they don't know their customer.

They don't have a clue how to relate to founders.

Most private equity firms are run by people with finance degrees and MBAs who have never run a business in their lives.

They think of businesses as spreadsheets.

So, instead of marketing to founders—their customers, the very people they need—they bombard us with jargon-filled, tone-deaf cold emails like the one above.

And they spend a fortune to do so.

Imagine a private equity fund with $500M in assets under management follows the typical playbook. The costs might be around:

Outbound team salaries: $500k-$1.5M Conferences and events: $100-$500k

That's around $600k-$2M per year in outbound and dealflow generation costs. That's conservative, the real number is probably much higher.

Now, they're also relying on investment bankers to bring them, say, half of their deals.

Over 5 years, that's:

$3-10M in salaries and expenses. $6.25M in banker fees ($250M x 2.5%).

How much does Tiny pay?

Zero. Nil. Zilch.

Why?

Because I've spent the last two decades being loud.

Writing blog posts. Tweeting. Going on podcasts. Writing books.

And the best part is, I freaking love doing it. It's a great job: I get to share interesting stuff I'm reading. Tell stories. Talk to fascinating people. Make new friends constantly.

But the bonus is, every day, a founder reads one of my tweets or puts down my book and thinks, "Maybe Tiny would buy my business," and sends us an email.

Why? Well, hopefully they go "this guy seems nice."

As a result, we get hundreds of inbound deals a month.

Not by sending tone-deaf emails or paying bankers, but by doing something so extraordinarily basic—something you'd think MBA private equity executives would have figured out by now:

✅ Branding ourselves appropriately. ✅ Knowing our customer and marketing directly to them. ✅ Relating to founders and speaking their language. ✅ Finding them where they are. ✅ Building a reputation.

They've got it all backwards:

Their customer isn't their LPs.

It's not the other execs they want to impress on LinkedIn with AUM figures.

It's founders.

So, dear shareholders, next time you see me tweet and think "distraction," think again.

I get criticized a lot.

When you have a big following, that's just part of the deal.

But as of a year or so ago, I run a public company. I have shareholders and have to listen to them—even the little ones.

And I do. I look at almost every reply I get on social media.

My favorite critique is that I've lost the plot.

That I've forgotten Tiny and I'm becoming an "influencer threadboi"—distracted by podcasts and writing books instead of running Tiny.

I'll often get replies like this:

"Get back to running your company, you tool."

"Wow, I thought this guy was a great investor, but now he's just a podcaster."

They don’t get it.

Let me explain:

About 15 years ago, when I was running @metalab, I wrote a blog post.

The online shoe company Zappos had a terrible website. Bored one night, I wrote a funny critique and suggested a bunch of ways they could improve it.

What happened next was crazy.

Someone posted it on HackerNews, then it went viral on Tumblr.

Suddenly, my inbox was overflowing. Dozens of the world's top companies had seen the article and wanted to work with us.

Shortly thereafter, Metalab hit an inflection point. We went from being an unknown agency working with startups to getting contracts with companies like Walmart, Apple, and Google.

Most agencies, I realized, had to spend huge sums of money to get this kind of deal flow:

Hiring PR firms. Running advertising campaigns. Sponsoring conferences. Spending tens of thousands flying around, shaking hands with people.

But in one manic night, I wrote a blog post and got the same result. For free.

Best of all, this one blog post kept delivering. For years, people would reach out to Metalab saying they’d seen it.

So, I kept at it. I started blogging more. Tweeting. Going on podcasts. All that stuff.

And you know what happened?

My "opportunity surface area" increased. Suddenly, everyone knew who I was at conferences. Opportunities came to me.

My online presence became a magnet for good things.

So when we started buying businesses, I doubled down.

But let me digress for a second...

Private equity firms and holding companies—Tiny's competition— are terrible at marketing themselves.

Let's start with the names.

For some reason, they choose names for their firms that either sound vaguely sinister—like “Maverick,” “Cerberus,” or “Grey Wolf”—or dull as rocks, like as “Jones Street Capital Management,” “Silver Oak Equity Group,” or “Pinnacle Equity.”

Their websites are even worse. They're covered in cheesy photos of finance bros in suits, black and white stock images of skyscrapers, and absolutely plastered with confusing finance jargon that seems designed to confuse founders.

Oddly, their whole brand is designed to appeal to two sorts of people:

1. Potential investors and LPs
2. Their colleagues in the industry

But here’s the insane part: the one person their website should be targeted to—business founders—have no clue what any of the stuff they talk about means.

AUM? EBITDA? General partner? Dry powder? Liquidity?

Like, dude, I run a company. I know three numbers: revenue, expense, profit.

It's like trying to make a hip D2C skin care brand for women but using a 1998 DreamWeaver template + overweight men as the models.

It's insane.

I remember getting emails from these firms, and I wouldn't even know how to engage.

Emails like this:

Dear Andrew,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Chadwick Bowmont Jr, and I am a Partner at Blackbeard Capital Partners, a private equity firm founded by a group of former Goldman Sachs alums. With over $3 billion in assets under management, we specialize in supporting midmarket companies like yours that are poised for significant growth.

At Blackbeard Capital Partners, we typically structure investments to align incentives across stakeholders, utilizing a combination of minority equity investments, LBOs, and add-on acquisitions. Our goal is to provide the necessary dry powder to fuel your growth initiatives while driving operational efficiency. With our track record in executing roll-ups and carve-outs, we believe there are significant opportunities for value creation, especially if you’re exploring a dual-track process or considering strategic liquidity events down the road.

We would love the chance to discuss how we might work together to help you achieve your long-term goals. Let me know a convenient time for you, and I’d be happy to set up a conversation.

I would just hit delete. It looked like a form letter (it was).

It turns out these private equity firms have a problem:

They have no deal flow.

Founders don't know they exist!

So what do they do?

They pay an army of junior staffers to send terrible cold emails like this, or they pay investment bankers and brokers between 1-3% of every deal they bring them.

Why are the emails so terrible? Because they don't know their customer.

They don't have a clue how to relate to founders.

Most private equity firms are run by people with finance degrees and MBAs who have never run a business in their lives.

They think of businesses as spreadsheets.

So, instead of marketing to founders—their customers, the very people they need—they bombard us with jargon-filled, tone-deaf cold emails like the one above.

And they spend a fortune to do so.

Imagine a private equity fund with $500M in assets under management follows the typical playbook. The costs might be around:

Outbound team salaries: $500k-$1.5M Conferences and events: $100-$500k

That's around $600k-$2M per year in outbound and dealflow generation costs. That's conservative, the real number is probably much higher.

Now, they're also relying on investment bankers to bring them, say, half of their deals.

Over 5 years, that's:

$3-10M in salaries and expenses. $6.25M in banker fees ($250M x 2.5%).

How much does Tiny pay?

Zero. Nil. Zilch.

Why?

Because I've spent the last two decades being loud.

Writing blog posts. Tweeting. Going on podcasts. Writing books.

And the best part is, I freaking love doing it. It's a great job: I get to share interesting stuff I'm reading. Tell stories. Talk to fascinating people. Make new friends constantly.

But the bonus is, every day, a founder reads one of my tweets or puts down my book and thinks, "Maybe Tiny would buy my business," and sends us an email.

Why? Well, hopefully they go "this guy seems nice."

As a result, we get hundreds of inbound deals a month.

Not by sending tone-deaf emails or paying bankers, but by doing something so extraordinarily basic—something you'd think MBA private equity executives would have figured out by now:

✅ Branding ourselves appropriately. ✅ Knowing our customer and marketing directly to them. ✅ Relating to founders and speaking their language. ✅ Finding them where they are. ✅ Building a reputation.

They've got it all backwards:

Their customer isn't their LPs.

It's not the other execs they want to impress on LinkedIn with AUM figures.

It's founders.

So, dear shareholders, next time you see me tweet about my book, start a fight with someone on X, or recommend my favorite skin cream, and you think "distraction," think again.