Humans of Martech 60: Kamil Rextin: Death to personal branding and dark social
Today on the show we have a veteran of the SaaS marketing industry, we’re joined by Kamil Rextin.
After moving from Islamabad, he worked in Karachi for 2 years at P&G and completed an MBA at Waterloo University. He got his start wearing many different hats like Growth, Demand Gen and Ops at early/mid stage SaaS companies in Montreal and Toronto including Breather, Pressly, Uberflip and CrowdRiff.
In 2018, he took the entrepreneurial plunge and went out on his own and started an agency called 42Agency. 4 years later, Kamil’s agency counts more than 5+ full time team members providing demand gen, marketing ops and ABM services. He’s worked with top brands like ProfitWell, Hubdoc, Sproutsocial, Knak and many more scaling B2B saaS companies.
Kamil’s a father, a founder, a podcaster, a community moderator, the author of the 42/ newsletter, a neurodivergent advocate… but most of his time is shamelessly spent on memes and hot takes on Twitter.
Kamil – we’re pumped to chat with you today, thanks for taking the time.
Questions and topics
Kamil, I’ve dived into your twitter feed over the past year and there’s a ton of hot takes that we can dive into that I’d love longer than 280 character take on. Recently you did an AMA on the B2B marketing community on Twitter, I pegged you with a bunch of questions and wanted to let you expand on some of those – maybe we can start there.
Running an agency vs in-house
For guests that have gone the in-house and agency route, I love asking the pros and cons of both of them. You’re even more fascinating because not only did you do agency… you founded an agency from scratch and have been running it for more than 4 years now. What’s the biggest upside/downside of running an agency vs being an in-house marketer?
What are some of your early learnings from starting your own agency?
Future-proofed marketing skills
Whether they end up in-house or at an agency, if you were mentoring a fresh marketing grad, you said that you would recommend them to specialize in the technical side of marketing. Why do you think the quantitative side of marketing is where a lot of opportunity is?
Technical marketing
Let’s dive into that a bit more, I think people generously add technical marketing to their skillsets. What does it mean to you? Is it anything that has to do with reporting and integrations or using martech or is it more technical than that? Like how to manipulate data and build basic models or building a Data Warehouse?
Analytics and Tracking in 2022
From a quantitative marketing standpoint, the tracking analytics world is weird in 2022. The industry is moving away from session based tracking and with Apple and others making a big business out of privacy and with click based tracking only getting harder with cross browser tracking, what should marketers be relying on in 2022 and beyond? Is it incremental testing? Is it statistical models or ML?
Martech buyer’s guide – Wirecutter for SaaS
I actually discovered you 4 years ago when I stumbled upon some of your early martech buyer’s guide work. You were building the wirecutter for SaaS, I think the first one you did was on CMS, can’t remember how favoroubly you talked about WP (lol) but what happened to this project, are you going to pick it back up one day?
https://twitter.com/kamilrextin/status/1338536972608999425
Dark social
Some influencers have denigrated tracking and attribution to the point where many recommend just ignoring it and trusting your gut. One of the main culprits of this is the rise of dark social. WTF is dark social, is it just a buzzword for offline referrals like in group chats or in Slack threads and forums, and do you buy into all of this hype? How much do you hate this term?
SaaS companies should be a media company narrative
Sticking to some of your hot twitter takes here, there’s a few more I’m excited to dive in with you. One of them is this idea that many influencers proliferate that SaaS companies should be a media company narrative. Why do you think this is bullshit?
https://twitter.com/kamilrextin/status/1362544724813430786
Personal brands
Another of my favorite twitter takes is your disdain for personal branding. A quick look at LinkedIn and Twitter reveals that building a personal brand has been dry humped to death. Every influencer is only an expert at self promotion. There’s a total lack of receipts and actual experience. It’s all about 24/7 self aggrandizement. Twitter screenshots on LinkedIn and nothing but dolphin claps and clicks. How do you really feel about building a personal brand?
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