Most business advice assumes growth is the goal. Andy Starr, co-founder of Level C alongside brand strategist Marty Neumeier, has built a business that deliberately opts out of that assumption, and he's convinced that's exactly why it's lasted.

In this episode of Fanclub Setlist, Erica talks with Andy Starr about what happens when a business stops chasing scale and starts obsessing over quality instead. Andy explains why he spends less than five minutes a day on LinkedIn and why Substack has become the more valuable platform for the kind of long-form thinking he and Marty do. He walks through the moment a fellow Level C alum offered to fund an endowment to keep the program running after Andy and Marty are gone, and why that reaction was the clearest signal that their approach was working.

The conversation moves into what Andy calls aesthetic intelligence: the ability to make decisions that other people instantly recognize as right, tasteful, or better, and why he thinks this is the one thing AI genuinely can't replicate. He also gets candid about self-management as a founder's real full-time job, and why he believes every business owner should be in therapy.

CHAPTERS

Sunday scaries vs. everyday scaries as a business owner

The rise of the "culturist, futurist, cultural futurist"

Why Andy spends less than five minutes a day on LinkedIn

Substack, long-form content, and the platforms worth your time

Knowing what you're good at (and what you're not)

Rejecting growth and scale on purpose

Managing yourself before you manage anyone else

Why every business owner should be in therapy

The Florence masterclass and the endowment offer

Defining aesthetic intelligence

Why AI can't replace taste and judgment

The two-minute test: can you explain what makes you different?

Final takeaway: don't ask any other question before this one

Connect with Andy Starr

Andy Starr's LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-andy-starr/⁠

Level C website: ⁠https://www.levelc.org/⁠

Level C on Substack: ⁠https://levelc.substack.com/⁠

Level C on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/levelcorg⁠

Most founders assume the goal is to scale as fast as possible. But for some operators, the most exciting and most valuable work happens earlier than that, in the messy, undefined stretch before a business has any real shape. That's the zero to one phase, and it's where Mikhail Alfon has chosen to spend his career.

In this episode of Fanclub Setlist, Erica talks with Mikhail Alfon, founder of Blue Light Media, a social media and content agency he built from nothing in 2014 and sold roughly a decade later. Mikhail walks through how a firing (he started a social media department without permission and got let go for it) became the origin story for an agency that went on to work with brands like Bulletproof Coffee, Nutribullet, and SharkNinja.

Now, post-acquisition, Mikhail works almost exclusively in the zero to one phase, helping founders go from an idea and a vision to a functioning team and system. He describes it as fractional CMO or fractional VP work: building out hiring, creative direction, and marketing infrastructure for early-stage companies. A major part of that infrastructure now includes AI. Mikhail shares how he uses Claude to turn raw meta ads data into creative briefs and marketing analysis, cutting down work that used to require a much larger team.

The conversation also covers the distinction between personal brand and company brand, why Mikhail intentionally built Blue Light Media to function without him at the center of it, and how his current business runs entirely on referrals rather than outbound marketing or paid acquisition.

CHAPTERS

Introduction

How Mikhail got into marketing: the local SEO job that led to a firing

The grit it took to start a business with $1,000 to his name

Personal brand vs. company brand: preparing Blue Light Media to run without him

What Mikhail's doing now: zero to one and fractional CMO work

Using AI and automation to replace a 20-person team

Advice for consultants without a referral base yet

Putting your ideas out publicly (TikTok, Instagram, Substack, LinkedIn)

Taking early clients for free to build a scope of work

Using Claude AI for meta ads creative briefs and marketing workflows

Understanding AI tools before hiring someone to build with them

Closing thoughts and where to find Mikhail

Connect with Mikhail
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikhailalfon

Website: https://www.mikhailalfon.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miqk/

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@itsmiqk?si=mAzJFJ3KkJGZxEJ0

Most founders hear the same marketing advice: post consistently, build a brand, run some ads, track the funnel. But for SaaS founders specifically, the bigger question isn't whether to market. It's whether the channel they're betting on actually drives revenue, or just makes them feel busy.

In this episode of Fanclub Setlist, Erica sits down with Jeffrey Zhao, founder of Ordinal, a social media management platform built to help SaaS companies and agencies drive real results and revenue on social. Ordinal works with over 1,000 fast-growing teams, including Mercury, Clay, and Zapier, and the conversation traces how Jeffrey's thinking on marketing evolved from a side pain point into a company-defining bet.

Before Ordinal, Jeffrey ran Slope, a design and marketing agency doing brand work and organic social services. The team kept hitting the same wall: the scheduling and publishing tools on the market were built ten or fifteen years ago, around assumptions about social media that no longer held. So they built their own tool to solve their own problem. That tool was originally called Assembly, and it didn't even have scheduling at first. It was built to solve a coordination and visibility problem for teams trying to manage a growing, more complex content workload.

One of the more counterintuitive parts of the conversation is the rebrand story. Assembly became Ordinal not because of an emotional rebrand, but a tactical one. The name was too generic to rank for, too easy to confuse with other companies, and people genuinely struggled to find the business after hearing about it secondhand. Jeffrey is direct about his philosophy here: most names are neutral vessels you build equity into over time, not the emotional core of a brand. Visual identity and brand strategy deserve strong opinions. The name itself should mostly be ownable, pronounceable, and searchable.

The conversation's centre of gravity, though, is LinkedIn. Jeffrey argues that social media has shifted from a brand-awareness checklist item into an actual go-to-market channel, especially for B2B SaaS. Some of the highest-valuation teams using Ordinal report that the majority of their leads come directly from LinkedIn organic content, driven by founders, salespeople, and entire teams posting in a coordinated way rather than relying on a single company page.

Erica and Jeffrey also dig into what kind of content actually works, why even Ordinal struggles to post on its own platform consistently, and where Jeffrey sees marketing heading as AI tools get folded into the workflow. The episode closes with Jeffrey's advice to founders weighing whether to start a SaaS company at all: stop optimizing on paper, and start building.

CHAPTERS

0:00 – Introducing Ordinal and founder Jeffrey Zhao

0:56 – The problem that inspired Ordinal and Assembly's early days

3:45 – First customers, YC lessons, and building through feedback

6:04 – Why Assembly became Ordinal and what makes a good brand name

10:53 – SEO vs. LinkedIn: Building a SaaS marketing strategy

14:17 – What actually works on LinkedIn (and why consistency is hard)

17:53 – AI, composability, and the future of marketing

19:45 – Advice for first-time SaaS founders