Full Results Of My First "Comment To Get" Giveaway

Hello hello!

Welcome back to, 1, One, 1. This newsletter is the place founders come to learn how to get leads from their social—and I’m so glad you’re a part of it.

I feel like I say every week was crazy. Maybe I’m being ridiculous. Maybe that’s life of an agency owner. We brought on two SaaS founders as clients this week (one Series A, one Series B), and I’m pumped to crush it for them.

As promised, here’s your 1 winning hook template, 1 post breakdown, and 1 content tip:

Winning Hook Template

Why Does This Hook Work?

This one’s pretty simple, but it should be in everyone’s bag. The best hooks make you stop scrolling through the feed and think “hold on, what?”.

Dara did exactly that here. If she said “My goal for 2025 is to have a more profitable year. Let me explain”, nobody would bat an eye. But who on earth wants to make less money next year?

It’s simple, but it works. And you can apply that to your work pretty easily—as long as you have a decent justification for it.

Now, some people take this too far. I’m sure you’ve seen some borderline insane hooks on the timeline before. Don’t do that. It’s not worth it. Have you ever read “the boy who cried wolf”? It only works for so long before the village (the timeline) doesn’t pay any attention to you—even when you actually have something to say.

How Can You Replicate It?

The right way to approach this is to do it tastefully. Use it when you have something somewhat jarring—but still tasteful—to say.

Dara didn’t say anything too crazy here. There’s a fine line you have to walk to make this work.

If you have a take that can be turned into a scroll-stopper like this, run with it. Some examples I might use are:

• I don’t want new hires to have 5+ years of experience.

• I want less clients in 2025.

• I love dealing with “nightmare” clients.

I can justify all of those. For whatever you write, make sure you can, too.

Post Breakdown

Today’s post comes from Simon Høiberg, founder at Aidbase.

This one made me laugh, but there’s actually a lot more to it than meets the eye. On the surface, it looks like he’s running a typical hot take with a brief explanation.

But if you visit Simon’s profile, you realize this is all a part of a narrative he’s carrying on—and a “common enemy” he’s attacking with his account.

Simon is building a portfolio of bootstrapped businesses. An extremely prevalent social strategy to help with this is picking an enemy (opposite of what you stand for), and attacking it. In this case, it’s VC-backed founders/businesses.

As for the post template itself:

Most [enemy identifier] [are negative thing].

They [did negative thing] instead of [doing positive thing].

And to each their own, of course.

But I’d much rather be a [hero identifier] who [does positive thing 1], [does positive thing 2], and [does positive thing 3].

How You Can Replicate This

1/ Pick an “enemy” for your product or service. I sell content services that get you leads, not likes. My “enemy” can be LinkedIn gurus that strictly talk about how to grow on LinkedIn, which leads to lots of likes and zero leads.

2/ Start with a bold statement. I might say “Most LinkedIn gurus are broke.” (You can make this as similar or different to Simon’s original hook as you’d like).

3/ Justify your statement. Following the original post structure, I might say “They picked a hot topic and rode the wave instead of creating real value”.

4/ Offer contrast. After the “And to each their own, of course.”, I might say “But I’d much rather have less than 10,000 followers and work with 10-15 SaaS founders who pay monthly for 7+ months, not burn my TAM, and never pigeonhole myself into a certain creator type.

You obviously need to adapt that for your own purposes, but you get the point.

Content Tip - Should You Run “Comment To Get” Giveaways On LinkedIn?

Last week I ran my first "comment to get" giveaway on LinkedIn. Many of you obviously know, because hundreds of people getting this email came from it.

I used to refuse to run these. I thought they were scammy, to some degree. But I changed my tune over the last few months after seeing some founders execute it extremely well.

I had an internal document full of 200 content prompts for agency owners. I passed it around to some peers in the space, and they told me they literally* would've paid for it.

This newsletter was brand new at the time, so I realized it might be a great way to grow the list and be able to speak to wonderful readers like yourself (seriously, thank you – the fact that I’m emailing hundreds of you right now is insane to me).

Instead of the typical Google Doc lead magnet (which is fine, by the way), I built a simple app with Lovable that made the prompt database both prettier and sortable.

Regardless, you don’t care about that—you care about making money. So do I. Here are the full results of the giveaway, a couple of weeks later:

• 112,000+ impressions

• 2,000+ new followers

• 396 newsletter subscribers

• 6 qualified calls (so far)

Some thoughts on the entire process:

1/ The conversion between comment -> email subscriber is lower than I thought. 

I imagined that ~75%+ of people who commented would go through with it. That number was closer to 40-45% (at the time of writing this). Just something to keep in mind.

You’ll benefit from the reach, of course, but you can’t expect even close to all the comments to actually join your list or enter your funnel, in that sense.

2/ I booked qualified calls immediately.

We’ve had six people that fit our ICP, who we've never talked to book on our calendar on the day of the post.

Nothing closed yet, but these posts definitely serve to break out of your typical audience.

Note that this is without me retargeting ICP engagers thus far. I’d imagine I can get 2-3 more calls on the calendar with personalized value (Looms or videos) to ICP engagers on that post.

Even closing two of them is well over >$100K ARR added from this. That’s not to say I will close two. Sales is hard. But, these people are warmer than typical cold traffic. I expect to hear back shortly.

3/ >50% of people are nowhere near qualified. 

Yes, there was lots of good here—but also some bad.

You can't imagine that 1,000+ people who comment are going to be qualified. I have zero down-sell offer right now. Maybe I need one. Regardless, I just can't sell to a good chunk of these opt-ins.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. If you’re on this list and aren’t qualified, I hope you find it immensely valuable. In fact, if you don’t, I’m not doing my job right.

This point is only included to say you can’t expect posts that get insane reach to also have fully qualified reach. There’s tradeoffs. Regardless, I sincerely appreciate you being on this list—whether you pay me or not.

If I Had To Run It Again

The things I’d do the same:

1/ I’d make the resource insanely high-value again. I refuse to make people comment for something that just isn’t worth it. It’ll waste your time and ruin my reputation.

2/ I’d make it for a specific ICP. This was for agency owners. If you have the prompts, you know they’re tailored for agency owners. My next one is for SaaS founders. Being specific with the ICP here is counterintuitive for reach, but does make 50% of my ICP—agency owners—feel like this is truly made for them.

3/ I’d properly set up my outbound motion beforehand. I gained 2,000+ followers and over 2,000 new profile views from this. Some qualified, many not. Next time I run this, I want to proactively have a Trigify + Clay + Smartlead play running, where I can identify ICP engagers and outbound to them to get a call booked, at scale.

If I made any missteps here, it was this. I didn’t realize it would do this well, in all honesty. LOL.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

• If you have a resource good enough that people would pay for it, run one of these to an email-gated landing page.

• I wouldn't run this without an email-gate. These people are now on my newsletter, and I would bet a small % of them will book calls after I build more and more trust.

• If you really want to juice this, retarget ICP engagers / profile viewers with Trigify or another solution 24h after the post.

You can expect another from me in ~1 month. SaaS founders, you're next.

I hope you found that immensely valuable.

Social Stuff I Found For You

📌 A link to my “comment to get” giveaway.

📌 My agency is hiring for a full-time content writer! Apply here.

📌 Beehiiv launches direct sponsorship!

Decide On The Next Issue

Last Thing

Thank you for reading. Truly, it means a lot to me that you take the time out of your busy week to do this.

Just wanted to say that my agency, Hat Tip, has availability for more founders like yourself if you want support with content.

See if you’re a fit here.

I’ll be back next week,

Christian