He Quit His Job, Bet on LinkedIn, and Built a Multi-Million Dollar Agency ft. AJ Eckstein

Hey friends,

Welcome back to Creator Etiquette™.

This week's episode is a special one! I sat down with my friend AJ Eckstein, founder of Creator Match, one of the largest B2B influencer marketing agencies in the game right now.

Here is why this episode is worth your full attention: AJ is 27. He left a prestigious consulting job at Accenture, built a following on LinkedIn before it was cool to do so, and turned that into a 30-person agency that has paid out over a million dollars to creators. He did all of it without spending a single dollar on paid media or ads. He has a lot to say about what separates creators who get rebooked from creators who get passed over — and it has almost nothing to do with follower count.

If you would rather watch or listen, catch the full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

If you want coaching on these topics to help get your brand off the ground, make sure to check out blomma.com and use my code GIGI to bypass the waitlist!

AJ was on the corporate track, with a coveted consulting job in San Francisco. Then the pandemic hit, his start date got pushed six months, and suddenly he had more free time than he knew what to do with.

So he started a career coaching podcast called The Final Round, began posting recruiting content on LinkedIn, and quietly built an audience of tens of thousands of followers. When he eventually got to 55,000 followers and started meeting Mr. Beast-level creators on LinkedIn who had never made a single dollar from the platform, he saw the gap. And he built Creator Match to fill it.

Here is the part of the story people skip over: he did not just quit. He saved six weeks of PTO, told his manager he needed a short leave of absence, gave himself one month to gain enough traction, and made the jump only when the math made sense. His analogy stuck with me: you do not jump out of a plane without a parachute. You build the parachute first, and then you jump.

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This was something AJ said that I think is one of the most important things a creator can hear right now. Of LinkedIn's one billion users, only about 1% post consistently. That is it. Which means showing up even slightly more than the average person puts you in a tier most creators never reach.

The brand deal does not go to the most qualified creator. It goes to the one the brand saw last week, and the week before, and the week before that. You don’t need to be the most talented, but you can be more present.

AJ shared that Creator Match has what he calls a Preferential Creator Network. A smaller, trusted inner circle of creators he can text on a Monday when a brand needs content live by Wednesday. These are the people who get the quick-flip campaigns, the last-minute opportunities, the unexpected income.

Getting into that network has nothing to do with your analytics. It has everything to do with how you operate and how easy you are to work with.

Do you respond fast? Do you send your invoice without being chased? Do you go slightly beyond what the contract asked for and add a cherry on top? AJ said those moments get written down and shared with brand partners. Creators who do that get called first. Creators who take ten days to respond, even with massive platforms, get passed over.

Be the creator that just sends it.

The internet tends to romanticize going full-time as a creator or founder, but it is difficult in ways that are hard to prepare for. One of the most important distinctions AJ made was that content creation as a creative muscle is completely different from content creation as a career. When it becomes how you pay rent, the pressure changes everything. You start saying yes to deals you do not believe in. You start posting things you would not otherwise post. The creative joy can drain fast if you did not build the foundation before you needed it.

His advice: do not jump because it looks cool. Use every night, weekend, and holiday to build on the side while you still have the security of a paycheck. Get enough momentum that the jump is calculated, not desperate.

AJ went to business school. He said it prepared him for almost none of what building a team actually requires. Every new hire adds complexity. He joked that he was his own HR department for a long time, until suddenly there were enough people that he actually had to hire HR. Health insurance, state tax registrations, employee management, retention — it compounds fast.

But the way he talked about his team made it clear this is also where the meaning is. When it is just you, the stakes are low. Worst case, you go home and start over. When there are 30 people whose families depend on what you are building, the weight is different.

Two things keep him grounded through the chaos: endurance fitness (he runs marathons to train his brain to expect difficulty and stay steady) and what he calls his corner. Like a boxer, the fight is only part of it. Who is around you matters just as much. His COO, his roommate who is also a founder, the team members he has recruited and retained — those relationships are what make the hard days survivable.

His perspective on every fire is that it’s just a problem to solve.

AJ's entire client pipeline came from LinkedIn. He posted about what he was building, brands found him, booked calls, and became clients. No paid media. No cold outreach campaigns. Just consistent content that stayed visible to the exact audience he wanted to reach.

He called it founder-led content, and said the rule that made it work was simple: give before you ever ask. He spent a long time helping creators and job seekers with free content before he ever pitched anything. By the time he launched Creator Match publicly, he already had an audience that trusted him.

That trust compounded into an agency that now runs six and seven-figure campaigns for some of the fastest-growing tech brands in the world.

Someone in our community asked: I have a decent following on Instagram. I'm a lifestyle creator and I keep hearing I should be on LinkedIn too. I have no idea how to translate my content into that world. Where do I start?

AJ's answer: just start and stop waiting to be perfect. Post and get enough data to make real decisions.

On LinkedIn, your audience is sitting at their work laptop in a professional headspace. On Instagram and TikTok, that same person is on the couch in full doom-scroll mode. Same person, completely different context, completely different content needs.

The lifestyle content can absolutely work on LinkedIn, but it needs a career or professional lens on it. A day-in-the-life as a founder? That lands. A day-in-the-life as an influencer with no business tie-in? Much harder. Think about who you are speaking to and where they are sitting when they see you.

Go follow AJ on LinkedIn and check out Creator Match if you are a brand or a creator looking to get serious about B2B content monetization. He is one of the most generous people in this space and this conversation is one I will be thinking about for a long time.

Welcome to Creator Etiquette™. I am so glad you are here.

Xo, Gigi Robinson Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom

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