Avsnitt
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This week on VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest break down their proprietary Influencer Activation Pyramid: a five-layer framework for B2B influencer content that moves from owned content at the base through sponsored, paid, earned, and organic at the top. They explain why you can't skip levels, why "paid is predictable," and what happens when brands mistake organic buzz for a birthright. Plus: why AI could never replace a great sales dinner, and the FTC disclosures your brand needs to be aware of.
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This week on VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest break down the most common mistakes they see on both sides of influencer marketing: the brands and the creators.
They talk about why brands get into trouble when they over-control messaging, chase only “big names,” or try to hide sponsorships instead of owning them. On the creator side, they unpack the pitfalls of losing your voice, overpricing yourself out of your ROI, overloading your audience with sponsored content, and letting AI flatten the very credibility people follow you for in the first place.
The throughline is simple: the best influencer marketing works when both sides know who they are, act like real partners, and don’t try to be sneaky.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Traditional PR is dead. Attention is the new currency.
In this episode of VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest talk about how PR teams are adapting to a world where content creators can function like journalists, analysts, or something entirely new. They discuss how brands should think about influencer relationships, why treating creators like traditional press often fails, and how PR, marketing, and influencer teams can collaborate.
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In technical communities, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. Developers have a nose for authenticity and credibility. In this episode of VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest talk about why the best tech content often looks a little imperfect. From avoiding “AI slop” to letting creators speak in their own voice, they break down the subtle signals that separate credible content from manufactured marketing. *No wine was harmed in the making of this episode.
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This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest break down the pendulum swing they’ve seen across marketing and engineering teams: fast, autonomous execution on one side and centralized, consensus-driven collaboration on the other. They explore why orgs drift toward process and visibility, what causes them to snap back toward small “special ops” teams, and how market pressure, redundancy, and leadership changes accelerate the swing.
They also share practical advice for surviving (and influencing) the shift including why high-output teams often look “inefficient” on paper, how centralized teams can avoid becoming bottlenecks, and what to do when a new leader arrives and starts rewriting the rules.
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This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest pull back the curtain on how they’ve built and scaled a fully distributed company in an era obsessed with return-to-office mandates.
They unpack the real incentives behind RTO, the productivity myth of “visible busyness,” and why written culture, intentional connection, and flexibility matter more than shared square footage. From hiring outside tech hubs to designing workflows around real life, they share what’s worked (and what they’re still learning) as a 20+ person remote team.
If you’re building a company and wondering whether in-person is truly required for innovation and performance, this is a candid look at what distributed can actually look like when done intentionally.
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This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest break down the real differences between B2C and B2B influencer marketing: from affiliate links and promo codes to multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles that take months (or years).
They explore why B2C expectations often sabotage B2B programs, how to measure success beyond “vibes,” and why B2B influence is about renting social capital, not chasing clicks. They also unpack the looming question: will AI influencers replace real experts? And why that shortcut could backfire hard in technical markets.
If you’ve ever tried to apply a B2C playbook to a B2B product and wondered why it didn’t translate, this episode is your reset.
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This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest discuss how the tech world is currently having a massive identity crisis, how AI is alienating developers from the very work they used to love, and explore the question: What happens when tech disrupts itself?
From the collapse of "tool-based identity" to the rise of vibe coding, they explore why this moment feels so chaotic. Along the way, they connect the dots between 19th-century naval battles, serverless hype cycles, and the very real possibility that we’re just in a messy transition phase. It’s a look at why the tech industry's ego is currently hitting a brick wall, and why the real disruption isn't the software, it's the incentives.
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This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest are joined by product marketing legend Jim Walker for a deep, opinionated, and wildly practical conversation about what great product marketing really looks like. Jim shares his unconventional path from engineer to product marketer, why technical credibility matters more than buzzwords, and how the best marketers act as translators between complex systems and human understanding.
They dig into why names like CockroachDB work (and why analysts were wrong), how to build a durable message stack across product, value, and company identity, and why product marketing should sit squarely inside the revenue function—not as a helper role. Jim also breaks down how to think about developer audiences properly (hint: “developers” are not one group), why vague words like robust and enterprise are meaningless, and how bad messaging quietly kills trust.
This episode is a masterclass in clarity, audience empathy, and saying the real thing, even when it’s uncomfortable.
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In this episode of Velocitea, Emily and Forrest break down what actually makes someone successful in this space (spoiler: do the work first). They also discuss why credibility beats clout and how to build an audience without giving off “desperate thought leader” energy.
They get practical on the nuts and bolts too: why you probably shouldn’t have your spouse manage you, what creators love about working with F&F (briefs, fast pay, no agent fees), and why the world is supply-side constrained on real tech voices. They also dig into the big question: should you quit your day job to create full time?
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In this episode of Velocitea, Emily and Forrest pull back the curtain on how influencer marketing actually gets built from startups to enterprise giants. They talk about why influencer marketing isn’t a plug-and-play tactic, how brand voice and product maturity shape every campaign, and why influencers succeed at saying things brands simply can’t.
They break down what really matters when selecting influencers (hint: it’s not follower count) and how outcomes should always come before names. The conversation also covers why short pilots aren’t ideal, why exclusivity usually backfires, and how the best collaborations happen when creators genuinely love the product.
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In this episode of Velocitea, Emily and Forrest take on “vibe marketing”: the growing trend of letting AI drive your content and hoping for the best. They break down why AI-generated marketing usually lands in the same bland mid-off, why AI influencers aren’t the future, and how synthetic data is quietly polluting the internet.
They also talk about what junior marketers actually need to learn, why writing is still a human craft, and why your weirdness is still your best marketing asset.
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In this episode of Velocitea, Emily and Forrest get spicy about influencer marketing in B2B tech. They break down why internal influencer programs so often turn into glorified PR, why “we’ll just work with a few creators we know” doesn’t scale, and how treating influencers like journalists backfires fast.
They dig into what actually makes a good influencer program work: repeatable systems, real data, clear ROI, and a healthy respect for creators as partners. Along the way, they talk about tastemaking, why most brands only see the tip of the iceberg on performance, and how the right campaigns can force a marketing org to finally get serious about analytics.
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In this episode of Velocitea, Emily and Forrest tackle a spicy question: Are we trying to kill Developer Relations? (Short answer: no.) The two unpack how DevRel has evolved from 2019’s conference-circuit celebrity era into something deeper, more technical, and far more human.
They dive into burnout, invisible labor, and what great DevRel actually looks like: bridging product, marketing, and community in ways that can’t be neatly boxed in a company org chart. Along the way: • why the “next Kelsey Hightower” probably wouldn’t get hired today • the difference between DevRel and DevEx (and why the term “relations” makes people squirm) • and who makes it onto their personal DevRel Mount Rushmore.
A mix of inside-baseball humor, empathy, and hard truths for anyone trying to build or support a developer community.
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This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest are joined by the one-and-only Kendall Miller: community-builder, meetup-runner, connector-of-humans, and self-described “bubbly business guy.” Kendall talks about the art of getting the right kind of attention in tech, why “mid” products still win all the time, and how delight (or lack of it) shows up in the products we build.
The conversation dives into the controversial startup Cluely and whether going “full chaos marketing mode” actually works in B2B SaaS. They discuss why influencers exist in the first place, how product teams lose their spark, and why founders should never design anything by committee.
Plus: • bald ponytail CTO lore • the Slack-to-Enterprise pipeline • and Kendall’s new startup Maybe Don’t, AI (yes, that’s really the name).
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In the inaugural episode of Velocitea, co-founders Emily Freeman and Forrest Brazeal finally sit down in the same room (a rare event!) to talk about how Freeman & Forrest came to be, what “influencer marketing for B2B SaaS” actually means, and why tech marketing could use a little more humanity. They unpack what surprised them most about leaving Big Tech to bootstrap their own company, why influencer strategy isn’t about chasing the biggest names, and how being outside the typical tech hubs gives them a different lens on the industry. Also: potatoes, rage quitting, and unsolicited career advice.
