Super Show Notes for Episode 2.02 of Damns Given Podcast
Guest: Jacob Warwick
Jacob Warwick spent 15 years building a career on LinkedIn — a ghostwriting company, millions in revenue, a hard-won reputation as the most direct person in the room. Then he walked away. Not because it stopped working. Because he got clear on what he was actually building, and the platform no longer fit.
This conversation isn’t a manifesto about logging off. It’s a case study in what happens when you stop optimizing for visibility and start optimizing for the right relationships. The questions Jacob’s story forces are ones every leader and independent professional needs to sit with.
The Jacob Warwick TL;DR:
- Where did you come from? Jacob rode LinkedIn from homeless 18-year-old to Fortune 500 director in two years — not through strategy, but through obsessive experimentation and the willingness to take jobs nobody else wanted.
- What did building Discover Podium teach you? He scaled a ghostwriting business to $1M+ in year one, ran it for five years on hundred-hour weeks, then shut it down instead of selling it. What he learned about commoditized work versus value-based work changed everything after.
- What finally made you leave? Two things happened simultaneously: he went viral on LinkedIn Lunatics and got publicly mocked by thousands of strangers. And he closed the best deal of his career — half a million dollars for under twelve hours of work. The contrast was clarifying.
- Is LinkedIn still worth it? His answer is honest and nuanced. Yes, for certain people at certain stages. No, as a universal truth. And the feed has genuinely degraded in ways that matter for serious professionals.
- What gives you hope? Faith, family, and a reordered set of priorities. Worth hearing in full.
Actions for Leaders
- Get clear on who you actually need to talk to. Not who follows you. Not who engages with your content. Who do you need a real conversation with in the next 90 days? Jacob’s clarity on this shifted at every stage of his career, and the platform choice followed that clarity — not the other way around.
- Follow money, not metrics. LinkedIn is monetized by your data and your contacts. Not by your outcomes. If you are not paying for something, you are the product. Design your time on any platform with that in mind.
- Think from their seat. Jacob’s business turned around when he stopped leading with what he offered and started asking what a win looked like for the other person. He polled his audience to set his pricing. He structured deals around outcomes his clients could verify. Empathy here is not soft — it is the mechanism.
- Audit what platform behavior is actually costing you. Jacob described waking up at 1:30 AM to respond to leads. He described his toddler shaking his wrist to get his attention while his eyes were on a screen. What is your current behavior costing you in presence, in identity, in the relationships that matter most? You don’t have to leave anything to do this audit honestly.
“Every time I’m pulled into my phone, it’s a distraction. And if it’s a distraction, it’s got to be an expensive one.” — Jacob Warwick
Summary
Jacob’s best clients have never come from his content. They come from one person telling another: you need to talk to this guy. That is it. Every platform, every post, every follower count is downstream of that single dynamic.
The ventures that last are built on a small number of high-trust relationships, not a large number of weak ones. If your work is good enough and specific enough that the people who experience it send you to the next person — the platform is optional. If it isn’t, no algorithm can fix that gap.
One more thing. Jacob chose to shut down a company rather than sell it because it had become something he didn’t believe in. He chose not to outsource his voice even when it was profitable to do so. Those are integrity decisions, not business decisions. And they are exactly what made people trust him enough to pay him half a million dollars for less than a day’s work. The trust you build in how you make decisions when no one is watching compounds. Slowly, then all at once.
Coming Soon on Episode 2.03 of Damns Given…
I interview Amy Carillo Cotten, Director of Transformation and we give a damn about the future of software:
Jacob just walked away from a platform that shaped his entire career. So what are the people actually building these platforms experiencing right now? In Episode 2.03, Amy Carillo Cotten — a senior technology strategist with over 15 years in the field — pulls back the curtain on what’s really happening inside the engineering teams that make the tools we all depend on, argue about, and occasionally rage-quit. It turns out the people building the future are having their own identity crisis. And the way through it looks a lot less like code and a lot more like the things Jacob found when he finally put the phone down. Make sure you’re subscribed. You won’t want to miss it.