Brought to you by beehiiv.
Today’s guest is Vin Matano, a part-time creator and the owner of an influencer marketing agency called Creatorbuzz.
Though he’s on the usual platforms — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube — Vin’s specialty is LinkedIn. This is the core of his personal creator work (which he says brought in around $200k last year) and his agency work (Creatorbuzz’s clients are all B2B companies).
In this episode:
💼 Building a $200k brand deal business
📈 How overdelivering turned one UGC gig into a 2.5-year partnership
💰 How Creatorbuzz brought in $2.5M in its first full year
Listen wherever you get your podcasts; watch below; and scroll down to read our profile.
— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor
How I’m hitting my LinkedIn growth and engagement goals this year
LinkedIn is still the most underrated social platform. That’s why one of my goals for this year is to hit 10,000 followers there — it helps me land interviews for the podcast, connect with a more engaged audience, and just meet other people doing great work in the creator economy.
I’m currently at 4949. The only way I’m going to hit that number is by posting useful, engaging content on a consistent basis.
I’m using Taplio to build my routine. It’s an all-in-one LinkedIn growth tool, that lets creators like you and me:
Generate first drafts based on your ideas
Make image-based carousels (without external graphic design tools)
Find relevant content to engage with
Track — and understand — your analytics
As the sponsor of today’s Creator Spotlight, Taplio is also giving you:
A 7-day free trial
$1 for a 1-month membership
Get started using Taplio today — and use code CREATOR1X1 to grab this special offer.
This is an advertisement.
Tripling creator revenue one year, doubling it the next
The only reason we post to LinkedIn is to make money.
On Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, people also post to make money, but it’s not the only reason. We’re also posting purely for creative expression or social connection. It’s all mixed together in one feed.
In this way, LinkedIn is the most honest platform; we all know why we’re there.
As a part-time creator, Vin Matano made around $200k in 2025. This is more than double the $94k he reports making in 2024. But it’s only equal to around 8% of the revenue his B2B influencer marketing agency brought in during the same time period.
Vin started making LinkedIn content at the end of the 2010s, after graduating college without a job lined up:
"I realized every time I posted on LinkedIn, recruiters would reach out to me, and interviews might come from it.”
Even after he landed a job (as a salesperson at a tech company), he kept posting, shifting to sales topics like his client prospecting strategies. He doesn’t remember getting much engagement until sometime in 2019, when one of his posts — a story about how closing a deal led to his meeting Gary Vaynerchuk — received over 1,000 likes and 1 million views
Vin spent six years at the same company, steadily climbing through the ranks, posting to LinkedIn all throughout. Eventually, he zeroed in on a day-in-the-life series, giving viewers a glimpse of him going to the gym in the mornings and commuting into Manhattan, showing them around the office.
@vinmatano Replying to @jakeclare21 Hyperwrite! #techsales #techtok #dayinmylife #dayinthelife #sales #nyc #nyclife #saas #tech #prospecting
Soon enough, brands were paying him to post:
The first time Vin earned any money as a creator was a $200 brand deal. He had between 10,000 and 15,000 followers on LinkedIn; the deal was for one text-only LinkedIn post.
The first deal that felt “major” was $9,000 for three videos. He recalls having around 30,000 LinkedIn followers at that point.
To date, the largest deal he’s closed as a creator was $28,000. By this point, he didn’t have many fewer followers than he does today (just under 54,000). His end of the deal involved three videos, one LinkedIn post, and “a bunch of [Instagram] Stories.”
All about brand deals
Brand deals made up the vast majority of Vin’s $200k creator revenue last year. Back in 2023, his creator income was $34k, spread across six revenue streams:
45% from brand partnerships
19% from advising
12% coaching
11% from digital products sales
7% from User Generated Content (UGC)
6% from affiliate links
(That post, by the way, received 617 reactions and 125 comments).
“As a part-time creator,” Vin told us, there’s no better value for time than brand deals.
Vin identifies two primary reasons he’s been able to increase his creator income so much year over year. The first is he left his job in the middle of 2024, which allowed him to expand the scope of his content:
"Once I quit and started my own business, I started opening up my content to different types of audiences, started doing founder-led content, more storytelling stuff. And I opened it up to more brand partnerships."
The second reason follows from the first: he’s been able to build deeper relationships with brands seeking to reach his increasingly wider audience. Two of his key partners are Adobe and — of course — LinkedIn.
One of his best-performing posts ever, with 5,107 reactions at the time of writing, is an ad for LinkedIn Ads:
Over-deliver to build more prosperous relationships
“I'm easy to work with; I make sure I meet deadlines, I over-communicate, and I over-deliver on content."
How does Vin land and renew long-term brand deals? He over-delivers. If he can get his foot in the door with a brand, even for a single post at a low rate, he’ll give far more than they asked for. This is exactly how he developed a relationship with Adobe:
“I did some UGC work for them, maybe in 2023 … It was one small project and I gave them three videos … I did it just to start working with Adobe and, two-and-a-half years later, I’m still working with them.”
There’s nuance here — Vin isn’t necessarily suggesting that creators should create two high-produced YouTube videos where a brand only paid for one. But if a brand asks for three Instagram Stories, Vin says he might deliver 10. It’s minimal extra effort for him, but it goes a long way for the partner.
He also stresses the importance of building these relationships with any agencies representing brands:
“If you can show that you're easy to work with to an agency that holds the budget to a lot of different brands, they're going to be really quick to recommend you across all of their brands.”
A multi-million-dollar influencer marketing agency
Vin left his sales job to package everything he’d learned as a professional salesperson and building his own part-time creator business in an agency model. Creatorbuzz works on behalf of B2B businesses to assist on or fully execute influencer marketing campaigns.
@vinmatano Replying to @MylesDad why I quit my tech sales job #techsales
Founded in the summer of 2024, the company currently has seven full-time employees (and additional contractors).
Two account managers focused on brand relationships
Three people focused on creator relationships
One person handling accounts payable (paying creators)
Vin rounds out the roster, doing a bit of everything as CEO
By the end of 2024, just half a year in, the team was half the size it is now; the rest were hired in October of 2025.
Entering 2025, Vin set $1 million as their revenue goal for the year. By September they did — and from there through the end of the year, the business exploded, with an additional $1.5 million coming in to end the year at $2.5 million. To get there, they worked with 212 creators across 26 countries, on behalf of over 20 brands.
Vin’s plans for 2026 are to continue working as a part-time creator himself — he’s hired editing and shooting help to up his quality bar — and to continue growing the agency.
Connect with Vin on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok.
Work with Creatorbuzz.
LinkedIn content strategy 101
Vin understands how to succeed on LinkedIn better than most — success meaning producing content that engages his target audience and attracts clients. At the time of this writing, his follower count sits just below 54k, higher than on any other platform where he’s actively posting.
The principles of a successful LinkedIn content strategy aren’t too different from those of any other social platform: post high-quality content consistently.
If there is a difference, it’s just that “high-quality content” here requires professional relevance.
LinkedIn staff recommend three specific topics
Vin has been actively posting on LinkedIn for more than half a decade and says the platform has become better at supporting creators in that time. One way they do this is by assigning community managers to top creators, including him; he has a direct line to the LinkedIn team.
There are three topic areas Vin says the LinkedIn team recommends focusing on:
News and trends: “If you are an expert in a certain industry, speak on that and share your POV. Give commentary on news and trends.”
Workplace stories: “What did you learn while at your last job that can be a lesson for everyone else? Did you have a really successful campaign? Did you have a really bad campaign that maybe you learned a lot from?”
Career advice: “What have you learned during your career so far that someone maybe two, three years behind you can learn from?”
You don’t need to be decades deep in your career to have something worth sharing:
“A lot of young people I talk to are hesitant to post on LinkedIn because they don't feel they have enough to share.
In reality, veterans in the space are looking to young people to see how they're talking, how they're thinking about things. You definitely have a lot to share no matter what stage of your career you're in.”
A little effort goes a long way — be earnest, have fun
Watch any of Vin’s videos — most of his posts are videos — and you’ll start to notice a few patterns. There’s always a brief hook before he cuts back to the “beginning” of the story to add context. But every video creator does this; if there’s a trademark detail to Vin’s content, it’s his use of props.
One of his best-engaged posts in the last year is a photo of him with a hand-made LinkedIn “Hiring” badge around his neck. 2,149 reactions at the time of writing! It’s a little bit cringe, it shows evidence of effort, it’s earnest. And it works.
“I don't think enough people are storytelling to answer your question. People are posting really bad stuff on LinkedIn, just a low quality. So the barrier, the bar is much lower.”
Again, the only reason we post on or scroll LinkedIn is to make money. It’s honest; it should also be fun.
No need to post every day (unless you need the reps)
There’s plenty of LinkedIn content advice out there — only post during working hours, make every sentence it’s own paragraph, you have to post every single day. I asked Vin if there was one piece of advice he thinks is nonsense.
“Posting every day is pretty nonsense. You don't need to post every day.”
On the other hand, there’s no harm in posting every day. Recent guest Daniel Berk posts at least that often, to the tune of consistent engagement and follower growth.
Vin used to post every day but has slowed to only twice or thrice per week. In the beginning, when you’re getting started, he says it’s “helpful just to build up that muscle and remove the barrier of fear you might have posting on LinkedIn.”
It’s good exercise — just not sustainable in the long term. Plus, Vin says, “Nobody really wants to hear from you every single day.”
