According to Joshua B. Lee, roughly how much does the average LinkedIn user earn per year compared to users on other social platforms, and what fraction of LinkedIn users are business decision-makers?

Answer at bottom of email

Joshua B. Lee's path into marketing started with an injury, not an ambition. A football injury in East Texas ended whatever athletic future he had been building toward, and in the aftermath, he found himself pulled toward something that had nothing to do with a scoreboard: the earliest days of social media as a business tool.

In 2003, when MySpace was still a fresh, chaotic platform that most established businesses dismissed as a toy for teenagers, Joshua became what he describes as the platform's first real marketing client, working to figure out how a still-unproven social network could actually drive business results before almost anyone else was asking that question seriously.

That early, unglamorous experimentation shaped what Joshua now calls his "human algorithm" philosophy:

Decades later, that same instinct led him to LinkedIn, a platform many marketers still dismiss as a place for job postings and recruiter spam rather than a genuine sales and marketing engine.

Joshua saw what almost nobody else was paying attention to: a platform where the average user earns dramatically more than users on other major social networks, where four out of five users are actual business decision-makers, and where nobody was building a real relationship-first content strategy.

He earned the nickname "the Dopamine Dealer of LinkedIn" for his ability to make even a famously buttoned-up professional platform feel genuinely engaging.

His company, Standout Authority, is built entirely around the premise that the same platform recruiters use to post job listings is quietly one of the most underused revenue engines in modern marketing, if you actually understand how the humans on it behave.

This week pairs Joshua B. Lee's breakdown of LinkedIn's underused business mechanics with his wife and business partner Rachel B. Lee's argument about why so many brands, despite posting constantly, have completely lost their audience's trust.

Together, the two conversations paint a complete picture: LinkedIn offers real, measurable business opportunity, but only for brands willing to show up as genuinely human rather than automated.

Joshua's numbers make the platform's opportunity concrete. The average LinkedIn user earns significantly more than users on other major platforms, and four out of five users are actual business decision-makers, a targeting advantage almost no other channel can match. Rachel's warning runs in parallel: mass automated outreach might convert at a small percentage, but it quietly destroys the exact trust that makes any of this opportunity valuable in the first place.

Watch These Misfits Episodes to Dive Deeper:

Rachel B. Lee's content pillar framework organizes personal brand content around three distinct categories, ensuring a founder or executive's LinkedIn presence never tips too far into either pure vulnerability or pure corporate credibility, both of which fail on their own over a long buying cycle.

Why this matters: B2B buyers researching a brand or a founder over a six month to two year decision window need to see a complete picture over time, not a single viral post. A founder who only posts vulnerable, personal stories builds resonance but may never demonstrate the actual expertise a buyer needs to see before committing. A founder who only posts polished, credential-heavy content builds authority but never builds the human connection that differentiates them from a dozen equally credentialed competitors.

How to build a three-pillar content strategy in practice:

The payoff of this structure is durability across a long buying cycle. A buyer who encounters your profile six different times over an eighteen month research process should see a consistent, complete picture of who you are, not three disconnected content strategies that happened to be running at different times.

Most reactivation sequences read like they were written by committee, generic language, generic offers, generic urgency. A reactivation sequence written in a genuine, specific personal voice, the way a founder or brand personality actually talks, tends to cut through inbox fatigue far more effectively than another polished but forgettable "we miss you" template.

Start by writing the first reactivation email as if you are personally checking in on someone you have not heard from in a while, because that is essentially what is happening. Reference something specific and real, a product category they showed interest in previously, or a piece of content they once engaged with, rather than a generic "it's been a while" opener that could apply to literally any subscriber on any list.

Avoid leading with a discount in this first message. Lead with genuine curiosity about why they went quiet, framed as an actual question rather than a rhetorical one. A simple, direct "what happened" tone, written in first person, tends to generate real replies that a generic template never would.

If the first email does not generate engagement, follow with a second message that shares something genuinely new or interesting, a behind-the-scenes update, a real lesson learned, or a meaningful change in your business, again avoiding a hard sales pitch until trust shows some sign of reactivating first.

Reserve an actual offer or discount for a third and final message in the sequence, and frame it as a genuine,time-limited reason to give the relationship one more chance, rather than the default opening move. This sequencing respects the subscriber's intelligence and tends to outperform jumping straight to a discount, which can read as desperate rather than personal.

For help with email marketing for your brand, contact dragon.fish

The Brand: Yeti built its brand from a niche, expensive cooler company into a broad lifestyle brand largely through a deliberate community and content strategy that had nothing to do with traditional cooler advertising.

Rather than pitching product specs, Yeti invested heavily in short documentary-style content celebrating the outdoor and hunting and fishing lifestyle its core customers actually lived, positioning the brand as a genuine part of that culture rather than an outside advertiser selling into it.

The Strategy: The strategy worked because it built genuine emotional resonance with a specific, passionate community before ever asking that community to buy anything.

Customers who felt the brand genuinely understood their lifestyle were willing to pay a significant premium over cheaper cooler alternatives, treating a Yeti product as a status marker within their specific community rather than a commodity purchase decision.

The Result: Yeti successfully commanded price points several multiples higher than mainstream cooler competitors while still building a business that reached well over a billion dollars in annual revenue, an outcome that would have been extremely difficult to achieve through price-based competition in an otherwise commoditized product category.

The Lesson: Investing in content that celebrates your customer's actual lifestyle and identity, rather than your product's features, can justify a premium price point that feature-based marketing alone rarely supports.

Japanese whisky owes much of its distinct character to a type of oak that barely exists anywhere else in commercial whisky production: Mizunara, a Japanese oak species notoriously difficult to work with because the tree grows slowly and often develops natural water pockets that make finding straight, usable staves for a barrel genuinely rare.

Coopers who work with Mizunara describe it as far more porous and prone to leaking than American or European oak, requiring extra skill and patience to construct a barrel that will actually hold spirit successfully for years of aging.

What makes the difficulty worth it is the flavor: Mizunara oak imparts distinct notes often described as sandalwood, incense, or coconut, aromatic qualities almost never found in whiskey aged purely in American or European oak barrels.

Because usable Mizunara trees are scarce and the wood is genuinely difficult to work with, barrels made from it remain expensive and limited in supply, which is part of why whiskies finished or aged in Mizunara oak tend to command a noticeably higher price point among collectors and enthusiasts who specifically seek out that distinct aromatic signature.

The next Collective Minds Society Cigar & Whisky trip is Feb 18-22, 2027

Use AI to evaluate a draft LinkedIn post against Rachel B. Lee's three-pillar framework before you publish it, catching imbalances in your content rotation before they compound over months.

Sample Prompt:

"Here are my last 15 LinkedIn posts and their content pillar. Which pillar does today's draft fall under, and is my recent rotation too heavily weighted toward one pillar?"

A quick AI check before publishing beats realizing three months later that you have not posted a single expertise piece in ten weeks.

Q: How much does the average LinkedIn user earn compared to other social platforms?

Joshua B. Lee cites an average of roughly $130,000 a year for LinkedIn users, compared to $50,000 to $70,000 on other major platforms, as discussed on Nobody Realizes How Much Money is on LinkedIn.

Q: What is Rachel B. Lee's headline formula for a LinkedIn profile?

"I help X do Y so Z," kept to roughly 220 characters, giving any visitor an instant, clear understanding of your value.

Q: Should I automate my LinkedIn outreach and posting?

Joshua B. Lee advises strongly against it, noting that LinkedIn and major AI platforms actively detect and penalize automated behavior patterns, which can damage both reach and account standing over time.

Q: How long does a typical B2B buying cycle take according to Rachel B. Lee?

She notes the modern B2B buying cycle now stretches anywhere from six months to two years, and the path a buyer takes through it is rarely linear, which is why sustained, consistent content matters more than any single post.

The average LinkedIn user earns roughly $130,000 a year, compared to $50,000 to $70,000 on other major social platforms, and four out of five LinkedIn users are business decision-makers.

Joshua B. Lee shared both figures on Nobody Realizes How Much Money is on LinkedIn, making the case that the platform is one of the most underused revenue engines available to B2B marketers.

Watch the full conversation