Miscreants runs 5x the founder brands per writer with Poplar

Miscreants is a hacker led creative agency for cybersecurity companies, based in New York and London. Twenty two people work with 25 to 40 clients at a time, most on long term retainers, across brand, product marketing, websites, motion and demand gen. Clients include Halcyon, HackerOne, Armis, OffSec, Sublime Security and a long list of RSA and Black Hat finalists. One of the agency's biggest use cases is founder brand, helping early stage security founders become leaders on LinkedIn.

Every client is a different voice to hold in your head

Before Poplar, Miscreants ran founder brand programs on a stack of internal tools and general purpose AI, with a separate project for every client. It worked, but it never stopped being manual. The more clients a writer carried, the more context they had to keep in their head. This person talks like this. That person only wants to post about these three things.

General purpose AI fixed the blank page problem and nothing else. Every draft came back needing a human rewrite, and the writer spent the day editing out the tells. A week's worth of posts for one client was still a full day of an IC's time, sometimes two.

Then the posts went into a separate scheduling tool. That meant a lag between something breaking in the news and a client being able to speak to it, which is exactly when a security founder's take matters most.

“You can only tell AI to get rid of em dashes and not use negation framing so many times. You're always going to get an end product a human has to rewrite.”

One writer, four clients, maxed out

The math capped the business. A single writer could carry about four founder brand clients before quality slipped or the hours ran out. Growing the program meant hiring, and every new hire meant another person learning every client's voice from scratch.

The clients felt it too. Handing your LinkedIn to an agency requires trust that what goes out will sound like you and reflect well on you. Every draft that needed edits chipped at that trust and pulled the founder back into the work they'd hired the agency to take off their plate.

“One person can now work with 10, 20 plus clients, whereas that one person maxed out previously at four.”

From breaking news to approved post in minutes

Poplar gave Miscreants a profile for every person they write for, so the voice lives in the platform instead of in a writer's head. Each client gets a login, sees what's queued, checks their analytics and approves. Because the drafts already sound like them, approval is a click, not a revision cycle. Many clients now just let it fly.

The lag disappeared. When something breaks, the team goes from headline to a post in the client's voice to sending it for approval in one sitting, with scheduling built in. The idea research, the writing and the scheduling that used to live in three tools live in one workflow.

A week of content that took a full day of an IC's time now takes two hours max. A single post went from about two hours to about ten minutes.

“If you're using a scheduler, and then a writer, and then an idea research product, having that all consolidated into one streamlined workflow is what we found Poplar really useful for.”

5x the clients per writer, and the clients noticed

The agency now recommends Poplar to anyone who will listen. The numbers explain why.

• Clients per writer went from a ceiling of 4 to 10 to 20 plus
• A week of client content went from a full day of an IC's time to 2 hours max
• A single post went from about 2 hours to about 10 minutes
• Clients went from zero posts a week to posting every day
• Founders' friends are asking how they post at that rate without it sounding like AI

“If Poplar disappeared today, we would have to onboard a lot more folks, and a lot of our clients would be disappointed. They've built a ritual where they log in, see the numbers go up and to the right, and hit approve.”

The sales call that closed itself

On a recent sales call, a prospect ran through every objection an agency hears about founder brand. How will you make it sound like me. How will you keep the cadence up. Will I have to edit everything. Then he pulled up a couple of LinkedIn accounts he wanted to emulate. One of them was a Miscreants client, and he had no idea.

He couldn't believe the founder wasn't writing the posts himself. That was the moment it clicked, and it closed the deal on the spot.

The resounding feedback from Miscreants' clients is that for the first time they feel like they can truly delegate their social growth to someone else and trust it will reflect well on them.

“He couldn't believe that wasn't actually him posting. That's how he went from zero posts a week to posting every single day. It helped us close the account right away.”