Who hasn’t fantasised about strapping a lie detector to their boss?
Well, the content creators at German AI company Tl;dv did this in the summer, putting their CEO Raphael Allstadt through his paces on camera. Is content his favourite team? “Yes,” Allstadt answered. This apparent lie resulted in an electric shock.
No European company does funny videos as well as the AI notetaker app, whose name — an acronym for “too long; didn’t view”, a nod to the internet shorthand for “too long; didn’t read” — sets the playful tone.
Tl;dv's trio of creators — Tom Budin, Renée Shaw and Ian Evans — may look like they’re larking about online all day but their output has become an engine for brand awareness and customer retention (Sifted recently ranked Tl;dv as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies). They’ve helped make my own LinkedIn experience a little more bearable.
The secret of their viral success boils down to this: “we're creators first, marketers second. A lot of companies make the mistake of having marketers running their social channels,” says Evans.
Tying it all together is Allstadt, chief cheerleader for the trio, who promotes every video and funny comment. Allstadt has achieved what self-proclaimed “chilled out entertainer” boss David Brent couldn’t in The Office: a light touch and the respect of his subordinates.
He also has one of European tech’s most unusual CVs: a geophysics degree, a management stint at Burger King and then this startup.
“He's unconventionally good, the trust he gives us, his lightheartedness, the fact that he's so self-aware,” says Evans. “I asked him when I joined the company if we’d become a unicorn someday, he said, 'You know what, I don't care if we make a billion dollars, I just want us to enjoy our lives'.”
From American Psycho to Love Island
My first encounter with Allstadt is in a park in Cologne with his dog. “My main learning from doing this for a while is that you should entertain first and sell second,” he says. “And in fact don’t sell for quite a while. Be ready to burn one year’s worth of creator budget for little results.”
Hire funny people too, of course. “It's much easier for a creator to learn jokes about tech, than a tech person to become a creator,” Allstadt says.
The company enjoyed its first viral success in 2022 with only its fifth video. The setup for this one is the seemingly innocent “Hey” message that many tech workers receive from colleagues on office messenger Slack. As the video accurately shows, this usually isn’t an innocent conversation opener — your colleague is about to follow up with a lengthy post that aims to rope you into time-consuming work.
The creators each have their specialties. “I'll go to Renee for a crazy CEO character, then I'd go to Tom for a sales character,” says Evans, who lately has been creating videos that feature an AI agent character that keeps misunderstanding directions from humans.
“Ideas come to me 24/7,” says Evans. “I’ll get them in comment sections, from memes. I'll go down Reddit holes to really understand tech personalities and the things that drive them crazy.” Shaw says a lot of her ideas stem from a “massive chip on my shoulder from old relationships with tech bros”.
Lately, the company’s been having most of its joy on LinkedIn — a much more forgiving place than TikTok, where the competition for high quality video is fierce. “TikTok demands your entire soul: are you truly funny? You’ll quickly find out.
“On LinkedIn, the bar is in absolute hell: the content is so bad. If you just show up and speak like a human, people go mental for it.”
A small handful of tech companies are funny online. Language app Duolingo really leaned into memes about its mascot owl murdering your whole family if you miss a Spanish lesson. “Every marketer is sick of hearing how good Duolingo is though,” says Evans. He nominates US media site Morning Brew: “my corporate work crush”.
One big part of Tl;dv’s success is that the three creators are not afraid to be brutal with each other. Despite the trio living very far apart — Evans is in Canada, Budin in the UK, Shaw in Australia — they describe their relationship as sibling-like. “For every one idea that gets posted, three get shot down,” adds Evans.
“We’ve all said to each other, it’s only beneficial if we can afford to be brutally honest. I don’t feel I have to mince my words,” says Budin. This might be an unheralded benefit of remote work: “There’s the safety of my screen, you can’t see peoples’ faces” after tough feedback,” says Budin.
Only about one in every 10 videos mentions the product, Budin estimates. Even then, it’s not a hard pitch.
“We just don’t take [the selling bit] that seriously — but we care a lot about what we produce,” says Shaw.
Dunking on Sam Altman
Of the trio, Shaw’s humour is the most absurdist — ”she’s insane,” says Evans.
A recent observation she made on LinkedIn: “if you're not exporting your WhatsApp history with your ex and querying it with ChatGPT for sentiment analysis and detailed breakdowns of argument root cause and fault… you’re falling behind.”
One of Shaw’s most popular skits to date is a conversation she imagined having with OpenAI boss Sam Altman, in which Altman repeatedly calls her a pretty pony. Shaw says she was contacted after by some people at OpenAI who were annoyed by this; equally, “I got so many messages from people saying ‘can you introduce me to him?’”
She brought back her Altman character again recently, imagining a conversation the CEO had with his mother, who feared that OpenAI was becoming a porn company (this was after OpenAI said it would introduce erotica to its chatbot for adult users).
Budin’s videos have the most flair. “He’s a true filmmaker,” says Evans.
In a recent effort, Budin recreates a scene from American Psycho, where the main character, Patrick Bateman, is flaunting his new business card in front of his colleagues. In Budin’s version, the characters are competing not over business cards, but who has the most buzzwords in their LinkedIn bio. “Global director of thought leadership and ecosystem optimisation” is the job title that sends Budin into a depression spiral.
In another recent video, Budin recreates a scene from Love Island — in his telling, it's a sales person having a lover's tiff with a CRM. “Babes, you, like, never update me anymore,” the teary CRM complains.
Allstadt reposted a screenshot of Budin’s CRM character (blond wig and mascara streaming) on LinkedIn, saying: “My average day as a founder: one moment I am updating our finance forecast, the next I am looking at Tom pretending to be a CRM on Love Island.”
Budin commented under this post with “Smash or pass?”. It was a peek inside an unconventional office.
Funny business: rules of thumb
Getting laughs online is definitely more art than science — but these are some things the Tl;dv folk say to bear in mind.
Entertain first, sell second. In fact, don’t sell for a while. “You need to earn the right to pitch to your audience,” says Budin. “People want to feel like valued members of a community so we try to shed light on a pain point and try to make our audience seen.”
Don’t buy expensive equipment. “An iPhone and CapCut [the editing software] will still get you so far,” says Evans.
Don’t create content to hit a quota — only post when you have something good. “We’ve changed our strategy a bunch, [in the beginning] we’d try and post three times a day each. Now we make fewer videos of higher quality,” says Budin. “The more you make, the more your confidence goes up; it’s easier to hit upload.”
Give honest — and if necessary, tough — feedback. “There’s nothing worse than being ‘mid’,” says Shaw. “A lot of videos I watch that are almost edgy — if you want to be funny, you have to be willing to have an edge.”
Make content for LinkedIn first — the competition is much tougher on TikTok.
Hire creators you enjoy watching. “That makes it easy to work together,” says Allstadt.
Don’t copy others. “You need to ask yourself what makes you unique,” the CEO adds.
