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Welcome to Volume 252 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 🛡️ How (and When) Big Brands Respond to Negativity on Reddit
- 👀 The Latest in B2B SaaS This Week
- 🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
- ➕ The Best Content Across the Web
Let’s get into it.
🛡️ Playing Defense: How (and When) Big Brands Respond to Negativity on Reddit
Your security vulnerability just hit 750 upvotes before your PR team finished their morning coffee. A pricing complaint is trending in your industry subreddit. A disgruntled customer’s rant about your support team is climbing Google’s search results.
Welcome to the new reality of brand management, where feature gaps trend and the comment section looks like this:
Reddit has become the unfiltered voice of customer sentiment, and with Google’s $60 million content deal pushing Reddit threads to the top of search results, every complaint has the potential to become your brand’s first impression.
Traditional marketing and PR don’t work here. You can’t control the narrative or buy your way out of trouble, not in the long run. Success requires knowing exactly when to engage, when to acknowledge briefly, and when strategic silence beats any response.
In the latest breakdown for the Foundation Lab, I look at how major brands like Tailscale, Cloudflare, Mint Mobile, and Ahrefs handle negative sentiment on Reddit.
Are you ready for the new rules of engagement? Check out the latest article.
🎤 Ross Takes the Stage at BrightonSEO San Diego
Ross is taking the stage as a keynote speaker at BrightonSEO San Diego 2025, and he’s tackling one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today:
Content Distribution in the Age of AI: How to Make Your Content Spread
Search is no longer confined to Google. Your audience finds content through Reddit threads, TikTok comments, LinkedIn posts, YouTube Shorts, newsletters, niche communities, and now through AI-powered search tools.
In his keynote, Ross will reveal how to build a repeatable and scalable content distribution engine that combines proven tactics with AI tools to get your content in front of the right people, at the right time.
What you’ll walk away with:
- Tactical strategies for teams of any size
- AI-powered tools to amplify your content’s reach
- Frameworks for multi-channel distribution that actually work
- Real-world examples of content that travels further than ever
Whether you’re a solo marketer or leading an entire department, this session will transform how you think about getting your content seen.
Ready to level up your distribution game?
Grab your tickets to BrightonSEO San Diego and secure your spot for what promises to be one of the event’s most actionable keynotes.
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- Channel-Specific Ideas: From SEO to email, get tactics that work
- Export-Ready Slides & Docs: Present your plan to your team or clients
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🚨 Podcast Alert: The Truth About Passive Income
A new episode of The Ross Simmonds Show just dropped, and this one tackles a big myth: passive income.
The internet loves to sell “make money while you sleep” dreams. Ross breaks down why that’s mostly hype, and what actually works. He shares five sustainable income strategies that aren’t passive, but are repeatable and real.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to build income streams through digital products, affiliate content, memberships, licensing, and investing
- How to use distribution to get your content in front of the right people
- How to validate fast, solve real problems, and scale systems that actually work
Catch the latest episode of the Ross Simmonds Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for the complete roadmap to building income streams that actually last.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week? 👀
💰 Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation | TechCrunch
🚀 OpenAI teases GPT-5 launch event this Thursday | The Verge
🤖 Claude Opus 4.1: Anthropic Delivers Better Coding, Debugging, Analytics Abilities | TechRepublic
🔗 Google Backtracks on Killing All goo.gl Short Links: Here’s How to Check Yours | PC Mag
📈 Upwork is buying its way into corporate staffing beyond freelancers | TechCrunch
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food 🧠
If you feel like you made a particularly embarrassing snafu at work this week, don’t sweat it. The Prime Minister of Sweden probably has you beat.
A few days ago, Ulf Kristersson made the ill-advised decision to tell the media about his AI usage habits. Specifically, that he “quite often” uses tools like ChatGPT and Mistral’s Le Chat to get a second opinion on his decisions. Points for honesty, maybe? But the overwhelming reaction online is negative—frustration, fear, and genuine confusion. It’s understandable because, as one professor rightly put it, “we didn’t vote for ChatGPT.”
This incident perfectly captures our current AI moment.
We’re simultaneously fascinated by the capabilities of these tools but are also uncomfortable with relying on it for critical decision-making. The public’s visceral reaction to Kristersson’s AI admission says that we’re still grappling with fundamental questions about AI’s proper role in society—despite what the C-Suite would like you to believe.
It’s easy for marketers and other tech-adjacent industries to jump at the opportunity that these tools provide. They can assist with creative thinking and output. They can speed up research. They can even take over entire workflows. But there’s a lot of trust and faith going into the word can.
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
Why you shouldn’t be ignoring Reddit, Inc. By James McMaster
🎖️ Reddit Post of the Week
It’s Never Been Harder to be in Digital Marketing In r/DigitalMarketing
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models | Anthropic
- Prime Minister of Sweden Dragged for Admitting He Uses ChatGPT to Help Him Make Decisions | Gizmodo
- The ROI Of Generative Engine Optimization: The New Age of Content | Ross Simmonds
- As AI Changes Internet Search, Reddit Lies in a Sweet Spot | Wall Street Journal
- ‘Post with the desired post-post in mind’: A crowdsourced social playbook for 2025 | The Drum
💻 Job Postings Worth Checking Out
Looking for a new opportunity? Here’s a round-up of some exciting job openings in the B2B SaaS space.
- Foundation: Reddit Specialist
- Foundation: B2B Content Marketing Strategist
- Foundation: Content Creator
- Foundation: Content Marketing Manager
- Foundation: Applied Research Specialist
- Foundation: Director of Digital Marketing
Want us to include your job postings in our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS professionals today.
🎧 What We’re Wired Into This Week
This SaaS news smattering is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email Leigha Henderson at leigha@foundationinc.co. We’re always looking for ways to improve and provide the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend!
