Carlos Caro has posted on LinkedIn nearly every day since March 25, 2022. He remembers the exact date. Four years on, he has written roughly 250 newsletter articles, recorded 85 episodes of his own podcast, and spent under $1,000 on marketing in total. Content is his entire funnel. No outbound, no cold email, no paid channels.
He is the founder of New Market Growth, a marketing agency for consumer lenders, and The Free Toaster, a newsletter and events business in the same niche. He met Supriya at Credit Karma, where he led partnerships for the credit card business and later ran Lightbox. Before that, Capital One for seven years. Before that, a full-ride econ PhD at Columbia that he quit after a year, and a year of poker.
The thing that started the posting was an interview. A 25-year-old founder with a billion-dollar valuation asked him, in his own zone of expertise, to prove it. Carlos’s takeaway was not that the founder was wrong. It was that he had shown up without a body of evidence, and that was his own fault.
What we covered
The prove-it problem. Carlos hates being on his heels. His fix is to put the evidence out publicly so buyers convince themselves before they ever reach him. If someone still needs a 90-minute call to be persuaded, he treats that as a fit signal, not a sales opportunity.
The metrics that lie. He averages around 1,500 impressions per post now, down from four or five thousand a few years ago, and yet impressions in aggregate are up 16% YOY (crossing 1M+ impressions over the last year). He gets 10 to 15 likes on a typical post, maybe 100 on a great one. His observation: the 100-like posts do nothing for the business. The 5 and 10-like posts drive the DMs, which are the only number that really matter. His DMs have doubled YOY.
The feedback vacuum. About a million reads a year, and he can count the pieces of real feedback he receives on one or two hands. He argues this is a genuine risk for creators, because you lose the loop that tells you whether the work is landing.
Anti-personal brand. Generic AI posts and robotic comments are not neutral. Carlos’s view is that they actively cost you credibility, and that saying nothing would be the better choice. He also expects a wave of pre-AI creators to lose their edge by diluting the authenticity that built their following.
Where AI belongs. Record the voice memo. Do the thinking. Then use AI to sharpen sentences and find hooks, and to turn one good asset into many.
The ROI math. Carlos runs the same exercise with skeptical B2B founders: value your hour, multiply by the hours a year of content takes, and you land somewhere around $30,000 to $50,000. Then ask what one closed deal is worth. It almost always covers the year. His read on the ROI objection is that it usually means “I don’t feel like doing this.”
How he would start from zero. Pick one platform. Handwrite 30 posts, typos and all. Ship one a day for 30 days on a single theme and study what happens. Then commit to a year. The strategy is not the hard part.
The event. Carlos’s co-founder Nick pitched live events and Carlos initially hated the idea. At first, the idea only reminded him of how useless giant conferences can be - 1,000s of people, $1,000s of dollars, and zero real human connection. Now he is running one: September 23 in San Francisco at the Exploratorium, 150 people, curated and invite only, outdoors by the water. Day two is a vineyard in Sonoma for 50 people, no talks, no fireside chats, just the conversations people have been meaning to have. The anti-goal is explicit: not a Marriott conference room, not Money20/20. Tickets are $1,000 for the day and $1,500 after August 1. Roughly half the current registrations are people he has never met.
Follow Carlos:
Subscribe: thefreetoaster.com
RSVP: events.thefreetoaster.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-carlos-caro/
Human Layers is hosted by Cat Valverde and Supriya Gupta of Eve. New episodes work through the same five layers with every guest: the story, what changed, how they built the brand, their take on executive voice, and whether it pays off.
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