How THNDR’s CEO increased LinkedIn engagement 8x with SecretSauce
THNDR is a B2B skill gaming platform focused on the iGaming industry. It provides a white-label skill games layer that operators (sportsbooks, DFS platforms, lottery apps) add to their products to keep players coming back, earning incremental revenue. THNDR has been running real-money skill tournaments for operators at scale since 2019: 166m+ games played, a 99.99% fill rate, 25+ partners live. Its games include 21 or Bust, Hit Me! Blackjack, Skill Slots, and Think-o.
Learn how THNDR’s CEO Desiree Dickerson created branded visuals for her founder-led LinkedIn presence with Secretsauce, and turned organic LinkedIn into THNDR's highest-performing channel.
Leaving money on the most important marketing channel
Desiree owns everything that isn't product: sales, contracts, operations, and every piece of marketing THNDR puts out. LinkedIn drives roughly 90% of their sales, making it the single most important channel the company has, and it's all handled by one person. "Marketing has always been just me, alongside running sales and ops. We're a 9-person company running a network of 25+ partners, so the majority of our resources are devoted to building out the product."
As an overloaded founder, cracking LinkedIn was critical. Knowing that visual content outperforms text, Desiree tried multiple ways to add branded visuals to her posts:
- General-purpose AI tools: Desiree cycled through every major AI model trying to create usable images and visuals. The output never matched what she needed. "I would try Claude, then Gemini, then ChatGPT, and then just forget it and make it myself in Canva."
- Canva: Canva was the fallback, but it was tough to use for someone without design skills or time. "I can make stuff in Canva if I spend time on it. I just have a simple template image for LinkedIn posts and post it."
- Dedicated content platforms: Desiree looked at purpose-built tools, but the friction of onboarding killed momentum before she could test the product. "The whole onboarding process was too much for something I just wanted to test before committing."
The result was that most days, she either posted text on LinkedIn or didn't post at all. "I used to only create text-based content, and that doesn't perform as well. So I would just be like, forget it, I'm not gonna post anything today."
For a company where 90% of sales come through LinkedIn, that gap was expensive.
“It didn’t even need any tweaking”
While other platforms required installs and lengthy onboarding, SecretSauce took minutes to set up. Desiree simply pasted THNDR's website link and uploaded their existing brand guidelines. SecretSauce learned THNDR’s brand instantly, and she started creating.
The first real test came when Desiree needed game skins to market THNDR’s slots product. Previously, Desiree would have skipped it entirely because the back and forth of AI tools fumbling her brand wasn't worth the time. With SecretSauce, she created them in a single session, and they were usable from the start. "I did it in SecretSauce and it was perfect. It didn't even need any tweaking."
SecretSauce also opened up content formats Desiree had never attempted. After years of reusing the same Canva template, she tried AI video for the first time with SecretSauce, and quickly generated something she was proud to post.
"SecretSauce has basically allowed me to go from doing the bare minimum that's really ugly to doing way better with less."
Growing LinkedIn engagement by 8x
The LinkedIn posts Desiree creates with SecretSauce consistently outperform anything she's posted before. "The difference is between 10 likes and 80 likes, and 12 comments. The posts I make with SecretSauce have a ton of engagement."
But the bigger shift isn't the engagement numbers. It's the fact that she's posting visual content at all. "It's like zero to one. I used to only create text-based content."
The inbound signal of the SecretSauce posts is clear. People in her network regularly tell her they constantly see THNDR's content on LinkedIn.
Desiree has tried nearly every AI tool available. In her view, most of them have been replaced by general-purpose models like Claude for everyday tasks. But for brand content, SecretSauce is in a different category. "SecretSauce blows Claude away."