Why agencies are the underrated distribution channel, and why legacy social tools can't catch up

Jeffrey Zhao co-founded Ordinal (formerly Assembly) about three years ago with Francisco. The product is a social media management platform built for B2B teams.

The market Ordinal competes in looks crowded. There are tonnes of social media schedulers. The likes of Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer have been around for a while. Some of these have been around for 15+ years. Despite this, over 1,000 marketing teams use it today, including Mercury, Zapier, and Clay - who's social lead posted 1,080 times in a single year and grew from 8K to 120K followers on one account. Leading agencies like Impactable, Influent, and Verbatim Labs also run their client programs through it.

I spoke to Jeffrey as part of our Inside the Stack series, where we go deep with founders on how they scaled their business. In this piece, we'll be sharing the ordinal playbook, their gtm strategy, and how they managed to scale to thousands of users. If you're evaluating social tools for B2B, Ordinal offers a 14-day free trial (no credit card) at tryordinal.com.

Five things worth knowing before the full interview

• Agencies are an underrated B2B distribution channel. Each one carries 20-30 clients. Every sales call they take on Ordinal's behalf is a touchpoint, and when an agency churns a client, the client often stays on Ordinal.
• Social tools can't use "powered by" viral loops. You can't brand someone's LinkedIn post the way you can a Notion page footer. Agencies solve the distribution problem without needing a viral hook.
• Legacy social tools were built for Instagram-era brand marketing. B2B social has evolved. It needs collaboration features like approvals, inline comments, and cross-posting across multiple team members.
• The winning AI strategy for a tool like Ordinal is to be open, composable infrastructure rather than a closed content agent. Foundational models improve too fast to bet on your own. Be the platform others build on top of.
• LinkedIn's link penalty has accelerated in 2025, despite LinkedIn publicly claiming they removed it.

The Ordinal playbook

1/ Rely on distribution proxies when viral loops don't work

Most SaaS companies rely on some form of product-led growth. A "powered by" badge, a shared link, a free tier that spreads organically. A social tool can't do that. You can't put a watermark on someone's LinkedIn post. It would be a red flag to the audience.

Ordinal found an alternative: agencies. There are thousands of agencies, each carrying 20-30 clients. Land one agency and you get distribution into their entire roster. Every sales call the agency takes and every pitch they make, Ordinal comes up organically.

The network effects compound from there. When an agency churns a client, the client has often already bought in. They stay on Ordinal directly. So each agency relationship seeds multiple direct accounts over time.

2/ Build good UX for how teams actually work

The incumbents were designed around one social manager, posting brand images to Instagram.

B2B social doesn't work that way anymore. A product launch involves marketing drafting posts, execs approving copy, sales reposting, legal reviewing. Publishing is now a team sport. The UX needs to reflect that.

Ordinal's bet is that the product needs to be a collaboration tool as much as it is a scheduling tool. Approvals, inline comments, cross-posting across multiple team members. Legacy tools can't fill this because it would mean rebuilding their core architecture.

3/ Be the platform agents run on, not the agent itself

Every tool is being asked the same question right now: are you building something that can't be replaced by claude code. Ordinal's strategy is to be the infrastructure layer, not the agent.

The reasoning: it's hard to build a general-purpose content agent that works for an agency running 30 clients, a solo exec building a personal brand, and an enterprise team with legal review requirements. One closed-loop agent can't serve all of those.

Foundational models are improving fast enough that any proprietary edge we built into an agent would compress quickly.

The analogy Jeffrey uses is Plain, the customer support tool. Plain doesn't build the AI. They let you bring Fin, Sierra, or Decagon. Ordinal wants to be the same for social. Ordinal's MCP is already live. The next phase: exposing their benchmarking data (millions of data points on what performs on LinkedIn) to third-party agents. Agents that query that data produce better output than agents that don't. The data layer is the moat.

4/ Know when to turn on each GTM channel

Ordinal tried cold outbound multiple times in the early days. Worked with agencies, tested cold email infrastructure. It never hit positive ROI until after product-market fit.

Nothing has fundamentally changed about this approach. Outbound just works a lot better when the product is serving something people want.

Cold outbound depends more on being known than most people admit.

They run everything through Cardinal now for outbound. The highest-signal conversion indicator is whether users schedule posts during the trial, so the entire trial flow is designed to activate that behavior.

5/ Use data as a moat

Ordinal sits on millions of data points about what actually performs on LinkedIn. Post formats, timing, cadence, and engagement patterns.

The next content play is Ordinal Data Lab, where they'll publish proprietary insights from that dataset. For example, LinkedIn's link penalty has accelerated in 2025, despite LinkedIn publicly claiming they removed it. Friday post engagements are just weaker than any other week day.

For the AI strategy, the data layer is what makes the platform play work. Third-party agents that query Ordinal's benchmarking data produce better output than agents that don't.

6/ The Ordinal tool stack

Jeffrey and Francisco are both product people. So they built a composable stack that lets two founders run content, outbound, and operations without a large team.

• Ordinal for content scheduling, collaboration, and analytics
• Claude Code with custom skills for drafting posts and changelogs
• Ordinal MCP + webhost MCP so Claude can push directly to the calendar and changelog
• Ahrefs MCP for SEO (they built their own tool for this)
• Cardinal for outbound
• HubSpot for CRM
• Stripe for payments

When they ship a product update, a Claude skill triggers that drafts the LinkedIn post and changelog entry simultaneously. They review manually, then schedule through Ordinal. The whole content workflow runs without anyone writing from scratch.

From the conversation

On why viral loops fail for social tools: You can't brand someone's LinkedIn post the way Notion can put a footer on a shared doc. That would be a red flag to the audience. Agencies solve distribution without needing a product-led hook.

On channels beyond LinkedIn: LinkedIn is by far the most active channel on Ordinal for B2B. But video and podcast content gets distributed to TikTok, Threads, and consumer channels. Those are underutilized green space for B2B right now. Less competition, growing audiences.

On the platform vs. agent decision: The analogy is Plain for customer support. They don't build the AI, they let you bring your own. Ordinal wants to be the same for social. Agents draft posts, create EGC programs, push to the calendar. Humans still approve, comment, and edit. "That's the collaboration model we're building toward."

On their internal content process: Neither founder writes from scratch. Claude Code drafts via custom skills. A product launch triggers a skill that drafts the LinkedIn post via Ordinal MCP and the changelog via webhost MCP simultaneously. They review manually, then schedule through Ordinal. "We're product people, not natural LinkedIn influencers. So we built a workflow that fits how we actually work."

B2B social is still under-tooled relative to how seriously teams are now treating it as a GTM channel. Ordinal is the product built for that gap. For agencies and B2B marketing teams evaluating their social stack, the 14-day free trial is at tryordinal.com.