What LinkedIn Is Actually For, If You’re a Founder

For nearly two decades my job was marketing — B2B software, mid-sized international companies, and several hundred LinkedIn posts written under my own name. Most of them hung off a product launch, an event, or a programme built around a single anchor asset.

Then I became a founder, which is a different job with the same task buried inside it. This series is written from both sides of that line.

The first thing worth correcting is the idea that LinkedIn does one job. It does two, on completely different timescales, and most advice collapses them.

Start with what most advice assumes and never checks: that the goal is an audience. Build a following, feed it, convert some fraction of it. That's a media business model applied to a company that isn't a media business, and it's a large part of why the advice feels like a second job you never applied for.

The long game is credibility. It makes sure that when someone who already has a reason to look you up does look you up, they find a company that visibly exists, is still trading, and thinks clearly about the thing it sells. This is most of the value, it accrues slowly, and it is close to unmeasurable.

The short game is the right person at the right time. Someone scrolling past sees a post, thinks that's me, and clicks through. It is unpredictable, it is not a plan, and it does happen.

That reframe changes almost every decision downstream, so it's worth being precise about it.

The moment that matters comes after the introduction

Think about how your name actually travels. Someone gets an intro to you and checks you out before the call. A prospect takes a meeting and looks you up the night before. An investor hears your name in passing from another founder. A candidate is deciding whether your company is real enough to leave a salaried job for. A former colleague is deciding whether to send someone your way.

In every one of those cases the person is already pointed at you. They have found you. What they're doing now is deciding what to make of you, and what they do, almost without exception, is open your profile and read down the feed.

What they find is either a company that is visibly alive and has a point of view, or a profile whose most recent post is from fourteen months ago. Both of those are answers to the question they arrived with. Only one of them helps.

This is the value that is easiest to underrate, because it is invisible in the numbers. Nobody comments “I was on the fence and your profile settled it.” The deal just closes slightly more often, the intro gets made slightly more readily, and you never find out which post did it.

And then, occasionally, the short game lands

A few weeks ago a founder read one of my posts, clicked through to our site, and filled in the contact form. What he wrote was: “We need consistency as opposed to ad hoc outbound marketing. Our team of 2 isn't getting this done ourselves.” He is about to become our first customer.

I could not have engineered that. I didn't know he existed, I wasn't writing for him, and I can't tell you which of the other posts did the quiet work of making him willing to click. That's the shape of the short game: you can't aim it, you can't forecast it, and you can't get it without having been posting for the long one.

Which is why the two jobs collapse into a single instruction. Write for the long game. The short game happens to you.

Which means the metrics you'd otherwise chase are the wrong ones

If the job is convincing people who already know your name, then followers are close to irrelevant. A follower is not a reader. The feed is ranked rather than chronological, so most of your followers will never see most of your posts, and the ones who matter most arrive at your profile deliberately rather than encountering you in a feed.

Impressions are similarly beside the point. Four thousand impressions from people who will never buy anything is worth less than forty from the right forty. The number that would actually tell you something — did the people who were already considering us come away more convinced — is not a number LinkedIn reports, and is not really measurable at all.

Be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise. The follower count gets used as the goal because it is the number that happens to be available; whether it means anything is a question that mostly goes unasked. That substitution is the origin of most of the bad advice in this category.

What it is not for, at your scale

It is worth saying plainly: at founder volume, LinkedIn is not a demand-generation channel. Two posts a week reaching a few hundred relevant people will not produce a reliable flow of inbound meetings, and you should not plan your quarter as though it will.

When someone sells you LinkedIn as a lead machine, the machine they usually mean is outbound direct messages at volume — a genuinely different activity, with a different cost, and a reputational bill that lands on the same profile you were trying to make credible.

It is also not for becoming a thought leader in general. “Interesting to everyone” and “convincing to the eleven people who could buy from you this quarter” are different targets, and chasing the first will reliably cost you the second, because the writing that travels widest is the writing with the least specific claim in it.

The one thing it is uniquely good at

There is a reason to be there rather than anywhere else, and it isn't reach.

On LinkedIn, your buyer, your next hire, your investor, your partner and your existing customers all read the same feed, under their real names, attached to their real job titles. No other channel puts those five in one room. Your newsletter reaches people who already opted in. Your website reaches people who already navigated to it. A conference reaches whoever is in the building.

That overlap is a constraint and an advantage at the same time. It's a constraint because a post has to work for all five audiences at once — you cannot write something for prospects that would embarrass you in front of a candidate. It's an advantage because when it works, one post does five jobs.

Which gives you an actual brief

Once the goal is “make an already-interested person more convinced,” what to post stops being an open question. It narrows to a handful of things:

1. What you are learning about the problem you solve. Evidence you are closer to it than they are.
2. What you believe about your market that most people in it don't. Evidence you have a position rather than a product.
3. What you are building, and why that way. Evidence the company is moving.
4. What a customer said that changed your mind. Evidence you are listening, and evidence customers exist.

And it rules things out just as firmly. Industry news with a one-line reaction attached does not make anyone more convinced of anything — it demonstrates that you read the news. Generic advice fails for the same reason. Congratulating other people's milestones is fine as manners and useless as evidence.

One test, and it is narrower and much easier to apply than “is this good content”: if the person on the fence about us read only this, would it move them?

The bar this sets

This reframe lowers the bar in one direction and raises it in another, and both halves are real.

Lower: you don't need reach, you don't need to go viral, you don't need to post daily, and you don't need to be the most visible person in your category. A modest, consistent, specific feed does the job.

Higher: everything you post is evidence, and it is read by exactly the people whose opinion carries the most commercial consequence. There is no low-stakes post on a founder's profile. Filler doesn't cost you nothing — it costs you a little of the thing you were trying to build.

That's the standard the rest of this series works from. A surprising amount of standard LinkedIn advice fails it on the first line, which is where we'll start.