Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Hope you had a great weekend. Spending some time back in LA for a few days to hang with family and friends. Also, per usual, caught up on some reading.

Current read: Of Darkness and Light by Ryan Cahill. This is the second novel in The Bound and the Broken series. Ryan’s an absolute unit—self-published the series and has written 1.5 million published words over the past 4 years. I’m impressed by the step-up in writing from book 1 to book 2. It’s inspiring to me as I’m drafting my first book and plan on self-publishing it at some point in 2026.

Now, before I spiral into a tangent on books and writing, let’s get to the main event.

Today, I want to let you in on the handful of traits that indicate whether a founder will have success with “founder-led content” on social. I’ve helped 100+ founders publish content online. These observations come from those experiences.

If you read this, and internalize it, you will have a competitive advantage.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Increasing the success odds of founder-led content as a GTM channel

4 traits & behaviors that unlock faster audience growth for B2B technology founders in 2025

I’ve put in a disgusting amount of reps into understanding social content strategy. Over 100 B2B founders have worked with my agency, Compound, over the past two and a half years on launching their founder-led content strategy.

Some, like Austin Hughes (0 → 30K+ followers in 1 year) and Adam Robinson (0 → 25K+ followers in 1 year), have been outlier success stories. Others struggle to see momentum and give up two months in.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the question: what separates the two camps?

If I can understand this, I can better qualify leads who come through our pipeline. I only want to work with founders who have a real shot at outlier success on LinkedIn. Today, as of September 28th, 2025, I believe I have the answer.

There are three traits and behaviors that I find influence the success of a founder-led content and comms motion more than any others. Address these, and you will have a genuine shot at building ridiculous distribution.

(1) Think on long time horizons.

Content is not a channel of ‘immediate results.’ Yes. You should see signs of life early on (especially if you work with an agency or hire someone full-time with content experience).

But, you need to be willing to publish content for months with minimal return.

I know content well. Yet, I still experience this!

I've been creating YouTube content for Compound over the past two years.

The chart below doesn't even go back that far, but if it did, you'd see a flat line right around 'zero' for the entire first year. Slow start!

Most would throw their hands up and pull the plug. YouTube clearly doesn't work! Right?

I chose not to stop because I understood each video was an investment. Instead, I:

(1) Spent MORE budget and brought in an agency to help me with YouTube strategy (thumbnails, titles, editing, scripting) so I didn't have to worry about it while running my own operation.

(2) Sat down every week in front of the lights and cameras to record another video.

Now, my channel's gained a few thousand subs, and YouTube consistently brings in 5-10 inbound leads per week for Compound.

I'm glad I decided to keep publishing instead of losing my mind over a channel 'not working' one month into testing it.

Important to note: you need to be iterating with each week of content. If you ‘just post consistently,’ but aren’t actively improving your hooks, paying attention to outlier posts, and using that data to improve your output…you will end up twelve months in with a painfully mediocre ROI on founder content.

[Check out the rest of my essays for the full blueprint on how to do this well]

(2) Remain personally involved in the content.

Internally, we refer to any time a founder introduces a new marketing hire to review their content as the “handoff of death.”

The Slack notification goes off: “John added Mary to the Slack channel”

Founder John messages: “Hey team - Mary is our new Content Marketing Manager. She’ll be handling all the approvals on my content going fwd. TY!”

My team, internally: “F*CK!”

As a founder, the moment you relinquish full control over your content output, you dilute the performance of your account.

Important clarification: this does not mean you have to write every piece, from scratch. You can, and in many cases should, bring in agency support for content production. But even when you do, you need to be the person spending 30-60min per week reviewing the content output from that agency.

Do not have a Head of Marketing review your content. Do not have your Chief of Staff review your content. And God, please, do not have your HR manager review your content.

Another important layer here: multiple cooks in the kitchen always leads to shit, diluted content. I’m sure there are exceptions our there…but I’ve yet to find them.

It’s bad enough to hand off approvals and feedback to someone who’s not the founder. It’s a catastrophic error to have 3+ people who are not the founder all arguing back and forth over a LinkedIn post.

looks you, the founder, in the eyes 🫵

You need to be the final filter for what’s published from your account.

(2a) Provide clear, specific feedback.

When your content engine expands beyond yourself—when you hire a Content Marketer to support your output, or an agency like Compound—a lot of your time still spent on content is used to provide feedback.

Your content team cannot read your mind. That will not change, at least, until Neuralink becomes widely available.

So, use your words. Leave specific, actionable comments on content pieces.

Don’t write: “This hook feels cringe.”

Do write: “I’m not a fan of sharing our revenue numbers openly in hooks. Could we try a different angle here?”

See the difference? Once leaves your content team trying to learn how to use a crystal ball. The other gives your team real next steps on how to write your next post in a way you resonate with.

Every piece of feedback you leave on a content asset is an investment. Leave more detailed feedback upfront, and your team might just be able to read your mind in a few months.

Content matters. Done well, it can change the course of your business. It’s worth the time you spend on it.

(3) Show up with credibility.

The founders who grow fastest on LinkedIn all have a dirty little secret.

Relevant industry experience. See, credibility is a multiplier. The formula is simple:

Performance = Content Best Practices x Credibility

When your reader views you as a credible authority, you play the content game on easy mode. Scrollers are more likely to stop and read your content...often despite you ignoring industry best practices.

When you zoom in on the startup founders who have 'blown up' on LinkedIn over the past 1-2 years -- think Austin Hughes, Gal Aga, etc -- you often see an overlap between what they write about and real, lived experience.

Their posts hit stronger because of believable, specific examples and unique takes formed by real-world reps.

I’ve seen this trend play out with the 100+ founders I’ve worked with over the years at Compound. The standout clients almost always have some sort of previous credibility with their ICP.

There isn't a hack to circumvent this. I mean, you could lie…but I wouldn’t quite recommend that. Lmao.

If you do not have inherent credibility with your ICP, that’s OK. You can build it. But, referring back to the first idea in this piece, you will have to extend your time horizon.

(4) Be open to expert opinions.

Founders tend to have a high degree of ego. This is often helpful for many aspects of company-building (like believing you are capable of building a company in the first place). But, this same ego can cause your content to flop.

It’s surprising to me that someone will spend thousands of dollars per month to hire a content agency, and then push back on every strategic recommendation said agency sends over.

Your personal taste matters. Trust your instincts and don’t post content hat is far off base. But, don’t shut down unique, potentially winning content concepts because you “know better.”

Our most successful clients treat founder content as a partnership. They are always willing to at least hear out our proposals, or take a risk on a hook that’s just out of their comfort zone. Sometimes, they’ll still veto a post—that’s fine! But the agency-client relationship is a true partnership.

(FYI: the same idea applies when you build out an in-house content team)

Final thoughts

I’ve been involved in enough founder-led content buildouts to feel confident in these recommendations.

Any time I’ve gone against the nagging gut feeling that a founder was not a good fit, it’s come back to bite me. In each of those situations, the founder failed in at least one of the above areas.

You'll also notice that none of these are particularly complicated.

TLDR: operate on a long time horizon, trust your team of experts and give specific feedback when you do pushback, and create content in a category where you already have credibility.

By the way, if you feel like you've gotten these down and you want to build out your own founder-led content motion: check out this essay next.

I give away the entire playbook we use with our clients at Compound. No gatekeeping. Enjoy 🙂

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• Brutally Honest Advice About LinkedIn Growth in 19 Mins by Tommy Clark 🎥

• How Extreme Winners Think and Win: Lessons from 400+ of History’s Greatest Founders by David Senra and Tim Ferriss 🎥

• Daniel Ek, Spotify by David Senra 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.

More from Social Files:

• Read the rest of my essays

• Work with my agency in 2025

• Try my LinkedIn content writing SaaS

• Steal my founder-led content templates

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark