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- How to launch a founder-led content motion on LinkedIn in Q2 2024
How to launch a founder-led content motion on LinkedIn in Q2 2024
A proven 90-day playbook for B2B SaaS marketing teams (even if you’re starting from scratch)

Hey!
Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.
Missed you last week. I was a bit swamped with onboarding a new team member at Compound (up to 7 FT now!) and prepping for a few client onboardings going into April.
So I decided to punt the newsletter for the first time in a while. Won’t be a regular thing, I promise!
Today’s edition is a ~3000 word heater. I laid out the entire playbook I’d use (and do use) if I was launching a founder-led social strategy for a B2B company in Q2.
By the end of this you’ll know:
Why you can’t ignore founder-led content in 2024
How to craft a Content Funnel that gets eyeballs and leads
Exactly what to post every day to give yourself the best chance at early success on LinkedIn in the next 90 days
And of course, I provided a ton of examples. The playbook is all here.
Let’s dive in.
🔎 DEEP DIVE
How to launch a founder-led content motion on LinkedIn in Q2 2024
A proven 90-day playbook for B2B SaaS marketing teams (even if you’re starting from scratch)

So, you want to launch a LinkedIn content strategy in Q2 2024.
What not to do: post into the void from your company account with a ‘strategy’ lacking any sort of cohesion.
What to do: ramp up posting from your founder’s (or founders’) account on LinkedIn & support it with some consistent posting from the company page.
Why founder-led content?
Or personal branding. Or whatever you want to call it.
The answer is simple:
It just performs better.
Social media users tend to ‘tune out’ corporate accounts. The ones that do get any engagement are run by companies with years worth of brand equity built up.
But even the behemoths are leaning into founder-led content. Airbnb runs all of its feature releases through Brian Chesky’s account. OpenAI saw the most engagement during its Sora launch from Sam Altman’s tweets.
Think about your own behavior on social. Who do you follow? Whose content do you hit refresh hoping to see?
Probably not a SaaS company account that does nothing but post links to white papers and blogs with stats from 2013. Yawn.
Company accounts alone aren’t going to cut it in 2024 if you’re an early-stage company.
Why LinkedIn?
Again, we need to be practical.
The answer is simple:
LinkedIn just performs better.
If TikTok crusaded for B2B SaaS I’d be all over it. Same with Instagram. But the the effort: reward ratio is far better on LinkedIn than any other platform.
But let’s expand so you know you can trust me on this.
(A) Platform-ICP fit.
Your ICP is likely using LinkedIn every day. They’re also using it in search of business related content (unlike TikTok or Instagram).
A VP of Sales at a high-growth SaaS company isn’t going to make buying decisions based off of a TikTok video.
(B) Organic reach is available and predictable.
If you post good content (more on what that looks like in a second) and you engage with industry folks to build real relationships over a period of time longer than 2 weeks without giving up…
You will grow on LinkedIn.
I love X (or Twitter). But it’s so much more volatile right now. A lot of the accounts that are gaining traction now are using shady engagement pods or know niche-famous people that can pump their posts. Hard to grow from scratch.
Even when you do get impressions on X, a lot of those folks aren’t converting into followers. Been seeing this for a while now across client accounts we manage.
When selecting organic social platforms, always ask yourself: Can I get predictable organic reach on this platform?
[Quick note: I am still a proponent of posting on X, but in most cases it makes sense to start with LinkedIn in mind and repurpose over to X]
(C) The content lifecycle is long.
Aside from YouTube, LinkedIn has the longest content lifecycle of all the social platforms.
I get hit with posts from weeks ago when I’m scrolling LinkedIn. And I’ve also seen my own posts from months back get engagement.
This is cool because you can build up a true content library. The content compounds.
And it doesn’t feel like as much of a ‘treadmill’ as other platforms.
The main problems SaaS founders run into when launching their content motion.
I’ve worked with 40+ early-stage founders on launching social content motions. Most of the problems I see that keep them from winning on LinkedIn can be put in 3 buckets.
These might sound familiar.
(1) You don’t have the time.
Building an early-stage company is hard. It demands everything from you.
Your calendar might look something like this…

The thought of adding another task into the mix is terrifying. I get it.
There are a lot of items on the to-do list for early founders that leapfrog “write a LinkedIn post” in priority level.
So content doesn’t get done. Or it gets done sporadically.
(2) Identity (not a ‘content person’)
Maybe you’ve never done content before.
You’ve been more of an ‘in the shadows’ founder. You don’t have a content mind (yet) that allows you to think in hooks and what would perform well on social.
A single post might take you hours. That’s okay! We all started there. And the system I’ll share in a few paragraphs will resolve this.
(3) You fear delegating personal content
Most CEOs I talk to tell me they look around the timeline and cringe at what they see. Brash statements for the sake of getting attention. Cringe, generic posts to try and hack the algorithm.
If that’s what building a founder brand looks like, you don’t want any part of it. I don’t blame you.
So, what do we do?
There are a few ways to address these 3 roadblocks…
(1) Do everything yourself.
(2) Hire an internal team member to support your content production.
(3) Hire an agency or freelancer to support your content production.
Option 1 works if you are a “content person.” You like writing stuff for LinkedIn or filming talking head videos. If this is you, hell yeah.
Option 1 might also be your only choice out of necessity if you don’t have the budget to hire. Maybe you’re early and bootstrapped, or you haven’t closed your raise yet. This is fine. You can still win, and I’d recommend getting the content reps in now. In 1 year, you’ll be glad you did.
Options 2 & 3 are what I would recommend if you’ve already raised your Seed or Series A and have the budget to hire.
Also. I wrote about the pros and cons of agencies and in-house team members in this piece. Read that if you're looking to hire.
Now let’s get into the week-to-week flow of how to produce founder-led content you’re proud of.
How to run a Content Interview
This YouTube video of mine runs through how founders can work with team members to run their content motion in 30-60min per week (same system we use at Compound).
TLDW of the video:
Your team will run a 30-60min Content Interview with you.
Prior to the Interview, your team will prep a list of 7-10 prompts for you to run through.
Your answers to these prompts will serve as the main source material for your LinkedIn content over the next 1-2 weeks.
Your team or agency then takes the transcript and creates 5-10x high-performing LinkedIn posts with optimize hooks, copy, etc.
The posts are authentic because the content came from you. Your team just formatted them for LinkedIn.
This is how you can be 100% confident that all content going out from your accounts is authentic.
The job of your marketing team (or agency) isn’t to “make up” stories on your behalf. Their job isn’t to regurgitate generic business stories from Wikipedia.
Their job is to take your unique stories and opinions and distribute them in a format that will perform well on social.
Your story is your moat. Use it.
What should your first 90 days of posting look like?
Ok. So you're an early- or growth-stage founder who wants to win on LinkedIn. You’ve decided you’re either going to write your own content, or you’re going to hire to support content production.
What should the next quarter look like for you?
In the following sections, I’ll walk you through
The right way to set content goals during your first quarter of posting (and common mistakes to avoid)
The best type of content to post on LinkedIn to grow your audience and generate demand
Content goals for your first 90-day sprint on LinkedIn.
If you execute this right, you will generate leads (and closed revenue) from social content in your first 90 days of posting. But that can’t be your North Star. Not yet.
Hear me out.
Objective 1A of your first 90 days of posting to social with founder-led content is to find what works.
Which topics does your audience resonate with? Which formats is the algorithm rewarding the most?
Objective 1B is to just stay consistent.
I was doing a social audit for a consulting client of mine over the past couple of weeks. Looking at their competitors I noticed something interesting.
Their best content came from their CEOs. But their CEOs would post once and then go dark for the next month. This cycle repeated and they’d have massive spikes and dips in social performance.
This is great news for you.
If you can post good content and stay at it over a long enough time horizon, you will beat your competitors (even massive incumbents) and founder-led social will turn into a major channel for you.
Okay. So what content should you post?
Start with your differentiator
Most B2B SaaS social strategies fall flat because they have no spine. No company-defining POV that they will go to war for. So they just blend in.
This isn’t even a “social strategy” issue. This is a product positioning issue.
Get clear on how your product is differentiated. Get clear on how your industry philosophy as a founder is differentiated. And the rest of your social content creation will be more natural & authentic.
This will in turn attract loyal followers of your philosophy and repel people that were never in your ICP to begin with.
I wrote this piece detailing the 5 levers you can pull in your social content to differentiate from your competition. Read this before moving on to the next section.
I also recommend checking out Wes Kao’s piece on developing your “spiky point of view.”
Wes writes, “A spiky point of view is a perspective others can disagree with. It’s a belief you feel strongly about and are willing to advocate for. It’s your thesis about topics in your realm of expertise.”
Watered down, “safe” positioning isn’t safe at all. It just gets you ignored.
Content Funnels 101
Every founder needs to craft a Content Funnel. There are 3 layers.
(1) Top-of-funnel content: TOFU content is meant to garner attention. The goal of this content is to generate impressions.
(2) Middle-of-funnel content: MOFU content is mean to firmly cement you as a go-to resource for your ICP. This content is value driven (no sales pitches), but the topics are targeted to your ICP.
(3) Bottom-of-funnel content: BOFU content is meant to convert the followers you have attracted using MOFU and TOFU content. It usually has the smallest potential audience on social, which is why you can’t just rely on it over and over and over again.

Here’s an example.
Assume you're selling an email marketing platform for DTC brands.
TOFU: A LinkedIn post by the founder about ‘5 lessons I wish I knew before becoming a startup founder.’ This is more broad and not specific to his ICP. But it will likely perform well on-platform and cast a wide net.
MOFU content: A LinkedIn carousel from the founder about the upcoming Gmail updates that are going to affect deliverability for marketing emails.
BOFU content: A LinkedIn post from the founder about a highly-requested feature update for a segment of your customer base.
All sections serve an important purpose.
But notice how MOFU content is inherently valuable, without having to mention the product. It creates trust in the company’s ICP, so it will become the default option whenever that person is ready to buy.
What should the balance between TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content look like in your first 90 days of posting? Simple.
TOFU: 20%
MOFU: 60%
BOFU: 20%
Most of your founder-led content should be focused on getting attention and becoming the go-to resource for your ICP in your niche.
Every founder that says “social doesn’t work” tends to spam the timeline with bottom-of-funnel case studies and feature highlights. These are important, but can’t be the whole strategy (if you want to stand out).
You’ll source this content for your team by running the Content Interview motion I mentioned above. Do that every 2 weeks to make sure you have fresh source material.
Pro-tip: categorize your Content Interview questions into TOFU, MOFU, & BOFU as well. This will make sure that you have enough source material to cover all parts of the funnel in your content.
How often should you post?
My recommendation: post 5x per week on LinkedIn (daily on weekdays).
Often enough to stay top-of-mind, but not so often that you start trading quality for quantity.
Also, LinkedIn tends to suppress your previous posts when you post in too short of succession.
5 high-quality posts per week (maybe 7 if you want to post on weekends) is all you need.
Whatever you do, don’t be an “I’m gonna text 1x per week” founder. It doesn’t work.
You need to post often for people to know who you are. And when people do know you, there is no reason not to double down. Aggressive cadence wins.
Here’s a sample content calendar
Okay, look. What ‘works’ from founder-to-founder differs. There is no one-size-fits all. But I can give you a solid template to start from.
To start from.
Use this for the first 30 days as you (or your team) gets reps in creating LinkedIn content. I am willing to bet that you will see signs of life as you begin posting.
🗓 Monday:
MOFU
Format: text + image
Topic: Share a polarizing take that you have about your industry. What’s something you believe that most others don’t? Be tasteful, but don’t be afraid to share your POV. Your ‘hot takes’ set you and your startup apart, attracting the right people.
Here’s an example.
🗓 Tuesday:
TOFU
Format: text + image
Topic: Company-related personal story. Personal stories perform well on LinkedIn because stories are the most compelling way to package information as a human. People love stories.
Here’s an example.
🗓 Wednesday:
MOFU
Format: carousel
Topic: Carousels are performing well on LinkedIn at the moment. Within the format of ‘carousels,’ a type of carousel I see doing well is the listicle. Listicles are a format that do well because they are tangible and easy to understand by the reader. They are also easy to produce as a writer.
Here’s an example.
Here’s another example.
🗓 Thursday:
BOFU
Format: text + image
Topic: Share a feature highlight or case study. These probably exist on your site already. Take the content from your site and use it to create social posts.
Here’s an example.
🗓 Friday:
NOTE: The most important component of each post is the topic. As you test, you can (and should) swap out formats based on what works.
For example, one founder we create content for has been seeing video perform quite well. So we swapped one of the “text + image” posts for a “text + video” post format.
You might notice carousels perform best for you. Or maybe you (or your content team) is more proficient in written content.
If you look across the NBA, several play styles can result in Hall of Fame careers. You don’t need to box yourself in. The above template is exactly that. A template (so you stop overthinking and start posting).
Your commenting and engagement strategy
There are 2 types of engagement on LinkedIn:
TYPE 1: Inbound engagement: people commenting on your posts or reaching out to you via DM
TYPE 2: Outbound engagement: you commenting on other posts or reaching out to people via DM
Inbound engagement
The ‘strategy’ here is stupid simple.
Reply to every comment you get. It’s such a low-lift activity with an insanely high ROI.
Replying to comments improves the performance on your posts & builds relationships with people in your ICP. When people comment and get a response, they are more likely to comment again in the future.
This creates a virtuous cycle of potential customers commenting on your content.
Leave no comment without a reply.
Outbound engagement
Outbound engagement is also quite simple. A lot of founders overthink this.
All you need to do is dedicate 20 minutes per day to commenting on other people’s content.
Whose content? 3 types of accounts:
ICP accounts
Company & founder accounts in your industry (non-competitive)
Content creators and influencers who your ICP follows
For example, if you’re selling into B2B salespeople, the split would look like this:
ICP accounts → B2B salespeople who are active on LinkedIn
Company & founder accounts in your industry (non-competitive) → founder of SaaS who also sell in B2B salespeople, but aren’t comps to you
Content creators and influencers who your ICP follows → content creators that B2B salespeople follow on LinkedIn, like Kyle Asay (great follow btw)
Most people think the goal is to ‘hack’ visibility by showing up in other folks’ comments sections. That’s part of it.
The real goal is to develop relationships with people who will then start engaging with your content (reciprocity, baby). This is one of the ways you start to reach more and more people on LinkedIn.
Just please. Do not use AI to automate this. It’s so easy to tell when people do this, and it’s such a negative signal. See below…
One more action to add to your outbound follow: send connection requests to people in your ICP that you come across on LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows 300 connection requests per week.
You don’t need to use all of them, but I would recommend connecting with

As you continue to publish, you engrain yourself deeper and deeper into their content consumption. When they need a product in your category—you are the default.
When B2B SaaS founders think organic social, they think of me and Compound. We’ve been booked out since our inception. This is by design. You can do this, too.
See how this works?
Commit to 20 minutes per day of outbound engagement and you will be surprised by the relationships you can develop with folks in your industry.
TL;DR
We covered a lot today. Here’s the short-and-sweet summary you can share with your team.
1. Founder-led content on LinkedIn is the most effective way to grow an audience and get leads for B2B SaaS in 2024.
2. Decide whether you’ll do it yourself, have an employee run content for you (a good role for your first marketing hire), or hire an external agency. There are pros and cons to each.
3. Commit to 90 days (1 quarter) as a test. You will see signs of life if you execute this strategy as laid out.
4. Get clear on your differentiator as a company and as a founder. Your LinkedIn content will be fueled by this.
5. Craft your Content Funnel and get clear on which topics fall into each stage.
6. Produce 5x LinkedIn posts per week, following the sample calendar I laid out above. Follow that calendar for 30 days. Use a biweekly Content Interview with your marketing team to source this material—or you can write it yourself if you want.
7. As you post, take note of which topics and formats perform better. Which gets more reach? Which gets more engagement? Which drives more inbound?
8. Respond to all inbound comments on your posts. No excuses.
9. Spend ~20 minutes per day doing outbound engagement (comment & connect with ICP). Don’t spam. Build real relationships.
It will be hard to do this for a quarter and not see an uptick in distribution (and revenue) from social. Commit to founder-led content for 90 days and you won’t go back.
Once you execute this, you can layer in your co-founders and company leadership to the same playbook. But that’s a topic for a different essay.
Last thing. Was this mildly helpful?
Share it with your favorite B2B founder or marketer. I want this piece to end up in as many #marketing Slack channels as possible.
🗃 FILE CABINET
Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.
The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary 📚
How to create a reality distortion field by Garry Tan and Lulu Merservey 🎥
What makes Paul Graham such a good writer? by David Perrell 🎥
3 skills the top 1% of marketers use to write viral LinkedIn content by Tommy Clark 🎥
Check these out.
BEFORE YOU GO…
As always, I appreciate you reading this week’s piece. I don’t take this space in your inbox for granted.
If you read to the end, I’d love to hear from you! Hit me with a reply and LMK what you think of this piece. It was a dense one.
Talk soon,
Tommy Clark
PS: If you want Compound to run this founder-led content motion for you… save a spot on our waitlist here. We’re at capacity right now, but looking to partner with some SaaS companies in May or June.