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. Flew back from London on Saturday, so I’m back in Austin and mostly recovered from jet lag. Spent most of my flight reading Sword of Kaigen—for how popular the book is…I was a bit disappointed.

Anyway, onto content strategy stuff.

Today I want to walk you through one ‘X factor’ that explains why some founders seem to grow so damn fast on LinkedIn (and why others struggle, despite doing ‘everything right’).

It’ll be a quick read. No more than a few minutes.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

The dirty little secret to fast LinkedIn growth

1 reason why some founders grow fast, and others can’t grow at all.

All of the founders who pop off on LinkedIn fast 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.

I remember earlier on in Compound's journey, we worked with a fintech client. The CEO wanted to create posts "like Jamie Dimon's."

I looked at Dimon's content and found walls of text that would scare off most readers were he not the CEO of JPMorgan. The content was horrendous. His posts did well despite his formatting, not because of it.

You also see greener founders do everything 'right,' yet gain zero momentum. Every post flops. "But I followed this viral hook template!" Yeah. You're also selling into GTM leadership as a 22-year-old 'cracked' founder with zero experience in sales. Why should they listen to you?

Remember, credibility is a multiplier, and anything multiplied by zero is...zero.

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 are lucky enough to have this built-in credibility with your target buyer, please, start posting ASAP! You are playing the content game on easy mode. It’s almost not fair. You’d be silly not to take advantage of this. A massive pile of money is sitting on the table in front of you. All you have to do to claim it is hit publish on LinkedIn a few times a week.

You might not have that luxury, though.

So, if you are starting from a place with little ‘real world’ experience to call on, what do you do?

A few options:

(1) Literally start a different company. Extreme. But if content is going to be the main lever for your business, the credibility multiplier is that important. Adam started RB2B—the B2B version of his Retention.com product—for this reason. To create Content-Market Fit. It worked, with RB2B growing from 0 → $1M ARR in a matter of weeks.

If you're still in the ‘idea’ phase of launching a startup, I do think it’s worth considering whether you’d be able to effectively build an audience to sell it.

(2) Hire someone with credibility to be the face of the brand on LinkedIn. Ideally, this is you, the founder. But, if you're selling into GTM pros without GTM experience, you could hire a VP of Sales with that experience who is willing to produce content for LinkedIn.

If you do this, I would still recommend posting as the founder and building your own credibility over time. Eventually, you will start to see your own momentum as you stick with it for long enough.

(3) Position your content the right way. If you are starting from scratch, my best advice is to be open about it. Position your content as ‘sharing learnings’ rather than ‘giving advice.’

You will start to build credibility and relationships with people in your new industry, without burning your reputation by talking out of your ass.

Again, none of these tactics are ‘hacks.’ It takes time to build trust.

The pinnacle of the content game is packed with "ten-year overnight success" stories. So you'd better start publishing now.

PS: If you do want to start posting more often, I’d suggest binging some Social Files essays. I’ve given to whole founder-led content playbook away, for free.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• I Studied 1000 LinkedIn Accounts, This DESTROYS Their Sales by Tommy Clark 🎥

• The Most Valuable Marketing Conversation You’ll Watch in 2025 by Mark Brazil and Oren John 🎥

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