Social Files by Tommy Clark
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The real price of content distribution

The real price of content distribution

An honest look at what’s required for founders to grow an audience in 2026

Tommy Clark
January 05, 2026

Hey!

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

Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year! I’m back in Austin now, and excited to get into the upcoming year of content and client work.

To start, I’m spending today’s piece on one of the most important content principles for you to understand in 2026. This is going to be how you AI-proof yourself, and stand out on a timeline that only gets more crowded by the day.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

The real price of content distribution

An honest look at what’s required for founders to grow an audience in 2026

Let’s get this out of the way up front: organic reach is not free.

You might not always need to pay $$$ for it, but there is a price. Too many marketing leaders operate under the assumption that their founder posting on social channels, like LinkedIn, guarantees results. Wrong.

The act of hitting “publish” is insufficient. Pushing a post live does not earn you reach. Anyone with a $30 subscription to any of the mainstream LLMs can generate a ‘passable’ social post in seconds. ‘Passable’ content gets passed over in 2026.

You must be willing to pay in blood for your distribution. Ok. Maybe not that far. But there is a price. Organic reach is paid for with three types of currency:

(1) Time

(2) Money

(3) Reputation

By the end of today’s piece, you’ll understand how each of these three works. We’ll use LinkedIn as the platform of reference for this discussion, since you’re likely a B2B founder or marketing leader—and in that case, LinkedIn is the obvious channel to master in 2026.

[BTW - if you were forwarded this piece by a kind and very smart coworker, consider subscribing if founder-led content is a priority for your marketing org in 2026]

(1) Paying for reach with time.

Yes. You can go viral on LinkedIn without paying for reach (buying ads).

No. There isn’t always a correlation between times spent on a content piece and how well it does.

But…but, but, but…usually, when you put more effort (aka time) into a post, it will perform better.

For example…

If you take the time to capture a relevant image or video in your office to pair with a post, and it performs better than the text-only post would have, you paid for more reach with the time it took to capture those media assets.
If you spent months collecting data for a LinkedIn lead magnet asset that ends up going niche viral, you paid for more reach with the time it took to source and sort through that data.
If you used an extra hour to rewrite a 5th version of the launch video script because you know, deep down, that it could be better, you paid for more reach with the time it took to take the final iteration the last 5%.

Time investment can also be measured in aggregate. You’re not going to post once and pop off. Every ‘overnight success’ on LinkedIn is a product of 6-12 months of dogged persistence. Austin Hughes, CEO of Unify, saw his LinkedIn growth hit an inflection right around month 6 of his posting journey.

Look at what happens in August ‘24:

Getting even more meta, think about the founders you see with the best LinkedIn content results. Plenty of them spent years in roles as their own ICP, gathering stories and data that makes their content now so compelling.

Understand this. Simply sitting down for 30 minutes to write the post used to be enough. But with AI tools like Claude and GPT enabling lazy marketers to one-shot mid content in seconds, the act of posting is not enough. The time cost of reach has increased.

(2) Paying for reach with money.

I’m not talking about ads or influencers, by the way. Organic content itself often requires a monetary investment.

For example…

If you spend $5K on a filming setup for your office that allows you to consistently create video assets, you’re paying for reach with money.
If you spend $5-10K on a content agency to support content production and remove bandwidth constraints, you’re paying for reach with money.
If you spend $200 to hire a photographer for your private ICP dinner and source media assets for LinkedIn, you’re paying for reach with money.

Late last year, Ramp hired Brian Baumgartner—aka Kevin from ‘The Office’—for a day-long activation, where they stuffed him in a cubicle and made him count receipts all day. I’m sure this cost a ton of money. They also broke the internet (well, the niche-b2b-startup corner of the internet) for a day, and got dozens of content assets from the campaign.

Of course, if you don’t want to spend money, you can always spend your time to earn distribution yourself. See how this works?

[If you are in the market to work with a content partner, join Compound’s waitlist here]

(3) Paying for reach with reputation.

This third currency is a dark horse. Most founders ‘wanting’ to grow on LinkedIn aren’t aware of it. You can wager your reputation for attention.

At the far end of the spectrum you have companies like Cluely, which initially took a hyper-extreme approach to generating attention. The founder, Roy Lee, manufactured X drama with his getting kicked out of Columbia and going on to raise from a16z. The marketing motion was driven largely off of controversial influencer content. The approach got impressions—it only cost Roy his reputation.

You don’t have to do this.

For example:

If you publish a post with a take that most others in your category disagree with, and back it up with data or lived experience, you're risking your reputation for more reach.
If you publicly call out a competing incumbent, you're risking your reputation for more reach.
If you share your ARR numbers (or other growth metrics) in your content, you're risking your reputation for more reach.

My filter for whether or not this content is “worth it” is two-fold:

(1) Does the content align with your true beliefs? Being edgy for the sake of it does nothing. Only share contrarian opinions if you’ll stand behind them.

(2) Does the content move you toward your ideal outcome? For instance, if your ICP isn’t other founders, and you don’t care to generate investor interest, sharing your ARR on the timeline doesn’t do much for you.

One other note here. I’m sure you can see how “time” and “reputation” are related. Founders who have spent years as their own ICP often have more credibility to trade on, which increases the baseline performance of their content. For example: if you spent 5 years as CRO at a unicorn company before founding your own, your content now will have stronger performance than a founder in the same category without the lived experience.

Speedrunning LinkedIn growth.

The founders growing the fastest on LinkedIn in 2026 invest all three of these currencies into gaining attention.

Take Adam Robinson, founder of RB2B, for example.

He spends time on his content. Upwards of 10-15hrs per week, last time I heard.
He spends money on his content. He’s built out a content recording setup, and pays a LinkedIn consultant to help ideate his winning content.
He wagers his reputation on his content. He’s toned down the more abrasive stuff as of late, but in the earlier days, he was willing to call out competitors, make public statements about his goals to reach ambitious revenue targets, etc.

It’s no surprise he’s entering 2026 with 140,000 LinkedIn followers.

The bar for ‘good’ content on LinkedIn has increased in 2025. It will continue into 2026. Yet, the platform remains the most effective way to reach B2B buyers for founders and marketing teams willing to invest their time, money, and reputation on the platform.

Are you willing to?

I hope this was helpful. If you’re ready to start publishing content on social, read this essay next, where I lay out 25 winning content ideas for founders.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

How Businesses Win LinkedIn's NEW Algorithm by Tommy Clark 🎥
Bill Gurley — The AI Era, 10 Days in China, & Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, and More by Tim Ferriss and Bill Gurley 🎥
State of Content 2026 by Hyper 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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