Troubleshooting content burnout

What to do when you get bored & burnt-out with your founder-led content

Tommy Clark
August 04, 2025

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. Per usual, I spent mine catching up on some reading. I’m currently on book 6 of The Sun Eater series: Disquiet Gods.

I'm not sure if it's recency bias since I just finished book 5, Christopher Ruocchio is giving Red Rising a run for its money as my favorite series. It just gets better and better.

Now, let’s talk content. Today I want to walk you through a recent time when I was burnt out with content creation—and exactly how I overcame it. This is a quick one, but a must-read if you want to have any sort of longevity in your personal brand.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Troubleshooting content burnout

What to do when you get bored & burnt out with your founder-led content

I have a confession to make. I haven’t been excited about ‘LinkedIn strategy’ in months.

I try to gaslight myself into being excited about it. But I just can’t bring myself to give a damn about the latest hook templates, case studies of founder-led content, viral ChatGPT prompts, and all the other stuff the personal-brand-industrial-complex cares about in 2025.

I enjoy helping Compound’s clients with founder-led content, but I started to feel like I was saying the same thing in the same way in every newsletter, LinkedIn post, and YouTube video. Effective marketing, sure. But mind-numbingly boring.

So, somewhere a month or so back, I started writing more about writing—meta, I know—and the books I’ve been reading. I’ve been spending a lot more time studying the craft. I even started writing my first science-fantasy novel (26,067 words in).

This change was scary. At surface level, this type of content deviates from what should drive the most business for my agency.

Writing insights are somewhat related to founder-led content, but it’d be far more straightforward to make short-form videos & in-depth LinkedIn posts about content marketing strategy.

I was so burnt out that I didn’t care.

A few months ago, I was prepared to accept shitty content performance—even lower revenue—as a consequence of that change. For me to stay consistent with my output, something had to change.

Fortunately, the outcome of this adjustment was far off from my expectations in the best way possible. I’m so glad I was wrong. Here’s what went down.

(1) My content started performing better. I’ve had a few posts in the past month that have been outsized winners. Nice. Also, we’ll have a record month in September. Woo!

(2) I started attracting better quality candidates for both our open Content Writer and Content Editor roles.

Result (1) is easy to explain. Content transfers energy. Your audience can feel the effort you put into a post. You, as a creator, are also going to put more care and research into each piece when you care about the subject matter. Therefore, your metrics often end up better.

It’s similar to training to get in shape. If you enjoy hitting the gym, you're going to practice better form. You're going to push yourself more in each set. The mind-muscle connection is. stronger. So, you’ll end up wayyy more shredded than the guy going through the motions on the Smith machine.

Now, result (2) was a pleasant surprise. As you may know, recruiting has been a pain in my ass. It’s the bottleneck for Compound’s growth. Had to say no to $15K in new monthly revenue this month just because we didn’t have capacity.

I’d been slamming my head against a brick wall for the past several months, trying to fill two open positions at Compound: one Writer and one Editor. We have the demand for growth, but the content talent pool is dire.

Every day, I would post about our culture & growth trajectory, run LinkedIn ads, and even do some outbound recruiting. All the right inputs. No great candidates. Ugh.

But…when I started posting more about reading & writing, I noticed our candidate pool got better. We started moving more first-rounders to follow-up interviews, and more follow-ups to test projects. And eventually, we found two great candidates to hire.

One exceptional Content Editor just started today. He told me that he only found my LinkedIn content because of this post I published a few weeks back about how we ask candidates about their favorite books.

He reached out shortly after via LinkedIn DM—and he got bonus points for mentioning he’d read Red Rising. The rest is history.

Had I not posted a ‘random’ write-up about my personal interests (reading fiction), we might have lost out on him as a hire. In an alternate timeline, he might not know Compound exists.

I speak to a lot of founders who end up burnt out by content. I almost became one of them—and I run a content agency! It can happen to any of us.

If you also find yourself in a spot where you start getting bored with your own content, know that it’s OK to make a change. Take inventory and see where your interests are. Your first priority when posting content is publishing stuff you’re stoked about.

The energy comes across to the reader, and there’s likely more of a business tie-in than you think.

A few ways to do this strategically:

(1) Mix the new stuff you enjoy in with the old, boring stuff that works. I started writing more about my personal interests, sure, but I do still post the ‘LinkedIn strategy’ content that keeps our waitlist full.

(2) See if your personal interests have a business angle. Looking back, I see it’s obvious how publishing content about my reading habits attracted higher-quality writing candidates for my agency. Writers who like to read tend to write better—duh!

Here’s another hypothetical example for you. If you're super into endurance training, there are a ton of ways you can tie that into your usual marketing content. Personal anecdotes, analogies, etc. I wrote more about how to implement Strategic Personal Content in this essay.

For now, I hope you walk away from this piece knowing that “content” doesn’t have to…and shouldn’t…feel like a war of attrition.

The best content comes from a place of personal interest.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

My LinkedIn Strategy Is Boring, But It Makes Me $100K/Month by Tommy Clark 🎥
How to Make Content People Give a Sh*t about w/ Oren John by 505 Podcast 🎥
Gonna be real, I just haven’t been consuming as much ‘marketing’ content lately. If you need a great book to read, check out The Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio. I’m on Book 6, Disquiet Gods.

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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