I talk to probably 5-10 SaaS or AI founders every week who want to get started with posting on LinkedIn. Depending on their goals and bandwidth, I usually suggest one of three possible paths, which I’ll lay out here.
Before diving in, a quick note about me: I’m growing my own founder brand on Linkedin (43k odd followers), grew my company to $100k/mo from it, and I’ve now worked with over 80 B2B SaaS companies helping them build out a Linkedin program for their founders and execs, so I hope to have a few relevant things to say here. These days I advise technical founders via Thormeier.co.
What are the 3 paths?
Founder-only + structure
Founder + Head of Content (internal)
Founder + ghostwriter-content strategist (external)
I’ll also cover a few paths that do NOT work (at least I’ve never seen them work, but I have seen founders burn a lot of time and resources trying to pursue them):
Founder-only + no structure
Founder + junior ghostwriter
Head of Content-only (no founder involvement)
Ghostwriter/agency-only (no founder involvement)
Founder-only + structure
Most of the biggest founder brands you know start out DIYing it, writing everything themselves, and many stay that way forever (I’ve interviewed many of them, incl. Jason Fried, DHH, James Hawkins, Dave Gerhardt, Adam Robinson).
Why? Because when you’re building your founder brand, your content is your product. The better it is, the more people you attract. And the more involved you are yourself, as the founder, the centerpiece of the content, the higher the ceiling in terms of quality, partly because writing is thinking, and partly because another factor of quality is a unique style, and the ceiling for uniqueness is also higher the more involved you are personally. Long sentence, sorry. Could probably use AI to rework the sentence, but then it wouldn’t sound as fun to me anymore.
Why “+ structure”? Most founders, especially the technical ones I advise, are not natural content creators/storytellers/presenters. They’re deep experts in their narrow field, and that field is rarely social media algorithms or human psychology (two sides of the same coin). Structure can either be internally imposed (by having a clear list of inputs and time blocking) or externally imposed (by working with a coach).
I’ve written extensively here on the structure I suggest to SaaS founders starting out on Linkedin:
The TLDR:
Post 3x per week
Allocate 1h creation/writing time per post. Timeblock it on your calendar
80% of your posts should be problem/solution content. You need to become the #1 expert/authority in the PROBLEM your company solves. Pick a pain point/goal/priority your ICP has and help them make some small or big progress on it by sharing an insight, a story, a framework, strategy, tip, reframe, mindset shift, etc. Don’t be shy to mention your product/company, you should be PROUD about what you’re building and project that into the world
Block off 30min every day to go through the following checklist, ideally right before or after posting:
Check all your notifications
Reply to all your comments
Answer all relevant messages/DMs
Write at least 5 comments on other people’s posts
Accept all relevant connection requests + send a conversation starter
Send 5 connection requests to prospects
Send 3 DMs to your existing network- come up with a meaningful thing to say to them
Check who visited your profile + send a conversation starter to relevant ones
Check post engagers + send a conversation starter to relevant ones
Check new followers + send a conversation starter to relevant ones
If you do the math, this all adds up to roughly 5-6 hours per week, which should be about 10% of your workweek as a founder. That sounds about right to me, if you want your founder brand to be anything but an afterthought
Again, much more detail, including how to write these posts, what a conversation starter is, etc here https://www.founderbrand.org/p/complete-guide-to-linkedin-for-saas
Summary
People involved: Only founder (+ maybe coach)
AI involved: Minimally (only for research, not for writing)
Resources needed: None, though it can be helpful to do a workshop or take a course to learn the fundamentals and build your v1 strategy
Upside potential: Maximum (top 1% founder brand)
Time involvement: Highest (minimum 5h/week, up to 10h/week). Or more - for full context, the max I’ve seen is Alex Hormozi at 2 full days per week (15 ish hours/week) and Adam Robinson at 25h/week during his peak
When to use this:
You’re early-stage and there only IS you
You’re ambitious and want to aim for the highest ceiling in terms of results (reach/audience size + revenue from it) but you’re ok with also spending more time (that’s the trade off)
Or you’re super anal about your content needing to sound 100% like you (this is the only approach where your content will sound 100% like you because it IS 100% you)
Founder + Head of Content (internal)
When I say Head of Content, that doesn’t need to be their actual, literal job title, but they need to be acting as that. It could be your Head of Marketing, your one and only marketer at the company if you’re early stage, your Chief of Staff, doesn’t matter.
What’s more important is that they are at a Director or above level. Meaning, you don’t want a junior person straight out of college, or a “TikTok”-native person. You want someone with business acumen, who understand what senior buyers (VPs and C-level) actually care about, how they make buying decisions, and they need to have a very solid understanding of your company, product, market, and customers.
And most importantly, it needs to be someone you, as the founder, have rapport with. Someone you can jam with.
What is their job? To pull you out of your day-to-day at least once a week, talk to you, interview you, prompt you, all with the goal to get you talking and sharing ideas, insights, and stories. They’ll record it and then use to write the content for you.
If you already have a ton of raw content materials, like podcast recordings, interviews, keynotes you gave, op-eds you wrote, etc, it’s also their job to collect this and splice it up into smaller Linkedin posts.
This is essentially the model we ran at my previous company, Project 33, as an agency. Our clients, founders, would get a fractional Head of Content, eg. Tobi who is still working with me now with clients at Thormeier.co, and he interviews them every week or two weeks and asks them questions around their work, what they’re seeing in the market, company updates, conversations they’re having with customers and prospects, and get their commentary on relevant industry pieces he found on X or Linkedin. I think this is the most repeatable, most straighforward model to run, because it’s easy to structure and stick to.
A recurring call 2-4x per month, recorded via Riverside, ran like an “internal” podcast interview.
After the interview, it’s the Head of Content’s job to pull individual content pieces out of it and write them.
I personally don’t care if the Head of Content writes them themselves, has a freelance writer they’re working/partnering with, or using Claude to write a first draft. The important piece is that you have source material and real depth and insight coming from the interview, to make sure you don’t product slop.
I will go into much, much more depth into how to execute this model because it will go waaay beyond the scope of this post, but if you need help with it or want my advice, or have us execute part of this, book a call with me.
Summary
People involved: Founder + Head of Content + maybe: writer/video editor/designer
AI involved: Potentially, but max for drafting
Resources needed: Have someone in-house to be able to fill the role, even if just fractionally. They need to have rapport with you, deeply understand your company, product, market, and have good taste + judgement for content
Upside potential: High (top 10% founder brand)
Time involvement: Medium, can be anywhere between 1-5h per week, depending on your ambition, and how smooth your relation with your Head of Content has become
When to use this:
You’re the kind of person who can’t get themselves to sit down and write for the life of you, no matter how hard you try, even if someone gives you a structure
You have some budget to hire someone (prob minimum around $5-6k/mo) OR you already have a Head of Marketing / Chief of Staff etc who can fulfill this role fractionally and fits the above criteria
You want great results, not quite as great as with the previous model, but you’re ok with the tradeoff given that you’ll spend less time overall
Founder + ghostwriter-content strategist (external)
Alright, last but not least. Or maybe actually least?
Most founders, if they want to do Linkedin, and don’t have someone internally who can help them with is, usually default to hiring a ghostwriter.
I’ll focus here on the setup that I’ve seen actually work, further down I’ll highlight the case where hiring a ghostwriter won’t work, which is why I’m talking about a “ghostwriter-content strategist.”
A ghostwriter-content strategist is a person who can write, but also has the business acumen to build and own a strategy that actually integrates with your overall company and GTM strategy. Similar to the “minimum Director-level Head of Content” role above, this person - generally - shouldn’t be a 21-year-old who spends 4 hours on Linkedin and their favorite creator is either Justin Welsh or Jasmin Alic. Nothing against those creators, but it’s a certain style of content that I’d describe as being more aimed towards a beginner-level audience, which is typically not the kind of content you want if you audience is VPs and C-levels.
You can find this ghostwriter-content strategist either as a solo freelancer or in the form of an agency, there are some good ones out there like Compound, Good Content, notus, or my previous company Project 33. Btw, we still take on a handful of agency clients every year to keep our execution muscle.
How can you identify that they’re a fit?
All the usual things when hiring apply, but the biggest sign which type of ghostwriter you’re dealing with:
Read the content they themselves put out. Do you find it insightful as a founder? Well written? Nuanced and mature, while still interesting and engaging? Or does their content feel cringe, obvious, non-insightful, gimmicky?
Obviously avoid the latter.
For a good freelancer, you’ll probably pay $2,000-3,000 per month. For a good agency, probably at least $5,000 per month. Agencies come with the added benefit that they have more capabilities, eg. video editing, graphic design, podcast editing, etc.
Other than that, the setup is very similar to the one with your internal Head of Content, just that it’s a contractor.
Summary
People involved: Founder + Ghostwriter-content strategist
AI involved: Potentially, but max for drafting
Resources needed: Just need the budget and about a month to find a hire a fitting ghostwriter-content strategist
Upside potential: Medium-high (top 25% founder brand)
Time involvement: Lowest, usually 1-2h per week
When to use this:
You don’t want to or can’t write yourself as the founder AND you don’t have any internal resources to get help from
You have the budget to at least hire a good freelance ghostwriter and stick with them for 4-6 months
You don’t want the best results, you want an 80/20 approach, where you spend the least amount of time possible while still getting a good outcome
You’re ok with your content only sounding 85-90% like you (the only way for your content to sound 100% like you is if you write 100% of it)
Combining them - a note
You can obviously combine these approaches. You could write all of your content yourself as the founder, spend 5-10 hours on creation and engaging, AND then also have a Head of Content or external strategist who further leverages your content, helps with ideating, edits video clips or graphics for you to include, runs ads on your content, edits your drafts with feedback for sharpness/conciseness, etc etc etc. That has an even higher ceiling.
What doesn’t work
Ok, now to the setups I’ve not seen work so far:
Founder-only + no structure
Kind of obvious. If you have no natural knack for content / social / marketing, and you just post random things that come to mind, with no strategy, no plan, no structure to it, it will fail.
Founder + junior ghostwriter
This is probably the most common one I see. Founder thinks: I want to do Linkedin, but I don’t want to spend any time AND I don’t want to pay much. This is easy. It’s just content. So they hire a “cheap” junior ghostwriter they find on LinkedIn. They pay them around $1,000 per month, usually they are not from the US / UK / Europe at that price point, so there’s a little bit of a language and culture gap, which is fine on it’s own, but combined with the fact that they’re too junior and don’t have the “strategist” skill we discussed previously, you end up with fluffy, cringe content that sounds a little too much like an influencer and not enough like something a legitimate founder or CEO would say. Avoid.
Head of Content-only (no founder involvement)
Similar to the one above in the sense that founder thinks: this is easy and I don’t want to waste any time on content. They should figure this out on their own.
The problem that happens here:
Even though the Head of Content does have business acumen and can act as the strategist, understanding your company, product, and buyer, they get zero input from you. So what will they do if they need to create content for you without input from you? Come up with stuff. Listen to some calls, do some research with ChatGPT and Claude, think about what they themselves find interesting, and write it up. The problem? It won’t sound like you, and it won’t be YOUR IDEAS, OBVIOUSLY. Some founders are ok with this, 95% are not.
So you’ll end up in endless revision loops or you’ll spend 30min editing their drafts just to make it sound like you and have your actual POV in it, at which point you should’ve just front-loaded that time.
You’re the founder for a reason. You have a unique POV, you know your company, product, customer better than anyone else. You have opinions about your industry that DEVIATE from the norm / status quo, which are exactly the interesting bit, and which no one can guess unless you tell them.
Ghostwriter/agency-only (no founder involvement)
It’s the same idea as above, just even worse, because at least your Head of Content has a lot of internal knowledge to draw from, call transcripts, All Hands meetings, infos about upcoming launches or releases etc, internal company docs, so they’ll often be able to come up with something half-decent, while an external person doesn’t even have that. Complete waste of money and time. And btw, when I say “no founder involvement”, 30min per month falls underneath that.
Next step
Alright, I hope this helped. There’s so much more to each model that I will write about in future posts, so make sure to sub.
If you want to work through which model works best for you, and how to implement it, that’s what I host monthly group workshops for SaaS and AI founders on, to build their LinkedIn strategy together live. You can sign up for one here: https://thormeier.co/workshop