How to grow your LinkedIn following for SaaS founders
![How to grow your LinkedIn following for SaaS founders](/content/images/size/w2000/2024/02/DALL-E-Feb-13-Businessperson-in-City.webp)
In consumer products, creator/celebrity brands are one of the biggest trends. Logan Paul and KSIâs Prime drink reportedly does $1.2 billion in revenue. Mr Beastâs chocolate company Feastibles is a $200 million business. The right face can propel an undifferentiated product to billions in revenue.
Until recently, this trend spared the software industry, with notable exceptions (Tobi LĂźtke at Shopify, Jason & David at Basecamp). Now it feels like many founders spend more time talking to LinkedIn than talking to users.
Engineering purists might call this a waste of time. But itâs one of the few high-upside channels left: Company pages are pay-to-reach and SEO is a bloodsport. Look at this:
![LinkedIn company page vs. personal profile reach](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/Twitter-post-162companyvsceo.webp)
The announcement of the exact same thing received more than 10x the engagement. Sure, the framing is different. But imagine how big the difference is!
Thatâs why LinkedIn is filled with founders and creators sharing their stories, perspectives and advice. A post that couldâve been written in an airport Uber summons customers on demandâwhile youâre asking strangers to âHop on a quick callâ.
Itâs easy to be jealous. But none of these founders logged into LinkedIn one day to find theyâve been awarded an audience that knows, likes and trusts them. Theyâve built it from the ground, starting small and growing big.
I know because Iâve spent the past weeks analyzing those founders. Iâve scrolled for miles to find their first, posts and traced them back to today. Hereâs what I learnedâand how you can build a following on LinkedIn to get new customers:
What are you optimizing for?
Before we start with tactics, letâs clarify something: If you copy someoneâs strategy (well), make sure you want the same thing.
Letâs take an example. Iâm on CommandBarâs marketing team. My goal: Get customers for CommandBar.
As one of my favorite podcast guests, I was excited to research Elena. I was impressed with her 95,000 follower audience, but disappointed with her content: It seemed so boringâMemes, viral videos with tech-related captions⌠That wasnât the insightful Elena Iâd listened to on podcasts!
I almost dismissed it as a fluke: A creator who used to be good, but now just chases whatever gets the most likes. Nothing to learn here. But a single post turned that perception around:
![Elena Verna LinkedIn growth strategy](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/PNG-to-WEBP-conversion-2024-01-26.webp)
I was wrong! Her content doesnât lack tactics & opinions on SaaS because itâs badâitâs that she doesnât aim to get SaaS customers!
To grow her Substack, she wants to maximize attention. Posting memes that get attention broadens her top-of-funnel and creates more subscribers. She accumulates LinkedIn followers because those trickle down into Substack.
Her strategy would look different if she was leading growth at a Series A startup like CommandBar. Then she wouldâve needed to tell more stories, share more tactics and focus more on showcasing specific expertise than broad reach. It wouldâve been easy to think âWell, she has 95k followers and I have 1.5k so I better start posting memes!â. I mightâve ended up with more followers, but no extra leads.
The above is a simplified modelâin reality, doing this well will looks like an indifference curve where youâll gain followers, engagement AND trust, but need to define how much you want of each.
Before you steal borrow any tactics, makes sure those tactics support the strategy you pursue. Make sure this doesnât become you:
![Instagram marketing failiure](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/PNG-to-WEBP-conversion--6-.webp)
The audience size of big creators is inspiring, but always work backwards from what you want, not what they have. If what they do doesnât align with that, donât copy it!
Note: For the rest of this post, Iâll keep using follower & engagement counts as success metrics. Thatâs because those metrics are visible while leads, customers, etc. arenât.
Okay, letâs figure out what I found:
Call out your people
Thereâs a temptation to create for everyone. Bigger TAM = bigger chance for your post to resonate with any given person, right? No!
![Aakash Gupta Linkedin slogan](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/PNG-to-WEBP-conversion--7-.webp)
Most creators used a typical startup strategy: Find a market wedge, then expand from there. Aakash Gupta makes crystal-clear who itâs for: PMs, product leaders, PM aspirants. And itâs not just him:
- Lenny Rachitsky created specifically for product managers, a group that many in tech didnât pay much attention to (or even detested).
- Elena Verna posted about marketing teams feeling neglected in engineering-dominated tech companies. She also advocated for women/mothers in tech.
- Anthony Pierri positioned himself (/his agency Fletch) specifically for product marketers in vertical B2B SaaS startups.
- Enzo Avigo (founder of june.so) brands himself as the âpre-PMF product management guyâ.
These were initial wedges, often followed by expansions. An example is Lenny Rachitsky, whose content now includes general tech career advice, growth strategies and more.
Never stop posting (even when nobody cares yet)
Startup founders, agency owners, full-time creatorsâeveryone I studied had one thing in common: Posting regularly for years, even when engagement was low.
The â10 year overnight successâ is a cliche. Itâs also true. Elena Verna has been posting for 7+ years. Aakash Gupta (now at 198k followers) started 2 years ago. Kyle Poyar, now at about 40,000 followers, started posting 8 years ago.
That doesnât mean breakout successes donât happen: Anthony Pierriâs first âexplainer imageâ post received 600+ engagements. Following this, he also had many troughs where engagement was low.
Step function growth is the only (real) growth
If consistency was all that mattered, growth would be linear: Get a few followers each day. Then, even without any breakout hits, youâll grow the following you want.
But thatâs not the case: In my research, the 80/20 principle always applied. Most of the engagement happened on outlier posts, which raise raised the baseline of non-outlier posts.
Algorithms suppress what doesnât get engagement, ensuring you never see those peopleâs average posts. Of the tens of thousands of posts I saw, most got average or even bad engagement. But breakout posts redefine average and bad.
A viral post can get you so many followers that an average post then gets higher engagement. Since viral posts are unpredictable, that doesnât mean you can skip the consistency. But you can give yourself a better chance:
High-engagement LinkedIn posts: 5 stealable tactics
Itâs impossible to predict which posts go viral. But itâs easy to know which likely wonât. You can think about it like a software product: You never know which app will take off.
But if an app has no social/collaboration features, sharing or invites, its chances of going viral are tiny (yes, there are exceptions).
The same is true for social posts. Here are 5 formats Iâve seen work often:
1. Involve others in your posts
The same way an app is more likely to go viral if people use it together, your post is more likely to get attention if it involves more people than you. This is because people you tag will get a notification. If they engage, the post will be shown to more people.
A great example is Anthony Pierriâs breakout post (way before he had 40k followers). He tags 7 people and/or companies!
![Anthony Pierri Linkedin post](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/bf388edb39122ea4160574ddb716cb9e.png)
He got attention from a ton of people. And itâs likely that some of these high-profile people engaged with it. The origin is deeply human: If others are talking about you, you want to know what they're saying. That doesnât mean you can just tag your way to virality. Many might be too busy to engage even with posts that directly compliment them!
But how much less engagement would Anthony have gotten had he only posted the Miro board?
2. Hot takes!
Taking the opposite side of a common argument gets peopleâs attention. Many tech founders or other entrepreneurial people have renegade opinions that run counter to conventional wisdom.
If you have some, share them!
![Anthony Pierri post on pricing](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/10a53988e0d1a6173a0c764039bd92a1.png)
This got attention because most people tell each other they need to charge more. Anthony takes the opposite point of view.
A few notes on this tactic:
- Use it sparingly: Nobody likes the person who always complains.
- Only do it when you believe in it: Short-term follower growth isnât worth compromising trust.
- Make a good point: You should be able to back up your point, as Anthony does with his story.
3. Do what others are afraid of
Many people are afraid to look ridiculous in a business context. Travis Tyler isnât. He creates TikTok-style skits on LinkedIn:
![Travis Tyler Gen Z Kyle Linkedin video](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/Convertio.webp)
In this specific skit, he rewrote Xfinityâs landing page with Gen Z lingo. Note that this isnât only funny, but also showed a great command of copywriting!
This is certainly not for everyone (and wonât get you a promotion of McKinsey), but works well for him. If youâre willing to go further than anyone else, go there!
4. Tell your story (if itâs good)
LinkedIn is awash with people talking about what someone could, should, would do and dispensing advice theyâre not taking. Everybody knows this.
Imagine a post that said âItâs worth taking a pay cut if itâs for doing what you love!â. Generic, read-right-past-it.
Enzo Avigo (and many other smart creators) do the opposite:
![Enzo Avigo quit job story](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/Convertio-Download.webp)
He tells his story and has skin in the game. If you have interesting stories to tell, this is far more interesting than giving advice. We love to see people share what theyâve done, not what they might do.
The right stories also build trust in you and give you depth, which makes people more likely to engage with you.
5. Summarize complex topics in one image
Kyle Poyar often creates âcheat sheetsâ, which summarize complex topics like SaaS growth in a single image:
![Kyle Poyar cheat sheet](https://commandbar.ghost.io/content/images/2024/02/Convertio-Download--1-.webp)
This makes your content feel incredibly valuable and makes readers feel like theyâre getting a ton of value in one post instead of cobbling the knowledge together from reading tons of blogs and social media accounts.
It also leads to people being more likely to screenshot/download your content and sticking around, which is a positive signal to social media distribution algorithms.
Iâll see you in my feed!
Alright, weâve just discussed a lot principles, strategies and tacticsâfrom abstract to actionable. I hope you put them into practice and go so viral you show up on my feed soon.