Founder-led sales and marketing never ends

Generating pipeline is really, really hard. It’s especially hard for early-stage companies who have to compete for mindshare with larger, better-funded competitors.

Over the past several months, we’ve advised dozens of startups looking to build more pipeline more repeatably. While we try to tailor our recommendations to each individual company’s ICP, the one piece of advice we’ve found ourselves giving every time is this: invest in your founder brand. Cultivating your founder brand is, without a doubt, the easiest and cheapest way to raise awareness of your company and begin building trust with prospective customers; once you get into a rhythm, it is also one of the most effective ways to generate high-intent pipeline.

In our view, LinkedIn is the best place to start that process. It’s easy to use and, for the vast majority of startups, it’s where your buyers already spend their time. Most importantly, a little consistency can go a long way: on average, founders see 33% more leads when they post regularly on LinkedIn.

This playbook is designed to help you craft your founder story, distribute it regularly on LinkedIn, and directly measure its impact on your pipeline and bookings. We’ve aggregated proprietary LinkedIn data, stories from founders, and guidance from the savviest LinkedIn gurus and packaged them up into five easy steps that anyone can follow to build their founder brand from the ground up (or take their existing efforts to the next level).