The no-budget marketing strategy every founder needs 🌠

You probably have a 'Silent Founder' crisis - here's how to fix it

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Here’s a little flow chart I made:

Yes, you absolutely should do ‘Founder Marketing’ (=share thoughts, expertise, and startup updates on your personal social media). It’s the easiest no-budget brand awareness tactic. You can’t afford NOT to do founder marketing.

You can do founder marketing in 2 ways:

1. Investing your time and simply writing posts yourself (FREE)

2. Hiring a ghostwriter to help you from Upwork or Fiverr (💲💲💲)

I highly recommend doing it yourself—it’s a skill worth mastering.

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How to Start: A Tactical Guide 🕹️

Simple:

☀️ Post on LinkedIn every single day, in the morning hours where you live.¹

That’s it!

But *what* to post exactly? 🤔

1. Product Updates 🎁

New releases, upcoming features, customer news. If you are not even doing this — I don’t even know what you’re doing as a founder.

2. Company Milestones 🎖️

Sharing news about funding rounds, ARR, and # of users = the easiest tactic for LinkedIn. Celebrating success is in the nature of its algorithm.

3. Industry Trends/News 🗞️

This is how you become a thought leader AND show that you actually understand your category.

4. Hiring Updates 💼

Share open positions and celebrate new hires.

5. Asking for Feedback 👂

It’s surprisingly powerful yet underrated. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, launched his search engine on Hacker News with a simple post: ‘What do you think of my new search engine?’. This generated hundreds of comments and kickstarted DuckDuckGo's growth. The lesson? Don't be afraid to put your product out there and ask for honest feedback.

For all of the above posts:

📜 The only rule is that you must be personal and share your emotions.

Just not too many emotions, please.

The Crying CEO

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How to Master: A Cheat Sheet 🦄

Here are my best 10 unconventional ideas for Founder Marketing:

1. 🕵️‍♂️ Stealth Demo Drops: “Leak” a sneak peek demo video of your upcoming release. Let early hype build organically. Bonus points if you say that the marketing team advised you not to post it.

2. 📊 LinkedIn Polls: This is such an under-leveraged tool for founders. Ask about industry pain points or controversial topics. Follow up with your take. Perhaps… a contrarian hot take? 👇

3. 🔥 Contrarian Hot Takes: Share a spicy, counter-intuitive opinion on your industry. Back it up with data or experience. Debate respectfully in comments.

4. 🧨 Failure Breakdowns: Talk about your biggest screw-ups as a founder. Share raw, honest lessons learned. It’s scary to talk about f*ckups — but these posts tend to go viral. Frame failure as growth.

5. 💡 Quick Wins: Share one simple but insanely useful tip that helped your startup grow. Make it immediately actionable. Ask others to share theirs.

6. 🏋️‍♀️ Founder Fitness Challenge: Publicly commit to a 30-day fitness challenge tied to a startup metric. E.g. ‘I’ll do 10 push-ups for every new user signup in the next month.’ Share daily updates and encourage others to join. Bonus: donate $ to charity for each rep.

7. 🌋 Extreme Survival Tips: Share your top tips for surviving as a startup founder, BUT present them in the context of extreme scenarios. For example, ‘How to pitch your startup during a zombie apocalypse 🧟‍♂️’ or ‘Raising funding during an alien invasion 👽’.

8. 💬 Data-Driven AMAs: Host monthly AMAs but bring receipts. Share a surprising data point → then open the floor for questions.

9. 🌟 Founder’s Favorite: Share your favorite productivity hack, book, or tool that's been a game-changer for your startup. Explain why it’s so valuable and ask followers to share their own favorites.

10. 🍗 Roast My Landing Page: Ask roasters to tear apart your landing page. Take brutal feedback in stride. Expect 100+ comments — people love feeling important.

Before publishing, make sure your post is in the sweet spot 🍭

• Emotional & real, but not TMI

• Valuable & technical, but not boring

• Bold & interesting, but not unprofessional

After publishing, engage and engage 🍿

• React and reply to ALL of the comments.

• Obsessively comment on other founders’ posts. Talk about your own experience in the comments. Without doing that, you will not succeed.

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Final Piece of Advice 👀

I’ve asked 20+ ‘silent founders’ why they are not doing any Founder Marketing.

The most popular answers I received, in descending order:

1. No time

2. I don’t know what to post

3. No one will care what I have to say (and it’ll make me look bad)

My challenge for you: Post one piece of founder content this week. A story, lesson, or hot take. Measure the response and keep iterating. The only wrong way to do founder marketing is to not do it at all. 🧠

And if you still need convincing, here’s a more detailed answer:

Send *this* to your founder.

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See you next week ✌️

Tom

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⏩ In case you missed it:

1. Twitter (X) is a great platform for founder marketing as well. But I always prefer Linkedin because job seekers + potential investors & partners + previous co-workers will 100% support your posts. Your best audience is already there.