Founder posts that sound like a person, not a press release

Nobody wants to read your press release

The most common founder post looks like this: “Delighted to announce that we have been shortlisted for [award]. A huge thank you to the incredible team. Exciting times ahead! #grateful #teamwork”

It gets eleven likes, nine of them from staff, and generates no work whatsoever. The problem is not the announcement. It is that the post contains nothing only you could have written.

Specific beats impressive

The posts that bring in enquiries are almost always about one job, in detail, with a number in it. Compare:

• “We deliver high-quality commercial fit-outs across the region.”
• “We just finished a dental practice in Leeds. Six weeks, occupied building, and they saw patients every day except two. The trick was doing all the noisy work between 6pm and 11pm.”

The second one tells a prospective client that you can work around their business without shutting it. That is the actual thing they are worried about, and no adjective would have communicated it.

Write the post you would send to one specific customer, not the post you would put on a billboard.

Four formats worth rotating

1. The job. What you did last week, what was awkward about it, how you solved it.
2. The opinion. Something you believe about your industry that a competitor would disagree with. If nobody could disagree, it is not an opinion.
3. The mistake. Something that went wrong and what changed afterwards. These consistently outperform everything else and everyone is too nervous to post them.
4. The explainer. A thing customers always misunderstand, explained plainly, without gating it behind a call.

Practical mechanics

Break the first two lines out on their own; that is all anyone sees before “see more”, and it decides whether the rest gets read. Keep paragraphs to one or two lines. Skip hashtags almost entirely; they do very little on LinkedIn now. Post two or three times a week rather than daily, because a thin post is worse than no post.

And reply to every comment yourself. That is where the actual conversations start, and it is the half of LinkedIn that most people ignore.

How long before it works

Realistically, three months of consistent posting before enquiries start referencing your posts. That feels slow. It is roughly the same timeline as ranking a page in search, and unlike search you own the audience at the end of it.