Helping LinkedIn Creators Build A Content Strategy That Generates Leads | Premium Ghostwriter | Sharing What Works

In 2024, I fell into the creator trap. 

100% of my work was writing social media content (for myself and clients) and I became obsessed with it. 

The money was good, but I hated what it was doing to my writing and my thinking.

I was getting WAY too many inputs and second-guessing myself constantly. 

I ended up creating a business I didn’t like - on the advice of people I didn’t care about - serving people I had no interest in serving. 

(Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.)

Then in 2025, I got sick of it and course corrected (maybe a little too hard) - going in the complete opposite direction: 

- No online presence
- Effectively ZERO content for myself 
- Mostly working on emails and strategy again
- Serving fewer clients, but working with them for longer
- Relying mostly on introductions and referrals for new clients
- Spending 100% of the rest of my time hanging out with friends and family

Much better for my sanity. 

Dipping my toe back into the online world, I see the same pattern everywhere: 

- Attention is getting hijacked by the loudest voices on social media. 
- Everyone is second-guessing their strategy on a daily basis.  
- Content is being forced into “approved” frameworks. 
- People are stuck in niches they don’t care about. 

Everyone is getting stressed the f**k out by a business that was supposed to bring them freedom. 

And personally, I’m done with it.

There’s a whole new world of weird and wonderful businesses that don’t conform to the “pre-packaged” business models on social media. 

You can build whatever business you want. 

And more people need to hear that. 

So that’s the mission going forward. 

My goal is to share the insights, stories, and strategies I’ve learned helping creators, coaches, and brands grow a business they love. 

If you believe any of the following: 

- The best business model is the one you love building. 
- Serving a “lucrative niche” you don’t care about is stupid. 
- Following a strategy you hate ruins your work and motivation.  
- Self-doubt is part of the process - it doesn’t mean something’s wrong. 
- Your business should accommodate your ideal daily and weekly lifestyle.
- Your best work aligns your skills, values, and beliefs - everything else can get in the bin. 

You’ll find something useful here. 

Paul

Paul Pirie

Get Leads From Your LinkedIn On Autopilot | Founder @ Hat Tip

If you:

→ Make social content
→ Want to make social content
→ Tried making social content but were unsuccessful

… you’re in the right place.

Truth is, publishing content you’re proud of on a consistent basis is tough.

You get busy. Things come up.

And for most founders, content takes a backseat to whatever fire they’re putting out at their company that day.

That said, its 2025.

Content is king — and the benefits for B2B founders are clear:

→ Drive low-cost brand awareness
→ Generate inbound leads from a new lead source
→ Become a “thought leader” in your space (even though you may hate that word)

And after meeting tons of founders while working in influencer marketing, starting Hat Tip felt like a no-brainer.

You can still benefit from publishing high-quality social content — without worrying about blocking out time to write, being inconsistent, or if you’re making content the “right way”.

Hat Tip handles that for you—while maintaining your voice—through:

→ Bi-weekly content interviews
→ Product and industry-specific thought-starters
→ The will to edit and revise until you’re proud of the content being published

If high-quality, consistent social content sounds like something you’re interested in, DM me or visit the link in my profile to book a call.

Thanks 👋

Christian

📧 christian@hattipagency.com
🐤 Twitter @dibratto

Christian Di Bratto

I've gone down the AI rabbit hole and cannot come out. 4 non-writing AI use cases founders/marketers should use to generate pipeline from social (no coding required):

1. Scraping all of your past posts and feeding the dataset to Opus 4.6 for analysis on what themes, topics, hook formats, and media choices correlate with better performance (comment if you want the master prompt).

2. Scraping your 3-5 closest competitors' posts to draw conclusions on what lands and doesn't land with decision-makers in your space (comment if you want the master prompt here, too).

3. Gathering ICP likers/commenters from your post automatically.

4. Automatically aggregating most recent industry news for commentary-style posts (we used this to crack 100k impressions for 2 different clients this week).

Comment if you want a video breaking down each of these if you're interested. There's no excuse not to be running each of these - none of it costs more than $20/mo and there's massive upside here (source: we do this for all clients now).

Founder @ Hat Tip. Founder Brand for startups.

Head of Marketing: We finally got our CEO to start posting on LinkedIn. It's a disaster.

Me: What happened?

Head of Marketing: The content isn't working. We've been at it for 3 weeks and nothing's happening.

Me: Alright. Walk me through the process. How much time is your CEO spending on content review each week?

Head of Marketing: Maybe 15 minutes total? He's super busy.

Me: Got it. And when you send him draft posts, what's he approving versus rejecting?

Head of Marketing: Well...he rejects anything that might be even slightly controversial. Like, we had a great post about how most founders waste money on branding too early. He killed it.

Me: What did he say?

Head of Marketing: That he didn't want to offend anyone in our network.

Me: So what's he approving?

Head of Marketing: Generic stuff - tips on productivity, leadership lessons, safe content.

Me: When did he start asking where the results are?

Head of Marketing: Last week.

Me: Two weeks in.

Head of Marketing: Yeah.

Me: Let me guess. He's wondering why there are no demo requests yet.

Head of Marketing: Exactly. He keeps asking if LinkedIn actually works.

Me: So your CEO won't post anything with an actual opinion, allocates 15 minutes a week to review, and expected pipeline in 14 days.

Head of Marketing: When you say it like that...

Me: The problem isn't that you convinced your CEO to post. The problem is nobody convinced him to actually commit to it.

Head of Marketing: What do you mean?

Me: Building pipeline from LinkedIn takes time. Budget for 3 months - and that's if you're posting strong content consistently.

Head of Marketing: So what do we do?

Me: Have a different conversation with him. Either he commits 30 minutes a week for review, approves posts with a real point of view, and sets realistic timeline expectations, or you shut it down until he's ready.

Head of Marketing: He's not going to like that.

Me: He doesn't like the current situation either.

LIVE NOW: 12-hour live stream making Clay in the middle of the street in Austin.

Available on Aidan Brannigan’s profile, presented by Clay.

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TechCrunch: 3M followers, less than 10 likes/post.
Forbes: 18M followers, less than 100 likes/post.
Microsoft: 28M followers, less than 100 likes/post.

(Btw, Microsoft owns this platform).

People just don't resonate with brand accounts anymore. There's no reason to follow or favor them, and these pages' stats are the best indicator of that.

On the other hand, Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft) has less than half the following of Microsoft's brand page, but (literally) gets 100x the engagement (sometimes more).

It's clear where the puck is going, and smart companies have already leaned in.

They're not totally ditching brand account, CNBC appearances, and traditional PR, but they're supporting those channels with thought leadership from founder/exec social channels.

Through this, they're able to tell their company's story in a much more personal way that actually resonates (while being in full control of the narrative they present!).

For your reference, here are a few CEOs/execs executing on this well and consistently:

Ryan Petersen, CEO at Flexport
Harley Finkelstein, President at Shopify
Peep Laja, CEO at Wynter

These people were early. Hell, we're still early. But time is ticking, and CEOs who start building their presences now will undoubtedly have a leg up on competition when they start.

- Signed, an agency owner whose entire life is building these presences for CEOs.

I sat on my couch and told myself I couldn't get up until I built a working tool. 2 hours later, I solved a massive content headache for my agency.

For context, we often clip our clients' podcast appearances at Hat Tip. Before, we'd to download 1-2hour-long .mp4s, cut the 1-minute clip from it, then delete the file. Not anymore.

Partially out of curiosity and frustration from past failed attempts, I wanted to prove to myself that I could build something useful (imagine the least technical person you know - that's me).

This felt like a problem ripe to be solved with an internal tool.

I wanted to be able to:

1. Feed it a YouTube URL.

2. Let me clip what I want without downloading the whole file.

3. Download only my clipped version.

My stubbornness paid off. With ChatGPT on the left side of my screen telling me what to do, and Codex on the right actually doing it, I built a tool that solved the problem.

I'm also ~90% sure deploying publicly is against YouTube ToS, but comment if you want the tool anyway and I can figure out how to deploy.

(video recorded a couple of weeks ago - I believe there have been two model updates since then)

PS - will be in Austin for the next few days…let me know if you’re around.

I was extremely close to not posting this.

I compiled over 100 of my favorite LinkedIn hooks from my swipe file, and templatized them. Then I got my graphics guy to make them look pretty in a carousel.

And the hooks are great - there's a reason they're in my swipe file.

But I do want to caution: Using any 1 of these 101 LinkedIn hooks is not going to be the reason you build the presence you want, generate millions in pipeline, or anything else.

You'll get that from:

1. Committing to building your social presence for 3-months minimum.

2. Not treating social like an afterthought.

3. Play the game the way it's intended: Without automating anything away, outsourcing writing to an LLM with no oversight, or anything else like that.

With all of that said, enjoy the hooks.

Linkedin Hooks

If I were in charge of generating pipeline for Vanta's founder brand starting from 0, here's exactly what I'd do by end of Q1:

(FWIW - an agency is not exactly required here. Sarah (Kollmorgen) Cottone or Jessica Munday could run this internally if needed):

1. Pick LinkedIn as the platform. Master one channel before expanding. Commit to 5 posts per week (3 minimum if handling yourself).

2. Assign Christina Cacioppo as the SME. Assumption: she's busy and can't allocate 10+ hours weekly. We'll build a system requiring less than 1 hour per week (45-min bi-weekly interview + 15-min weekly review).

3. Send Christina an onboarding form covering company understanding, messaging, ICP definition, content preferences, POV definition, and success criteria.

4. Define the POV. Clarify who Vanta counter-positions against, how the product differs specifically, and what makes Christina unique as a founder.

5. Research Vanta's competitors making founder-led content. Identify what's working, what's failing, and where the white space exists.

6. Map content buckets to each funnel stage:

TOF: Building Vanta stories, culture/team-building, general founder takes
MOF: Compliance education, competitive advantage angles, pro tips, horror stories, step-by-step processes
BOF: Customer stories, FAQ answers, objection handling, product updates

7. Write 10-12 content prompts mapping to these buckets (4-5 TOF, 4-5 MOF, 2-3 BOF) for the first interview. I have 400+ of these in a database if you want them.

8. Record the bi-weekly call on Riverside. Ask prompts like a podcast conversation. Let Christina elaborate naturally.

9. Draft 5 posts weekly from the transcript, linking exact timestamps for transparency. Pair each post with high-converting media based on internal data.

10. Share posts via Notion calendar. Christina reviews for 15 minutes. Log all feedback to reduce future edits.

11, Post approved content and reply to early comments to maintain engagement momentum.

12. Pull 1,000 ICP decision-makers using Sales Navigator (CISOs, VPs of Security, CTOs at Series A/B companies). Manually connect with 100 weekly. Once they accept, Christina's content starts appearing in their feed.

13. Weekly, pull ICP profile viewers from Sales Navigator. Share this "warm" list with Vanta's sales team for targeted outreach.

14. Report every Monday via Slack: impressions (WoW), followers (WoW), profile visits (WoW), saves (WoW), best post link, tracking sheet link.

15. Repeat the cycle, optimizing for winning topics, angles, formats, and media choices each iteration.

Coinbase's marketing is way more founder-led than they get credit for. Recently, though, this got them in some hot water.

The company's X account posted Brian Armstrong explaining their earnings, split-screened with Subway Surfers gameplay (retention hack from the short-form video world).

People hated it.

There was tons of negative commentary around how "unprofessional" this was, and how this is terrible for building trust.

All I saw was a Coinbase marketing team that "gets it", a founder willing to play along, and 3,000,000 views as their reward.

I'd estimate the raw earnings call video without the brainrot overlay would get less than 1% of this viewership.

Credit to all involved.

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Paul Pirie

Christian Di Bratto

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The Battle

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Engagements

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