LinkedIn, for founders who are never going to post every day

Everyone who has ever done well on LinkedIn will tell you the answer is volume. Post daily, engage for thirty minutes, comment on twenty things, repeat for eighteen months.

They are not lying. It does work. It is also a part-time job, and you have a company to run. So here is the version for one post a week, which is the cadence most founders can actually hold.

One post a week beats five posts for three weeks

The failure mode is not posting too little. It is starting at five a week, burning out by week three, disappearing for two months, and coming back to an audience that has forgotten you.

The algorithm forgives low frequency and punishes disappearing. A weekly post, every week, for a year, does more than a heroic fortnight.

Pick the day you are least likely to be firefighting. For most founders that is Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Put it in the calendar as a recurring thirty minutes, and treat it like a customer call.

What the one post should be

Not an announcement. Announcements are the lowest performing thing on the platform, because nobody has ever changed their plans because a stranger shipped a feature.

The things that work, roughly in order:

Something that went wrong, and what you did. Specific, recent, with the numbers. "We had 40% of our first order come back damaged. Here is what we changed about the packaging and what it cost." Few founders write these because they are uncomfortable, and that discomfort is why readers stop on them.

Write about a decision and why you made it. Why you priced at £28 and not £19. Why you went direct instead of wholesale. Readers want the reasoning, and the conclusion on its own teaches nobody anything.

Write about something a customer told you that surprised you and changed what you are building. A testimonial does none of this work.

Write about a number and explain it. "We sold 300 units at a market on Saturday. Here is what the stall cost, what we would do differently, and what it tells us."

The first two lines decide whether the rest is read

LinkedIn truncates at about 200 characters on mobile. Everything after "see more" is read by people who have already decided to read.

So the first two lines cannot be a warm-up. No "I have been thinking a lot about..." No "Excited to share..." Start where the story is already moving:

We priced our moisturiser at £28. Our accountant thought that was insane.

That is a first line. Setting the scene first is the most common reason a good post goes unread.

What to do on the other four days

Not nothing, but not much. Fifteen minutes, twice a week:

Comment on three posts. Add something the post left out, or disagree politely and say why. A good comment on somebody else's popular post reaches more of the right people than most of your own posts will.

Reply to every comment on yours, properly. A one word reply is worse than none. The comment section of your own post is the cheapest place you will ever get a conversation with a buyer.

That is it. No connection sprees, no automated messages, no engagement pods. All three are visible from the outside and all three cost you more credibility than they buy reach.

If you sell a physical product

Two adjustments.

Photograph the unglamorous parts: the pallet, the co-packer, the failed batch, the label proofs laid out on a kitchen table. Product shots perform badly on LinkedIn because readers see them as advertising. Process photographs perform well because readers see a business being built.

Talk about unit economics openly. LinkedIn's audience is mostly people who run things, and they want to know what a candle costs to make at 500 units against 5,000. Stockists and investors read these posts without commenting on them.

How to tell whether it is working

Not likes. The metric that matters is whether the right people start arriving already knowing who you are.

Watch for three things: inbound messages that reference something specific you wrote, people at events who open with "I read your thing about the packaging", and stockists or buyers who reply to a cold approach because your name was familiar.

If none of those has happened in three months of weekly posting, the problem is what you are writing about, not how often.