Founder-led marketing: A guide for content leads
Founder-led marketing may be the ultimate “do more with less” marketing play. But how do you get started? What content works best? If you’re in marketing, how can you talk your founder into committing hours a week to the process?
Chris Walker, the CEO and founder of Passetto, generates $10 million a year in revenue from his LinkedIn content and podcast.
Peter Caputa, the CEO of Databox, gets hundreds of sign-ups a month from his “building in public” LinkedIn posts.
Compare those numbers to, say, the average click-through rate for blog posts (less than 2%), and you can see why founder-led marketing is getting a lot of hype in the content world these days. It’s the ultimate “do more with less strategy,” the antidote to GTM bloat.
The catch, of course, is that founders are, by definition, busy. So the keys to founder-led marketing are:
- To build systems and processes to make it an easy lift for the founder
- To create marketing content that delivers maximum return in terms of engagements and conversions, to make it worth the time it will take up
Whether you’re an early marketing hire looking for low-cost, high-return content strategies or a founder looking to build a marketing strategy that’s worth your time, this article is for you.
We’ll look at:
- What founder-led marketing really means (hint: it’s not just about getting your founder to whack some stuff up on LinkedIn—although that’s a good start)
- The do’s and don’ts of founder-led marketing
- What founder-led content performs best
- How to create a consistent founder-led content schedule
“We have a three-person marketing team, and one of them is me and we create more content than most thousand-person companies.”
What is founder-led marketing?
Founder-led marketing is the content, branding, and promotional efforts created and/or shared by the company founder (usually) or CEO.
Founder-led sales is when the founder is out there pitching and closing deals. Founder-led marketing is how the founder drums up the leads they then sell to.
When people say “founder-led marketing”, they often just mean “getting the founder to post content on LinkedIn,” but actually it can be:
- Posts by the founder on social media, particularly LinkedIn or Twitter/X
- Blogs (either written by the founder or ghostwritten from interview content)
- Podcasts hosted by the founder
- Guest posts by the founder in relevant industry publications
- Guest appearances on relevant podcasts
- YouTube content created by the founder
- Product marketing created by the founder (such as product demos and tutorials)
Founder-led marketing isn’t founder branding
Finn Thormeier, founder of founder-led marketing agency Project 33, coined the term last year to describe a growing trend in content—founders actively using their network, expertise, and personal story to engage their target audience and drive awareness for their products.
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He clarifies that founder-led marketing isn’t about “building the personal brand of the founder, to get them to 20,000 followers on LinkedIn or 50,000 followers on TikTok.”
Rather, the purpose of founder-led marketing is to harness the founder’s credibility and knowledge of your market to be the voice of the company and get your messaging out there. It’s not building the founder’s brand—it’s using their platform to build your company’s brand.
“Founder-led marketing isn’t about building the personal brand of the founder, to get them to 20,000 followers on LinkedIn or 50,000 followers on TikTok.”
Founder-led marketing is an ongoing collaboration
Content lead Eric Doty has collaborated on founder-led marketing playbooks twice, first at Butter and now at Dock. For Eric, founder-led marketing has two sides to it:
1. Your founder becomes your brand mascot.
They represent your company, they give your marketing a personal feel, and they become the person you’re buying from.
Alex Kracov, Dock’s founder, is in all their product videos, for instance. “It just feels nice and start-uppy when the founder is the one doing the demos,” says Eric.
2. Your founder informs and steers your marketing decisions.
Founder-led marketing is also about involving your founder in your marketing, Eric explains. “Your founder has their finger on the pulse better than everyone else, so they should be really tightly involved in the messaging for your product and how you talk about it.”
Founder-led marketing is about audience-building, not just lead-gen
David Baum, the founder of Relato, has done the founder thing three times before. He’s noticed a major shift in startup marketing since last time:
“For the last two businesses I co-founded, founder involvement in marketing and comms was mostly press work. To be honest, that really was the norm. Funding related news stories, press releases for new hires, that kind of thing.
But with Relato, I knew from the get-go that I had to build an audience, put myself out there, and engage deeply with the community.”
The biggest change for David has been thinking about startup marketing as a relationship-building exercise, not just a tactical lead-gen activity.
“We didn’t think of signups as an audience back then. They were prospective customers. The most engaged people on that list become testimonials, but that was about it.
This time around, I really care about getting to know people and understanding their problems and aspirations. I've become quite obsessed with the needs of our prospective customers.”
Why is founder-led content so effective?
It’s easy to make the case for founder-led content. When done right, it’s crazy effective. Eric confirms that Alex’s posts on LinkedIn (for instance) don’t just get a lot of traffic—they also drive a lot of inbound leads, conversations, and deals.
Here’s why founder-led content works:
1. It makes for great content
When I asked Peter Caputa why it works so well for Databox, he explained, “People love stories. I'm telling our story as it happens. People follow along. No different than why reality shows are popular and why people follow celebrities.”
Unlike official marketing posts on your company page, founder-led posts tend to be warts-and-all accounts of the ups and downs of building your company. They don’t just make your target market aware of your product—they get people emotionally invested in your success.
“People love stories. I'm telling our story as it happens. People follow along. No different than why reality shows are popular and why people follow celebrities.”
2. It’s informed by real customer insight
Your founder has been talking to prospects and customers since day one. They know what your market is interested in. They know how your product intersects with your market’s pain points. They know where your product is going and what features will get people talking.
They should be the ones out there talking about it.
3. It generates invaluable feedback
Founder-led marketing isn’t just about your founder talking to people from a soapbox—they should also be listening closely.
It’s an incredibly valuable way to gain insight into the messages that land and the product features that get people talking.
Founder-led marketing can help you:
- Note messaging that lands particularly well, and use it to create better sales scripts
- Use audience questions about what your product does to refine your development roadmap
- Turn audience comments into ideas for future content
As David puts it,
“As a founder, a lot of your work revolves around understanding customer needs and building the product. The insight from that process is pure gold in marketing, and so are the relationships.
I’ve made a point of building an audience in parallel with conducting customer insight and testing product iterations.”
“As a founder, a lot of your work revolves around understanding customer needs and building product. The insight from that process is pure gold in marketing, and so are the relationships”
4. It’s cost-effective
Eric calls founder-led marketing the “most cost-effective marketing tactic.” Sure, the founder’s time is valuable—but that’s the only cost involved. “If you can be efficient with getting the word out there then it's going to have a much higher ROI.”
5. It’s a demand-gen powerhouse
Of course, the most important thing about founder-led marketing is that it works. To quote Peter Caputa,
“There isn't a day that goes by where I don't get someone reaching out to me saying, "I love what you're doing. We want to partner with you." Or "Can you point me in the right direction to learn more about Databox?" Or "I'm impressed with how much your company is innovating. We're looking at switching from [competitor x] to you."
And that's the passive stuff. I can start conversations at will with people just by turning conversations I'm having via comments into 1:1 private DM conversations.
You'll be amazed at how effective it is. You just gotta get started.“
“There isn't a day that goes by where I don't get someone reaching out to me saying, "I love what you're doing. We want to partner with you.”
Is founder-led marketing right for your company?
You might assume that founder-led is only the right fit if your founder is a former marketer, like Dock’s Alex Kracov. But Eric thinks it makes sense for every startup.
“If you don't have a marketing strategy, your product is likely to fail even if it's an amazing product. You need that early traction, and you need some form of founder-led marketing.”
Peter agrees: “I think it makes sense for any business.”
Some nuance, though:
Finn suggests that if you’re still figuring out product-market fit, then it may be premature to start marketing your product. Your founder should still be out there, selling and refining your messaging, positioning, pricing, and ICP. But they should be in information-gathering mode, not publishing content.
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On the flip side, David has started founder-led marketing already as a means to generate brand awareness. His point—while his marketing efforts may not be generating revenue yet (Relato is still pre-launch), he’s creating valuable relationships that will hopefully pay off in the long term:
“If you’ve been interviewed by me for product development, you're guaranteed to be a connection on LinkedIn, probably share a Slack community membership, signed up to our early access list and in my DMs. That’s touchpoints with hundreds of people within our ICP across five channels.”
“If you don't have a marketing strategy, your product is likely to fail even if it's an amazing product. ”
Another caveat—it works best if your founder or CEO is pretty close to your ICP. When I asked Finn about what makes someone a great founder-marketer, he said that in his experience, they share four characteristics:
1. They are or have recently been their ICP
2. They talk to a lot of their ICPs every week
3. They are a user of their own product/service and have their hands in the dirt
4. They actually enjoy putting out content, being on video, speaking on podcasts, replying to comments and messages etc. etc.
If your founder doesn’t meet those criteria, it doesn’t mean you can’t do this kind of marketing. It just means you might need to choose another team member to become the face of the business.
For instance, Peter Caputa is the CEO, rather than the founder. If you sell to financial leaders, your CFO might be the right person. If you sell to marketers, then your first marketing hire might be the right person. And so on.
How founders can make the time for consistent posting
Of course, there’s always a catch—and with founder-led marketing, the problem is time. As with other content strategies, founder-led marketing only works if you’re consistent. So how can you work with the founder to create regular content?
1. Get them fired up
“First, inspire,” says David. “Get them to read Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt. If that doesn’t get them excited you should check their pulse.”
Here’s Dave on why you should be doing founder-led marketing, like, yesterday:
“Send this to your CEO:
Brand is not your logo or website colors. Brand is your reputation. The best way to build a reputation today as a business is right here, online, through content.
Content builds authority, credibility, and trust. That's why you should be on social media, have a podcast, write articles, etc. That is how you build a brand today.”
You might also want to point them toward founders nailing founder-led marketing, to show them what’s possible—people like Andy Crestodina, Adam Robinson, Peep Laja, and Jennifer Smith come to mind.
“Get them to read Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt. If that doesn’t get them excited you should check their pulse.”
2. Build a low-lift system
Next, you’ll need to define how you’re going to collaborate. In general terms, founder-led marketing can be handled in one of four ways:
i) The founder sets aside an hour a day and does it all—posts on LinkedIn, comments and engages, hops over onto X and does the same, and so on. See, for example, Jason Fried of 37 Signals, who’s been engaging with his market online (and even writing his own blog posts) for over a decade now.
ii) The founder sits down with a marketer (either in-house or agency) on a regular cadence (Finn suggests once a week), and answers interview questions on camera. The marketer then repurposes the results into:
- A weekly newsletter
- 5 LinkedIn posts
- 1 YouTube video or podcast episode
- 1 blog post
- Etc…
iii) The founder sets aside time once a week for a brain dump—bulleted notes, Loom videos, or similar. Then the marketer dives in and turns the brain dump into ghostwritten content—blogs, LinkedIn posts, tweets, etc.
iv) The founder works on content in sprints. This is how Alex does it at Dock. For instance, he spent a couple of weeks collaborating with Eric to create the content for the first batch of blogs. Or he’ll block out a few weeks and record a batch of podcasts.
As the marketer, your part of the process is to provide structure, manage the systems, repurpose the content to get the most value out of it, and (probably) nag the founder.
3. Build in engagement time
When people talk about founder-led marketing, many think it’s all just content. But Brad Zomick, a founder-led content specialist, says that’s wrong. “These days it's more like Twitter in that you need to engage with your ICP regularly.”
Make sure that your founder is prepared to dedicate some time, ideally on a daily basis, to responding to comments or commenting online.
For example, David sets aside “specific time slots when my ICP is online to post and engage.”
“These days it's more like Twitter in that you need to engage with your ICP regularly.”
What founder-led content performs best?
Assuming you’ve got your founder fired up and built some systems to get started, what content should you plan to create? According to our experts, the best-performing content tends to be about:
Building in public
The “building in public” stuff works best for sure,” says Eric. People like advice, but they really love the hero's journey of the founder.
They love to hear how things are going. They love to hear lessons that they've learned. They love to hear mistakes they've made. And it's easier to grow a following where you're sort of positioning yourself as this CEO who shares openly.”
The product
Perhaps unexpectedly, product-led content also performs very well, says Eric. “If you have a nicely designed product, people like to see it.”
Peter Caputa agrees—nearly half his LinkedIn posts are either about Databox or created using Databox.
It’s not about being sales-y—skip the marketing jargon and features lists. It’s more about the founder showing their own excitement for the product they’re building, or dog-fooding the product for the ICP.
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Authentic, personal thoughts and beliefs about your industry
David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37signals and an OG of founder-led marketing, explains that what makes their content work is that it comes from the heart.
“Both Jason and I write about a lot of different things and the majority of it is not directly in service of selling more Basecamp or Hay because that doesn't work either. You can burn out really quick.
I've seen some people try it as a strategy, thinking, ‘Founder marketing, I need to do some of that because I want more traffic and signups.’
People can smell that instrumentalism. They can tell you're not sharing because you have something to say but because you want something.”
YouTube creator and founder-led marketing specialist Finn McKenty agrees. A founder with over 1 million followers, Finn recommends that founders skip the polished marketing posts and just share their passion for what they’re building.
“It’s the same as art: imperfection is more interesting than perfection…You want to be the human equivalent of a watercolor painting, not an AI image.”
Brad Zomick also cautions founders not to play it safe with their content: “Creative risk is a big lever to pull to gain more awareness and engagement.”
Founders tend to have strong, controversial opinions about what’s wrong with their industry—it’s often what drove them to build their product in the first place. Those opinions can be a major driver for awareness and engagement.
“It’s the same as art: imperfection is more interesting than perfection… You want to be the human equivalent of a watercolor painting, not an AI image”
Your founder is the best SME for your content
Founder-led marketing has emerged as a highly effective strategy for startups seeking to build brand awareness and generate leads with limited resources. By leveraging the founder's unique insights, personal stories, and knowledge of the target ICP, you can create authentic and compelling content that resonates deeply with the market.
For founders, the key is to remain genuine, share their journey and insights openly, and actively engage with their audience. Meanwhile, marketers should focus on creating efficient capture systems to ensure consistency without overburdening the founder.