The one change that took my founder-led content from 143K to 382K views a week

“Do you ever feel like all the founders on X talk about the same thing? I’m tired of it.”

That was the third time I’d seen this founder complain about it on my feed. It was also the only kind of post of his I’d ever seen. Which makes sense. Complaining that everyone sounds the same is what you post when your original stuff isn’t getting any traction.

He isn’t alone. Trying to be too original is the biggest content mistake founders make.

Founders post the wrong kinds of content because of famous-person bias. Founders want to do social media; they have no idea how, so they look at someone famous and try to copy them.

Look how original Justin Welsh is! I’m going to post about how living a quiet life in the mountains is the ultimate flex. But they are not Justin Welsh; they don’t have millions of followers; they post something they think is unique, like the mountain idea, and it flops.

It flops because you can post very differently when you have a loyal following than when you don’t. When Justin Welsh first started building a following, he didn’t post the way he does today. I know because I went back and studied the content he posted when he first started vs. what he posts today, and it is completely different.

Back then, his posts were tactical: real numbers and strategies on topics his audience cared about. Only once he built a huge following did he start talking like a capitalist Buddhist monk.

When you have a big following, you can ignore the algorithm, post what you want, and still get engagement. When you are just starting, you are completely at the mercy of it.

And what does the algorithm want? Familiarity. Social media algorithms favor posts that talk about what the community you are trying to reach is already talking about, especially for accounts without a big following.

I also made the mistake of trying to be too original. When I first started posting on social media again after a six-year break, I talked about whatever topics I wanted to, completely oblivious to the discussions my target customers were already having.

For example, I talked a lot about coding and founder-led marketing, posting variations of things like “The cheapest customer acquisition channel is a founder with a strong opinion.” Some got good engagement, but many flopped.

Then one week I decided to experiment with changing what topics I talked about. Instead of posting about topics I was interested in, like coding and founder-led marketing, I started posting about what someone who cared about founder-led marketing was actually talking about on X.

Those people weren’t talking about founder-led marketing; they were talking about AI, venture capital, and everything else related to startups, so I started talking only about those subjects instead.

The result? My views on X went from 143K the week of Jul 29 – Aug 4 to 382K the following week and 300K+ the week after that. The only change I made was changing topics and talking about what my target customers were already talking about.

All of my top posts are now on these subjects, including my biggest posts of all time: “What’s after AI?”, which got 74K views, and “Stripe only had 50 users two years in. Don’t give up,” which got 71K views.

Finding those topics wasn’t hard. I looked at what the accounts my target customers follow were posting about that week and wrote down the subjects that kept coming up: AI, funding rounds, acquisitions, whatever founders were arguing about that day. Then I posted about those things.

It may make the founder at the beginning of our story mad, but talking about the same topics as everyone else is how you win on social media when you are getting started.

You can think of your niche on social media as part of an ocean that has its own wave pattern. The waves are the topics everyone is discussing that day/week. Yes, you can create your own big wave, but you’ll fail most of the time.

Or you can ride the waves that other people (usually people with millions of followers) or the news create instead. Sure, you won’t get the satisfaction of creating the wave, but this is business, not personal creative fulfillment time.

Plus, you can still talk about whatever you want, just not on social media. I still talk about founder-led marketing all the time in my newsletter, and it gets amazing engagement because no algorithm decides what to show or hide.

Once you’ve spent enough time riding other people’s waves and built a following of your own, you can start creating your own waves on social media, and that’s when things start getting really interesting. I know because I worked on content that created a massive one with over a billion views on social media. But that is a story for another day.