The 2,000-year-old trick behind founder content that sells

I went from getting zero engagement on X and Threads a few months ago to 1.2 million views a month using rhetorical techniques dating back to ancient Greece.

I started using social media again because I am currently finishing writing my third book, The Self-Taught Marketer. It's about founder-led marketing: how the founders winning right now are stealing the social media playbook influencers invented to drive sales because distribution is getting more expensive every year and organic distribution is free.

That is why founders like Adam Robinson and Naval Ravikant are turning to LinkedIn and X to drive sales. Adam used his 155K followers on LinkedIn to bootstrap Retention.com to $22M in revenue with only a handful of employees. Naval built one of the most influential personal brands in tech through X, with a single post reaching over 100 million people.

I analyzed the content founders like Adam Robinson and Naval create and found they use rhetorical techniques that have been around for thousands of years.

Examples of the rhetorical devices they use include antimetabole and antithesis. Antimetabole repeats the same words in reverse order. Antithesis places two opposing ideas side by side.

One of Naval's most shared tweets uses antithesis, a device the ancient Greeks used two thousand years ago: “Earn with your mind, not with your time.”

When Adam Robinson announced his pivot from software interfaces to APIs, he used the same device: “UI for humans is dead. Long live APIs.” It mirrors the “The king is dead. Long live the king.” declaration formula that dates back to 15th-century France.

Naval is a master of antimetabole as well, with tweets like: “Read what you love until you love to read.”

I started using their rhetorical techniques, and they work surprisingly well. When I first started trying founder-led content, I could not figure out X or Threads and was getting zero engagement no matter what I did.

Now I'm getting 1.2 million views a month on Threads and X, with 511K views on X in the last 30 days, and my newsletter grew by 200% this month. I never would have achieved that without spending time studying rhetorical techniques like antimetabole, which I used in one of my best-performing tweets: “You don't need VCs. VCs need you.”

With AI allowing anyone to post unlimited slop, one of the best ways to stand out is to master the rhetorical devices that make points land. They haven't changed in thousands of years, and they still work today.

Most people are not willing to put in the effort to do this. They want to create a powerful social media presence to sell their product, but they aren't willing to put in the work it takes to break through the long line of people trying to do the same thing.

If you are willing to put in the work and learn rhetoric, you will be one of the few founders who stand out from the crowd.

Social media is new. Persuasion is ancient.