We are in the golden age of founder-led marketing, but it won’t last forever

I went from 0 to 1.8 million views per month posting founder-led content.

I did it in only 60 days and without ever turning on a camera. Instead of posting videos, I posted B2B text content on X and Threads that earned me follows from an OpenAI executive and a famous tech journalist.

I accomplished this so quickly because we are currently in the golden age of founder-led marketing, driven by the rise of text-based social media. Most people think of video when they think of content. And most founders don’t want to do any marketing, let alone get behind a camera. But in 2026, text-based social media is having a moment, with Threads hitting 500 million active users last month and X at around 570 million.

Text-based social media is gaining popularity as platforms like Threads and X adopt TikTok-like, discovery-based algorithms. That means having a small number of followers no longer limits your reach to your existing audience as long as you post good content. For example, I only have 4,000 followers on X, but 49K people saw my top post this month.

Founders like Finn Mallery are using founder-led marketing on text-based social media platforms to generate massive attention for their companies. His posts on LinkedIn and X helped Origami go from 0 to 100K MRR in 6 months. Adam Robinson used his LinkedIn following to take RB2B from zero to $5M ARR in 13 months with no paid ads and a five-person team, and has moved on to his newest startup, MoltSets, which is already gaining traction with the same strategy. Threads has fewer success stories, but I am seeing a new wave of promising founders taking advantage of its massive reach.

This window, where mass distribution is available to anyone willing to take it, will not last forever, though. AI has made it so everyone can build. Attention is what is scarce. As more people get laid off from tech jobs and realize that salaried positions are no longer the “safe route” they were sold as, more people will start building. And at some point, with rising competition, getting this much attention this quickly will not be possible.

But here is the good news. Your follower count no longer caps your reach, but the benefits of having a following still compound. The more followers you have, the easier it is to get more views and more followers, so the gap between someone starting today vs two years from now will keep widening. In the next year or two, founders who have already built a following won’t have to worry about being locked out and will instead find themselves with a massive distribution advantage that will not be possible to replicate. Start today, and two years from now, you are the founder with a following instead of the founder who can’t break through when this opportunity closes.

This is an exciting time in founder-led marketing. I’m going to continue experimenting and sharing what I learn. So far, the most helpful thing I’ve learned is that every post should be modeled after a specific post type that performs well on the platform you are using. When you first start, everything seems the same; you can’t see the patterns, so you have no idea what kind of content to create.

Then, as you study what other people are doing, the patterns start to emerge. You realize the top founders are all creating content using specific formulas. Those with little social media experience write whatever comes to mind and hope it works. Experts come up with what they want to say and plug it into an existing formula. For example, you could share your latest win as a milestone post. Or, if you believe everyone in your industry is wrong about something, share a hot-take post. In both cases, you should follow the structures other people have used for milestone and hot-take posts instead of winging it.

If you haven’t started building an audience, start today. The best time to start is while you are still building. Building an audience on launch day doesn’t work. It takes time to build trust. You must give your audience value before you ask for help. That is why building in silence doesn’t work. When you finally launch, if you haven’t been building an audience, you are asking people who don’t know you to support you. So build an audience now, even if you are still building, even if you aren’t building anything yet. So that when the time comes, whenever it is, you are ready.