Is posting on LinkedIn worth it for an early-stage startup?

73%

of B2B buyers in the 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn study said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis than traditional marketing for judging an organisation's competence

Why does posting matter more before you have a track record?

An established company has case studies, reviews and a list of known customers. An early-stage startup usually has none of those, so a cautious buyer has very little to go on beyond a website and a first call.

Your posts fill part of that gap. In the 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn thought leadership study, 73 percent of the roughly 3,500 business buyers surveyed said thought leadership was a more trustworthy basis for judging a company's competence than traditional marketing. For a startup with no logos yet, how you think in public is often the best evidence a buyer can find.

The study covers thought leadership in general, not posts by startup founders, and LinkedIn co-ran it. Read it as a sign of how buyers weigh what they read, not a forecast for your first quarter.

Does it help with hiring and investors too?

Often, and at the early stage that can matter as much as sales. A first engineer or first sales hire is betting their career on you. Reading months of your posts lets them see what you care about and how you make decisions before they ever reply to a job ad.

Investors read founders too. If you have no warm introduction, being visible gives people a way to find you, and a run of posts shows how you think before anyone has taken a first meeting.

What can you learn from posting this early?

Quite a lot, and cheaply. Each post is a small test of how you describe the problem you solve. Some framings draw thoughtful comments and messages from the kind of people you want to sell to, while others get polite silence from everyone.

Watch the words people use when they reply. Their phrasing often turns into better copy for your website, your pitch and your outreach than anything you would write from scratch. Note which topics bring in strangers from your target market and which only reach friends and other founders.

Is it worth the time when you're stretched thin?

Only if the time stays small. Writing every post from a blank page each week is hard to keep up alongside building and selling, which is why it is easy to start strong and then stop.

For many people talking is quicker than writing, and five to ten minutes of talking through what happened that week is roughly a week of material once it has been cut into posts. Start with one text post and one video a week, then add more as the habit settles.

If your buyers are consumers, or they don't use LinkedIn, the case is weaker for sales, and your time may be better spent where they already gather.