Easiest growth hack every startup should implement 🤳🏼

Each of your employees should post content. Including you.

The first growth hack we implemented at ETN, which I scaled to 10x monthly impressions in 5 months, was getting every employee to post online.

Picture this. You have two identical companies.

Startup A has 50 employees, while Startup B has 50 employees. Same revenue, product, market, GTM.

The only difference is at Startup A, everyone posts. At Startup B, nobody does.

Startup A just turned 50 employees into 50 different distribution channels. Startup B has 50 employees sitting behind Slack slacking around.

People follow people. Not brands.

Look at Alex Hormozi or Steven Bartlett. Their personal brands and audiences are enormous. Their companies, more niche.

The person often has more reach than the company. Even Tara agrees.

Beauty of this is it works whether there’s 100s of employees or just 3 of you. There’s been 3 of us when we did it in etn. Company account had 2,000 subscribers, our combined networks ~15,000. Do the math.

TL;DR: Just have your employees post shit.

LinkedIn.
X.
Substack.
YouTube.

It doesn’t matter which one.

They can post about:

• What they’re building

• What they’re learning

• Customer problems they’re seeing

• Wins and failures

• Behind-the-scenes decisions

• Dogfooding (How they use the product)

You don’t need 50 content creators. You need 50 people who know something. Look at companies like Beehiiv, PostHog and Carta.

Most of their distribution comes from the people inside the company acting as influencers.

How to actually make this work

Knowing that your employees should post is established now. Getting 50 people doing it is the challenge. Most of us are scared what the public thinks, want to keep our lives private, or can’t be arsed.

Here’s how I’d implement it step-by-step.

1. Be smart how you go about it

“Hey team, let’s all start posting more on LinkedIn!”

Try that and you get laughed out the door.

Problem is that nobody knows what to post. Nor how to write. If you’re lucky, you get a few painfully corporate posts about how “excited” they are about the latest company milestone.

They get 4 likes and never post again.

If you’re unlucky you get nothing.

Instead, how you should start is give people content territories. Have team members stick to their niches and talk about what they know. A bug they fixed, or an interesting use-case they saw a customer use the product for.

Make them feel like David Attenborough. I mean.. everyone loves him.

2. KISS: Keep it silly, stupid

I’d start with three types of posts:

1. I learned X. This is how. Something they learned from building, selling or operating the company.

2. I noticed X. An interesting pattern they’ve seen in customers, the market or their industry.

3. We tried X. Here’s what happened. Experiments, failures, launches and results.

3. Create a content pipeline