Unify's founder-led content playbook

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

Back with a second edition in one week (forgot to hit schedule on last week’s 😆).

This might be my most asked for newsletter yet. I’m giving you an inside look at the playbook we’ve used to scale founder-led content at Unify.

$15M in pipeline came inbound in 2024. A lot of that was directly attributable to LinkedIn.

Let’s dive in.

📒 GTM Playbook

Unify’s founder-led content playbook

An inside look at the content strategy we used to drive millions in pipeline

We drove more than $15M in pipeline inbound in 2024.

A lot of that came from my Linkedin content. In the past year, I’ve grown my audience from ~3K to 16K — and the channel has becoming a major contributor to our growth as a company.

Here were my 2024 LinkedIn stats:

• 5,718,440 impressions (+48,859.5% from previous year)

• 1,546,175 members reached

• 47,056 profile viewers

Today, I want to let you in on the playbook.

The early days

In the earlier days of Unify, our GTM was unpredictable. I was doing a lot of hand to hand combat in sales as a founder. This was normal for that stage of the company, but towards the beginning of 2024, I knew we needed something more scalable.

We saw the first signs of spark from organic social during our Seed round announcement.

I’d seen some sporadic success on Twitter in the past and had a hunch that we’d be able to create some noise with the fundraise.

We posted the announcement on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Both went semi-viral in our corner of the internet. And it spread awareness quickly—we received 420 inbound demo requests in the 48 hours after announcement.

Great start, but still a one-time spike.

With clear signal that this channel works, we made doubling down a priority in 2024.

We’re happy with how that wrapped up. Now, let me share some of the learnings that came from building out our content engine (and exactly how we did it).

Learning 1: Picking the right platform.

Find the platform your ICP lives in and build your brand on it.

At Unify, we sell into founders, growth and sales. It was obvious that our ICP lives on LinkedIn.

X can work as well, but we’ve seen it be a lot more volatile. It requires being online far more, which a lot of founders simply can’t do. On LinkedIn, you can post ~1x per day, and grow predictably.

We opted to go hard on one content channel versus spreading ourselves across 3-4+. That focused effort allowed us to scale faster.

Learning 2: Commit to posting 5x per week for 6 months.

Here’s our Linkedin impressions over time:

We started posting mid-March. Saw some good momentum and signs of life early. But the channel didn’t really start picking up till around August.

Had I stopped posting before then, we miss out on millions in pipeline.

When other founders see that I post 5x per week, they’ll often ask:

• How do you have the time to do this?

• Isn’t posting that much going to annoy your audience?

Re: the time & bandwidth aspect—I don’t have a lot of time to write content. But we’ve built a system around it (which I’ll explain in a moment).

Re: “annoying” your audience—this is a myth. I’m not sure why founders believe it. The frequency accomplishes a couple of things:

1. We get in front of our ICP every day. They see us everywhere.

2. We learn more quickly what resonates with our ICP. Posting 5x per week gets me ~20 data points per month. Posting 1x per week would get me 5. I’m learning at 4x the rate, which allows me to increase my ‘hit rate’ on social—the % of posts that go viral.

Consistency and discipline are the foundation of your audience growth.

Learning 3: Tell real stories.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful levers you have in your content.

Your stories are your moat in your content.

Nobody can copy them.

You’ll notice that a good amount of my content is made of stories from my experience building at Unify and Ramp beforehand. I’ll share the ups, downs, and learnings of building a startup.

For example, this post about going from me as the only ‘AE’ to a team of 6 AEs did well on LinkedIn.

I’ll also share numbers that might be a little more revealing than a lot of founders are comfortable with.

I don’t think you have to go full ‘building in public,’ but giving your audience an inside look at what it takes to build a company is a great way to get them rooting for you.

I believe this is beneficial for us since we are selling into founders, sales, and growth. The storytelling content both performs well and attracts the right audience.

Telling stories is also fun.

Learning 4: LinkedIn loves hiring & team-building content.

Unify went from 7 → 28 team members in 2024.

And while not the intention, this growth has been a lever for us in content.

Every time we hire someone new, we’ll make a dedicated post about it. Every time we run an offsite, we’ll make a post about it. Every time someone gets promoted internally, we’ll make a post about it.

This content over-performs.

This post covering how we promoted Anthony to Revenue Lead is a great example of the trend.

So is this one that I wrote right after our Q4 off-site in Phoenix.

I have a hunch that this is because LinkedIn started off as a hiring platform. Also, people on the platform love celebrating milestones. So when you can frame a post as an ‘announcement’ or ‘milestone’ (i.e. making a key hire), the timeline eats it up.

Learning 5: Brand lets you swing above your weight class.

I wrote in my 2024 Year In Review that “we’re consistently beating thousand-pound gorillas in our category with more money, bigger teams, etc.”

One of the drivers of this has been the brand we’ve built around Unify. People in the industry perceive Unify as a company to watch—this was definitely not the case one year ago. Nobody knew who we were.

LinkedIn content, without a doubt, has been a primary driver of this brand perception.

All of the founder stories, team updates, etc. helped us build this perception of momentum.

Without this, we’d have been competing solely on features. Which now, I’d feel confident in—but early in 2024 we definitely did our fair share of ‘selling the vision.’

Learning 6: LinkedIn loves lead magnet posts

We started playing around with these lead magnet posts in late 2024. Essentially, you prompt the reader to comment a specific word in return for you sending them a content asset.

For example I probably ran the same playbook with this newsletter. I had you comment “LINKEDIN” under a post, and then sent you this guide.

This works well because the comments feed the algorithm.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

Take a shot every time I say “My growth team told me I shouldn’t share this” 😂

I’m not sure how much longer this specific format will last, but the meta learning here is to find winning formats and squeeze everything you can out of them.

This lead magnet format is an example. We also saw this with new hire highlights early on.

Too many founders don’t double down on winning content. Use them over and over again.

How we built our content engine

So how did we actually build out our content engine?

Like I said, I had seen some success with content in the past. And the fundraise announcement solidified that hunch. But we still didn’t have a consistent motion in place.

As an early-stage founder, my calendar was often a mess. Still is (though I’ve made some progress in working on that).

Between sales, recruiting, and the 17 other tasks that fall on the founder—finding time for content was tough. So from day 1, we built a machine.

We engaged a content agency back in mid-February to help us execute founder-led content (let me know if you want an intro).

This is the workflow:

• Every 2 weeks, I sit down to chat with the content team.

• They’ll run me through a list of prompts based on topics we think will hit on the LinkedIn timeline. Being almost a year in, we’ve got a good grasp on what my audience likes.

• The call flows very much like a podcast interview. I take all the stuff that lives in my head (that I would write about if I had time), and get it out onto the recording.

• The team takes that recording and turns it into ~5 LinkedIn post drafts.

• I review the drafts, make any minor edits as needed, and approve the content. Early on as we were calibrating, I spent more time on edits. Now, they’ve got my tone of voice down.

• I also take note of content ideas in my Notes app as they come up. I bring these in bulk to the content agency and they turn them into v1 posts.

I like this workflow because it allows me to scale content output with my ideas, and my authentic stories. This is all stuff that I’d write about, we’ve just built a workflow to go from idea to finished draft without taking 15 hours of my week that I don’t have.

An important clarification here: building a team to support your content output doesn’t mean it’s ‘hands off.’ I’m still giving input on content, sharing specific stories for us to use, all that. I also generally enjoy content.

If this wasn’t the case, I don’t think we’d win as big with it.

Now, as far as the content strategy, we’ll break up the topics into a few categories. The agency refers to this as a Content Funnel:

• TOFU: Founder stories, hiring content, etc. This content is meant to get lots of visibility and cast a wider net (though we have seen it drive pipeline).

• MOFU: Industry-specific thought leadership. This content is meant to establish me as an authority in go-to-market.

• BOFU: Product-related content. This content is meant to sell product, This post listing all the features we dropped in 2024 is an example.

Most of our content will be TOFU or BOFU, since we want to use LinkedIn to get in front of more people. We’ll usually mix in 1x BOFU piece per week.

As a general rule: 10-20% TOFU, 60-70% MOFU, 10-20% BOFU.

Resist the urge to shill your product in every single post. You won’t grow an audience this way. It also won’t perform (I’ve tried it).

Tying LinkedIn content to outbound with Unify plays

We dog-food our own product a lot at Unify. It powered $7M of pipeline and $530k of closed won revenue in 2024.

And it’s been key for us in tying LinkedIn growth to revenue.

Here are a few ways we’ll use plays to book demos from our LinkedIn content:

1: We’ll have someone on our Ops team sift through the engagement on my LinkedIn posts (likes, comments, etc) and add ICP accounts into an automated outbound sequence.

2: We’ll pull a list of folks who have viewed my profile, and run a similar play.

We’ll send this template out to folks (feel free to steal):

“Noticed you checked out my profile. Anything I can answer about Unify?”

This sequence has an 8.2% response rate.

What’s next?

2024 proved Linkedin organic worked well for us.

In 2025, I want to get more of our team active on the timeline. I want Connor (my Co-Founder) to post more, since he has a ton to share. And we’re building a culture of content creation at the company.

We saw signs of life here when we announced our Series A—we had every team member draft their own post for the announcement. This helped make it feel like we were everywhere on launch day.

I’ll also be funneling more of that LinkedIn traffic to my newsletter (where you are right now). The first 6-7 editions are giving me a similar feeling to when we started posting on LinkedIn. Excited about this.

Maybe I should have gatekept a bit more in this edition. But I hope this convinced you to start taking founder-led content seriously.

Linkedin content changed the course of Unify as a company.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Plays just got updates that make generating pipeline even easier. Stoked about this one.

1. Slack Alerts: Get instant notifications when prospects are run through a play, so you never miss potential follow-up moments

2. If/Else: Create branched paths using CRM data and intent signals to personalize every play—and maximize the chance of a meeting.

3. Delays: Time your outreach perfectly by adding strategic delays between actions.

The future of Outbound is automated but humanized outreach. These updates to Plays bring you one step closer.

If you want to use Unify to generate more pipeline, book time with our team here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks again for following along.

What other topics do you want to see me cover?

Respond to this email and let me know.

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.