Lessons from $9M+ in LinkedIn cash flow
The most direct way I can think of to explain this system
Whether you’re building martech, salestech, proptech, HR tech, medtech, or just about any other kind of tech: LinkedIn will be a friend to your MRR, if you do it right.
As long as your target customer uses a computer for at least a good chunk of their work. Even if your ICP doesn’t post much.
LinkedIn is for “scrolling social media but feeling like you’re productive”.
And that’s where your SaaS comes in.
To shortcut all of the ‘guru advice’ out there and just give it to you straight:
The way to generate revenue with LinkedIn content is to make your way into LinkedIn’s organic reach system - with your personal founder profile (not your company’s brand account).
These stats are from my personal profile as the co-founder of DemandBird, Wildfront’s ‘focus product’. It’s a social media tool. Yes, this does give us an inherent advantage on social media, but it’s far from the only niche that works on LinkedIn.
To do this, you must first decide that you actually care about helping and educating the people who are part of your market - if you see this as a ‘lead gen channel’, it might work, but it won’t work nearly as well as it otherwise would.
Then, you need to decide that your job is to provide “professional infotainment” to these actual live humans (not algorithms), somewhat consistently, who will appreciate what you’re publishing.
This content you publish should be pleasing to read, correct and credible, and it must go beyond the obvious.
You will also need to do more than just post: you’ll need to write comments on the posts of other people in and around your market. These should represent your real opinions. You might want to try to write 100-400 comments per month. (Practice, and you can do this in 1-2 hours per month.)
As you converse with people on LinkedIn, you should also send Direct Messages (DMs). You need to Connect to someone first before you can message them. Above all, treat this like real life: social skills will serve you far better than any template or sales playbook.
All of this can get pushed to your CRM, tagged and coded with things like “what solution the person currently uses”, “features they would need before they can sign up with you” (so you can follow up with them later), etc. Agents can handle all of this my sidebar pullout looks for any mentions of competitors of our SaaS being used, and when I click to upload my message history, it detects any ‘dealbreaker’ features that we lack and logs those to CRM:
Over time, you’ll notice this all stacks up. Maybe about 2-3 months into it, you’ll hear people saying to you, “I’ve been reading your posts for a while”. You’ll start to get more free trial and demo request signups that feel like they were out of the blue. Marketing will just get easier.
Growing your organic LinkedIn presence, as the founder of your SaaS, is a warm light that improves all of your other marketing channels. It is a multiplier that lowers the difficulty level of PR, market feedback gathering, and referral asks. It’s difficult to put a dollar value on the ability to write a post about a new feature and get instant signups, registrations, new MRR, questions, and subscribers.
The same of course is true for any social network that you build a presence on, of course. This doesn’t just go for LinkedIn. But if you sell to corporate types? LinkedIn has the highest concentration of those. Of course corporate folk use Instagram, and TikTok, etc; but on those sites, they’re mixed in with a lot of others, so the signal strength is lower.
I worked with Apollo to create a free social selling course that covers this system. Find it here:
The Wildfront Academy, also free, has a section on LinkedIn, too. It’s longer and homemade.
Reply with any questions or if you want me to take a look at your LinkedIn presence and give you my two cents.
-Alex