Find your prompt
A guide to writing online for smart founders
At some point, every founder asks me some flavor of the same question: “How can I start getting inbound from writing on X or LinkedIn?”
Now, you don’t have to write online to build a successful business. Plenty of founders scale to $100M+ without writing online much, or at all. But many founders want to write online. And my hunch, as you’ll see, is that the thing that causes founders to write well online is the same thing that causes them to build great companies. Which is why I finally decided to write about this topic, even if it’s slightly off my typical beat.
Now, my approach is different than what you typically see from people who talk about “building your audience”. Perhaps that’s because I don’t sell ghostwriting services or audience-building courses, or maybe I’m just uniquely allergic to templated / AI-generated / selfie slop.
Today, most founders tend to look at the sheer volume they will need to write, look at the cringe trash that is lauded as “best practice”, post a few times, hire a ghostwriter, feel gross, see meh results, and quit.
I’m here to tell you that you can write online without:
Writing slop
Spending hours you don’t have writing each post
Obsessing over follower counts or analytics
In fact, these things will probably give you a short-term bump, but will burn you out fast and are long-term stupid. Not to mention how soulless the internet feels as a result of everyone following this playbook.
What, then, is the only thing that matters when writing online?
Take something - just one thing - very seriously.
That’s it.
Think about this thing deeply, obsess over it… and the writing, and everything else, will follow.
Another way to say this is, find your writing prompt.1 What is the one prompt you can obsess over for a long time?
My prompt is simple: Why do startups work when they work? I think about this all the time. I can’t not think about it. Because I’m thinking about it all the time, I write whatever is on my mind, which means most posts take a few minutes to write.
And yeah, some posts do well, others don’t. I don’t really follow the analytics. As long as I stay generally obsessed with my prompt, everything else seems to work, and I can keep writing forever. And that is what I am optimizing for - my continued obsession with the prompt. The second I start thinking about analytics, or hooks, or driving people to some CTA, I start to lose steam and write trash.
Obsessing over a single prompt doesn’t just give you endless material. It gives you a compounding advantage: You become the person - the “n of 1” - for a topic. This is because over time, you can’t help but create your own IP, your own lexicon. You do this when you realize that most of the thinking out there is pushed by writers who haven’t done the thing… and as a result, they write stuff that sounds right but is backwards; being a founder brings you into constant contact with reality, which is, perhaps surprisingly, a superpower.
So what is your prompt? Focus on something in your customers’ worlds - something on the demand side. As a founder, you are already obsessed with something on the demand side. This is how good products are built, anyway! Writing publicly with the prompt you’re already obsessing over shouldn’t be much extra effort.
If you pick a good prompt - and write as someone exploring the topic alongside equals, not a deity lecturing the unwashed hordes - you might not grow your audience super fast right away, but you’re on a path to become “n of 1” over time.
Some examples of prompts:
Why does it mean to build quality software? (Karri Saarinen - Linear)
What actually works in B2B marketing attribution? (Chris Walker - Refine Labs)
Why is it so difficult to write a B2B homepage? (The boys at Fletch)
What makes sales training actually work?
How will AI agents be priced?
Why is it so difficult to implement AI successfully at large organizations?
What is school going to look like in a post-AI world?
Why do some local governments work better than others?
How are websites going to reshape around AI search?
Finding your prompt doesn’t have to be scary or a huge exercise. You can start with a rough prompt and iterate towards a good prompt as you figure out what your customers pull, and what pulls you.
And yeah, sure, throw in the occasional post for the homies (aka: other founders). But if your prompt doesn’t help your customers make progress, yet your primary goal is to make your business successful, then writing stuff to get founder cred is a total waste of your time.
Anyway, follow your prompt, and you might curse me next month, but you’ll thank me next year. And I’ll thank you for making the internet a better place.
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PS:
Last chance to work with me for a while. Get my help finding PULL in your startup, & making your sales & GTM work, fast. Grab 15 with me here (next founder sprint starts June 2).
Shoutout to Iris Mansour from LinkedIn on the idea of your “prompts”.