Founder post triggers

24 Founder Post Triggers

Credibility before traction comes from the specificity of the problem you work on, not the size of your wins. Every trigger below already happened — pick one and publish it.

Customer Evidence (6)

1. The surprising sentence — a customer line that changed your view. Verbatim.
2. The real no — the actual reason a prospect declined, not the polite one.
3. The exit reason — why someone churned, plus your read.
4. The recurring question — asked three times in support. Answer it publicly.
5. Their words, not yours — how a customer described you to someone else.
6. The unintended use — someone using it for something you never designed.

Numbers You Can Stand Behind (5)

7. Before and after — one conversion rate, one change, both figures.
8. The retention read — a churn number plus your honest diagnosis.
9. Channel cost direction — what a channel costs, and whether that is rising.
10. The failed experiment — what you tried, what it returned, what you concluded.
11. The expectation gap — forecast versus what landed.

Decisions and Reversals (5)

12. What you cut — a feature removed, and what removing it cost.
13. The reversal — a decision your team argued you out of.
14. The thing nobody used — built, shipped, ignored.
15. The pricing change — what moved, and why.
16. The deliberate no — a customer, segment, or feature you turned down.

Product as Demonstration (4)

17. Raw output — what it just produced, unedited.
18. Before and after artifact — the same task with and without it.
19. The hard part — a genuinely difficult problem, and your solution.
20. What it refuses to do — a constraint you built on purpose.

Position and Category (4)

21. The real comparison set — who buyers actually weigh you against.
22. The disagreed belief — category orthodoxy you think is wrong.
23. The loose term, defined — a vague word, made precise.
24. The unpriced change — a market shift most have not adjusted to.

Play Selector

Pick one and hold it — they train different expectations and combine badly. Cases: references/plays.md.

Play	Run when	Triggers
Publish real numbers	You have data and tolerate exposure	7–11
Content on audience pain	You serve a specific, badly-served group	1–6, 24
Speaking is showing	The product's output is visible	17–20
Position alignment	The company's claim is already clear	21–23

Opening Lines (Lowest-Effort Tier)

Share something already circulating, add one sentence of real judgment:

• "This matches what we see with our own users: …"
• "Most people read this as X. The more useful takeaway is Y."
• "The part everyone skips: …"
• "We tried this. It worked / it didn't, because …"
• "I believed this a quarter ago. What changed my mind: …"

Ramp and cadence: references/first-four-weeks.md.

Pre-Publish Check

• Contains one first-hand fact — a quote, a number, a reversal
• Could NOT have been written by someone who read the same articles
• Inside your one chosen topic (hold ~70% of output there)
• States a process, not an opinion
• Any number in it, you can stand behind unedited

What good looks like

• Strong founders write from one specific thing that happened; weak ones write from a general position. A draft with no first-hand fact is noise wearing the costume of insight.
• The common mistake is waiting for results. The second is posting announcements — they answer "what shipped" instead of "what this means for you".
• It is working when strangers engage and what they say back names your topic. Scattered replies mean the topic has not landed.
• Track inbound that names your specific problem. Better signal than follower count, and earlier.

Rules

• MUST anchor every post in a first-hand event from the work.
• MUST hold ~70% of output inside one topic.
• NEVER publish a number you cannot stand behind, or dress up a bad one.
• NEVER wait for results to start.

Example prompts

Give me 3 post triggers I can write today from this week's customer calls.

Which play fits a product whose output is a generated document?

Turn trigger #8 into a draft — our 90-day retention is 22%.