B2B founders are the new influencers
TL;DR: Enterprise buyers live on LinkedIn, not your website. Founder-led content - consistent, peer-to-peer, not obviously marketing - is now the most effective B2B distribution channel. But every playbook degrades once everyone runs it.
I recently attended an event hosted by The Transaction & GTMshift. Great speakers - Cristina Cordova (Linear), Carilu Dietrich (ex-Atlassian), Maya Spivak (ex-Segment), Chris Degnan (former Snowflake CRO). The discussion was around how the GTM playbook is changing with AI. Here are my takeaways.
Where B2B Buyers Actually Are
Enterprise buyers aren’t on your website. They’re on LinkedIn. Your brand isn’t what lives on your homepage. It’s what shows up in someone’s feed - consistently, over time. Fortune 100 buyers follow everyone in their industry on LinkedIn. They don’t click through. They scroll. Viral moments are nice. Consistency builds pipeline.
The “cool kids effect” is real. One paid influencer generates 5 to 20 unpaid mentions. Not because of reach - because of trust. A peer recommending something hits differently than an ad. The most effective content doesn’t look like marketing.
Rethinking Your Message and Your Hiring
Don’t sell a better product. Sell a transformation. Linear’s early pitch was “the issue tracker you’ll actually love.” The issue is: nobody buys a better version of something they tolerate. The moment they repositioned around how AI is changing how engineering teams build - it became a board-level conversation. Same product. Different framing.
Don’t hire from the category leader. The rep at the #1 company has the brand doing half their work. Find the person who’s been grinding at #2 or #3 - fighting for every deal, selling on relationships, not reputation. If they can sell something mediocre, imagine what they’ll do with a great product.
When Every Founder Becomes an Influencer
A personal reflection: we’re all being told to become influencers now. Post 2-3x a week. Build your personal brand. There are LinkedIn ghostwriters specifically designed to help B2B founders go viral.
Algorithmic discovery is increasingly how you get found - I wrote about how this affects hiring too. But I keep coming back to Andrew Chen’s Law of Shitty Clickthroughs. Every channel degrades when enough people start gaming it. LinkedIn is not immune to that.
As with all things growth and marketing - the playbook works - until everyone’s running it.
If you’re thinking about how to build a GTM motion that outlasts the current playbook, I work with founders on exactly this.