Content Fudge

I just hit 5,000 followers on LinkedIn - how cool is that? 🎉

A year ago I had barely 1,000 and couldn’t write a hook to save my life. 👇

Genuinely: back then a colleague used to text me, regularly, to tell me my hooks sucked.
And she was right.

I’d been in marketing for years, but LinkedIn was its own animal and I hadn’t tamed it yet.

I didn’t know what to post, so I posted… whatever. My garden. Moving apartments. I’m not joking.

Followers, engagement, reach, all of it started from zero. Arguably below zero, since I was boring the few people who did follow me 😅

So I did what I do with anything I haven’t figured out: studied it obsessively.

Every top LinkedIn creator, every teardown, everything they’d worked out about how this platform decides who gets seen. Every “how to grow on LinkedIn” YouTube video? I watched it. Obsessively.

It still took me until March 2026 to go viral for the first time.

Months of posting into near silence, 4 likes, before anything landed. But since that first hit, it keeps happening, because now I understand why it happens.

Here’s what got me from 1,000 to 5,000:

Being good at your craft isn’t enough here.
↳ LinkedIn has its own rules. Learn them, or stay invisible while people half as good get seen 🤷‍♀️

The hook is 90% of the game.
↳ A brilliant post nobody reads past line one may as well not exist. So I became a hook scientist, on purpose.

Analyse, then double down.
↳ I go through my numbers every month, find what worked, and make more of exactly that. My advice - stop guessing and assuming, start reading the data.

Consistency is the price you pay upfront.
↳ I posted for months into silence before the first viral hit. Most people quit the week before it would’ve worked.

Post for your audience, not your diary.
↳ Nobody was hiring me off my gardening updates. The day I started posting against the grain in my industry, everything changed.

📌 Bonus: pick one thing to be known for and hammer it from every angle. Scattered content is why most accounts stall out.

P.S. If you’re somewhere near where I was a year ago, let me know in the comments and I’ll cheer you on!

Maybe the point isn’t where you’re going, but who you become along the way.

That’s the point, isn’t it?

Every brand that failed to reinvent itself after AI will be painfully missed.

But there’s one cure that can save you.

And today I taught it, in German (!), on stage.

I gave my first personal-branding talk entirely in German at the Wienerin Gründerinnen Tag, alongside the brilliant Jacqueline Pröll Jacqueline Pröll | Personal Branding & Visual Storytelling.

Business world used to be simple. You had a business, a product, a shop. The customer walked in and bought from the company.

Now the business stands behind a person. Behind the founder, with her ideas, her experience, her vision, all communicated as content. And the customer buys from that person, because they resonate with her, not with the business.

Why? Because people buy from people.

That’s the shift, and it’s the one thing that still protects you when everything else gets automated, when AI makes services free and a thousand competitors flood the market.

So the cure is a personal brand built on real positioning.

Here’s what I want every founder to hold onto:

👉 Positioning is one repeated, public link between your name and a single topic. List everything you do and people trust you less, because you sound like a restaurant serving every cuisine and mastering none. Real expertise is an inch wide but a mile deep.

👉 You find it by writing down every problem you solve, then choosing the one you could talk about for four hours. That’s your category.

👉 Your value proposition is built with a five-step roadmap: the alternative people would use without you, the thing you do that it can’t, the proof you’ve delivered before, and who it matters most to.

👉 Context decides your worth. The same work, framed as world-class, gets treated as world-class. Framed carelessly, it gets ignored. How you show up tells people how seriously to take you before they’ve read a word.

The brands that get this will own the next decade.

The ones still hiding behind a logo, hoping the work speaks for itself, are the ones we’ll miss.

🎤