With no audience and no budget, the fastest route is other people's comment sections. Find the three places your buyers already talk, be useful there in public for a month, and write to the handful who describe the problem you solve. Posting comes later, and tools come last.
Disclosure: Signl is ours, and this article tells you not to buy it in month one. That is the honest sequence: the method below is free, and tooling only pays once you know which sources are worth automating.
The constraint nobody plans around
A founder doing this has one scarce input, and it is not money. It is the four to six hours a week that are not spent on the product, the hiring, the fundraise or the customer who is already live.
That constraint rules out most published LinkedIn advice immediately. Daily posting, a content calendar, a Sales Navigator seat with saved searches, a sequencer with warmed domains: each is defensible on its own and the stack does not fit in six hours. So the plan below is ordered by return per hour, and the things to skip are listed as explicitly as the things to do.
The four-week ramp
| Week | What you do | Hours | What you should have at the end |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Write the one-sentence ICP. Find three sources | 3 | Three places your buyers talk, named |
| 2 | Read every day. Reply in public only | 5 | Twenty replies, two or three conversations started |
| 3 | Add your own posting, twice a week. Keep replying | 6 | The first post that produced a comment worth answering |
| 4 | Write to the people who described a problem | 5 | Five to fifteen real conversations, and a view on which source works |
Month two is the same as week four, repeated, with the worst source dropped.
Week 1: the ICP and the three sources
The ICP, in one sentence. Who you sell to, what hurts, what you fix. If you cannot write it, that is the week's work and it is more valuable than any prospecting. Everything downstream is a filter, and a vague filter passes everyone.
The three sources, in this order of reliability:
- One competitor's founder or most active person. Their comment section contains people with the problem who have not chosen yet. The approach rules are stricter here and matter; finding leads in competitors' comments covers them.
- One creator your buyers read. Ask five people in your market whose posts they read. The answers will repeat. Vetting a creator takes ten minutes.
- One phrase your buyers use about the problem. Not your category name. The words they would use complaining about it on a Tuesday.
Three. Not ten. You will read all of them, which is the point.
Week 2: read and reply, do not message
The whole of week two is public. Read the new comments on your three sources each morning, and reply where you have something specific to say.
This feels like it is not working and it is the step that makes the rest work. Replies are visible to everyone reading the thread, including people who will never comment. For a founder with no audience, this is how the first few hundred of the right people encounter you, and it costs nothing but attention.
Rules that keep it useful: answer the substance, never pitch, and do not mention your product unless somebody asks a question it genuinely answers. If you would not say it at a table in a pub, do not type it.
Week 3: start posting, twice a week
Now that you have read three hundred comments, you know what your market argues about. That is the input posting needed.
Two posts a week. Write about a narrow operational problem, take a position, and end with a question only someone with the problem could answer. The shapes that work and the closing questions that do the work are in LinkedIn posts that bring buyers into the comments.
Your own posts are the best source you will ever have, because on your own post you may say plainly that they commented, and because the people who turn up chose to.
Week 4: write to people
Only now, and only to people who described a situation rather than agreed with something.
Keep it to three sentences: the problem in their words, something they did not know, a small question. Not a meeting request. The worked examples are in how to message someone who commented, and if you are moving to email, the channel switch has its own rules in turning a comment into a cold email.
Expect small numbers. Five to fifteen conversations from a month of this is a good outcome at this stage, and each one is worth more than a conversation from a list because they came with context.
Six things to skip
Each of these is reasonable advice for a company with a sales team, and wrong for a founder in month one.
| Skip | Why |
|---|---|
| A content calendar | You do not yet know what to say. Write from what you read this week |
| Sales Navigator, at first | It is a filtering tool and your problem is not filtering. Revisit once you need volume |
| A sequencer and warmed domains | At twenty sends a month the setup costs more than it returns |
| Connection request campaigns | High effort, low information, and the acceptance rate tells you nothing useful |
| Lead magnets | They produce list volume, not conversations. Good later, distracting now |
| Optimising your profile for a week | An hour. It matters, and it is not a project |
When to buy a tool
Three signals, all of which have to be true.
- You can name the two sources that produced a conversation last month.
- You are missing things because you were busy, and you can say which week you missed.
- Reading the sources is taking more than an hour a day.
Until then, a tool automates the part you have not learned yet. After that, it removes the part that was always going to lapse: checking every source every day, catching threads while they are fresh, never writing to the same person twice.
What that costs when you get there: Signl is $99 a month for 25 sources with unlimited seats and no per-person charges, which at founder volume is less than the time it saves in a week. There is no free plan, but the analyser on the home page shows who engaged with a profile's recent posts without an account, which is enough to see whether your market produces anything worth watching before you pay for anything.
What to expect, honestly
Month one produces almost nothing measurable. You will have conversations, not pipeline. That is the correct output and it is why most founders stop in week three.
The information is worth more than the leads early on. Three hundred comments from your market is the cheapest product research available, and it will change your positioning before it fills your pipeline.
This does not scale with you. It works because a founder is credible in a way an SDR is not, and that advantage does not transfer when you hire. Plan for the motion to change rather than to grow.
Some markets are silent. If four weeks of looking turns up no competitor with an active founder, no creator worth reading and no phrase with posts behind it, your buyers are not here. That is a real finding and the right response is to stop, not to try harder.
If it does work and you reach the point where the reading is the bottleneck, the operating manual is LinkedIn social listening for B2B sales.
