It's easy: you just start really, really small
Dan, Harrison, and I have been operating Go Between for a few years but only made our small business LinkedIn Official™ within the last six months or so. We delayed because we'd found success and steady work through our direct networks and didn't feel the need to do so — and because it took us about that long to get a logo and brand colors together. I'm grateful to say that we're continuing to find steady work, but we have found a few reasons to let folks in the wider world know that we exist.
So let's not draw out this click-bait title too long. You grow your audience by 900% in 70 days by starting a page on LinkedIn with four followers: yourself and two business partners, plus your brand designer Sean Brice. You write about what you find interesting and useful and you post it every week for about eight weeks. You find your company page at 36 followers and think "Sweet! Oh, but if we'd gotten to 40 folks I could have subtitled this post 'How to 10x your follower count in 2.3̅ months.'"
Just so you know, we do exist
Here are the 2⅓ reasons that motivated us to finally publish our career change: to see our name in OLED lights is a small vanity but a real component; to make our business development process clearer, and to make future product launches easier, are the two greater components.
Justin Jackson has developed an exceptionally thorough metaphor that relates business to surfing. It describes what it means to work fundamentals, to evaluate the water, and to "make it happen." It's a great article and you should read it. We took an even simpler concept back to our own conversations — are we even in the water yet? We'd dipped our toes in: sporadic client conversations, a brief google ads campaign for Marginal. But we weren't doing anything that would let us catch a wave in the future.
We enjoy working with our word-of-mouth clients, joining teams and working projects from ideation to delivery. We'd also like to find folks who are looking for high leverage expertise where we can deliver a ton of value in a small amount of time (and total cost!) We'd like you to know that we have a depth of experience providing advice and leading engineering teams through architectural discussions, systems design, and other big decisions. We know how to teach business and product folks how to communicate in ways that turn complex problems into actionable projects with clear outcomes. We still do make really good part-time teammates. We'd like you to know that we do have a contact form and that it's right here.
We'd also like to let you know, later on, when we have a product that we think you'd enjoy (maybe try out Marginal with your team in the meantime). You cannot know these things without us telling you. You will not know these things if you do not know or care at all about us in the first place.
The Art of Posting
I am not naturally inclined to "Just Post." My time on link aggregator sites is spent scrolling gifs of cats, and my time on forums is spent reading peoples' opinions about their favorite curated collections of gifs of cats. On the internet, in my leisure, I consume much more than I create. But I do think that it's helpful to have opinions and to considerately share them, and so I try to post anyway.
Nothing that we say about barely-executing code, or the right kind of laziness, or what happened at our Summit in Saugatuck is especially novel or groundbreaking. We write our recycled thoughts out anyway and try to be helpful to at least — or maybe just — one person: our words might be their first exposure to an old idea; our sentence formulation might tickle their brain in a way that others haven't.
I'll end on a bit of actionable advice. Write about topics that you care about because they'll read better. Include parts of yourself in your prose because it will resonate more. You might use an AI or language model like a rubber duck, but shouldn't as a ghostwriter. A post per week for three months is better than ten posts in two weeks followed by silence because people will forget about you. Find a place where people might care about what you think and post regularly even though no one will pay attention at first. They'll start to, later. Writing is hard but it gets easier with practice. And so we post on, words against the current, born out ceaselessly into the aether of the internet.
Thanks for your time and attention.