What's up, it's Zayd.

After LinkedIn shipped the 360Brew update, my impressions dropped. I was operating with the same posting cadence and effort, but the reach was…embarrassing. I quickly realized that I needed distribution I could buy rather than distribution I had to earn.

The obvious move was to write new ad creative and spend money finding out which version works, but I didn't want to fund that discovery process, because I felt like I'd already run it accidentally for twelve months…in public…for free.

I was right, the winners were sitting in my own profile the whole time, so this week we’re getting into how to find yours.

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My favorite finds of the week

Every founder doing content eventually learns the hard way that when you build a channel that works, an algorithm update lands, and a third of your reach evaporates for reasons nobody at the platform will explain to you.

Content is still the right investment, but depending on unpaid distribution of that content is where the risk lives, and paid distribution of proven content is a very different bet from paid distribution of guesses.

Take every post from the last twelve months and every inbound meeting you booked in that period. Dump both into Claude and ask a narrow question. Which posts coincided with a spike in demos that week or the following one.

The answers are rarely the posts you're most proud of, which is annoying, but information is information. My best-performing content by engagement is frequently not my best-performing content by pipeline, and until you line the two datasets up next to each other you have no way of knowing which is which. Most founders (me included) are optimizing for the wrong one and have been for years.

Once you have the shortlist, filter it hard.

That third rule is the one people break, because there's a strong temptation to improve a post before spending money on it, which quietly throws away the exact thing that made it worth spending money on.

The Ultimate LinkedIn Hook Writing Guide: A Complete System for High-Performing Content:

$30 is the cost of a coffee and a fancy breakfast sandwich in NYC with tax and tip, but it’s also a totally reasonable starting point. It's low enough that you can run several at once and let them sort themselves out.

Add your CTA link with a UTM so you can actually see what happened, then target the people who should be seeing it rather than everyone your platform will happily sell you. Our return on ad spend has been strong, and the reason is almost entirely that we're not paying to test creative, just to distribute creative that already passed a test.

Pull your last twelve months of posts, your inbound meeting log, and the three posts that moved demos. Check them against the image rule, trim lightly, keep every hook intact, add a tracked link, and put $30 behind each one.

That's a two-hour job producing ad creative that took you a year to validate. It remains, by a comfortable margin, the highest leverage thing I've done with a small budget.

Valley now has a free trial. No demo call required, just spin it up and see what warm outreach actually looks like.