john rush's linkedin playbook

Yo :) it’s Yash and Andrea!

Welcome to the founder/mode journal!

In each issue, we break down successful Linkedin posts so you can reverse engineer them for your own content.

This week we’re breaking down posts from John Rush. He is a prominent builder / indie hacker who is building 24 products at the same time.

We’ve been following John’s work for a while, and really like his no bs approach.

John has ~40k followers on Linkedin (as of this date). His posts often go viral and act as a powerful top of funnel for his products.

Let’s get into it!

But first..

• founder/mode v2 - We’ve been busy building ahead of our v2 launch in September. ICYMI - we’re launching a $49 plan that lets founders leverage founder/mode’s AI workflows, without a human editor in the loop. This is great for folks who have a marketing person and/or want to add the final touches themselves. Btw - subscribers of this newsletter get one month free ;)

• Reply Guy - We’ll also be shipping an update to our chrome extension. We’re adding a “Reply Guy” feature which will let you generate smart replies to posts you come across. Replies are a highly underrated growth hack for Linkedin. Creating a list of 5-10 creators in your industry and consistently engaging with their posts adds to your reach count.

• SocialBench - We're building the definitive benchmark for how different AI models generate social content. Here's how it works:

  • Each model will be given 33 tasks (prompts), based on what founders need today: Think product launch post, hiring announcements, origin stories, tactical breakdowns, etc.

  • Each model generates 33 posts, 3 times. So 99 posts per model. (just to cover for variance)

  • Then we score the posts across various dimensions:

    • Hook quality

    • Specificity

    • Cringe index (yep)

    • Emotional resonance

    • Skimmability

    • <more dimensions tbd>

• Then we rank them. Side by side. It’s a fork of EQBench (a popular creative writing benchmark) but made for founders, marketers, and VCs who actually post online.

John often starts with a hook that is extremely vulnerable -- this gets folks emotionally invested in his story and keep reading. This one is a no brainer in theory but kinda hard to do without sympathy baiting -- vulnerability builds trust by validating others people’s experiences.

John uses curation beautifully - he posts monthly tech drama recaps that often go viral! This is a relatively low lift way to create content that adds value to the feed. People love and appreciate you if you can give them the tl;dr. Everyone loves a good tl;dr.

John uses events that most tech folks are talking about and adds a little bit of humour to them - people instantly know what he’s talking about. I think this style comes naturally to some people and can be extremely cringe if done wrong, so

Long text posts are often wasted because most of the content gets folded into Linkedin’s “..more” section.

90% of John’s posts have some visual element to them - an infographic / picture / video.

Side note: There are some cool tools that do this for you now and something that’s on founder/mode’s roadmap too!

All this to say - USE visuals.

That’s it for this one!

Until next time,

Yash & Andrea

Thinking of posting more on socials / building distro / attracting leads as a founder?

Would love for you to check out what we’re building at founder/mode - we help founders turn their unstructured thoughts and ideas into engaging, meaningful posts.

Schedule Demo