24 Founder Post Triggers
Credibility before traction comes from the specificity of the problem you work on, not the size of your wins. Every trigger below already happened — pick one and publish it.
Customer Evidence (6)
- The surprising sentence — a customer line that changed your view. Verbatim.
- The real no — the actual reason a prospect declined, not the polite one.
- The exit reason — why someone churned, plus your read.
- The recurring question — asked three times in support. Answer it publicly.
- Their words, not yours — how a customer described you to someone else.
- The unintended use — someone using it for something you never designed.
Numbers You Can Stand Behind (5)
- Before and after — one conversion rate, one change, both figures.
- The retention read — a churn number plus your honest diagnosis.
- Channel cost direction — what a channel costs, and whether that is rising.
- The failed experiment — what you tried, what it returned, what you concluded.
- The expectation gap — forecast versus what landed.
Decisions and Reversals (5)
- What you cut — a feature removed, and what removing it cost.
- The reversal — a decision your team argued you out of.
- The thing nobody used — built, shipped, ignored.
- The pricing change — what moved, and why.
- The deliberate no — a customer, segment, or feature you turned down.
Product as Demonstration (4)
- Raw output — what it just produced, unedited.
- Before and after artifact — the same task with and without it.
- The hard part — a genuinely difficult problem, and your solution.
- What it refuses to do — a constraint you built on purpose.
Position and Category (4)
- The real comparison set — who buyers actually weigh you against.
- The disagreed belief — category orthodoxy you think is wrong.
- The loose term, defined — a vague word, made precise.
- The unpriced change — a market shift most have not adjusted to.
Play Selector
Pick one and hold it — they train different expectations and combine badly. Cases: references/plays.md.
| Play | Run when | Triggers |
|---|---|---|
| Publish real numbers | You have data and tolerate exposure | 7–11 |
| Content on audience pain | You serve a specific, badly-served group | 1–6, 24 |
| Speaking is showing | The product's output is visible | 17–20 |
| Position alignment | The company's claim is already clear | 21–23 |
Opening Lines (Lowest-Effort Tier)
Share something already circulating, add one sentence of real judgment:
- "This matches what we see with our own users: …"
- "Most people read this as X. The more useful takeaway is Y."
- "The part everyone skips: …"
- "We tried this. It worked / it didn't, because …"
- "I believed this a quarter ago. What changed my mind: …"
Ramp and cadence: references/first-four-weeks.md.
Pre-Publish Check
- Contains one first-hand fact — a quote, a number, a reversal
- Could NOT have been written by someone who read the same articles
- Inside your one chosen topic (hold ~70% of output there)
- States a process, not an opinion
- Any number in it, you can stand behind unedited
What good looks like
- Strong founders write from one specific thing that happened; weak ones write from a general position. A draft with no first-hand fact is noise wearing the costume of insight.
- The common mistake is waiting for results. The second is posting announcements — they answer "what shipped" instead of "what this means for you".
- It is working when strangers engage and what they say back names your topic. Scattered replies mean the topic has not landed.
- Track inbound that names your specific problem. Better signal than follower count, and earlier.
Rules
- MUST anchor every post in a first-hand event from the work.
- MUST hold ~70% of output inside one topic.
- NEVER publish a number you cannot stand behind, or dress up a bad one.
- NEVER wait for results to start.
Example prompts
Give me 3 post triggers I can write today from this week's customer calls.
Which play fits a product whose output is a generated document?
Turn trigger #8 into a draft — our 90-day retention is 22%.
