By: Nate Bek
I never expected LinkedIn to matter this much.
I opened my account in 2018 because a college business class required it. At the time, it felt procedural, a place to park a résumé. Today, it functions as a professional marketplace where reputations are built in public and evaluated in real time. I use it to source investments, assess founders, and watch markets take shape before formal announcements are ever made.
LinkedIn — love it or hate it — is where your investors, customers, and recruits quietly judge you long before a meeting is scheduled.
That shift framed a recent Ascend AMA with David Walsh, the founder and CEO of Limelight, a platform that helps B2B software companies run paid creator partnerships across LinkedIn, newsletters, podcasts, and other business channels. The conversation centered on a structural change in enterprise distribution. In B2B software, attention is moving away from institutional channels and toward individual voices.
(Watch the full recap here. Password: &0!wd7nP)
LinkedIn now has more than a billion users globally, yet only a small fraction publish regularly. David says only about 1% of users actually create content while the rest just consume. That imbalance created an unusual market dynamic where attention is abundant, and credible supply of content remains limited.
LinkedIn, of course, understands this. In recent years, it invested aggressively in newsletters, native video, creator analytics, and algorithm changes that reward consistent posting. The platform is making the safe bet that the more often professionals open the app daily, the more valuable the network becomes.
As paid acquisition costs rise and traditional media exerts less influence over buying decisions, founders and operators increasingly function as the front door to their companies. A visible voice can attract investors, influence hiring, and shorten sales cycles before a formal pitch deck is even opened. More often than not, the front door is LinkedIn.
“People want to buy from people,” David says. “Corporations and logos don’t matter the way they used to.”
Before building Limelight, David interviewed nearly 100 B2B creators and more than two dozen heads of marketing. Creators described building trust through tactical insight and lived experience. Marketing leaders described rising acquisition costs and pressure to find new channels.
That discovery process led to the creation of Limelight, and pushed him to build his personal audience.
“I started content when I had nothing,” he says. “Didn’t even have a product!”
He now writes about fundraising challenges, hiring mistakes, and lessons from prior ventures. Over time, these posts built familiarity. Prospects entered sales conversations already aware of how he framed the market.
(Hell, even I felt like I knew all about him when I first met him over Zoom. Also, it’s here I should note that Ascend is a proud investor in Limelight.)
From the investor side, founders who publish consistently attract warmer inbound interest. Their writing functions as early diligence, revealing how they think, what they value, and whether they understand their market. In environments where technical features compress quickly, reputation compounds more slowly and becomes harder to displace.
All of this is easier said than done. Execution remains uneven. Open up LinkedIn and it’s probably a slop field. As a result, founders should avoid promoting new features and product updates before building out trust with their audience.
If you jump straight into marketing, it’s easy to conclude that the whole thing is a waste of time (!).
“Everyone, when they start out, just writes bottom-of-funnel content,” David says. “It flops.”
David, who now has more than 40K LinkedIn followers (!), says to stay disciplined. Demonstrate insight before promotion, teach us, and then — and only then! — does product marketing land.
Eventually, as you scale your personal brand and business, you will need to expand quickly into new audiences. The best way to do that is to partner with other creators, building off their brand power.
At this point, David says to start with a focused group of creators and commit budget for several months. Sporadic campaigns rarely generate meaningful signal.
For instance Clay, one of Limelight’s early customers, adopted an always-on approach that made the brand a consistent presence in relevant business conversations.
Your brand will retain final approval, but campaigns perform best when creators speak in their own voice. Audiences respond to expertise and authenticity more than to scripts.
“Business influencers are typically business savvy,” David says. “They care a lot about their personal brand.”
The larger point returns to where our conversation began. For better or worse, LinkedIn is now the distribution layer where investors, customers, and hires observe before they engage. In a market crowded with competent products, visibility and clarity increasingly shape outcomes.
“You need to think about ways to differentiate and ways to stand out from the crowd,” David says. “And there’s no better way to do that than building your own personal brand and creating content.”