founder-employees-or-creators
Use when allocating LinkedIn distribution across founder, employees, and paid creators. Produces a motion recommendation with the math behind it. The three aren't rivals — they're stages and layers; the skill is knowing which layer the next euro belongs in.
The one-question fork
Do the people you need to reach already follow your employees? If yes, advocacy amplifies real relationships. If no, creators are how you rent audiences you don't own. Engagement comes from existing relationships; clicks come from buying intent — advocacy CTR runs ~1–2% against ~8–14% on aligned creator posts, and CPL splits the same way (€40–80 vs €15–25).
Founder-led: the default start — and its ceiling
A founder posting 3–5×/week on a personal account (3–5× the reach of a company page) can realistically drive 5–25 inbound demos a month, and outbound that references a founder's post replies at ~40% vs ~5% cold. But saturation arrives around 15–25K followers: engagement-to-reach declines, demo inbound plateaus, and the comment section shifts from buyers to peer founders — the same audience seeing the same person repeatedly with no new buyers entering.
Run the founder's math honestly: 8 hours/week at €200/hour is ~€6,400/month; if that produces ~10 demos, the same budget on creators typically produces more qualified clicks in a fraction of the founder's time — while founder posts keep converting best downstream. Keep the founder posting; stop the founder being the only channel.
When each motion wins
- founder — early credibility, high-trust categories, and the voice no one can outsource
- employees — warm-intro enterprise motions, coordinated launch moments, brand recall inside networks you already have
- creators — net-new buyer reach, pipeline economics, verticals where the founder has no standing