The real reason you can’t stick to LinkedIn

If you’ve ever written a LinkedIn post, stared at it, and deleted the whole thing, this one’s for you.

Building a personal brand has two stages nobody warns you about: Cringe Mountain and the Valley of Death. You have to get through both.

Hot Take 🔥

The thing standing between you and a personal brand that works isn’t skill or strategy. It’s your willingness to be bad at it in public.

The reason most people don’t post isn’t because they don’t know what to say. It’s because there’s always someone they don’t want to see it. An old colleague. A family member. Someone who knew them before.

Emma’s first posts in 2020 were painful. Oversharing. Awkward selfies. The unmistakable energy of “does anyone even care?” No clients, no network, no opportunities. Just a pandemic and a willingness to look stupid in public.

Five years later: UK National Entrepreneur of the Year. £70k+ in grant funding. An 18,000-strong community. It all traces back to those cringeworthy early posts.

That’s Cringe Mountain. You can’t skip it. The only way past it is through it. But once you’re over the mountain, you hit something worse. The Valley of Death - the long stretch between starting to post and starting to see results. This is where most people quit. Not because they couldn’t handle the cringe. Because they couldn’t handle the silence.

Steal Our Strategy 👀 Surviving both stages

🏔️ Cringe Mountain

1️⃣ Name the person you’re afraid of. Who flashes in your mind when you hover over publish? Name them. Once you see the fear for what it is - one person’s hypothetical opinion - it shrinks.

2️⃣ Give yourself a cringe quota. Your first ten posts will be bad. Accept it. By the time you’ve used them up, you’ll have found your voice.

3️⃣ Ask the only question that matters. In a year, what moves you closer to your goals - posting or procrastinating?

🏜️ Valley of Death and what it actually looks like (we’re in it right now):

Sending thoughtful emails and hearing nothing back. Posting content we’re proud of and watching it get half of last week’s engagement. Attending dozens of networking events, learning something new each time, rewriting our model again. Not knowing if it’s going to work. Questioning ourselves.

The Valley isn’t dramatic. It’s showing up on a Tuesday morning when nobody’s watching and doing it anyway.

Founder Diaries 📓 Two perspectives from the mountain and the valley

Emma’s Story

I nearly stopped posting in early 2021. The cringe had faded, but the results hadn’t arrived. A handful of likes, zero business. I remember thinking: what is the point?

I didn’t stop because I didn’t have a better option. No network, no connections, no ad budget. Posting was my only tool.

Then slowly (so slowly it was almost invisible) things shifted. A stranger commented. Someone shared a post. A DM about the Calming Club. A journalist found me. An award application was stronger because I could point to an audience and a body of work. None of it came from one post. It came from a hundred posts nobody remembers.

Your action step: If you’re in the Valley, zoom out. Look at the last three months as a whole, not post by post. More followers? Clearer message? Even slightly more engagement? If yes, it’s working. You just can’t feel it yet.

Graeme’s Story

My Cringe Mountain wasn’t about posting. It was about what it meant. I’d spent my career behind the scenes. Putting my face online felt like asking for attention, and everything in me resisted that.

The first time I posted about anxiety and building a business when your brain constantly tells you it’s going to fail, I almost deleted it. The response was unlike anything I expected. People I hadn’t spoken to in years reached out. That post did more for my credibility in a week than years of quiet work behind closed doors.

But the Valley hit harder than the Mountain. We’ve questioned everything - the model, the messaging, ourselves. Some weeks Emma and I look at each other and say “are we sure?” Then we come back the next day and keep going. Not because we’re certain. Because we’re committed.

Your action step: Write down every single thing that’s happened because of your personal brand, no matter how small. A connection. A DM. A compliment. We undercount our wins in the Valley. The list is longer than you think.

The Lucky Founders Club 🍀

We built this for founders in the Valley. The ones who’ve started posting, started showing up — and are now in the quiet stretch where the results haven’t caught up with the effort. You don’t need another course. You need people going through the same thing, with two founders honest enough to admit they’re going through it too. Join the waitlist

If you’re on Cringe Mountain, post something today. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to exist.

If you’re in the Valley, keep going. The silence doesn’t mean it’s not working. It means it’s not finished.