A creator who grew from zero to 13K LinkedIn followers in six months shares how the platform's small creator community makes it easier to monetize than saturated alternatives. He posted daily stories about growing up in China and moving to the US, hit his first viral post within a month, and landed startup partnerships by month three.
LinkedIn is an underrated platform for creatives. Let me make my case. Earlier this year, I was going through an existential crisis. I was a second year in college. I had no clue what I was going to do with my life. I had been following a few creators on LinkedIn who were posting things I thought were interesting. They were not conventional posts, no AI slop, not just flexing your professional achievements. So I was like, huh, I wonder if I could do this too. For context, I had been blogging ever since I was 12 years old. I've always been really passionate about creating content. I just didn't really have a lot of experience doing that at scale. So I started posting stories of me growing up in China, moving to the US. I started posting like a bunch of other things, just anything in my life that I thought were interesting and worth talking about. I then started getting traction and I hit my first viral post within about a month of posting, and that's when I realized that growing on LinkedIn is actually really easy because there's not a lot of people actively posting, and I ended up making friends with a lot of the creators I used to follow just because the community is that small. And then some startups started reaching out to me to to do partnerships. I worked with some really interesting founders and products that I thought were actually really amazing and really useful. I think I started monetizing my LinkedIn account within about 3 months, and I hit the 10,000 follower count at about 6 months. I'm sitting at around 13K. I think I post about once a week now, but at the peak I was posting once a day, and it didn't really take that much time because I would just write up a draft during lunch or when I'm on the treadmill. At first people were like, oh, like I saw your post on LinkedIn, and I would feel super awkward and embarrassed. But after that, it just becomes a hobby almost. I personally found a lot of great opportunities thanks to LinkedIn. I'm building my own company now, and I'm using LinkedIn as a part of my distribution. People shit on LinkedIn all the time, but that's just because you haven't found a way for it to be useful for you. Right now, if you start posting on LinkedIn, you'll still be early enough to make money fairly easily compared to other platforms. I don't want to gatekeep, and I wrote a blog article about how I grew my following, and it's completely free. So comment guide, and I'll send it to you.
