We pulled every startups & founders post from a dataset of 12,988 LinkedIn posts and ranked them by engagement rate. 833 posts from 50 creators qualified. The median one earned 171 reactions and 14 comments, and the category earns more engagement per follower than the cohort median. Below are 22 of the highest-performing startups & foundershooks in the set, exactly as they appeared before LinkedIn's “see more” fold, plus what separates them from the startups & founders posts nobody read.
The short version
- Sample: 833 startups & founders posts from 50 creators.
- Median startups & founders post: 171 reactions, 14 comments (0.56 per 1,000 followers).
- Top-decile startups & founders posts run 49 comments at the median, against 14 for the category overall.
- The highest-lift hook style here: Number-led opener.
How do startups & founders posts perform on LinkedIn?
Engagement rate here is (reactions + 4 × comments) ÷ followers, reported per 1,000 followers so accounts of different sizes can be compared. Comments carry four times the weight of reactions because they are scarcer and push a post into the commenter's own network.
| Measure | Startups & Founders posts | All posts in cohort |
|---|---|---|
| Posts analyzed | 833 | 12,988 |
| Creators | 50 | 65 |
| Median reactions | 171 | 122 |
| Median comments | 14 | 12 |
| Median rate per 1,000 followers | 0.56 | 0.4 |
Read that last row carefully. It says startups & founders content earns more engagement per follower than the cohort median, which is a statement about this cohort of 50 creators, not a law of the platform. Category averages move with who writes in them. What travels better is the pattern data below, because it compares posts against other posts by the same kinds of accounts.
What makes startups & founders posts different?
These are the ways startups & founders posts diverge most from the rest of the cohort. Each is a comparison of this category against all 12,988 posts.
- These posts address the reader less often. 26.9% put "you" or "your" in the visible hook, against 36.4% cohort-wide.
- Video is used more often for startups & founders. 15.1% of these posts are native video, against 12.4% cohort-wide.
Which hook style works best for startups & founders posts?
We sorted every startups & foundershook into five opening styles, then checked which styles are over-represented among the category's top-decile posts compared to the category as a whole. A lift above 1.0 means the style appears more often at the top than it does on average.
| Hook style | All startups & founders posts | Top decile | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number-led opener | 1.6% | 5.6% | 3.50x |
| First-person opener | 15% | 32% | 2.13x |
| Question hook | 13.3% | 12% | 0.90x |
| Flat declaration | 69.7% | 50.4% | 0.72x |
Sample sizes shrink fast once you slice a category by style, so treat the smaller rows as directional. The pattern that holds across every category we measured is the one in the full study: openers with a person in them beat openers with only a topic in them.
22 real startups & founders LinkedIn post examples
Every hook below is real, taken from a public dataset, and shown as the reader saw it before tapping “see more”. Author names are stripped. Engagement figures are lifetime totals at the time the data was collected, so treat them as relative signals rather than precise scores. Follower counts are included because a post that earns 400 reactions on 3,000 followers is doing something a post that earns 400 on 300,000 is not.
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Breaking down the three strongest startups & founders posts
#1: the flat declaration
724 reactions and 92 comments against 10,283 followers, a rate of 106.19 per 1,000. That is 265.5 times the cohort median. The comment-to-reaction ratio is healthy, which means the post gave people something to respond to rather than just something to approve of. The visible hook runs about 33 words, using nearly the full pre-fold allowance to build the setup. It ran with a shared article.
#2: the first-person opener
1,333 reactions and 508 comments against 66,387 followers, a rate of 50.69 per 1,000. That is 126.7 times the cohort median. Notice the comment-to-reaction ratio: roughly one comment for every 3 reactions, which is unusually conversational. Posts like this are asking something the reader wants to answer, not performing for applause. The visible hook runs about 42 words, using nearly the full pre-fold allowance to build the setup. It ran as native video, the format that over-indexes hardest among top performers.
#3: the first-person opener
251 reactions and 15 comments against 6,299 followers, a rate of 49.37 per 1,000. That is 123.4 times the cohort median. This one earned reactions far more than replies, the signature of a post people agree with rather than argue about. That still travels, but it travels less far than a post that starts a conversation. The visible hook runs about 32 words, using nearly the full pre-fold allowance to build the setup. It ran with a shared article.
The common thread is that none of the three resolve before the fold. The reader has to open the post to find out what happened, which is the entire mechanism behind a hook that works.
What format should you use for startups & founders posts?
Format mix for this category, next to the cohort. Cohort-wide, native video over-indexes about 2.6 times among top-decile posts while shared article links over-index in the bottom half, which is covered in detail in the piece on external links.
| Format | Startups & Founders posts | All posts |
|---|---|---|
| text | 17.9% | 21% |
| image | 31.6% | 36.4% |
| video | 15.1% | 12.4% |
| Shared article/link | 34.1% | 29.4% |
| Document/carousel | 0.7% | 0.5% |
| poll | 0.4% | 0.3% |
Which hashtags do startups & founders posts use?
The most-used tags on startups & founders posts in this cohort, by number of posts. We are reporting usage only, not performance: most individual tags in this dataset are dominated by a handful of accounts, so a per-tag engagement figure would describe those accounts rather than the tag. For what the data does support on tags, see the hashtag analysis.
- #startups (133 posts)
- #entrepreneurship (64 posts)
- #technology (55 posts)
- #venturecapital (48 posts)
- #justq (45 posts)
- #startup (44 posts)
- #innovation (40 posts)
- #leadership (38 posts)
- #digitalhealth (37 posts)
- #healthcare (37 posts)
How to write your own startups & founders post
In this category specifically, the number-led opener carries the highest lift into the top decile (3.50x), so that is the shape to reach for first. Video is already well-used in this category at 15.1%, so it is table stakes rather than a differentiator here.
- Pick a moment, not a subject. “What I learned about startups & founders” is a subject. The Tuesday you got it wrong is a moment.
- Write the first 210 characters last. Draft the body, then find the most arresting line in it and move it to the top. More on this in how to start a LinkedIn post.
- Cut at the fold and reread. If the visible part answers itself, there is no reason to tap.
- Ask something you actually want to know. In this category 14.3% of hooks contain a question, and questions correlate with the comments that carry the most weight.
- Keep it native. Put links in the comments if they have to exist.
Frequently asked questions
What should I post about startups & founders on LinkedIn?
Post specific moments rather than general observations. In our cohort, the startups & founders posts that reached the top decile by engagement rate had a median of 49 comments against 14 for startups & founders posts overall. The pattern behind that gap is concrete detail: a decision you made, a number you can name, a thing that went wrong. Generic advice on startups & founders is the most crowded and least rewarded content in this category.
How much engagement do startups & founders posts get on LinkedIn?
Across 833 startups & founders posts from 50 creators in our cohort, the median post earned 171 reactions and 14 comments, which works out to 0.56 engagements per 1,000 followers using our weighted formula. The cohort-wide median is 0.4 per 1,000, so startups & founders content earns more engagement per follower than the cohort median.
How long should a startups & founders LinkedIn post be?
The part that matters is the visible hook, roughly the first 210 characters before LinkedIn's "see more" fold. In this category the median hook runs 206 characters and 35 words, and hook length does not separate top performers from weak ones anywhere in our data. Write for the fold, not for a word count.
Should startups & founders posts use hashtags?
Keep them minimal. 33.7% of startups & founders posts in our cohort carry four or more hashtags, and cohort-wide, heavy hashtag use appears about 1.6 times as often in bottom-half posts as in top-decile ones. LinkedIn has also removed hashtag following and de-emphasized tags in search, so they no longer drive the discovery they once did.
About this data
Numbers come from our analysis of a public dataset of 34,012 LinkedIn influencer posts. We scored 12,988 English posts from 65 creators by engagement rate (reactions + 4× comments, divided by the author's followers) and compared the top 10% against the bottom half. The dataset captures each post's text up to LinkedIn's “see more” fold, which is exactly what a reader sees before deciding to engage. These are correlations, not guarantees. Full methodology and caveats are in the full study.