I am a growth-driven B2B marketing leader with 15+ years of experience across SaaS, GovTech, and services, building demand engines, brands, and communities that scale.

What I focus on:
🔸 LinkedIn as a growth channel (organic + paid)
🔸 Demand generation and ABM that actually converts
🔸 Brand and storytelling in complex B2B environments
🔸 Category leadership, not just lead volume

I am a former basketball player and one of 80 LinkedIn Certified Marketing Experts globally (and the only one in New Zealand), and I regularly mentor and train marketers worldwide.

On LinkedIn, I share:
🔹  Practical B2B growth lessons
🔹  LinkedIn strategy that works in the real world
🔹  Honest takes on modern marketing leadership

If you care about B2B marketing that is strategic, human, and effective, follow along or say hello.

Javier YebenesB2B

Marketing | Data | Driving Growth For Early-To-Mid Stage SaaS Companies | 👉 osmanlee.substack.com 👈

90% of B2B SaaS startups don’t lose because of product—they lose because they stay silent while their competitors dominate the narrative.

You're a B2B SaaS founder building a great product but: 

1. Your louder competitor is winning attention, even with a worse product
2. You're being out-positioned in your own category
3. Investors, buyers, and top talent don’t know you or don’t trust you yet
4. Your brand feels like it’s playing catch-up
5. You know you should be showing up online, but it keeps slipping

Too many founders give up on amazing products, thinking they’ve failed.

The reality is: nobody knows WHO you are or WHY they should care. 

And in B2B SaaS, narrative is GTM.
Perception drives pipeline. Founder voice drives velocity.

Why Founder-led Influence works: 

✅ People buy from people they trust
Your voice is your moat. It builds trust faster than any ad ever could.

✅ Shorten the sales cycle
Buyers come in already primed by your content, your story, and your authority.

✅ It creates inbound gravity
You attract top-tier customers, investors, and hires without begging for attention.

✅ Protects your market share
Your content becomes a shield. A story. A signal that you’re the one to bet on.


WHY NOW?

The loudest founder in your space is already winning the perception game.
Not because they’re better. But because they show up, speak clearly, and own their story.

If you don’t claim the narrative, they will.
And by the time you decide to catch up, it might be too late.


💡 SOLUTION: 💡

I partner with B2B SaaS founders to build founder-led influence systems that drive capital, close enterprise deals, and create competitive moats on LinkedIn.

This isn’t content for content’s sake.

It’s positioning insurance in a high-noise, high-stakes environment.

→ Click the links in my Featured section (or DM me to learn more)!

Osman Lee

Emir Atli went from college dropout to building a $30M AI company. His secret weapon? A LinkedIn content system that generates 1M+ impressions/month and brings in 100s of 5-figure ACV deals. Here’s how he did it:

BACKGROUND

Emir Atli (Hiring Chief of Staff) is the Co-Founder & CRO of HockeyStack, a YC-backed B2B analytics platform that helps marketing and sales teams with GTM intelligence.

Most founders treat LinkedIn like a megaphone for product updates.

Emir treats it like a full-funnel growth engine.

CONTENT SYSTEM

Emir posts 5 content pillars. 1 post per pillar per week.

A) TOFU (top-funnel)

i. Personal achievements and stories: eg his college dropout journey, dealing with skeptics about his immigrant background. These posts travel far outside his ICP but they humanize him. People follow people first, products second.

ii. Industry/market commentary: Contrarian takes that position him as someone who sees the market clearly

B) MOFU (middle)

iii. HockeyStack achievements: This is social proof without hard selling. Sharing how they opened a London office, revenue milestones, having enterprise logos signal momentum and reduces perceived risk.

iv. HockeyStack GTM playbooks: This is where Emir dominates. He shares the actual tactics that worked for them eg outbound plays that drive 65% of HockeyStack's pipeline, attribution experiments. High educational value and demonstrates competence.

He’s subtly hinting - "If this is what we give away for free, imagine the product.”

C) BOFU (bottom)

v. Product launches & use cases: Here's where Emir gets creative. Most product announcements are boring. Feature lists. Loom demos. Yawn.

Emir's twist: Short, humorous video skits.

These aren't random. They're:
→ Pattern interruptions: Most BOFU content gets skipped. Skits stop the scroll. 
→ Product explanation without product fatigue: The skits dramatize the problem first, then casually introduce the feature as relief. No demo-style monotony. 
→ BOFU content that doesn't feel BOFU: Prospects don't feel "sold to." Non-prospects still engage and share. The algorithm rewards it.

Result? BOFU content that inherits TOFU distribution.

Most founders fail at LinkedIn because they think content is about broadcasting.

Emir wins because he understands content is about building in public.

It's personal without being performative.
It's valuable without being salesy.
It's systematic without being soulless.

That's how you build an authentic distribution moat.

Want to build a founder-led marketing that drives pipeline? DM me!

Osman Lee 

CEO @ Mindshare Lab | LinkedIn Content, Ads & DMs for B2B SaaS companies

You’re reading this post on a Sunday.

That means you’re a hustler.

Because real winners don’t relax. They judge.

You see someone touching grass? Loser activity.

You see someone watching Netflix? Mentally retired.

You? You’re farming insights.

You’re not doomscrolling LinkedIn. 
You’re figuring out how to replace your $50k/yr dev hire using Claude Code.

Real alphas don’t log off. They refresh.

So keep scrolling, champ. The grind never stops.

Neither does the feed.

CEO @ Mindshare Lab • $1.5M Pipeline Generated • Sharing LinkedIn Advice That Actually Generate Leads

Today I turn 28!

Here are 28 lessons for my younger self:

1. Optimize your life for an ideal Tuesday, everyday so you don’t have to look forward to weekends or holidays

2. Working hard IS the goal. It's not ‘Work hard, so that X’ because then X becomes the goal

3. Energy management is just as important as time management

4. Be different. It’s the only way to live a life different from others

5. Beware the lollipop of mediocrity; lick it once and you'll suck forever

6. Checklists are more important than SOPs

7. Great work takes great struggle. Because if it were easy, then it’s low hanging fruit which means others have done it

8. Aim higher than what you think is possible

9. To improve at anything, always think: more, better, new (in this order)

10. It’s one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life. Have a bias for action

11. Making friends is a solo sport

12. If you want more opportunities, focus on weak ties. The more people you know casually, the more doors you open

13. Fear is good - it tells us what we have to do. The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it

14. Separate how you feel from what is required to achieve your goal

15. You don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are - Alex Hormozi

16. The way to test the quality of your decisions is to test the process by which you make them

17. Hack motivation by designing the right incentives. As Charlie Munger said, "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome”

18. If you want to win in business long-term, you need to think long-term. If you don't win long-term, you don't win

19. Don't stare at the summit. Stare at your boots. Focus on making one more step

20. People don't pay for information - all of that is free. They pay for packaging, speed, implementation and outcome

21. You can always ROI every experience you have because you can always benefit from it or benefit from the inverse of it

22. Volume negates luck

23. Do things in series rather than in parallel. It's more effective

24. Learn the right lesson from the scar. The only thing that's worse than the mistake is learning the wrong lesson from the mistake because you're bound to repeat it again

25. My motivation is not letting down the people who believe in me

26. Do the work first. The learning afterwards will become more relevant and relatable

27. If you have low standards for friends, you will have many. If you have high standards for friends, you will have few. You can’t expect to only befriend exceptional people and then be surprised when there are not many of them

28. Do the thing that will create the most epic story

Appreciate everyone who’s been in my life and following my journey ❤️

The number of founders I’ve talked to who’ve been fed bad advice by LinkedIn influencers/gurus is insane.

Especially the kind that prescribes formulas like:
- “just post consistently”
- “add selfies to every post”
- “tell more personal stories”
- “do X, Y, Z to get impressions”

HUGE red flag.

Because the truth is: no one (that I know of at least) has cracked the LinkedIn algorithm.

There are no universal rules.

Text posts work (look at Gal Aga). 
Videos work (look at Carmen Vicente). 
Infographics work (look at Wouter Durville).

Everything works.

And that’s exactly why “best practices” are misleading.

What actually matters isn’t the format, it’s whether your content works for you:
 
your market
your category
your ICP
your positioning
your stage

A founder selling to Heads of Finance will not win with the same playbook as a creator selling courses.

A deep-tech startup won’t grow the same way a PLG SaaS does.

A new category doesn’t play by the same rules as a mature one.

Chasing tactics is how people stay busy and stay invisible.

The real job is experimentation:
→ Figure out what your audience reacts to.
→ Double down on what creates signal.
→ Ignore everything else.

LinkedIn isn’t a formula.

It’s a feedback loop.

And the founders who win are the ones who treat it like one.

After working with 15+ SaaS founders last year, I’ve concluded that you need at least one of these to grow on LinkedIn:

1. Strong POV about the market (cuts through sameness eg Adam Robinson, Amos Bar-Joseph)

2. Frequent product + company updates (shipping, learning, hiring, launching - creates momentum eg Emir Atli, Zhu, Marty Kausas, Tyler Denk 🐝)

3. Industry experience (Pattern recognition from lived experiences eg Peep Laja, Gal Aga)

Ranked from “easiest” to hardest to pull off. Did I get the ranking right?

Building in public is the MOST overrated LinkedIn strategy in B2B unless you’re doing it right. (And this is coming from someone who runs 15+ CEO LinkedIn profiles.)

Most founders/CEOs confuse authenticity with relevancy.

Sharing your journey only works if your journey overlaps with your buyer’s problems.

If your story has nothing to do with what your ICP is struggling with day to day, they won’t care no matter how honest, vulnerable or “real” it is.

Your audience isn’t here to watch your startup diary. They’re here to solve a problem.

Building in public ≠ narrating your life.

It means narrating decisions, tradeoffs, mistakes and learnings that map directly to your buyer’s world.

Let’s say you’re selling to Heads of Legal / Legal Ops.

❌ “Building in public” (but ineffective):
“Today we shipped v3 of our workflow engine. Huge shoutout to the team 🙌”
They don’t care.

✅ “Building in public” (actually works):
“We learned why legal teams resist automation. it’s not fear of AI, it’s fear of being accountable for decisions they can’t fully audit.”

Now you’re speaking their language.

You can then share:
- how you designed audit trails
- how approvals work
- how errors are surfaced
- what broke in early pilots
- what legal teams pushed back on
- what surprised you about their workflows

That’s still YOUR journey but framed through their risk, incentives and constraints.

If your ‘building in public’ content doesn’t help your ICP…it’s not marketing. It’s journaling.

Authenticity gets attention.

But relevance earns trust.

And trust creates demand.

Most advice about LinkedIn content focuses on how to “stop the scroll”. Hooks. CTAs. Formatting tricks but I think that misses the point.

The best posts aren’t just attention grabbing, they’re useful (unless you're posting memes).

And usefulness has a structure.

Over time, I’ve found four that matter most.

A useful LinkedIn post = Clarity × Leverage × Friction × Signal

1. Clarity - can someone act on it?

If a reader finishes your post and can’t explain it in one sentence, it’s not ready.

Clarity means:
one idea
one direction
one takeaway

2. Leverage - does it change how they think or act?

Good posts inform. Useful posts reframe.

They help readers see a familiar problem differently, stop doing something wasteful and double down on what actually matters.

Small insight → disproportionate payoff.

3. Friction - does it challenge an existing belief?

If everyone already agrees with your post, it won’t go ‘viral’.

Friction doesn’t mean being edgy for clicks. It means gently pushing against a default assumption that make readers think “wait….is this actually true?”

4. Signal - does it prove you actually know this world?

This is what separates generic advice from earned insight.

It shows up in specificity, in tradeoffs, in constraints, in details that only appear when you’ve actually done the thing.

When a post references concrete situations, tensions or second-order effects, readers can feel that it wasn’t generated from abstraction.

Signal builds trust quietly without saying “trust me.”

And ironically, these posts tend to perform better than the ones engineered to perform.

Because usefulness compounds.

I don’t get why agencies lock clients into long contracts.

Maybe I’m missing something but it feels like a lose-lose situation.

Yes, I understand the upside for agencies: revenue predictability, cleaner forecasting, peace of mind.

But let’s actually play it out.

Scenario A: 
The client enjoys working with you.
You’re delivering results. 
You’re adding value month after month.

In that case, they’ll stay anyway - contract or not.

Scenario B: 
The client wants to stop.

Now the long contract becomes legal handcuffs filled with refund requests, tense conversations, resentment, bad taste.

You might “keep” the revenue but you lose trust, goodwill and potential referrals.

At Mindshare Lab, we do have a minimum engagement but it’s 3 months.

Why?

Because we want clients treating LinkedIn as a long-term channel, not comparing it to paid ads where you put in $X and expect $Y next week.

That’s the premise.

Those 3 months act as:
- Enough time to do the foundational work
- A real time-bound experiment
- Risk reduction for the client if LinkedIn isn’t a fit (rare in B2B)

Obviously, we want long-term partnerships.

But we also want clients who want to be here, not ones who feel stuck.

So my question is: when do long-term contracts actually make sense?

For founders who know LinkedIn works...but don’t know what to post, here are 7 proven content formats that consistently perform.

CONTEXT

Over the past year, I’ve helped 15+ B2B SaaS founders generate ~$1.5M in pipeline from LinkedIn. These are the exact formats we regularly use with clients:

1) Introduction / re-introduction post

This is the format we start with for almost every founder.

An intro post is essentially: “If you don’t know who I am, here’s a bit about me and what I’m focused on.”

A re-intro post is: “A lot of new people followed me recently, so in case you’re wondering who I am, here’s a bit about me.”

These work especially well after a viral post. 

One of the biggest downsides of going viral is people follow you…then forget why. 

A re-intro gives them a reason to care again.

2) Company / product announcements

Company updates = fundraises, new hires, milestones, or culture changes. 

The goal here is perceived momentum showing that things are moving and the team is winning.

Product updates = new features, new products, or new verticals. Most companies do this poorly because they make it about themselves. 

A simple structure that works: announcement → why we built this → benefit to the ICP → CTA.

3) “Do cool stuff, talk about it”

This is Alex Hormozi’s $100M content advice.

Every educational post needs to answer two questions:
- Why should I consume this?
- Why should I listen to you?

The first shows value. The second shows credibility.

The format I like to use here is: here’s what we did → here are the results → here’s what we learned.

4) Category hot takes

A strong POV is the fastest way to stand out ie say things people quietly agree with but don’t publicly say.

Your takes should be a natural extension of the market you operate in and the problem your product solves.

Test different angles. When a few hit, double down.

Amos Bar-Joseph is world-class at this.

5) ICP frameworks / playbooks

The best educational posts are immediately actionable - readers can implement =within 24 hours.

If you can share something truly valuable, tried-and-tested from experience, there’s a good chance your post will end up being shared internally in your ICP’s Slack or DMs. 

6) Trend jacking

Trend jacking isn’t about commenting on random viral news eg sh*t post on Cloudflare's outage but you sell marketing analytics. 

It’s about tying relevant industry trends back to what you actually do. 

At the end of the day, you want people to see you as an expert, not some news reporter jumping on hype trains. 

7) Customer conversations

This is the easiest format. Look at the meetings you’ve had over the past week. Pull out interesting questions, objections or insights customers shared.

Share them.

---

That’s 7 post ideas. One for every day of the week.

What’s left? Time to actually write them.

And if you don’t have that, maybe we can help.

To the companies looking to hire 23-yr old social media interns,

don't do it…

Lately I’ve been talking to a few seed-stage companies that hired interns to “run” their socials.

They were posting almost every day on LinkedIn and getting <5 likes/post on their company profile.

Founder: “We’re just not seeing any results from LinkedIn”.

When I audited their profiles, the problem was super clear.

- There was no clear POV
- Hooks were weak or generic
- Posts were just blog excerpts repurposed into LinkedIn format
- And a lot of AI-generated content that immediately scream, “this was made with ChatGPT/Claude”

Truthfully, I don’t think it’s the intern’s fault.

The real issue is how companies think about social.

Most default to hiring interns because they treat LinkedIn like a checklist item for “online presence,” not as an actual GTM channel that should generate demand and pipeline.

It’s the same mistake as asking someone with no experience to run sales.

You wouldn’t hire a junior intern to “figure out sales” and expect revenue.

But for some reason, we think that logic doesn’t apply to content.

I also get founders asking me to coach their interns into becoming LinkedIn specialists.

My usual answer is: this almost never works out if your goal is ROI.

LinkedIn content in B2B requires: 
– Domain expertise 
– Strong judgment and taste 
– A point of view shaped by real exposure to customers, deals and industry experience

Those things don’t get developed in 2–3 months. Often not even in 6–12.

If the goal is business impact, the more effective path I recommend is:

Have specialists run it first → build signal → document what works → then pass the learnings to an internal team.

Trying to “figure things out” for a 6-12 months while your pipeline stays flat is a costly experiment.

Curious what others think about this.

I've helped my clients generate 1.5M impressions on LinkedIn and almost every post that performs well comes down to one thing: 

credibility.

Let me explain:

Sam Altman could write a long-winded, unformatted post with painfully obvious advice and people would still listen.

Why? Because he’s Sam Altman.

If you already have credibility eg you’re an exec at a F500 company, people will pay attention by default.

If you don’t, you just have to prove it. The easiest way is by showing:

👉 “I did X and got Y results.”

or as Alex Hormozi puts it - "do cool things, talk about it" 

The more you achieve and the more you talk about it, the faster people move from:

“Who is this person?” → “That’s the person who did X, Y, and Z.”

That’s what I call LinkedIn clout.


P.S. framing posts from “Here’s how to….” to “Here’s how I…” makes your message infinitely more powerful.

When did your coffee addiction happen and how? Curious because I think it's happening right now for me. 

Context, I used to not be able to drink coffee because for some weird reason, I’d get sleepy after drinking one. 

(Fun fact: i'd used to drink coffee to treat my insomnia.)

To get that energy boost, I started with black tea, then hot chocolate and matcha latte. This was me for 26 years.

But for some odd reason, I've "upgraded" from matcha to mocha and now latte in 1 year and I no longer get sleepy anymore. 

Maybe it's because I'm working 3 timezones now...

but curious to hear stories from some coffee veterans 🤣

I presented a slide to a Head of Marketing saying TOFU/MOFU/BOFU doesn't exist. (10 second very awkward moment of silence.)

Your buyers don't think in funnels.

They're not thinking "I'm 60% through my buying journey."

They're thinking "I have this problem" or "I wonder if there's a better way to do this”

Funnels assume linear progression and predictable stages. Buyers jump around, skip steps, regress, enter at different points.

Yet most B2B content strategies are still built entirely around TOFU/MOFU/BOFU.

You're creating content for stages that only exist in your spreadsheet.

The better framework: think in awareness stages.

Where does your buyer sit in terms of understanding?
Unaware (don't know the problem exists) →
Problem Aware (feeling the pain) →
Solution Aware (know solutions exist) →
Product Aware (evaluating options) →
Most Aware (ready to choose).

If you’re creating a new category, most of your ICP is problem-unaware.

You need worldview-shifting content. Education. Reframing. Language creation.

Think Gong or Clay.

If you’re in a mature category, the education is already done for you.

Your job is differentiation, positioning, and proof.

Think Pipedrive or Attio.

Same channels. Same formats. Completely different intent.

That’s why copying someone else’s “content funnel” rarely works.

They’re playing a different awareness game.

The best content strategy isn’t about volume or formats, it’s about meeting your buyers where their understanding actually is.

See the visual below 👀

Save it. Then use it.

taplio

The Battle

Javier YebenesB2B

Osman Lee

Followers

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taplio

The Battle

Javier YebenesB2B

Osman Lee

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Osman Lee's LinkedIn Performance

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