Luke Shalom

CEO @ Grow Solo I help the C-suite turn industry expertise into predictable pipeline

There are two ways agency founders try to turn LinkedIn into a reliable source of clients.



One is by guessing. Posting when there is time. Relying on referrals and hoping the next month is a good one.



The other is by building a system that creates steady conversations, even when client work gets busy.



Our clients choose the second.



→ Joya Dass (Founder, Women’s Leadership Lab)



The problem:



- She spent hours in the DMs to book a few calls.

- Content happened on weekends.

- When delivery picked up, sales stopped.



Some months were strong. Others were quiet.



Even in good months, there was stress about where the next client would come from.



What we did:



We built a simple LinkedIn content system she could run in house. No ghostwriter or agency retainer dependency.



We shifted her content from generic how to posts to insight driven thinking.



That changed the conversations. People in her network showed up aligned and ready to buy.



We added a content led outbound system powered by a setter we hited and trained. The system kept working while she focused on delivery.



Results:



- Revenue grew from $150k to $300k.

- Sales became predictable.

- The pressure eased.



→ Jonathan Crowder (Founder, Founders Ally)



The problem:



- No time for content.

- Unpredictable sales calls.

- Leads with no budget.

- No sales background. A 10 percent close rate.



What we did:



We removed Jonathan as the bottleneck. 



We built a content system using AI supported by his real thinking. It sounded like him, not software.



Trust was built before the call. Outbound went from 10% to 40% response rates.



We focused prospecting on real buying moments, like recent funding to catch buyers at the right time.



We simplified his sales process. Clear outcomes. Clear cost of inaction was communicated to his buyers.



Results:



- Meetings went from 3-5 a month to 10-15 sales qualifed leads a month.

- A visible pipeline. Increase to a 25 percent close rate.

- $300k in pipeline in 60 days.

- $30k in new revenue closed.



→ Brian Dukes (COO, Exit Wise)



The problem



- Ovelry dependent on referrals.

- No LinkedIn playbook.

- No time to write.



What we did



- We clarified positioning.

- Simplified the offer.

- Built a content engine.



Then we added outbound from the founder profile.



Everything was owned and run internally.



Results:



- Consistent posting machine.

- 500 to 6500 ICP followers.

- $740,000 in LinkedIn-driven revenue over two years.



We have helped 100+ founder led agencies replace unpredictable growth with systems they understand and control.



If this feels familiar send me a DM with "Grow", we should talk.

Founder

We help executives to build and monetize their brand on linkedin by scaling your content and turning it into leads, authority and thought leadership.

How?

Engagement + DM flows = Qualified meetings. 

Done with you. Done for you.

I close 50% of my discovery calls with 5-figure clients. Here's the exact founder profile funnel that does it:
 
Most agency founders are stuck in "random acts of growth".
 
They post and hear crickets.
They buy expensive tools.
They hire an agency and blow there marketing budget.

Nothing works.
 
So pipeline stays unpredictable.

Referrals dry up.
 
And LinkedIn gets written off as something that "doesn't work for our industry."
 
It's not the channel. It's the absence of a system.
 
The founders winning right now have stopped chasing tactics and built a Founder-Led Demand System.
 
One engine where content, trust, and outbound compound together.
 
Here's exactly how mine works.
 
TOP OF FUNNEL
 
Tools: LinkedIn, Perplexity, Claude
 
My founder brand on LinkedIn is the engine.
 
Every month it pulls the right people in. Follows, likes, connections, profile views from founders who match my ICP exactly.

By the time they reach out, they already know me. They already trust me.
 
That means every call I take is with someone already in consideration. I'm not selling to strangers.
 
But that only happens when your positioning is locked in and your content is engineered to take someone from skeptical to ready to buy.
 
Most founders post randomly and wonder why nothing converts.
 
MIDDLE OF FUNNEL
 
Tools: YouTube
 
LinkedIn gets them in the door. YouTube closes the trust gap.
 
I've never gone viral. My videos are lucky to get 500 views.
 
But every single client I've signed in the last 6 months said YouTube was one of the main reasons they hired me.
 
Why? Facetime. There's nothing that builds trust faster than watching someone think out loud on camera for 20 minutes.
 
Every video is built around a buying objection I hear on calls. I post once a week and drive LinkedIn traffic to it. Our setter uses videos in the DMs before calls, between discovery and close, and when leads go cold.
 
It's the best sales tool for trust building I have.
 
BOTTOM OF FUNNEL
 
Tools: Valley AI
 
This is where most agencies leave money on the table. They generate interest and have no system to convert it.
 
We run warm outbound to every ICP founder who engages with content. Likes, comments, profile views, lead magnet requests. All of it.
 
A human is in the loop at every stage. We qualify hard before anything hits the calendar.

That's why close rate is 50%.
 
Interested in building this out for your Agency? DM me "grow" and I'll show you the gaps stopping you from turning LinkedIn into  7 figure channel.

Founder at Atticus | Predictable LinkedIn pipeline using a founder-led sales system I 100+ clients scaled | Be the next 👉 atticusagency.com

Stop sending DMs that get ignored. I booked 1,000+ sales calls from LinkedIn and made $1.3M doing. Steal the exact script ↓

Comment and I'll send it to you.

I used to spend hours crafting the "perfect" DM. Tweaking. Rewriting. Getting ghosted anyway and following up like a desperate ex.

Now I use a 5-message sequence I've tested for 3 years straight. Instead of 18 rejections out of 20, we are booking 20-40 calls a month.

Every conversation feels like it came from them.

Here's what's inside:

- DM 1: Open with context, not a pitch
- DM 2: Follow up without sounding desperate
- DM 3: Uncover their pain in natural conversation
- DM 4: Transition to a call without it feeling forced
- DM 5: Make it stupid easy to book the meeting
- The complete walkthrough...  all 5 messages in action
- 5 mistakes that kill your DM conversion rate
- How to customise the script for your ICP

BONUS: DM Personalisation Framework that gets 80% response rates.
It took me 2 years and 1,000+ DMs to build. Takes you 60 seconds to steal.

Stop using LinkedIn DMs like a cold email channel. 

Start using them like a trust-building machine.

How to get it: 

1/ Connect with me 2/ Comment below and I'll DM you everything

♻️ Repost to skip the queue. 

P.S. We must be connected... otherwise LinkedIn blocks the message.

P.SS The perplexity lead magnet will be coming over today/ tomorrow... keep those eyes peeled!

LinkedIn

Personal branding and ghostwriting

Monk Entertainment

- Research and analysis for technical content
- Conducted keyword research, analysed competitor content, and used data insights to inform the content direction
-Ensured consistent brand voice and tone across all content channels

Content Writer

Kidadl

- Wrote and edited website copy, social media posts, and email campaigns for 15+ clients in diverse sectors
- Received recognition from clients for creating engaging content that drove website traffic and improved social media engagement
-Conducted A/B testing and analyzed content performance to inform optimization and strategy changes

LinkedIn Personal Branding and Ghostwriting for founders, investors and VCs. One interesting thing every day. AI, Tech, Writing, Culture, Psychology.

I write for people’s LinkedIn.

→ Great content is born out of insight. If you see the same cup of tea every day, each day you will find that your idea of that cup of tea is being morphed into something else, something more profound. This is how I choose to write. 

The ability to distil complex ideas into a simple preliminary form. This is what sells. It truly does.

DM or email me at manavjhaveri2000@gmail.com to get started.

P.S I'm a Travel Buff - Check out my experiential Travel blog: https://letstravel2023.blogspot.com

Manav Jhaveri

One of my favourite marketing insights is that human satisfaction is often inversely proportional to ease.

During the time the LEGO Group was doing its market research, supported by big data and focus groups, they were suggested that the digital age had shortened children's attention spans. 

> This insight told them that kids wanted instant results and Lego decided to actually apply this insight. They made bigger pieces and set simpler. They thought that the barrier to entry was their enemy. 

> This went horribly wrong; they were almost bankrupt because they were making dumbed-down toys that lacked the soul of the brand. 

In 2004, Lego's new CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp sent researchers into the homes of “super users” to watch them play. In one home in Germany, they met an 11-year-old boy.

When they asked him what his most prized possession was, he didn't point to a high-tech gadget or a simple-to-build toy. He pointed to a pair of old battered Adidas sneakers. They asked him - “why those shoes?” 

> Because the specific wear and tear on the side of the shoe proved that he was the best skateboarder in the neighborhood. That scraped look was his “trophy." 

The Lego team realized that they had fundamentally misunderstood a child's ego.

They realized that mastery is more valuable than play and that children and humans in general don't actually want things to be easy. 

They want the status that comes from completing something difficult. The "scraped knee" on the sneaker, was proof of his competence and by simplifying the sets, Lego had stripped away the child's ability to show off their skill. 

#Lego #marketing #brandbuilding #mastery #toys #casestudy

Manav  Jhaveri

LinkedIn Personal Branding and Ghostwriting for founders, investors and VCs | Content Writer | One interesting thing every day. AI, Tech, Writing, Culture, Psychology.

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The entire game of entrepreneurship is really about rebuilding your nervous system.

Entrepreneurship is a repeated exposure to uncertainty, risk, rejection, and possibility - often all in the same week.

That’s why it hurts.

There are days when a deal closes and adrenaline floods your body. You feel unstoppable. And there are days when losses pile up, momentum disappears, and you wake up wondering why you ever started.

The external events change. The emotional waves swing wildly.

But one thing sits underneath all of it: your nervous system.

Over time, this pressure rewires how you respond to chaos. What once felt overwhelming slowly becomes normal.

Most people pursue entrepreneurship for wealth or status.

But neither is guaranteed.

You might succeed. You might fail.

What is almost guaranteed, however, is adaptation.

It is essentially a long, unstructured stress test on your psyche. Survive it long enough, and you build a kind of emotional callus - the ability to remain calm in volatility, to act despite fear, to metabolize uncertainty.

In other words, you develop nerves of steel.

Even a failed entrepreneur often walks away with a nervous system far more resilient than when they began. And maybe that is the real point.

If you want to accelerate your psychological evolution - voluntarily choosing a life where uncertainty becomes your training ground, entrepreneurship is one of the fastest paths available.

Not necessarily to wealth. But to strength.

#Entrepreneur #Wealth #Nervoussystem #mind #success #failure #startup #resilience

Red Bull built its brand on a "medicine bias."

Red Bull's founder, Dietrich Mateschitz realized that for the product to be a high-performance energy drink, it shouldn't taste like a refreshing soda. If it tasted like a delicious orange juice, people wouldn't believe that it had the power to "give you wings."

There is a psychological bias that humans have that if it tastes bad, it must be working. We associate the word "delicious" with "frivolous" or junk and we associate the word "medicine/bitter" with "effective" or potent. 

Red Bull leaned into its “chemical” taste. They made the cans smaller than a standard soda and priced them 2x higher. The small, expensive, weird-tasting can signalled to the brain that this isn't a normal drink; it's like a high-octane fuel/drug.

In fact in early blind tests, people did not like the taste of Red Bull. Forget dislike; they hated it. Testers felt like it tasted like a liquid chemical or a cough syrup. Most companies would take this feedback and change the formula to make it sweeter or tastier but Red Bull did the exact opposite.

We don't trust a solution that doesn't have a little bit of a ‘bite' to it.

#redbull #marketing #branding #performance #bias

India has 6 Lakh 53,000 startups. Only 33,500 are funded.

That’s roughly 5%.

The other 95% are building without a VC on their cap table — and the narrative still treats them like second-class founders.

👉 A VC fund isn’t in the business of building your company. It’s in the business of finding outliers. 

The math demands it. 

A $500M fund needs to return $1.5B to its LPs. With 30+ bets and the expectation that most will fail, the 1-2 companies that survive have to return the entire fund - often at 50-100x.

That’s not a partnership. That’s a lottery ticket strategy.

About 60-70% of VC-backed companies return little or nothing.  

The model works for VCs because the rare winner compensates for all losses. It doesn’t work for the founder of a solid, profitable ₹50 crore business that could compound for 20 years - because that business doesn’t fit the return profile.

- Zoho never raised external capital. Today it’s valued at over ₹1 lakh crore. 

- Zerodha bootstrapped its way to becoming India’s largest retail stockbroker. In FY22, they became the most profitable new-age companies in India - without a single rupee of VC money. 

These aren’t exceptions. They’re proof that the definition of a “good business” has been hijacked.

Somewhere along the way, raising a round became a milestone. Press releases. LinkedIn announcements. Congratulations from people who’ve never seen your P&L.

But capital raised is an input. Not an outcome.

The businesses that endure are the ones obsessed with margin, customer retention, and unit economics, not the ones optimizing for the next term sheet.

95% of Indian founders are building that way - they just don’t get the applause.

#startup #venturecapital #investor #founder #businesses #angels #sharktank

Gen Z is extremely anxious about getting on calls or pitching to clients arbitrarily. 

This is a big issue.

Faith in your product/service must translate into aggressive distribution.

That means volume. Pitching ten or fifteen people a day. Taking calls. Starting conversations. Getting rejected.

Most people never reach comfort with selling because they never reach the necessary volume. They stop after two attempts and conclude they are “not good at sales.”

Volume reduces the role of luck.

The more conversations you start, the less dependent you are on chance. Opportunities begin to appear not because you are lucky, but because you are visible.

- Fear, anxiety, and nervousness are normal. 

- Feeling like you are not enough, or like you don't deserve the job in that moment, is also normal. 

These are things not only you are experiencing, but all of us are.

Trust me.

#sales #founder #opportunity #anxiety #entrepreneur

Unpopular opinion - The shittier the day, the greasier the food we want.

A friend asked me something recently: “Eating healthy is good for the long run, so why don’t we just do it?”

We spent the next hour realizing it was never really about the food.

In India, the average person works 6-7 hours, commutes an hour each way. That’s 9-10 hours gone before you’ve even thought about dinner. 

And those hours aren’t spent doing something you love. They’re spent grinding through something you tolerate. So when you finally get home, does your brain say “great, now let’s do another hard thing”? No. It says: order the chow mein. Get the dal makhani. You’ve earned the dopamine.

Now layer in something else.

Layer in purposelessness, brutal commutes, punishing weather, and infrastructure that quietly drains you. By evening, that person isn’t just physically exhausted. He’s mentally gone.

This is where unhealthy food steps in as a coping mechanism.  And the thing about coping mechanisms: no one ever designs them to be hard to reach. 

They work precisely because they’re easy and immediately pleasurable. Have you ever seen a coping mechanism that wasn’t?

The more your life demands one, the deeper you fall into that loop. Coping mechanisms aren’t inherently bad. We all need them. But when they’re needed too often, they stop being a release and start being the routine. 

They take over. Completely.

This isn’t a food problem. It’s what happens when the life around the food becomes unbearable.

#Unhealthyfood #diabetes #Sugar #Processed #diet #health #heartattack #india

“Bro, why don’t we build something in AI?”🫠

This is the cringiest thing I HEAR A LOT.

We’ve completely flipped the script. Instead of finding a problem and working towards a solution, we’re picking a tool first and then hunting for a problem to justify it.

The horse goes before the cart. Always has. You spot a problem, you feel the pain of it, you build something to fix it. 

IF that solution needs AI, great — use it. If it needs a simple spreadsheet or a WhatsApp group, use that instead. 

The tool should serve the problem. Not the other way around.
But somewhere along the way, “let’s build in AI” became the pitch. Not the solution. Not the insight. Just the tool.

And nobody stops to ask the obvious question: what problem are you actually solving?

Many problems don’t need AI. They need clarity, execution, and someone willing to do the unglamorous work. 

Wrapping bad thinking in a good-sounding technology doesn’t make it an ‘AI’ business.

#ai #technology #founder #startup #problemsolving

Every substance abuse problem increases the wealth cycle in an economy. (AI is the current cocaine)

The opioid crisis created a $600B market — rehab, pharmaceuticals, law enforcement, healthcare. 

- Alcohol funds an entire hospitality and healthcare complex. 

- Cigarettes built some of the most profitable companies in history. 

Nobody sells the cure without first engineering the disease. This is not a conspiracy. It is how markets work.

- Steve Jobs never let his kids use an iPad. 
- Peter Thiel caps his children at 90 minutes of screen time per week. 
- Bill Gates withheld smartphones from his kids until they were 14. 
- Snap CEO Evan Spiegel — the man who built one of the most addictive apps for teenagers - imposed the same 90-minute weekly limit on his own child. 

Read that again. The architects of the attention economy do not let their children anywhere near it.

This is not hypocrisy. It is information asymmetry - the oldest business advantage in existence.  They understand what they built. They understand it well enough to protect their own children from it.

AI is next.

The promise is productivity. The product is dependency. Every new interface that reduces friction also reduces your ability to function without it. 

That is not a side effect. That is the business model.

#ai #technology #addiction #depression #socialmedia

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Luke Shalom

Manav Jhaveri

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The Battle

Luke Shalom

Manav Jhaveri

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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);}Luke Shalom's LinkedIn Performance

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