Sophie Steffen, co-founder and CEO of the Barcelona-based growth performance agency Kunoichi, has acquired every client she has ever signed through LinkedIn. In this segment of her conversation with Patrycja Radwanska on the Let’s Talk Marketing series, she explains why the single most important thing she has learned about the platform is the one nobody wants to hear about.
The Wrong Scoreboard
The first mistake most aspiring LinkedIn creators make is to define success in terms of likes. Steffen has watched it happen often enough to be blunt about it: if your scoreboard is engagement, you are playing the wrong game. The post with three thousand impressions and two likes is not a failure. The post with twelve likes from your immediate network is not a success. Both are deposits. The only thing that actually matters is whether you keep making them.
Her own posts demonstrate the point. Some land in the algorithm and reach thousands of people. Others appear and quietly do nothing. She has stopped trying to predict which is which, because the prediction does not matter. What matters is that the posts exist, that they are recognizably hers, and that her audience sees her name in the feed often enough for the slow physics of familiarity to do its work.
“If you’re chasing likes, you’re in the wrong path. It’s about building that trust, and that consistency only builds when you post every week in a regular way.”
The B2B implication is sharper than it sounds. Lead generation is a credibility business. The people who eventually book a call with Kunoichi do not do so because of a single viral post. They do so because they have seen Steffen’s name often enough, in enough different contexts, that hiring her feels safer than hiring someone they have never heard of. Familiarity, accumulated patiently over years, is the actual product.
Perfectionism Is the Real Enemy
Ask Steffen why people quit posting after six weeks, and she will not say it is because the strategy was wrong or the audience was hostile. She will say it is perfectionism. The aspiring creator looks at the polished posts in their feed - the ones with the immaculate hook, the perfectly cropped image, the eight-paragraph essay structured around a personal vulnerability that somehow ladders up to a B2B insight - and decides they cannot publish anything until they can produce the same.
The problem is that the people whose posts they are studying did not start by producing those posts either. They started with one like from a friend, or from their mother (if their mother was on LinkedIn). The polished version is the output of two or three years of unpolished version. The version that does not exist yet, because the aspiring creator is still waiting for inspiration.
The fix is to lower the bar to something that cannot fail. Authenticity over polish. A short post that says something real beats a long post that took two hours to write and never gets published. The data each post generates - how it performed, what it taught you about your audience - is more valuable than any single post’s reception. You cannot collect that data if you never hit publish.
Building a Cadence That Survives a Bad Month
The mechanical fix Steffen recommends is to choose a frequency that is small enough you can guarantee it on your worst week, not your best. Once a week, twice a week, five times a week - the right answer is whatever you can defend during a quarter where everything else falls apart. A plan to post daily that collapses in week three has produced fewer posts than a plan to post weekly that ran for a year.
Once the cadence is set, the practical question is how to protect the time. Steffen does her own content drafting on the stationary bike at her gym - two things at once, neither of them ideal in isolation, but both happening in a slot that is already on the calendar for reasons unrelated to LinkedIn. Other people use treadmill desks, batch their writing on Sunday evenings, or dictate ideas into a notes app between meetings. The format does not matter. The cadence does.
“You have to build a system that’s manageable. Don’t put too much on your plate, but you have to start somewhere, and you have to continue starting.”
The principle is the same one that makes savings accounts work and makes diets fail. Small actions taken consistently beat large actions taken sporadically. The reason this is hard to internalize is that the small actions feel like nothing while you are doing them. The visible payoff is months away, and the dopamine hit of a viral post never comes. What comes instead, eventually, is a feed full of people who already know who you are, and a calendar full of discovery calls you did not have to chase.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Sophie Steffen.
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