So, you want to be a content creator? - by Elena Verna
Elena's Growth Scoop
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Career Growth<br>So, you want to be a content creator?<br>This has been my journey, with all the good and the bad that came with it.
Elena Verna<br>Jul 28, 2026
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Everyone wants to be a content creator these days. Or an influencer. Or, if you speak LinkedIn, a thought leader. Personally, the last 2 give me the ick - please never ever call me an influencer.<br>I get it. Attention feels good. Likes, comments, reposts, follower counts. They all scratch something in our fragile, validation-seeking egos. We live in the attention economy, after all. And to be fair, I’ve encouraged plenty of people to start posting or writing. I genuinely think more people should share what they know.<br>What I don’t think people see is what it’s actually like on the other side. So if you’ve ever thought about putting yourself out there, here’s how it worked for me (and what no one tells you about being a ‘creator’).
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My personal story
Why I started ‘creating content’
I didn’t start creating content because I want to become some sort of influencer (puke). In fact, if your motivation is to become an influencer, please just don’t.<br>For me, it actually started after I was a guest on Reforge a few times. It hit me how much valuable knowledge is trapped inside companies. Every team is figuring out things that would help hundreds of other teams, but the lessons are never outside the org. Sometimes they don’t even make it past the team that learned them - they just stay locked away in Slack threads, Notion docs, and people’s heads.<br>Instead, what does get shared in public is a lot of nonsense. So many people posting online have never actually done the job. They’re throwing out generic career advice or recycled frameworks that sound profound but fall apart the moment you actually try to apply them, much less scale them. (If I see one more post saying the secret to career success is ‘having a great manager’ with 10,000 likes, I might blow a gasket.)
That feeling only got stronger once I started advising startups. I was shocked by how similar everyone’s problems were. Different companies, different industries, different stages... but they were all struggling with the exact same growth, product, and organizational challenges. It was almost demoralizing. Why are we all separately relearning the same lessons instead of sharing what works, what doesn’t, and why? We’d make progress so much faster if we spent less time rediscovering the basics and more time solving the next generation of problems.<br>Mistakes like, for example: Not paying attention to activation. Swinging over to enterprise too early if you’re B2B. And over-focusing on how your homepage looks when it doesn’t even f#*%ing matter.<br>So my content creation journey started with: ‘Hey, I have thoughts. I have years of experience. They actually have some pretty cool patterns in them. Some of them are right, some are wrong, some don’t apply to everybody, some do. Why don’t I just start sharing them?’<br>How I started: LinkedIn
Twitter/X was a hot mess express at the time (maybe still is, ha), so I figured LinkedIn was the way to go.<br>I started with just bite-sized pieces of content. My posting rules were very simple: If I said or shared something 3 times in normal conversations, I was just going to post about it.<br>Another rule came from Brian Balfour, which I still use to this day. He said the content that performs best falls into two buckets. One, it’s a contrarian take. Two, it’s a pattern. A contrarian take works because you’re basically saying what everybody is thinking but isn’t willing to say, or maybe hasn’t even recognized is true. It’s provocative, so it gets people talking! Patterns also work because our brains loooove recognizing patterns.<br>So I started with just that - little pattern frameworks created and screenshot from Miro boards, a couple of thoughts, and that’s it.<br>I started with almost no engagement (as in: 20 likes = BIG deal) and maybe posting once a week. And I kept it in my own voice, with my own typos. I was just trying to share, not go viral.<br>At first, it felt like the same three people were always liking and commenting on my posts. I felt like this guy:
I quickly realized that my ‘superpower’ was around product-led growth - I had so many nuggets to share that came so naturally. And people reacted! My follower count grew from a few thousand connections to 40K in a year.<br>Then one day I created a meme. And it blew up.
So just like that, memes became A...