You have a few hundred connections and most of them are exactly the people you are building for: operators, managers, other founders, the occasional buyer with a budget. On paper it is the best distribution you own. Then you post the launch, it gets nine reactions and one comment from a recruiter, and you go back to thinking LinkedIn is where content goes to die.
The audience was never the problem. The format was. Most founders write the LinkedIn launch as a press release, and the feed is not a newsroom, it is a place where people decide in three lines whether to keep scrolling.
To launch a product on LinkedIn, post from your personal profile rather than the company page, spend the first three lines (everything visible before the "see more" cut) on the problem instead of the announcement, attach native video that reads with the sound off, keep the external link out of the post and put it in the first comment, and stay available for the first two hours because comments and dwell time are what push the post beyond your own network. ShipTeaser handles the attachment: paste your product URL and get a 15-second silent teaser, square or vertical, sized for the feed.
Three lines is your entire hook
LinkedIn truncates posts after roughly three lines on desktop and even less on mobile. Everything after that sits behind a "see more" link that most people never press. So the hook is not a stylistic choice, it is a hard character budget, and the announcement is the worst possible thing to spend it on.
The instinct is to open with what you built. Nobody has a reason to care yet. Open with the situation your reader recognises, and let the product arrive once they have already agreed with you about the problem.
- Weak: "Excited to announce the launch of our new AI video tool for founders."
- Better: "Every founder I know has a launch video sitting in a folder, half edited, three weeks late."
- Weak: "After 6 months of hard work, we are live!"
- Better: "We shipped four features last quarter and announced none of them properly. That is the actual bottleneck."
Write the first three lines last, once you know what the post is really about. That is the same discipline as the three-second hook in video, applied to text.
Post from your profile, not the company page
Company pages reach a fraction of what personal profiles reach. This is not a rumour, it is how the feed is weighted: LinkedIn is a network of people, and posts from people travel. A brand new company page with forty followers is close to a broadcast into an empty room.
Post as yourself, tag the company page inside the post, and let colleagues comment rather than repost. A comment from a teammate in the first ten minutes is worth considerably more than a silent share.
What to attach
Native video autoplays in the LinkedIn feed with the sound off, which means the same constraint as everywhere else: if your video needs audio to make sense, it makes no sense. A narrated screen recording is the default founder instinct and the wrong one here. The first frame is usually a login screen, the pace is a demo pace rather than a feed pace, and the voice-over carries information that nobody hears.
What works is short, silent, text-led and unmistakably yours. Square uses more feed space than widescreen and vertical uses more still. Keep it under twenty seconds, because the purpose is to prove the product exists and looks credible, not to explain it. The explaining happens on the landing page, after the click.
A document post (the PDF carousel) is the other format that performs, and it is worth knowing because it optimises for the exact thing LinkedIn measures: dwell time. Someone swiping through eight slides is telling the algorithm the post is worth showing to more people. Per-platform dimensions and durations are in launch video specs.
If the video only works with the sound on, it does not work. The feed is muted by default and nobody is going to unmute a stranger.
The link problem
LinkedIn suppresses reach on posts that send people off the platform. You can argue about how much, but not about the direction, and the fix costs nothing: write the post without a link, then add the link as the first comment immediately after publishing, and edit the post to say "link in the comments".
This has a second benefit. Your own comment is the first thing in the thread, which starts the conversation the algorithm is looking for. A post with zero comments is dead on arrival regardless of how many reactions it collects.
The first two hours
On X the decisive window is roughly an hour. On LinkedIn it is longer and slower, closer to two hours, and the post can keep travelling for a day or two afterwards. That is genuinely good news for a founder who cannot sit on a feed all day, but it does not mean you can post and disappear.
- Post mid-morning on a weekday. Tuesday to Thursday, in the working hours of your main market. Weekend launches on LinkedIn reach almost nobody.
- Reply to every comment with a sentence. Not a reaction, not a thank you. Comment threads are the strongest signal you can generate.
- Message the twenty people who helped. Individually, not in a group. Ask them to comment rather than react, and tell them why it matters.
- Do not edit the post for the first hour. Editing shortly after publishing can disturb distribution. Fix the typo tomorrow.
- Answer the sceptical comment properly. The one asking how you compare to a known tool is doing your marketing for you. Reply with specifics, in public.
LinkedIn is not X
If you are launching on both, and you should, resist the temptation to paste the same text twice. The two feeds reward different things, and the same asset needs a different frame around it. The X version of this playbook is in how to launch on X.
| X | ||
|---|---|---|
| Decisive window | About one hour | About two hours, then a longer tail |
| Hook budget | The first line | Three lines, then "see more" |
| Best voice | Blunt, fast, opinionated | Direct but professional, first person |
| Post from | Your account | Your profile, never the company page |
| External link | First reply | First comment |
| Video length | 10 to 15 seconds | Up to 20 seconds, silent |
| Second format | Screenshot or GIF | Document carousel (PDF) |
| Worst day | Friday evening | Saturday and Sunday |
Treat it as a sequence
One launch post is not a launch. The announcement, the first paying customer, the feature that came out of a complaint, the number after thirty days, the thing that broke and what you learned: each of those is a post, and each reaches people who missed the previous one, which is nearly everybody.
What kills the sequence is production cost. If every post needs a new asset and every asset costs a day of editing, you will publish twice and stop. That is the real argument for keeping launch video cheap enough to remake, which is the case made in video content for startups.
FAQ
Should you launch a product on your LinkedIn profile or your company page?
Post from your personal profile and tag the company page inside the post. LinkedIn is weighted towards people rather than brands, so a personal post reaches substantially further than the same text on a page, especially a new page with few followers. Ask colleagues to comment on your post rather than reshare it, because comments carry more weight than shares.
How long should a LinkedIn launch video be?
Twenty seconds at most, and silent. Native video autoplays muted in the feed, so anything that depends on a voice-over is lost, and a launch clip only needs to prove the product exists and looks credible. Square or vertical uses more screen than widescreen. ShipTeaser produces exactly this: a 15-second, 1080p silent motion-graphics teaser generated from your landing page, with no voice-over and no editing.
Does putting a link in a LinkedIn post reduce reach?
Yes. Posts that send people off the platform are shown to fewer people. Publish the post without a link, add the link as the first comment immediately, and mention "link in the comments" in the post. This costs nothing and has the useful side effect of starting the comment thread yourself, which is the signal the feed actually rewards.
When is the best time to post a product launch on LinkedIn?
Mid-morning, Tuesday to Thursday, in the working hours of your primary market. LinkedIn traffic follows the working week closely, so weekend posts reach very little. Stay available for the two hours after publishing, because that is the window where comments decide how far the post travels.
What if the launch post underperforms?
Leave it up and post again in a few days with a different angle. Deleting and reposting the same thing wastes the small amount of distribution you earned. Almost nobody saw the first post, so the second one reaches a mostly new audience, and treating the launch as a sequence rather than a single day is what separates products that get noticed from products that do not.