If you’ve ever stalled out rewriting your About section, or waited for your headline to feel “just right,” you’re in good company.
Yesterday, I hosted an event alongside Abraham (The AI Collectice and Supriya Gupta (Eve) where we had three execs step into the hot seat for a public teardown of their LinkedIn profile. My goal for everyone in attendance was the to provide clarity that when you strip branding back to lived experience and authored signal, the patterns (and mistakes) become hard to unsee.
Way too much energy gets spent mythologizing voice as something you “find.” What we saw: every founder in the hot seat already had opinionated hooks and differentiated thinking, but most of it was buried, either deep in old posts or locked away in DMs, decks, or hallway conversations.
The fix isn’t always some elaborate rebranding strategy. Instead, we should be looking to transplantation. Find the hook that could only belong to you, and move it to the very top: headline, About, first sentence. Then let your work, past stories, and customer evidence fill in the rest.
A few lessons anyone can use: The Three S’s
Specificity: Readers (and algorithms) scan for lines that only you could write. Those happen when you channel a real, unique viewpoint. Steer clear of catch-all labels and context-free adjectives. Instead, answer: “What is the sharpest, most contextual claim I can credibly make?”
Sharpness: Round, consensus-seeking language gets scrolled past. Sharpness is the line that cuts: “Most leaders don’t have a messaging problem. They have a participation problem.” If it’s not a little uncomfortable to own, it probably isn’t sharp enough.
Scale: If you’re already leading, building, teaching, or ranting, you already have 80% of the content you need. Schedule time once a month to audit: what fire did I drop in meetings, podcasts, or Slacks that hasn’t made it to the feed? Pull those, raw. Publish. The 20% is packaging.
No One Is Born with Presence. It’s Built by Habit. It’s almost always the operators with the juiciest receipts who feel the most awkward about “horn-tooting.” I get it. It feels cringe, until you realize: doors open for the visible, not just the excellent. If you want outcomes to match your impact, treat presence as a job requirement, not a medal ceremony.
Try This Now:
Open your last five posts, memos, or talks. Find the spiciest line (the one that got real nods, or a DM after). Make that line your new headline or About hook.
Pick one buried insight, turn it into a post, and drop it this week with the brief story behind it. Don’t let the algorithm edit out your edge.
For extra credit: audit your comment history. Is it an echo chamber of congrats, or do you drop real POV and ask ambiguous questions? Comments compound visibility in their own right.
Thank you to everyone who put their profiles up for live critique, and to Abraham & Supriya for co-hosting the event with me. If there’s demand, we’re happy to repeat the teardown series; send a DM or comment if you’re game.
Cat Valverde
GM, Eve Studio
helloeve.co
