Anton Cherkasov

Last Wednesday I hosted a founders meetup in Bali. One question for the room: what’s your best distribution channel? 6 founders. Different products, different audiences. But almost every answer came down to 2 things. SEO or social media. Here’s what stuck with me.

So if you’re stuck on distribution: Pick one channel. Post more than feels comfortable. Study what already works. Wait for the curve.

What’s your best distribution channel right now?

Not copying. Taking a proven idea and making it his.

This is the exact playbook I see working on LinkedIn too. A lot of PostHero users do the same thing: check competitors, find posts that already went viral in their space, and adapt them to their own niche and voice. You don’t need to invent viral. You need to recognize it and make it yours.

2. Social growth is slow, then sudden. One founder grew his Instagram to 500,000 followers. But his first 300 followers took 3 months. Then one reel blew up. Then another. And the next 3 months took him from 300 to 100,000. Same effort. Completely different curve once he found what works.

3. How he found it is the real lesson. He posted 4-5 times a day. Goal is to learn faster. More posts = more data = faster to find what goes viral. And he didn’t guess what to post. He watched his competitors, found their viral posts, and added his own 2 cents on top.

1. SEO is not dead. Everyone loves to say it is. The founders using it are quietly getting great results. What works for them is nothing fancy: → High quality content (once a day) → Backlinks → Good website structure Boring. Slow. Still works.

You can now run your whole content workflow from Claude. PostHero MCP is live: write posts in your voice, make carousels and reels, check what’s performing. Setup takes 30 seconds: Customize → Connectors → Add custom connector → name it PostHero → paste mcp.posthero.ai/mcp

This tweet was written and scheduled without opening a single app. I just asked Claude. It's connected to PostHero through MCP, so it drafts, schedules and checks my analytics right inside the chat. Setup takes 1 minute: add mcp.posthero.ai/mcp as a custom connector in Claude.

1,964 posts were created in PostHero last week. Almost 2,000 in a single week. When I started, that number sounded impossible. Grateful for everyone who trusts PostHero to run their content.

The most valuable thing I’ve built isn’t a product. It’s an audience. I’ve built and sold a few products. Focus. Kepler Leads.

In the AI world, where anyone can build anything in a weekend, your product isn’t the moat anymore. Your audience is. The people who trust you and actually listen, that’s the thing nobody can copy or outbuild.

Build the audience. The products will have somewhere to land.

The most valuable thing I’ve built isn’t a product. It’s an audience. I’ve built and sold a few products. Focus. Kepler Leads.

Every one of them grew from the same channel: content. Not ads. Not cold outreach. Just showing up, sharing what I was building, and letting the right people find me.

Products come and go. I’ve sold some, shut some down. But the audience stayed. It followed me from one thing to the next.

7 *spicy* personal brand tips I’d give any founder starting from zero:

7. Your story is the one thing competitors can’t copy. They can clone your product in a weekend. They can’t clone six years of you showing up as yourself.

Pick one and start today. The best time to build your personal brand was years ago. The second best is this afternoon.

7 *spicy* personal brand tips I’d give any founder starting from zero:

5. Don’t sell. Share. Nobody follows you for your feature list. They follow you because they see how you think and how you live. The selling takes care of itself.

6. Boring and consistent beats clever and occasional. The person who posts a decent thing every day wins over the genius who posts once a month.

7 *spicy* personal brand tips I’d give any founder starting from zero:

3. Post before you feel ready. Your early posts will be bad. Post them anyway. You don’t find your voice by thinking, you find it by publishing.

4. AI won’t make you a good writer. It only amplifies what’s already there. If you can’t tell good from bad, it just makes you average faster.

7 *spicy* personal brand tips I’d give any founder starting from zero:

1. You don’t need a big audience. I got my first 5 customers with 400 followers. The right 400 beats a random 40,000.

2. Stop trying to go viral. Viral brings strangers who never buy. The quiet, specific post that gets 12 likes is the one that brings a customer.

10 signs a creator used AI to write their post. Once you see these, you can’t unsee them.

5. The one-word sentence for drama. “And that changed everything. Forever.” Instant fake gravity.

I’m not anti-AI. I use it every day. But if you don’t train it on your own voice, it hands you the same beige paragraph it hands everyone else. The post isn’t that someone used AI. It’s that they let it sound like AI.

10 signs a creator used AI to write their post. Once you see these, you can’t unsee them.

3. The word “quietly.” Everything is quietly falling apart, quietly changing, quietly building. It’s trying to manufacture an emotion the writing didn’t earn.

4. “It’s not just X. It’s Y.” The fake-deep escalation. AI reaches for it when it has nothing bigger to actually say.

10 signs a creator used AI to write their post. Once you see these, you can’t unsee them.

1. “You don’t have a X problem. You have a Y problem.” This is called correctio. AI loves it because it sounds profound without saying anything real.

2. Everything arrives in groups of three. “No fluff, no filler, just results.” That’s a tricolon, the rhythm of a keynote speech. It’s why every post now sounds like the same LinkedIn thought leader instead of a person.

In 2022 I sold my startup Focus. It grew almost entirely on SEO. And SEO worked. But looking back, I made one big mistake.

When I sold Focus, the traffic went with it. I had to start from zero again. A personal brand works differently: - It stays with you after you sell - People trust a founder more than a landing page - Every new product launches to an audience that already knows you

SEO builds a business. A personal brand builds you. Now I do both. And the personal brand helps much more than I expected. If you're building with SEO only, start posting today. Your future self will thank you.

In 2022 I sold my startup Focus. It grew almost entirely on SEO. And SEO worked. But looking back, I made one big mistake.

I never built a personal brand around it. SEO brings traffic. But traffic doesn't know who you are. People found Focus on Google, used it, and that's it. No relationship with the founder. No audience that follows what I build next.

The person you will be in 12 months depends on: - The content you consume - The posting schedule you follow - The people you surround yourself with - The engagement habits you cultivate - The conversations you participate in I'd add one more: The LinkedIn presence you build.

Today, my LinkedIn presence is responsible for: • 80% of my new client opportunities • Partnerships I never could have cold-emailed my way into • A community who challenges me daily

Same person. Different reach. Different life. Building a LinkedIn presence isn't vanity. It's one of the most strategic inputs you can control.

4 years ago, I had the expertise. I had the work ethic. I had the vision for my company. But I had no LinkedIn presence.

Which meant: - No inbound leads coming to me - No credibility in the market - No distribution for my ideas

I can spot AI content in 3 seconds. [And it's killing your credibility] Here's what gives you away:

(your rough edges are your brand) keep the random thoughts start with what actually pissed you off today say the thing everyone thinks but won't write show your half-baked ideas (they're more interesting) make weird comparisons (coffee shops & conversion rates)

What's the most obvious AI sign you've spotted?

I can spot AI content in 3 seconds. [And it's killing your credibility] Here's what gives you away:

robotic transitions like "moreover" and "furthermore" perfect grammar with zero personality em dashes everywhere (–) lists that sound like they came from a template buzzwords like "leverage", "game changing", and "cutting-edge" safe opinions that offend nobody

The real problem isn't that AI writes badly. It's that AI writes SAFELY. And safe is forgettable: don’t let AI take away what makes you different

Ran a founders meetup last week. One thing stood out. Around 80% of them struggle with the same thing: marketing.

Not the product. The product is usually great. They just can't get enough people to see it. I know it well because I made the same mistake. I spent most of my early time building and almost none telling anyone. The product got better. The business didn't.

The hard truth: a great product nobody hears about loses to an average one people know. Every time. The earlier you start marketing, the faster you get results. Waiting until the product is "ready" is just delaying the part that actually grows the business.