Case Study · The Innovator
A Marine Raider’s resilience story pulled 2.5× the engagement of any business post, proof the playbook scales down to 50 people.
The challenge
The founder and CEO of a ~50-person urology medical-device startup is a former Marine Raider who sustained a spinal-cord injury in combat, an experience that became his mission and his company. He arguably had the most compelling personal story in our entire client base, but he was posting in bursts: thirteen posts one month, then three months of silence, then another burst. The engagement was there whenever he showed up, but the inconsistency meant the audience never compounded. Each burst restarted the flywheel from scratch.
What we did
The fix wasn’t a content overhaul. It was consistency. Over roughly seven months we converted sporadic bursts into a steady, sustained cadence so the algorithm could work in his favor and the audience could actually build. And we leaned into his “why”: the injury that led to the problem, the problem that led to the company, and the personal moments of recovery and family (the resilience narrative) rather than product launches and milestones.
The results
Sustained posting rose 2.3x, from 2.6 to 5.9 posts a month, and average likes climbed 21% as consistency let the algorithm compound. The decisive data point: his personal and resilience stories averaged 441 likes, about 2.5x the ~200-like average of his business content. His most powerful moments show the ceiling: the first time his sons saw him stand and walk drew over 3,000 likes; his injury anniversary nearly 3,000. The takeaway matters for every founder who assumes visibility is a big-company game: a 50-person startup produced the same compound curve, with the same framework, as a 3,000-person organization.
The playbook doesn’t require scale. It requires consistency.