TL;DR: For five weeks, every LinkedIn post I published was drafted in Sahayak, the tool I built. Most posts got modest reach, two broke out, and I learned that impressions, reactions and trust are three different things. Not a flop, but a lot of learning.
The problem
Indian professionals want to build a personal brand, but staying consistent is hard. I’m one of them. So before launching Sahayak, I ran a stealth month: I used Sahayak for every post, without telling anyone, to see whether it actually helps me stay consistent.
What I did
- 15 posts between 27 September and 1 November (14 during the stealth month, plus the launch post), across five frameworks: Concept Breakdown, Hot Takes, Build in Public, Story Post, and Insights from Others.
- Every draft came from Sahayak, and I edited every one. When the context is ready, a draft takes me around 1.5–2 minutes. Hot Takes and Insights from Others take longer, because I have to do the research first.
- I tracked everything in a spreadsheet: impressions, reactions, comments, profile views and followers.
The one thing
Two posts brought most of the reach, and I couldn’t have predicted which ones.
| Anthropic and Git (Hot Take) | Job Sherpa (Build in Public) | |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 13,614 | 30,949 |
| Reactions | 9 | 71 |
| Saves | 2 | 108 |
| Sends | 1 | 24 |
| Profile views | 19 | 166 |
| Followers gained | 3 | 27 |
Together they made up about 85% of my 52,367 impressions. The other 13 posts mostly reached a few hundred people.
That’s why consistency matters to me now. Every post is a chance. I can’t pick the winner in advance, but posting regularly gives me more chances.
The second lesson is in the table: reach is not trust. Both posts reached people far outside my network (98% out of network). The Anthropic post got people to look. Job Sherpa got people to save it, send it and follow me. People react to a post which has some pain or fear attached, like job loss or Anthropic replacing something.
And I learned why engagement rate misled me. It divides by impressions, so where impressions were low the engagement rate was high, but the number of reactions was not. Where impressions were high, the engagement rate was low, but reactions were high. People see a post without necessarily reacting; that’s normal on LinkedIn. So I count high impressions as a win, to some extent, and I watch what people do: profile views, saves and follows.
Overall, followers grew from 998 to 1,123. 41 of them came in the first week, after my first three posts. My connections also grew, from 999 to 1,048.
What’s still broken / next
- I missed two targets. My engagement rate was below the 3% I aimed for, and I logged only 8 unique commenters against a goal of 40–50. Most comments were appreciation, or questions about how the tool would help. One was a question about evals, which I answered with real numbers.
- The reveal brought 2 sign-ups so far. There’s a lot of activity on the home page, but not much beyond that. I have a new strategy to reach more people, and that’s next.
- I’ll keep posting and keep tracking, now watching saves and profile views, not just engagement rate.
Part of my Build Log.