Why Every Scary LinkedIn Decision I Made in 2025 Turned Out Right (And What It Means for Your 2026 Strategy)

But 2025 taught me something crucial: your fear isn't a warning sign. It's a compass, and it's pointing exactly where you need to go. Especially if you're building on LinkedIn in 2026.

The Three Scary Decisions That Changed Everything

Let me walk you through three decisions I was terrified to make—and why each one became the turning point that transformed my business and content strategy.

Watch the full video above, or keep reading for the complete breakdown of what changed in 2025 and what you need to do differently in 2026.

1. Requiring Credit Cards for Our Free Trial (The Decision That Fixed Everything)

I was convinced this would kill our signup numbers. I'd been putting it off for months—actually, years if I'm honest. Every metric I cared about would tank, or so I thought.

Here's what actually happened:

In mid-2025 (May through July), our SEO work finally started kicking in. Traffic was growing beautifully. But signups, activation, and new subscriptions? They weren't following. People signed up more, but they didn't activate. They didn't subscribe. The numbers just weren't correlated, which caused countless sleepless nights.

The Breaking Point: As a founder, you're in constant doubt about whether your product is actually any good. I thought with one marketing channel finally working, everything else would inevitably rise. But it didn't.

That's when I finally did what I'd been avoiding: I started asking for a credit card at signup. Still a free trial, but you have to put your card in.

The Results Were Immediate:

• It raised activation rates like magic
• It filtered out tire kickers who never intended to subscribe
• Our MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) completely reversed course
• What was a downtrend before late July/early August became an immediate growth trend

This one change put our entire product trajectory into an upward spiral. Better activation meant better feedback from the right people, which meant we could improve the product based on real user needs. We're still in this positive loop today.

The Lesson: I knew I should do this for a long time. Every expert, coach, consultant, and book told me to—especially for bootstrapped software products. But I kept thinking nobody would sign up anymore, that I'd lose 70-80% of signups overnight.

And you know what? I did lose the signups. But I gained the subscribers.

We weren't losing users. We were finally filtering for the right ones—the ones who activated, posted, actually had the problem we're solving, and stuck around.

That's when it hit me: The real problem we're solving isn't lack of ideas or writing ability. The main problem is commitment to the cause. By asking for that little bit of skin in the game at signup, we raised commitment and attracted people who were committed to the cause.

2. Starting Weekly YouTube Videos (Building the Content Machine)

This was a different kind of scary. It wasn't a single decision—it was showing up week after week, talking basically to no one, wondering if I was wasting hours of my life.

I was never keen on putting my face in front of content. But I realized that to be authentic and practice what I preach, I had to do it. So about half a year ago, with zero subscribers and zero proof, I hit record for the first time.

The Reality Check:

• I committed to one video every week (and haven't missed a single one)
• To this day, I'm not getting huge views
• I still hardly have any subscribers
• I'm not pushing YouTube as a lead generation channel at all

So why continue? Because I figured out something crucial after iterating on my production process:

These weekly videos became by far the easiest way for me to generate a ton of content.

Here's what happens with every single video I create:

• The video goes on YouTube
• It becomes a blog post
• It becomes a newsletter
• It becomes a LinkedIn article
• It gets cut up into shorts for YouTube and LinkedIn
• YouTube shorts get 1,500+ views pretty regularly with minimal effort
• I turn the topics into LinkedIn posts using the transcripts

The Real Insight: Views on a single video are almost irrelevant. The system I built around it—that's the asset. Video is still the most authentic way to talk about anything, to get your face out there, to market to existing users, new users, and people on the fence.

In the beginning, it took me two days to create one video. Now I'm doing it in half a day because the system delivers. And with time, I don't mind talking into the camera anymore.

3. Betting Everything on Boring Consistency Instead of Viral Content

This might be the most important shift of all.

In 2023, I managed to get several very viral posts on LinkedIn that generated great leads. I thought I'd found a repeatable system where I could go viral once a month fairly predictably.

Then 2025 Hit:

Early in Q1, the viral strategy stopped working. We had a huge campaign launching a free LinkedIn scheduler—I did everything that worked in 2023:

• Aligned my "army" (reached out to influential accounts)
• Lined up people to interact and boost the post
• Used proven viral formats

It massively failed. There was a little blip, but it didn't create the leads we hoped for. It didn't go viral the way we expected. It proved something had fundamentally changed.

But Here's What I Noticed:

While my reach went down, my engagement rate went up. I was getting better, higher-quality engagement on my content.

At that point, I decided the viral strategy wasn't working anymore. I needed something that compounds and builds over time based on quality.

The Data Proved Me Right:

A few months later, we ran a huge report analyzing our user data (I'll link the detailed video below). Here's what we found:

• Consistent posters gained an average of almost 5,000 followers
• Inconsistent posters gained only 783 followers
• Both groups used the same tool (Continent) with the same features and AI
• The only difference was showing up and purposefully iterating on content

The Uncomfortable Truth:

As humans, we tend to go for big, exciting stuff instead of boring, repetitive work. But that repetitive work is what's needed now with LinkedIn.

It's not about:

• Finding the perfect hook anymore (AI writes great hooks)
• Trying to hack the algorithm (I don't think that exists anymore)
• Some burst of creative genius (every "inspired" post I wrote myself flopped)

What works is:

• The repetitive stuff that has worked before
• Repurposing what works for others with your own ideas
• Doing and talking about the same stuff again and again in different ways
• Ignoring the fact that it might become boring for you

We're not in a talent gap anymore because AI is our talented ghostwriter. We're in a consistency gap.

That's actually good news because consistency is a metric you can control. It's not sexy. It's not cool. But it's one you have 100% agency over.

LinkedIn Made the Same Scary Decision (And Why It Was Right)

I wasn't the only one making scary decisions in 2025. LinkedIn was too.

LinkedIn did something this year that terrified all of us: They cut reach dramatically—on average 50% down from the 2023 peak.

People panicked:

• "The algorithm is broken!"
• "LinkedIn is dead!"
• "LinkedIn favors bros over women!"
• "Time to move to X or ditch LinkedIn altogether!"

But here's what I think actually happened:

LinkedIn made the same trade we made with credit cards. Their goal wasn't to punish creators—it was filtering and pruning for quality, filtering out the tire kickers at the content level.

The Old Algorithm vs. The New Algorithm

The Old Algorithm: More like a numbers game. It showed your content to tons of people. If enough engaged, it went viral. Volume over everything.

The New Algorithm: Says "prove you have something valuable to say and we'll show it to exactly the right people."

What This Means Practically:

• Yes, your impressions are down
• But the people seeing your content are more likely to actually care
• The algorithm got much better at matching content with the right audience
• Less reach, better engagement, more qualified attention

Sound familiar? That's exactly what happened when we added credit cards. We got fewer signups but better users.

In a way, LinkedIn and we both gave up volume for quality. And I think LinkedIn was right to do that.

What This Means for Your 2026 LinkedIn Strategy

The fear compass isn't just "do the scary thing." It's more specific than that.

The scary thing in 2026 is this: Stop optimizing for reach. Start optimizing for relevance instead.

Let me break that down with specific mindset shifts:

Your 2026 Mindset Shifts

Shift #1: From Reach to Relevance

• Your fear: My impressions are down
• Your new mindset: The right 500 views beats the wrong 5,000. Quality of attention matters more than quantity.

Shift #2: From Viral to Consistent

• Your old thinking: I need to go viral
• Your new mindset: Consistent expertise compounds faster than occasional hits. The algorithm literally rewards consistency now. Irregular posting gets penalized.

Shift #3: From Broad to Niche

• Your fear: I'm too niche
• Your new mindset: The algorithm rewards topic authority. Suggested posts (which are growing fast) specifically match content to topic interest. Niche is an advantage now, not a limitation.

Think about it this way: How many people do you need to have a successful business? If the answer is 100, 500, or something in that range, remember there are more than 1 billion potential leads on LinkedIn. Your job is to find those 100 or 500 right ones for you. There's no such thing as being too specific because there are enough people for your specific niche on LinkedIn. Guaranteed.

Shift #4: From Outputs to Inputs

• The classic fear: I'm posting and nothing is happening
• Your new mindset: Track your inputs, not your outputs. Posts published, streaks maintained, days you showed up. Your 30th post will outperform your first one by tenfold if you keep doing that and iterate on what you're talking about.

Of course, watch your analytics. But embrace the new reality and embrace the fear. Your fear is probably toward:

• Accepting smaller numbers in exchange for better quality
• Consistency over creativity
• Depth over breadth

That's the door. Walk through it.

How We're Supporting This New Reality in 2026

In Q4 2025, we added features that support this new reality:

• New dashboard for better visibility
• Streak counter to track consistency
• Better support for commenting and engagement
• Integrated analytics, comments, content, and lead management

The reality is that creating great content isn't the end game anymore. AI has made that really simple. But having an integrated system that allows you to stay on top of everything—analytics, comments, your content, your leads—that helps you get this stuff out and compounds over time? That's still very valuable in 2026.

We're doubling down on:

• Making it easier to repurpose your content
• Making it easier to improve on what has already worked
• Making it as easy as possible for you to walk through that door

Where My Fear Compass Is Pointing in 2026

For me, it's exactly this: doubling down on the boring things, the little tweaks, the little improvements—both for Continent and for this content.

It's about:

• Showing more authority
• Embracing more opinions
• Becoming more vulnerable
• Not just sharing updates but deeper insights into what's working, what's not, where we are
• Relentlessly doing the hard work

Here's the funny thing: Building a new feature is actually not hard. It's fun. What's hard is taking a feature you've already built and relentlessly improving it so it's:

• Frictionless UX
• Highest quality in output
• Completely bug-free

That's the hard work, and it takes much more time than building the feature in the first place. That's what we're doubling down on in 2026.

Questions to Guide Your 2026 Strategy

So here are the questions for you:

• What is the thing you've been avoiding on LinkedIn?
• What is the vanity metric you're afraid to let go of?
• What is the topic you're avoiding or being ambiguous about?
• What would you build? What would you post if you optimized for the right 500 people instead of the wrong 5,000?

That is probably your 2026 unlock.

I'm off to finding my next scary door. Best of luck to all of you in 2026.

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