Every AE I talk to says they are "doing LinkedIn."

Then I ask what that means, and it's the same thing every time.

Automation. DMs. A sequence firing into an exec's inbox.

That's not LinkedIn. That's cold email. Some would even say spam.

I use LinkedIn completely differently, and it changed my business.

I decided I was going to have a point of view that nobody else had. And for anyone who cared about that one topic, I was going to be the person they got their thinking from. That was the whole strategy. Not a pitch. A perspective.

So I stopped DMing founders, and I started commenting.

Here's what most people miss about that distinction. DMing is a withdrawal. You're reaching into someone's inbox and asking for their time before you've given them a reason to care. Commenting is a deposit. You're adding something to a conversation they already chose to be in, in front of an audience, where the value you add is visible to everyone watching. Same platform. Opposite motion. One takes, the other gives, and people can feel which one you're doing.

So here's what the day actually looked like.

An hour a day. Finding the people who were already my prospects. I also looked for the handful of people in my space with real reach. I turned on notifications, and was often the first to say something sharp when they posted. Not generic. Not AI slop. Something different from everyone else.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The comment section under a popular post is its own sea of sameness. "Great post." "So true." "Thanks for sharing." Fifty people saying the same nothing. If you want to be seen, you can't sound like the other forty-nine. You have to add a real thought, take a small position, say the thing the post danced around. The bar isn't high. Most people aren't even trying. But you have to actually try.

Here's what nobody tells you about commenting. Posting gets you in front of people who already know you. Commenting gets you in front of the people who don't. You say something worth reading under someone else's post, and the people in that thread go, who's this? And they click over. And now you're on their radar without ever having asked them for anything.

Think about what just happened there. You didn't interrupt them. You didn't land in their inbox uninvited. They chose to click. They came to you. That one difference, whether they came to you or you chased them, changes the entire temperature of everything that follows. A conversation that starts with them curious about you is a fundamentally different conversation than one that starts with you asking for their time.

It got so predictable I could feel it working. I would do a batch of comments, and I knew a certain percentage would come comment back, or at a minimum I'd see them show up on my profile. That's the tell. When someone views your profile, they're thinking about you. Now you send the connection request, and that's not cold anymore.

That's the whole trick, honestly. The connection request that everyone treats as step one is actually step three. By the time I sent it, they'd already read something I wrote, formed an opinion, and come looking. I wasn't a stranger asking to connect. I was the person whose comment they remembered. The request was a formality on a relationship that already existed, even if it was only a few days old.

I got to a point where I was self-generating 15 to 20 meetings a week. Zero automation. Just commenting and posting.

I don't see many sellers doing this. That's exactly why it works.

Now, a word on the sales part, because I don't want to pretend I was above it. I will admit there were times when I leaned in a little more. After a thoughtful comment, I might say, "I'd like to learn more about what you are building. Open to a conversation?" In my case the founder audience is proud of what they built and often wants to show it off. So the ask didn't feel like an ask. It felt like interest, because it was. That's the line. You can lean in, but only after you've given enough that leaning in reads as curiosity, not as the thing you were after the whole time.

And in other cases it may not land as well. A buyer who isn't proud of what they're building, or who's guarded, or who's been burned by a hundred pitches disguised as compliments, will smell the pivot. So read the room. The move works because it's genuine. The second it becomes a script, it stops working, because the whole reason commenting beats DMing is that it doesn't feel like selling. Turn it back into selling and you've given up your only advantage.

There is no silver bullet. I'm not going to tell you this is the one channel that replaces everything else, because it isn't, and anyone who tells you they've found the one thing is selling you the one thing.

But the principle underneath it travels everywhere. Most sellers do the same thing as every other seller, which means they compete on volume and land in the same ignored inbox. The entire game is doing something different, something that gives before it asks, something that makes a person curious enough to come to you.

The key is doing something different than most sellers.

Give more than you get.

The meetings take care of themselves.