Tanmay Singh Chauhan

Today, I’m entering my 4th year as a full-time ghostwriter. I grossed $150k, quit college, and completely flipped my life. 10 career advice I would give to my younger self: 1. Landing your first client will open all floodgates. But it’s also the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. 2. Knowing the right people gives you access to top-quality leads that never make it to the street. But they don’t entertain mediocre talents. 3. Be nice to everyone. Always leave people in your favor. Reciprocity will take care of the rest. 4. You’re in the business of reading and research. Be a professional reader. Take notes. 5. Outwork people. Work at least 6-8 hours a day. Don’t take weekends off. Follow an air-tight routine. 6. Cold-pitching is your greatest weapon. Hunt well-to-do-clients. Do free work for them. 7. Don’t take advice from people who are at the same level as you. They don’t know any better. 8. No one owes you work. Be a professional and always keep looking for it. It’s part of the job. 9. Acquire new sub-skills every month. Every new skill you acquire unlocks more money. Soon, you'll be in the top 1%. 10. If you don’t do this for at least 10 years, don’t do it for 10 days. Patience beats excellence in the long term. . . . Badum...tshhh. That's it for the day. Namaste.

As I stay longer in the game, I realized that whenever I see someone smart with raw horsepower of intelligence doing better than me, it's usually someone who got into the game with more initial knowledge. So instead of starting it at level 1 like me, they skipped directly to level 5. And that phase, level 1-5, is where most people quit cause it's too boring as you're just learning about how the game is played. Now, it might seem like they're naturally talented or fast learners, but once I got to know them personally, I often found out that they spent their amateur days elsewhere. It's never that they skipped those 'sucking days'. They were always taught this by someone else, just like I got that knowledge, albeit a little late. Once I got that initial knowledge and paid my dues, sucking at that skill, I never felt they had any big advantage over me. The playing field was levelled. So the concept of natural learners was completely shattered for me. It was just a matter of who got that opportunity and cashed in on it earlier. But the best part of it was always if they saw the game, something worthy of being kept playing. Those are the ones that suddenly appear out of nowhere after a couple of years, giving the impression of gifted people. Although it was just someone who found the game fun and kept levelling up.

A good researcher beats a great writer every day. A good writer is someone who can: • Write hooks • Produce stories • Take care of packaging This doesn't move the needle in most cases. On the other hand, a good researcher is someone who can: • Find underused sub-topics • Fill knowledge gaps in your audience's head • Keep an eagle eye on your top competitors' content In other words: A good writer can polish your content, improving it by 10% at best. But a good researcher discovers untapped opportunities, delivering a 100% improvement. Be careful who you choose to work with.

The sand shortage paradox perfectly defines why AI writing will always miss the mark. In the construction business, it’s a known thing that sand is a critically endangered species. We’re running out of sand as we build more infrastructure, more houses, and more walls. But then one would say, “we have thousands and thousands of kilometer-wide deserts.” Correct. Just one thing, it’s of no use. And the flaw is that it’s too perfect. Too polished. In deserts, the wind transports sand all the time, and in that process it pushes it around so much that it becomes a perfect circle. And a perfect circle is terrible at sticking together. Hence, it cannot be used for building things, the structure will not hold itself. That’s why we now have sand mafias stealing from beaches, because that sand is imperfect, jagged, and actually sticks together. Now, think of AI writing. You prompt it, it takes a deep dive into its wide knowledge and database and comes up with something. The output is also correct to some extent. But again, like that desert sand, it’s too polished, it’s too perfect. AI, with its neat bullet points, perfect prose, and careful argument, is hollow. It doesn’t have a human stain that drives people to read and keeps it engaging. It’s unjagged. I read more than the average joe, and I love how each writer comes with a prejudice. No matter how smart they are, they’re cracked and painted in a way that I like. Take the example of Nietzsche, you can see his personal bitterness bleed into his philosophy. Even after 100 years, people read him for those reasons. Now, I know AI is getting better at writing, it might even get to the point where we can’t tell the difference, but since it will always be too polished and too perfect, people will not like it. I predict good writers will use it to do their cleanups and research, but they will not use it for its writing prowess.

After 4 years of writing social content full-time, here are some harsh truths I’ve learned about founders and what they want from their content partners: . No matter what they tell you, all of them love going viral once in a while. . They want the writing to sound like them, even if you write wayyyy better than they do. . They want you to take their ideas (even if they’re outright mediocre) and create a post from them. . They want quick responses on Slack and quick turnarounds on edits. Even if you’re not doing your best work, they just want to feel that someone is “on it.” . Most of them don’t like the boring parts of content (first drafts, research), so don’t involve them. . Let them take the credit for success, of course in subtle ways. . They love an expert with a spine, so push back when you genuinely feel their suggestion is harmful Anything else I’ve missed?

some of you just want dozens of likes on your posts and not make any money and it shows in your content.

Great content is just logical content with a sprinkle of novelty. And logical content is a checklist that you never fail to follow. It has several parts: . Big claim – “I believe China will be the only superpower by 2050” . Reason, why do you think that – “Its GDP has consistently been in the top 10 sectors” . Evidence, to support that claim – “As per reports, they’ve been growing at 5%” . Warrant, the bridge between evidence and claim – “The same pattern repeated when the US rose to world power in the 60s and Germany in the 20s” . Addressing objections, the top arguments against your claims For instance, one of my clients is a huge believer that early-stage startups must not look for work-life balance. So whenever I find in my research that another veteran founder believes something similar, I use that in place of evidence. This covers the novelty part. Instead of just anecdotally arguing your point, you take help of evidence to pack a more powerful punch. Now of course this is a very tedious process that you follow every time, but after you soldier through the first 2 to 3 months, it becomes second nature.

A content writer who primarily thinks his job is to ‘just write’ will always stay mediocre. I did this in my early years. All I would do was sit and come up with posts for clients and myself. It read like a template with the names swapped out. Of course, I later learned that good writers are broad thinkers who always try to punch above their weight category. They do this by taking up new topics to explore, new actions to summarize, and bringing new thinking to their old worldviews. It requires great effort. For example, a great post you read in 2 minutes about how they increased their retention rate probably took them 6 months of hard work. Difficult activity thus atomizes great content. That’s why I have a rule of thumb that I try to follow: “Is this a summary of a difficult activity I completed?” If the answer is NO, I drop that idea immediately. There’s already too much slop on the internet, and I don’t want slush named after me.

@Connorwregan framework is wide set of rules that are flexible sort of like a lodestar. How-to are quite tactical very little scope, they work step by step, sequence is of great importance. and thank you :)

@TanmayS_Chauhan Tanmay, I had this one bookmarked. One of the accounts I go back to for great ideas. Was curious, what distinguishes a 'how-to' from a framework for you? Thanks

In 2025, I transitioned completely from Twitter to LinkedIn ghostwriting agency and built a new lead gen channel for myself. Here’s what’s working for me: 1. Be pigeonholed I stick to 3 topics that I can pull off best. I don’t want to add to the noise, so I leave no chance for people to get confused. As Buffet often said, “Stay within your circle of competence.” I follow that to my heart. 2. Outbound This is the first time in my 4 years of writing career that I started doing outbound regularly. It works unfailingly well on LinkedIn. I’m sending max connection requests (200+) and all those who accept get a templated welcome DM. 3. Free work On top of all this, I’m pitching 5-6 free-work to the ones I consider “will immediately benefit from my service. " This is a numbers game, so I consider it buying lottery tickets every week. Apart from all this, it’s a good content exercise for me to write for different businesses in different styles. Keeps me sharp. 4. Only writing 5 types of posts Though I may not be doing this for myself with utmost discipline, but definitely doing it for my clients. I keep things brain-dead simple: Monday – Framework Tuesday – Case study Wednesday – How-to-guide Thursday – Lesson/Mistakes Friday – Authority by association And by the end of every month/week, drop in a recap of what happened. 5. Backstage content None of this matters if I don’t bring crunchy content to the table. AKA case studies. Like generating leads for 8-figure businesses. Or scaling my agency past $150k. Or how I attract leads for my business. High-quality source/action gives birth to high-quality content. 6. Less but high quality It took me a lot of time to accept the reality that ‘bigger is better’ audience doesn’t work for high-ticket service-based businesses. The majority of my clients on LinkedIn have less than 10,000 followers, and they generate millions in revenue simply because the right people are following them. I did that mistake on Twitter once. Not again. . . . That’s it for the day. Namaste.

As a first-time founder learning sales on the go, the buyer cycle was such an outlandish concept to me. Over time, I learned that turning a potential lead into a client can sometimes take anywhere from 3 weeks to 15 weeks. I always thought it was a maximum of 4–5 weeks, tops. I would stop following up and assume the deal was a dead end. Then I worked with a tier 1 content agency founder and saw their sales cycles. They would go as long as 20 weeks sometimes, and they still wouldn’t panic. A lot of the jitters I had were just part of the learning experience. I forgot that ROI on content is never guaranteed. If you promise that, you’re going to attract the wrong crowd. It takes a lot of guts from a founder to justify that cost. They would often just poke around, inquire with a couple of agencies with a good reputation, and then go cold for a while. One time, I asked a founder I signed after following up for 10 weeks what made him pull the trigger. He said, “Our competitors are growing strong on LinkedIn.” Other times, I got answers like, “Timing felt right,” or “Revenue is stable.” So the answers have no consistent pattern. It’s kind of like asking a girl out. There’s 5% control you have over the decision, the other 95%, you simply don’t know what went wrong. The smart decision here is to just control what you can, which is consistently following up and continuing to publish good content on your end.

One of the biggest psyops that personal branding gurus sold to the masses was write at a 4th-grade level. I’ve found this simply not true at all. The reason, which was hiding in plain sight, was that the founders I was writing for were all well read and neatly educated. Some went to Stanford, others had MBAs from Harvard, a few were avid readers, so they abhor childish writing. So, I think the goal was never to DUMB IT DOWN. These founders are writing for other well-educated VCs, founders, and 8-figure leads who don’t like being talked down to. But of course, there’s some truth to this advice. And that is to write simple. I’m going to kick it up a notch, I think they mean to write logically. Each sentence has to fight for its place in the post. If that means the writing becomes slightly more advanced, so be it. The goal of writing is to convince the reader, not make them feel smarter because they read your whole post in one breath.

All of my clients are growing quite crazily, and the common denominator among them is that they’re heavily involved in the process. In simple words, they give a damn. They don’t want plug and play. They don’t want someone to get their personality and writing style instantly. I’ve seen many agencies onboard founders who are “too busy to get involved in content.” Sure, content doesn’t belong at the top of the pyramid when you’re running a startup. There are too many balls in the air that you have to keep an eye on. But that doesn’t degrade its value, and you can’t half-ass it. If you’re going to half-ass it, which means: . not doing regular interviews . not keeping a check on writing quality . not asking about the long-term goal You’re essentially telling your content agency, “I don’t care what you post. I’m going to complain and I’m going to churn.” I’ve had incidents where founders of content agencies tell writers that “this client belongs to the above category.” They know putting in any active effort is still going to be met with a dead wall, so they do the bare minimum so that you keep paying the invoice month after month. It’s much better for such founders to completely stop this Ozempic content run and return when they actually think it’s something worth doing.

A players don’t tolerate office politics. B players can’t avoid office politics. C players do office politics.

I post 5x a week for clients, and they bring such impressions. Here are a few things that are working for us: . Informal hooks work the best, like starting the first sentence mid-way or with conjunctions . Share the founder’s taste resource list, like where they get niche industry updates . No VA comments, much better to leave them as they are, and hell no on AI comments . Posting 1x case study, I go through their transcripts and find quick wins they delivered . Taking content from their sales calls, spotting objections, and turning those into content . Going through the content of their top 3 competitors on LinkedIn and stealing authentically Most of this just stuff is just boring slogging but it definitely works.

Use to roam around the neighbourhood. We had a lot of trees so I would climb up and sit on the branches with friends. Read a lot of difficult Hindi non fiction that my father bought. And of course swing on the maingate of the house waiting for other kids to show up.

The easiest upgrade I’ve made to my lead-gen game: Give unasked consultation to ICPs. Every week, my VA sends 150 to 200 connection requests (which you should do as well.) Once they accept, I go over their profile and start treating them like my clients. Like what changes I would bring to their content if I were writing it. I write a Notion document that has: . things they’re not doing right . changes I would make . what result those changes will bring, often I’ll plug my case studies here It takes me close to 60 to 90 minutes to make the whole thing. I’ve started doing this 4 times a week. So far I’ve been getting 2 positive responses out of 10. They either become clients or warm leads for me. I ran the same experiment with my other client, who has delegated this process to his team, and he just adds the final check before the pigeon is sent with the scroll.

@charliewrich We’re taking notes charlie

I do my best writing when I’m moving around Sometimes I just pull into a random parking lot behind a Costco, turn on my hotspot, write up some posts, then drive to the next place

“10+ calls booked or you don’t pay the money” Anyone guaranteeing you this is either a LinkedIn god or they’re absolute beginners with no skin in the game. Even if you’re one of the best in the game, you still can’t promise a certain number. Especially for a new founder who has never posted previously. Often, my clients churned because they think content works like a vending machine. You put content in, and a lead pops out. And in times like these, when people barely have any patience, some bogus agencies take advantage of it. Of course, what happens afterward is a series of sad events: • all they do is spam LinkedIn outbound for you • the leads aren’t qualified or high quality • you churn and start looking for the next fix Back in the day, I worked at such an agency, where clients would churn every two months, sometimes even sooner. They take advantage of your marketing innocence. It’s a phase most new founders go through. They learn their lesson and eventually realize how much effort it actually takes to build a new acquisition channel. A good rule of thumb for service-based agencies that have just started posting is to expect nothing in the first 6 months. Not saying you can’t generate leads before that. But when it happens early, it’s usually because you already come across as a very credible person with a lot of work experience. Because, generally, people don’t suddenly start throwing their money at you (especially for premium-priced services) just because you decided to start posting content. There’s a story in Buddhism that talks about something similar. Early monks lived on bhikṣā, going door to door asking for food in the same neighborhood every day. But some monks would get bored with showing up in the same area and start seeking novelty. They would travel to different neighborhoods every week. But the problem was villagers were less likely to give food to monks who were inconsistent or unfamiliar. Sometimes they would wait to see someone show up at their door multiple times before offering the first meal. The Buddha warned monks to avoid this hopping around and get good at showing up. That’s why I always tell such founders that repetition precedes lead-gen. Even when I started building on LinkedIn, it took me around 6 months before I got my first inbound. Though I had years of work experience. You have to play the long-term game here.

@mehekprabhakar Great writing, even better research!

@Simridhi_ gg

Lesssgo fam! Lessgo.