What's your founder broadcast actually worth?
Five inputs. One year of pipeline. The number is usually larger than founders expect — and easier to defend than the gut figure they were going to use anyway.
Open the math
The calculator runs your inputs through a five-step funnel. Three constants are Studio Nine's working benchmarks — they're conservative, anchored on B2B SaaS clients with founder-led content programmes:
- Reach factor · 40%. LinkedIn impressions count each view, not each viewer. Across a year of consistent posting, roughly 40% of gross impressions resolve to unique people.
- ICP-relevance · 30%. Of the people who see a founder's posts, what fraction sit in the actual ICP? Founder audiences over-index on relevance compared to brand audiences, but they're not pure — 30% is the working assumption.
- Warm-lead rate · 1.5%. The share of ICP-relevant viewers who, across a year, convert into a warm inbound (reply, DM, demo request, intro). Anchored on what we see for clients with a quarterly content rhythm.
Steps 4 and 5 — lead-to-deal conversion rate and average deal size — are your numbers. Plug in honest figures. The output is annual pipeline value, defined as closed-won revenue we'd reasonably attribute to the founder distribution channel, not aggregate intent or vanity-stat reach.
Equivalent paid spend values your warm-lead volume at a B2B LinkedIn-ads cost-per-lead of ~$250. This is the cheapest you'd realistically generate the same lead count via paid targeting — most teams pay more.
What this tool deliberately ignores: dark-social effects, podcast/newsletter spillover, hiring-driven candidate quality, fundraise narrative, partner trust. Each of these is real and large; none are in the number above. Treat the output as a floor.
Paired with the essay: Why founder broadcast is undervalued (and how to start treating it like a real channel).