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Pipeline · Free tool

Founder Audience ROI

Work out your founder audience ROI: what your founder broadcast is actually worth in annual pipeline. Five inputs model one year of compounding distribution, honestly.

01LinkedIn followers

Your current follower count on your founder profile. Approximate is fine.

02Posts per week

Posts you publish, or could realistically publish, on the founder profile each week. Consistency matters more than volume.

3/ wk
/ wk
03Average post impressions

Median impressions per post over the last 90 days. LinkedIn shows this in your post analytics. Use the median, not the standout.

04Average deal size

Annual contract value, averaged across your last 12 months of new business.

$
05Lead-to-deal conversion rate

Of warm leads (inbound enquiries from people who already know your work), what % become closed-won? Most B2B teams sit between 5% and 15%.

8.0%
%
Under the hood…

The calculator runs your inputs through a five-step funnel. Three constants are Studio Nine’s working benchmarks. We keep them deliberately conservative and base them on B2B clients whose founder-led marketing runs on content:

  • Reach factor · 40%. LinkedIn impressions count each view, rather than 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 versus brand audiences, yet they’re not pure. So 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).

Steps four and five, lead-to-deal conversion rate and average deal size, are your numbers. The output is annual pipeline value. That is, closed-won revenue we’d reasonably attribute to the founder distribution channel, rather than aggregate intent or vanity reach.

Equivalent paid spend values your warm-lead volume at a B2B LinkedIn cost-per-lead of ~$250. That’s the cheapest you’d realistically generate the same lead count via paid. Most teams pay more.

What this deliberately ignores: dark-social effects, podcast and newsletter spillover, candidate quality, fundraise narrative, partner trust. Each is real and large, yet none are in the number above. Treat the output as a floor.

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