How do you figure out which topics a founder should own?
A founder is usually the most credible voice a young company has. Buyers trust a person who built the product more than they trust a brand page, and a founder who writes well about one subject for a year becomes the name people think of when that subject comes up. The trouble is that most founders write when inspiration strikes. They post about a fundraise one week, a hiring lesson the next, and an industry hot take after that, and none of it adds up to a reputation for anything in particular.
Founder-led content works when it's narrow. Two or three topics, repeated from different angles, build recognition far faster than twenty topics touched once. So the real job is choosing those few topics well, and a good choice rests on three questions:
- Has the founder earned an opinion here? The best topics come from what the founder has actually done, decided, or gotten wrong. A logistics founder who rebuilt their pricing twice has standing on pricing. They have much less standing on leadership in general.
- Does their audience already care? The founder's past posts and talks show which subjects drew real engagement and which ones fell flat. A topic that already pulls comments is a topic people want more of.
- Is there an open spot for the company? If buyers search for the questions behind a topic and your website has no page that answers them, the founder's take can fill that gap and keep working for months.
Answering those questions by hand means reading a year of the founder's posts, sorting them by theme, comparing engagement, checking search demand, and auditing your own site. That's a slow afternoon for a marketer and an impossible one for a founder. It's also exactly the kind of evidence-gathering an AI agent does well, as long as the founder stays the source of every opinion.
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it finds the topics your founder should be known for and gets the first piece out the door.
How Kite finds your founder's topics and gets them seen
Kite starts with what it already knows about your company. During onboarding it researches your positioning, products, customers, and competitors and saves that research in your team's knowledge base. That tells Kite which subjects matter to your buyers before it looks at the founder at all.
Next, Kite reads the founder's public presence. It collects their recent LinkedIn posts, their posts on X, and the talks and podcast appearances it can find, and it groups what the founder talks about into recurring topics. It scores each topic on the founder's standing, the engagement it drew, the search demand behind it, and whether your company already has a page on it.
Then Kite picks the strongest topic and does the work. It writes a first guide from the founder's best thread on that subject, prepares the LinkedIn posts and other pieces that will carry it, and lays out when each one should go out. You review everything in the Kite web app or in Slack. Once the topics are agreed, Kite can keep the founder supplied with fresh angles each week and watch which posts land.
Kite may suggest this work on its own during sign-up. When your company is founder-led, the founder has a following, and your blog is thin, finding the founder's topics is often the first piece of work Kite proposes.
- Read everything the founder has already said in public
- Score each topic on standing, audience, and opportunity
- Write the first guide from the founder's own words
- Plan how the guide gets seen
- Keep the topics fresh every week
- See which topics are working
Read everything the founder has already said in public
Kite builds its picture of the founder from what they've actually published, not from a job title. Give it the founder's LinkedIn profile and Kite reads their headline, current role, past experience, and listed expertise, along with their recent posts and how much engagement each one drew. It adds the founder's public posts on X, and it searches the web for podcast episodes, conference talks, and interviews where they spoke at length.
Kite keeps each piece of evidence tied to its source. A topic label such as "pricing for usage-based products" only goes on the list when Kite can point to the posts, profile lines, or talks where the founder discussed it. If two people share the founder's name and Kite can't tell which profile is theirs, it asks before it uses anything, because one mixed-up profile would put someone else's opinions on your founder's list.
What comes out of this step is a map of the founder's recurring themes. Most founders have a handful of them, often without realizing it. One might be a story they tell in every interview. Another might be a subject they post about every few weeks that consistently outperforms everything else they write.
Score each topic on standing, audience, and opportunity
Kite turns the founder's themes into a founder-topic scorecard, so you can see why each topic ranks where it does. Each topic is judged on four things:
- Standing. Kite checks the topic against the founder's experience and your company's work. A topic they've lived through, such as building the product, selling to a specific kind of customer, or a mistake that cost real money, scores higher than a general opinion anyone could hold.
- Audience response. Kite compares the engagement on the founder's posts about each topic with their posts on everything else. A theme that regularly draws more reactions and comments than the founder's usual is a theme their network wants more of.
- Search demand. Kite uses its built-in search data to check how often people search for the questions behind each topic. It also looks at the questions buyers ask AI assistants in your category, since a clear founder take can become the source those answers cite.
- Your company's coverage. Kite reads your website to see whether you already have a page that answers the topic. A topic with an engaged audience and no company page is the strongest kind of opportunity, because the founder's network already cares and nobody at the company has written the definitive version yet.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Say a founder posts about three things: fundraising, remote hiring, and why their industry's onboarding takes too long. Fundraising posts get polite engagement but have nothing to do with what the company sells. Remote hiring gets steady reactions, but dozens of better-known voices already own it. The onboarding posts draw twice the comments of anything else, buyers search for onboarding questions every month, and the company website has no page on the subject. Onboarding goes to the top of the scorecard, and the other two stay on the list with the reason they ranked lower.
You and the founder have the final say. The scorecard is a recommendation with its evidence attached, and the founder may know that a topic is off limits or that a new one is about to matter. Kite treats the agreed list as the founder's themes from then on.
Write the first guide from the founder's own words
Kite turns the top topic into a first guide that your company can publish and the founder can stand behind. It starts from the founder's best-performing thread on that subject, since that's the version of their argument their audience has already responded to. It keeps the founder's strongest phrases as they wrote them and builds the guide around them, then fills in the surrounding context from your company's research, such as what your product does, who your customers are, and how your market works.
The guide is written to be found as well as read. When people search for the questions behind the topic, Kite titles and structures the guide around the words they use, so the page can keep bringing in readers after the founder's original post has faded from the feed. Kite writes it in your brand's voice with the founder's opinion at the center.
You review the draft before anything goes live. Once you approve it, Kite publishes it to a website it hosts for you and returns the live URL. If your blog runs on Webflow, WordPress.com, or another supported content system, Kite publishes through that connection instead.
Plan how the guide gets seen
A guide on your blog only reaches people who already visit it, so Kite delivers the guide with a distribution plan. The plan names each piece that will carry the founder's argument, where it goes, and when.
The main channel is usually the founder's LinkedIn. Kite pulls post-sized pieces out of the guide, such as the sharpest claim, the most surprising number, or a before-and-after from the founder's experience, and writes each one as its own post with two or three alternative openings. Each post opens with a concrete fact the founder supplied, inside the first couple of lines that show before LinkedIn's "more" cut-off. Links go in the first comment, since links inside a post tend to reduce its reach.
These posts are saved in the Social tab in Kite with a suggested day and time. Each one shows exactly how it will look on LinkedIn and which of the founder's own words it was built from. The founder approves a post, copies it to LinkedIn, and marks it posted. Posts from a person's own profile should come from that person, so Kite drafts and the founder posts.
When a post needs a detail the founder hasn't given yet, such as the specific moment behind a lesson or the number that proves it, Kite asks for it with one to three short questions. "When did this last actually happen?" and "Who would disagree with you?" are typical. The founder's answers are saved word for word on their page in the knowledge base, so Kite never asks for the same story twice.
The plan can also include a newsletter version of the guide and posts for your company's own channels. Kite drafts those alongside the founder's posts and publishes the ones outside LinkedIn through a connected account once you approve.
Keep the topics fresh every week
Owning a topic takes repetition, so Kite can keep the founder supplied with new angles on their themes every week. Once the founder is set up, Kite puts together a weekly LinkedIn plan that arrives on Monday morning in their timezone.
To build it, Kite reads the founder's recent posts, including ones written outside Kite, and searches the past week's news in each of their topic areas. It also looks for something new at your company, such as a launch recorded in the knowledge base. From that, it sends up to four post drafts built from material the founder has already given, and a brief of up to five fresh topics. Each topic arrives as a question or a tension rather than a ready-made view, with a prompt asking for the founder's take. Kite never supplies the founder's position. The founder replies with their opinion on the topics they care about, and Kite drafts from that reply.
Kite also learns from what the founder changes. It compares each approved post with the draft it wrote, and when the same edit shows up across two or more posts, such as shorter openings or no closing questions, it applies that lesson to the next week's drafts and tells the founder what it changed.
See which topics are working
Kite measures the founder's posts against their own usual, which is the fairest test of whether a topic is landing. For posts the founder marks as posted in Kite's Social tab, Kite compares each one's reactions with the founder's typical post. It also rereads their recent public posts each week, so it sees how everything they post performs, not only the posts Kite drafted.
On a website Kite hosts, built-in analytics show how many people read the guide and where they came from. Kite can also run the topic's questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to see whether your company starts appearing in the answers. These results tell Kite which themes deserve more of the founder's time and which ones to drop from the scorecard.
What you get
A founder-topic scorecard
Each of the founder's recurring topics, scored on their standing, their audience's response, search demand, and your company's coverage, with the evidence behind every score.
An agreed set of themes
The two or three topics the founder will be known for, saved on their page in your knowledge base so every later draft follows them.
A first guide
A publishable page on the strongest topic, built from the founder's own thread and written to be found in search.
A distribution plan
The LinkedIn posts, newsletter version, and company posts that carry the guide, each with a suggested day and time.
A weekly LinkedIn plan
Every Monday, up to four drafts and a short brief of fresh topics for the founder to weigh in on.
How to get started
Start by giving Kite the founder's LinkedIn profile and a simple goal. You might say, "Find the two or three topics our CEO should be known for," or "Our founder posts randomly. Figure out what they should write about and draft the first piece."
Kite reads the founder's public posts and your company research, then comes back with the scorecard and its recommendation. Once you agree on the topics, it drafts the first guide and the distribution plan for review. If the founder uses Kite themselves, they can set up their own author page in the Social tab by answering a few questions about their recent work. That's often the fastest route, and it starts their weekly plan.
You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. You don't need to connect anything for the scorecard or the first drafts, because Kite reads public LinkedIn and X posts with its built-in research. Connect Webflow or WordPress.com when you want Kite to publish the guide to a blog that runs outside Kite, or have Kite publish it to a site it hosts.
Kite proposes the topics and drafts, and nothing goes live until you approve it.
Integrations used to find your founder's topics
Kite researches the founder, scores the topics, and writes the guide with its own built-in tools. Integrations decide where the founder's posts and the finished guide appear.
Reach the founder's network
Common questions
How many topics should a founder try to own?
Two or three is the right number for most founders. That's enough range to post every week without repeating yourself, and narrow enough that people start linking your name to those subjects. Kite records the agreed themes on the founder's page, and both the weekly plan and every new draft stay inside them. You can swap a theme out later if the scorecard shows it isn't landing.
What should a founder write about on LinkedIn versus the company blog?
LinkedIn suits the founder's personal moments: a decision they made, a mistake, a customer conversation that changed their mind. The company blog suits the fuller version of the argument, written to answer a question buyers search for. The strongest founder-led programs connect the two. Kite writes the guide for the blog and then pulls the founder's LinkedIn posts out of it, so each post gives a taste of an idea the guide explains in full.
What if the founder doesn't have much of a following yet?
The scorecard still works, but it leans more on standing and search demand than on past engagement. Kite looks at the founder's experience, your company's positioning, and the questions buyers search for, then asks the founder for the stories they already tell out loud. A founder with little posting history can still pick strong topics. Kite simply has less evidence about what their audience likes until the first few posts go out.
How long does it take for a founder to become a recognized voice?
It usually takes months of steady posting, not weeks. Recognition comes from repetition, so the founder's tenth post on a topic does more than their first. That's why Kite sets up a weekly plan instead of a one-off campaign. It compares each post with the founder's usual results, so you can see within a few weeks which themes are gaining ground.
Can Kite post on the founder's LinkedIn for them?
Kite drafts the LinkedIn posts, and the founder posts them. Each draft waits in the Social tab, where the founder approves it, copies it to LinkedIn, and marks it posted. The guide itself publishes to your blog once you approve it, so the only step that needs the founder's own hands is posting from their personal profile.
Can Kite do this for someone other than the founder?
Yes. Kite can run the same process for any executive or subject-matter expert on your Kite team, such as a head of product or a lead engineer. It keeps a separate page for each person, with their own topics, material, and weekly plan, so each person's posts stay in their own voice.