Research someone's LinkedIn profile and posts

Kite researches one confirmed identity at a time, because mixing two people's profiles would make every conclusion afterward wrong. The surest way to start is to paste the person's LinkedIn profile URL. Kite cleans up links copied from the app or a search result so they point at the profile itself.

If you only have a name and a company, Kite searches professional profiles by name, employer, and title to find the match. When more than one person could fit, such as two people named Sam Chen at the same company, Kite asks you which one you mean, usually by checking their title or location with you, rather than guessing.

The profile gives Kite the factual frame for everything else: who the person is, where they work, and how they got there. Kite pulls these profile fields:

• The headline and the about section, in the person's own words.
• Their current role and employer, plus their past roles and companies.
• Their education, listed skills, and location.
• Their connection count, which gives a rough sense of their reach.

When the purpose calls for it, Kite also looks up the person's work email, preferring an address at their current employer and recording whether it was confirmed as deliverable.

The profile is also where Kite checks for gaps between what someone says and what they've done. A headline that says "helping SaaS teams scale" means more once you see that the person spent six years running sales at two SaaS companies before going independent.

The quickest way to understand what someone posts about is to group their recent posts by theme and see which themes they return to and which ones drew a response, and Kite does that grouping for you. It pulls the person's most recent original posts and skips reposts they shared without adding any comment of their own, since those say little about what the person thinks.

For each post, Kite has:

• The full text, the date, and a link to the post.
• The number of reactions, comments, and shares it received.
• Any links the post included.
• Whether it carried images or video.

From that, Kite tells you the three or four topics the person keeps coming back to, what they seem to believe about each one, and which posts started the most conversation.

Take a head of operations at a regional logistics company whom you're about to pitch. Kite might find that most of her posts over the last two months are about driver turnover, that she's skeptical of software that promises to fix it, and that her one post with five times her usual comments was a story about a dispatcher who quit over a scheduling mistake. That tells you what to lead with and what tone to avoid.

Kite tells you how many posts it read and whether more were available, so you know how much history sits behind each conclusion. You can ask it to go further back or to narrow the read to a specific period.

You learn someone's writing voice by looking at the habits that repeat across their posts, and Kite describes those habits with an example post behind each one. It looks at:

• How the person opens a post.
• How long their sentences and paragraphs run.
• Whether they tell stories or make arguments.
• How they use lists, line breaks, questions, and emoji.
• The words and phrases they reuse.
• How they end a post, whether with a question, a call to action, or nothing at all.

Kite keeps the person's actual post text as source material and keeps its own descriptions separate from it. A voice note might read, "Opens with a one-line claim, then backs it up with a short story from a customer call," followed by the posts where that pattern shows up. That separation lets you check each observation against the real writing, and it keeps the description honest when someone's style varies.

This is the part that matters most when you're writing for someone. If you're ghostwriting for your CEO, Kite can save their voice to your team's wiki so every later draft starts from how they actually write. If you're pitching a guest post to a newsletter writer, knowing their voice tells you what kind of piece they'd want to publish.

The research is only useful when it shapes what you do next, so Kite carries it straight into the next piece of work. Here's what that looks like for the most common reasons people research a profile:

• Reaching out to a prospect. Kite drafts a short LinkedIn message or email that refers to something the person actually posted about and connects it to your company. For LinkedIn messages, Kite drafts the text for you to copy and send from your own account.
• Partnering with a creator. Kite summarizes whether the person's themes and audience response fit your brand, and it can write the outreach and the brief once you decide to go ahead.
• Writing for an executive. Kite writes posts in that person's voice on the topics you choose, using the voice notes and example posts as its guide.
• Building a personal website. Kite can use a person's profile and posts as the starting material for a site about them, including their photo and the logos of the companies they've worked for.

Kite asks for your approval before it publishes anything or sends any email, and you can give it more autonomy once you trust how it writes.