swan-gtm Founder persona ops
Applies when someone else's name goes on the content and their reputation rides on it. Produces the written operating agreement and running cadence for the engagement.
The content is the founder's substance. The operation is what makes that true at volume.
Set boundaries before content
Agree in writing what publishes autonomously and what always needs sign-off:
- Numbers and client names.
- Opinions about named people.
- Anything touching the client's regulated ground: medical, financial, legal claims.
- Any reply to a journalist or an angry customer.
Define escalation triggers and who gets pinged. The mediocre version starts writing posts on day one and discovers the boundaries through an incident.
The agreement is a document, not an understanding. The sign-off matrix, escalation ladder, and the clauses that matter when something goes wrong are in references/operating-agreement.md.
Run intake once, properly
Two assets come out of intake.
First, the voice corpus, the genuine samples a fingerprint gets built from and every draft gets checked against.
Second, a world bible: offers, clients that may be named, numbers that may be cited, collaborators, competitor policy, and the list of people and topics never to touch.
The never-list saves the engagement more often than the rest combined. Both assets are specified in references/intake-and-world-bible.md.
Mine stories, never invent them
Ghosts fabricate exactly nothing about lived experience. No invented anecdotes. No family moments. No opinions the founder has not voiced.
Instead, run a short monthly story-mining call or collect voice memos, and bank real anecdotes with dates and sensory detail.
The story bank is what makes volume possible without fiction. It is the difference between an account that compounds trust and one that eventually gets caught. When the bank runs dry, the correct response is to book another mining call, not to fill the gap. Running the call and structuring the bank is in references/story-mining.md.
Build a rhythm the founder can survive
Batch drafts. One approval touchpoint a week. Target under 30 minutes of founder time, because approval friction is the number one killer of consistency.
Track edit rate, the share of drafts the founder changes before approving. Falling means calibration is working. Rising means voice drift, so go back to the corpus and re-extract rather than absorbing the edits one at a time.
Under 10 percent after the first month is the working target. An engagement that needs an hour of founder time a week will quietly stop getting it, and the posts stop with it.
Operate the engagement layer
Publishing is half the job.
Comments get answered in-voice inside the first hour. DMs get triaged on a written split: the ghost handles logistics and thank-yous, the founder handles relationships, and qualified sales conversations route through the agreed handoff.
The pipeline forms in comments and DMs. An engagement that ships posts while ignoring them is decorating a feed. The triage split and handoff rules are in references/engagement-and-handoff.md.
Two or more personas, one company
Distinct lanes per persona. The same take never appears twice, even reworded. No reciprocal engagement pattern between them.
Two leaders echoing each other reads as staged and burns both accounts.
What good looks like
The best operator designs the approval loop and risk boundaries before drafting a single post. The mediocre version is a content vendor: posts delivered, engagement ignored, anecdotes invented when the calendar runs dry.
The output is good when the founder spends under 30 minutes a week, edit rate sits under 10 percent after the first month, nothing has been walked back, and the audience treats the account as genuinely the founder.
Rules
- MUST agree the sign-off boundaries and escalation triggers in writing before the first draft.
- MUST build the voice corpus and world bible before production starts.
- MUST source every anecdote from the founder's own account of it, with a date.
- MUST keep approval batched to one weekly touchpoint under 30 minutes.
- MUST track edit rate and re-extract from the corpus when it rises.
- NEVER invent lived experience, or publish an opinion the founder has not voiced.
- NEVER ship posts while leaving comments and DMs unworked.
- NEVER allow a reciprocal engagement pattern between personas at the same company.