I'll do the math first.
Three retainer clients at $1,200, $1,500, and $1,800 a month. Roughly $1,000 a week from those. Plus an average of one new $1,000 setup fee per week from a fresh close, plus one or two $200-400 one-off posts that come in from referrals. The total wobbles between $1,800 and $2,400. Two thousand on average. I'm calling it $2k a week because it's the cleanest number.
This is LinkedIn ghostwriting. I write posts that get published under founders' and executives' names. They go on calls and to dinners. I figure out the words. Nobody pays for content creation. Everyone pays for time saved.
The whole pipeline runs on cold DMs. I send about 80 a week. I get between 8 and 14 replies, which sounds like garbage but converts into one closed retainer every two to three weeks. The math is harsh but the math is the math. It works because the DM is specific and I send it consistently.
This post is the DM, the workflow behind it, and the parts I'd actually believe if I were skeptical reading this.
One piece of unsolicited advice before the workflow. Skip the YouTube tutorials. I spent six weeks watching them at the start of all this. Every video had a different opinion on hooks, niching, pricing, outreach scripts. I almost quit twice. A structured course condenses the messy parts into a few days instead of weeks. YouTube has value once you already know what you are looking for. It is genuinely terrible as a way to figure out what you should be looking for in the first place.
My background, briefly
I was a B2B journalist. Got laid off in early 2024 when the trade publication I worked for got absorbed into a parent company and they didn't need duplicate editorial. I had about 4 years of writing about SaaS, fintech, and supply chain, which turned out to be more useful than my journalism degree.
I tried freelance journalism for six months. It paid worse than my old job and I hated chasing editors. So I started writing LinkedIn posts for a former source. A SaaS founder I'd interviewed twice. He liked them enough that he offered me $1,200 a month to keep doing it. That was the first dollar. Everything else came from cold DM.
The actual DM
Here it is. Four sentences. I send it to founders and execs at companies in B2B SaaS, fintech, or supply chain. Niches I know well enough to write about credibly.
> Hi [first name], saw your post about [specific topic from their last 3-5 posts]. I write LinkedIn content for B2B founders in [their adjacent niche] and noticed your last few posts have been about [pattern I see]. Curious if you write these yourself or have help, no pitch, just genuinely curious.
That's it. The whole thing is built to do four jobs.
1. Prove I read their content. Mentioning a specific post from their actual feed is the difference between getting a reply and getting reported as spam.
2. Establish I work with their peer group. Founders only care about other founders' workflows. "I write for B2B founders" lands. "I'm a writer" doesn't.
3. Show I'm paying attention to their patterns. Saying "your last few posts have been about X" makes me sound like a person, not a template.
4. Open dialogue, not pitch. The "no pitch, just genuinely curious" line is the most important part. Pitching in the first DM tanks reply rate. Asking a question reveals interest first.
I rewrote this DM eleven times before I landed on this version. Earlier versions were too long, too salesy, too vague, or all three.
Why this works when most cold DMs don't
Most cold DMs read like they were written by ChatGPT in 30 seconds because they were. People can tell. The pattern recognition for slop is built into anyone who's been online for a year.
My DM works because it requires research per recipient. I spend about 90 seconds on each one. Reading their last few posts, identifying one specific thing to reference, customizing the niche line. 80 DMs × 90 seconds = two hours of work per week. That's the whole acquisition cost. Then I send and wait.
The 10 to 14% reply rate I get is high for cold outreach because each message looks one-to-one even though the skeleton is templated. Most people who reply are either curious about my workflow or are already half-thinking they should hire someone.
Where AI fits in
I use Claude for two things and only two things on the outreach side.
First, I dump a prospect's last five posts into Claude and ask it to summarize the dominant themes in three lines. That gives me the "pattern" line in sentence 3 of the DM in about ten seconds. Without AI, this would take me five minutes per prospect of actually reading posts. With AI, it takes one minute including verifying Claude got it right.
Second, when I close a client and start writing for them, I use Claude to research their industry and competitors, summarize their existing posts into a voice guide, and draft post structures. I do not let it write the actual sentences. The voice has to be theirs, not Claude's default voice, and the only way to keep it theirs is to draft sentence-by-sentence myself.
If you let Claude write the posts, the client will know within four weeks and you will lose them. The clients I keep keep me because the writing sounds like them, just better and more often.
What I shopped before I built this
For honesty. I considered other freelance angles before settling on LinkedIn ghostwriting.
I looked at general copywriting (saturated, hard to differentiate). Email newsletter writing (real but requires building an audience). Substack ghostwriting (smaller market, lower budgets). SEO content (race to the bottom, AI-saturated).
LinkedIn ghostwriting worked for me because the buyers are founders who have money and no time, the deliverable is small enough to scale (5 to 10 posts a month per client, not 50), and the writing skill required is high enough that pure AI output gets caught. That last part is what makes it defensible against people who try to do this with a $20 ChatGPT subscription.
I also did a short structured course on Mindwand somewhere in the middle of figuring this all out. It wasn't a LinkedIn course or a ghostwriting course. It was a general AI course about how to prompt and structure conversations. The reason I bring it up is that the prompt structure they teach is the same structure I now use to brief Claude on a new client's voice. There are other courses that do the same thing. Coursera has some, the $497 creator courses cover similar ground. I picked Mindwand because it was cheap, daily, and I actually finished it. The format matters more than the brand.
The part I'd still believe if I were skeptical
I'm telling you the dollar figure, not selling you a roadmap to it.
You probably won't replicate my income in your first month. I didn't replicate it in my first month either. I made $1,200 in my first month, then $0 in my second because I burned out on outreach and stopped, then $400 in my third, then $1,800 in my fourth, then $2,800 in my fifth. The line is jagged for everyone.
The DM works because it's specific. It will keep working until enough people copy it that LinkedIn users develop pattern recognition for it, at which point I'll rewrite it again and so will everyone serious about this. Tools and templates always have a half-life. The thing that doesn't have a half-life is the discipline of writing 80 thoughtful messages a week, which is harder than it sounds when you're three weeks into a no-response stretch.
If you take one thing from this post, take that.