Louis's unfair advantage is that he refuses to play
Every other account in this series is optimised. His is a running joke about the optimisation, and it costs him exactly what you would expect.
Louis Grenier works on positioning and go-to-market for established B2B companies, and he wrote Stand The F*ck Out. Across the 100 posts we looked at, published between June 2025 and July 2026, he posted 1.8 times a week and averaged 137 reactions from 41,000 followers. 57 of those 100 finished under 100 reactions. That is the lowest reach of any account we have pulled apart. It is also completely on purpose.
He spends most of the account attacking the exact thing that would grow it. Adversarial positioning is when you build an audience by publicly refusing the conventions of your own channel, accepting lower reach in exchange for being the only person saying it. One of his best posts is a line-by-line parody of the standard LinkedIn template, written start to finish in square brackets.
Hook tested, formatted for the skim, CTA at the bottom. Predictable, effective, everywhere.
'Everyone thinks [something that nobody really believes]. → [First bullet full of platitude]'
“→ [Third bullet with a specific, yet unverifiable, number]”
— From his parody of the standard LinkedIn post template (776 reactions)
Five things that showed up across all 100 posts
- Lowest reach in the series, full stop. A median of 77 reactions, and 57 of 100 posts finished under 100.
- The most varied reaction mix we have measured. Just 59.3% of his reactions are a plain Like, against 72% to 90% for everyone else here.
- Almost nobody reposts him. A mean of 2 per post.
- He barely posts. 1.8 times a week across thirteen months, the lowest cadence here bar April Dunford.
- His biggest post is completely off-topic. A note about an actor dying of colon cancer, nothing to do with marketing, pulled 1,473, more than ten times his median.
The numbers behind the account
Two numbers matter here, and they point in opposite directions.
His median post earns 77 reactions, his mean 137, on 41,000 followers. Only 3 posts in 100 cleared 500 and exactly one cleared 1,000. By every reach measure this is the weakest account in the series. No point dressing that up. He posts less than twice a week and refuses the formatting everyone else swears by, and the numbers do what you would expect.
Where the engagement comes from
How the reach is distributed
The content-type mix
Format and cadence both move distribution; our guide to how the LinkedIn algorithm works covers the mechanics.
The top posts
| # | Post | Reactions | Comments | Reposts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | James Van Der Beek died of colon cancer at 48 | 1,473 | 130 | 25 |
| 2 | Everyone thinks [something nobody really believes] | 776 | 197 | 20 |
| 3 | There were 1,000 reasons not to run that NHS meme | 540 | 67 | 15 |
| 4 | Don't hire a marketer, use HubSpot and Buffer | 490 | 84 | 9 |
| 5 | Here we go again (on HubSpot's Loop Marketing) | 430 | 109 | 14 |
| 6 | BREAKING: [AI model 0.01% better than the last one] | 349 | 80 | 9 |
What the account is actually built from
Five of the six are attacks on something. The sixth, the one with no argument in it at all, reached furthest.
Something that matters and has nothing to do with marketing. Rare, and ten times his median.
The standard LinkedIn post, written entirely in square brackets, mocked line by line.
A real piece of work praised properly, usually one that nearly did not get made.
A named company's marketing concept taken apart in public, with reasons.
Parodies of AI announcement posts, written in the voice of the thing he is mocking.
Advice given plainly, without the joke, when he actually wants to be understood.
Pillar 1: The off-beat human post (the reach engine)
Why it works: His biggest post by a factor of two, and the one post in the sample with no argument, no joke, no marketing angle at all. He flags the detour up front, 'never talk about it here either', which is the thing that stops it reading as opportunism. For an account built on satire, that is an uncomfortable lesson.
Pillar 2: The template parody (the signature)
Why it works: 197 comments on 776 reactions, his best ratio anywhere. Writing the parody purely in placeholders beats describing the problem, because every reader fills the brackets with a post they scrolled past this morning. Satire lands when the audience does the recognising for you.
Pillar 3: The campaign teardown (the craft tier)
Why it works: Opening with six objections in quotation marks is the strongest structure on the account. Anyone who has dragged creative work through an approval process recognises every line, and 'Claire from Accounting didn't understand the joke' is the one people quote back.
Pillar 4: The vendor callout (the position)
Why it works: Naming a specific big company and its specific concept is exactly what most consultants dodge, which is why this pillar works. The three-step pattern, create fear, package old solutions, profit, hands readers a lens they can point at the next vendor announcement themselves.
Pillar 5: The AI-slop satire (the running joke)
Why it works: The same placeholder trick, aimed at AI announcement posts. It reaches less than the LinkedIn parody because the target is narrower, but it proves the format travels, and for a low-cadence account a reusable format beats any single hit.
Pillar 6: The direct note (when he stops joking)
Why it works: The escalation is the whole joke. Each swap is a bit more absurd than the last, until the earthworms make the point retroactively. A list built to degrade on purpose is hard to pull off, and almost nobody here tries.
The hooks that earned the click
Several of them are not hooks at all in the conventional sense, which is rather the point.
'I don't really pay attention to celebrity news (and never talk about it here either), but I'm going to make an exception.'
'Everyone thinks [something that nobody really believes].'
Six quoted refusals in a row, opening with 'You can't joke about cancer.'
'Here we go again...'
'BREAKING: [New version of an AI model that's 0.01% better than the previous one]'
'Don't hire a marketer… Use HubSpot and Buffer.'
None of these are optimised, and two of them mimic bad writing on purpose. For the mechanics of a conventional opener, our guide to writing LinkedIn hooks digs in, and you can pressure-test your own first line in the free hook generator.
A voice that would rather be right than reached
Sharp, profane, structurally inventive, and completely uninterested in what the feed rewards.
- Writes in placeholders when parodying, so readers supply their own examples.
- Stacks real objections in quotation marks, which is the most recognisable device on the account.
- Escalates lists until they collapse into absurdity, on purpose.
- Names specific companies and concepts rather than gesturing at an industry.
- Swears where it lands, and does not asterisk out the parts that matter.
- Uses zero hashtags across all 100 posts, and posts only 1.8 times a week.
The objection-stack is the structure worth taking, and it transfers to any field where good work has to survive approval.
- "[The safety objection]" - "[The brand objection]" - "[The legal objection]" - "[The audience objection]" - "[The one specific colleague who did not get it]" There were 1,000 reasons NOT to [do the thing]... [But somebody did it anyway, and here is what happened]
What he does, and doesn't, do
- Write parodies in placeholders
- Name the specific company he disagrees with
- Stack real objections verbatim
- Flag it explicitly when he goes off-topic
- Praise craft properly when he finds it
- Hashtags, formatting conventions and hooks
- Posting more than twice a week
- Images, at 31% despite being his best format
- Softening a position to widen its reach
- Any of the things that would raise his numbers
There is a real tension here worth saying out loud. He writes about positioning for a living, and the position he picked for himself is the one that costs him the most reach. Maybe that is the exact trade he wants. It is still a trade. CaptureFlow is an AI content agent that turns your expertise into weeks of on-brand content for every platform. You capture one idea in 5 minutes, and CaptureFlow, trained on your voice and your past posts, reshapes it into a LinkedIn post, an X thread, a carousel, or a short video, so one strong position works more than a single channel. See how the AI content agent works.
The system underneath the posts
There is no growth engine here. There is a position, held consistently, at a measurable cost.
The trade he is making
- The most varied reaction mix in the series, at 59% Like
- A recognisable position nobody else occupies
- Credibility with people who share the frustration
- Total consistency with a book called Stand The F*ck Out
- A median of 77 reactions on 41,000 followers
- 57 of 100 posts finishing under 100
- A mean of 2 reposts, the lowest measured
- Reach roughly a tenth of comparable accounts
Read this next to the April Dunford playbook, the other positioning authority here, who posts at a similar cadence and reaches about four times as far, and the Mark Ritson playbook for contrarian marketing commentary at scale. For marketing teams, the three together map the whole range from principled and quiet to principled and loud.
Your 30-day challenge
Eight posts. Take the structures, and decide separately whether you want the stance.
- Days 1-3: List the real objections that nearly killed your best piece of work, verbatim
- Days 4-5: Publish them as quoted lines, then what happened when someone did it anyway
- Days 6-7: Include the one specific colleague who did not get it
- Days 8-10: Write your industry's most tired post format entirely in square brackets
- Days 11-12: Do not explain the joke underneath it
- Days 13-14: Compare its comment ratio against your normal posts
- Days 15-17: Take apart one specific named company's concept, with reasons
- Days 18-19: Give readers a repeatable lens rather than just a complaint
- Days 20-21: Praise one piece of work properly, in the same detail you criticise
- Days 22-24: Check what share of your posts finished under 100 reactions
- Days 25-27: Check your Like share; under 70% means people are choosing a reaction
- Days 28-30: Decide honestly whether the trade is one you want
The stop-doing list
| Stop doing | Do this instead |
|---|---|
| Describing a bad format | Writing it in placeholders and letting readers fill them |
| Gesturing at 'some companies' | Naming the company and the concept |
| Complaining without a lens | Giving a repeatable pattern readers can apply |
| Only criticising | Praising real craft in the same detail |
| Assuming low reach means the work is wrong | Checking your Like share before concluding |
| Assuming a principled stance is free | Measuring what it costs, as this account does |
The metrics to track weekly
| Metric | Benchmark to aim for |
|---|---|
| Share of posts under 100 reactions | Under 20%; his is 57% |
| Like share of reactions | Under 70% is a good sign; his is 59.3% |
| Comment-to-reaction ratio | 20%+ (he sits at 27.7%) |
| Reposts per post | His 2 is the clearest cost of the stance |
| Posts per week | More than 1.8 if reach matters to you |
| Your best format vs your most-used | His images beat text and he uses text 62% of the time |
The takeaways
- 01Write the parody in placeholders. Louis Grenier's second-biggest post mocks the standard LinkedIn template entirely in square brackets, and pulled 197 comments.
- 02Stack the real objections. Six quoted refusals, landing on 'Claire from Accounting didn't understand the joke', is the sharpest structure on the account.
- 03Name the company. Taking apart HubSpot's Loop Marketing by name is what most consultants dodge, and what gives the pillar its weight.
- 04Check your Like share before you judge your reach. His is 59.3% against 72% to 90% elsewhere, which means his audience reacts deliberately.
- 05Count the cost of a stance. 57 of his 100 posts finished under 100 reactions, and a mean of 2 reposts is the lowest we have measured.
- 06Flag it when you go off-topic. His biggest post is about an actor dying of cancer, and he says outright that he never writes about this stuff.
Frequently asked questions
- Who is Louis Grenier?
- He works on positioning and go-to-market for established B2B companies, and he wrote Stand The F*ck Out. His LinkedIn account is mostly satire, aimed at marketing culture and at LinkedIn's own conventions.
- What kind of post performs best for Louis Grenier?
- Oddly, the one with nothing to do with his subject. A post about the actor James Van Der Beek dying of colon cancer earned 1,473 reactions, more than ten times his median of 77. His template parody is second at 776.
- Why is his reach so low?
- He posts 1.8 times a week, uses no hashtags, refuses standard formatting, and spends most of the account satirising the exact conventions that drive distribution. 57 of his 100 most recent posts finished under 100 reactions on a 41,000-follower base.
- Is a small, highly engaged audience worth the lost reach?
- His reaction mix suggests the engagement is genuine: only 59.3% of his reactions are a plain Like, the lowest share in this series, which means people choose how they feel instead of tapping the default. Whether that is worth roughly a tenth of comparable reach is a call each account has to make.
