Become An Engineer Influencer
The primary currency for career growth is the network of people who know who you are, what you do, and what you stand for. With the tools available to all of us, building credibility and influence has never been easier.
Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack contain countless examples of engineers who are achieving incredible success because of their ability to connect with an audience.
Once you have influence, it becomes significantly easier to expand your network, build distribution channels, and grow a business.
This course is focused on how YOU can become an engineer influencer. We cover 10+ case studies of other engineer influencers and how to apply their strategies to grow and monetize your own brand.
An engineer influencer is an engineer who builds an audience on social media and uses that to kickstart their future startup or business.
Examples include:
-
Rahul Pandey - ex-Meta engineer, who leveraged his 60k followers on YouTube to launch Taro, a career-mentoring app that got into YCombinator
-
Gergely Orosz - ex-Uber engineering manager, who used his Twitter following to grow his paid newsletter "The Pragmatic Engineer" to 140k readers in 18 months
-
Daniel Vassallo - ex-Amazon engineer, who grew his following to 130k followers on Twitter and now teaches a highly successful cohort based class called "Portfolio of Small Bets"
Each of these engineer influencers focused on building their social media following first.
Is this course for me?
If you're a 1) W-2 employee in tech and 2) interested in diversifying your income streams, then yes!
What if I'm not an engineer?
That's OK! You can apply the principles I teach to any field. I also discuss a number of designers, PMs, and engineering-adjacent folks as examples as well.
How is this course specific to engineers?
First, I strive to use other engineers as examples wherever I can in this course.
Second, this course addresses entrepreneurial mistakes that engineers are most likely to make. This includes:
-
focusing too much on product building rather than channel building
-
feeling intimidated about self-promotion
-
not knowing how to make sales
-
thinking they don't have the authority to speak on engineering
-
always aiming for a VC-scale unicorn
I'm Michael, an ex-Netflix engineering lead turned engineering consultant and EECS alum @ UC Berkeley.
When I quit my job at Netflix, I thought that the only way to make money was either through another W-2 job or from building a VC-scale startup.
But soon after, I discovered a network of engineers who aimed for a middle ground between these two extremes. These engineer influencers all realized that it was easier to succeed as an entrepreneur if you build an audience first.
When I started my entrepreneurial journey in February 2022, I had 0 followers, 0 income streams, and 0 assets. But after focusing on building my social media presence for 6 months, I:
-
Grew my audience from ~0 followers to 11k on Medium, 10k on LinkedIn, 2.5k on Twitter and my Substack newsletter with ZERO prior social media experience
-
Went viral 4x on LinkedIn, Medium, and Facebook
-
Published articles in Business Insider and Yahoo Finance
-
Was invited by multiple CEO's to give paid speaking engagements (recording here)
-
Cracked the LinkedIn algorithm - I managed to get a post about engineering to reach over 1.2 million impressions, with over 4k likes
-
Cracked the Medium algorithm - I have never gotten under 1k claps on any article, I have a 100% curation rate on Medium, and I only wrote 6 articles.
-
Regularly network with other CEO's, and large Youtubers, Twitter, and LinkedIn personalities.
I now focus on engineering consulting for early-stage startups: https://www.allinengineeringconsulting.com/. But I wouldn't have any business if it weren't for my efforts to grow on social media first.
Now I'm certain that audience building is a critical first step in succeeding as an entrepreneur. This course aims to show you how to build yours.
Connect with Michael:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-lin-tech/
- Twitter: https://x.com/_michaellin
- Newsletter: https://www.michaellinwrites.com/
I'm literally in this course! so of course it's awesome 😇
Seriously, though, Michael does a great job talking about content creation and how to leverage your strengths to make an impact. The playbook worked really well for Taro, and this is increasingly how companies will be formed.
I really liked hearing Michael's personal learnings on things that worked and did not work in his content creation process of this course and his recommendation on various funnels by type of media. I recommend this course for those building up their brand and starting out and to those who have already established a brand to be able to improve it when launching their next products.
I really enjoyed this course. I found the sections about Topic Selection and Content Creation extremely insightful.
I did not consider telling my own story of coming from a Mech-E background to Staff Software Engineer at Twilio as something others would want to hear more about, but now I see how valuable it could be. Thanks for making this!
