I’m usually wary of a startup that leans too heavily on a platform it doesn’t control… and yet today’s startup is currently entirely built on top of LinkedIn.

So why did I decide to share Vulse with you? I’m really impressed with how they’ve executed on their product and I’m interested to see how they develop. They’ve certainly come on impressively in the 13 months since I first tried the software.

But first: check out another newsletter you might want to subscribe to. I mean, not many newsletters get an interview with Mark Zuckerberg 👇 [Ad]

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Vulse wants to turn your team into LinkedIn stars

Building a following on LinkedIn has become an essential part of business for many individuals and companies. 

But knowing what impact you’re getting from all of that time spent crafting your posts (or asking ChatGPT to do it for you!) isn’t easy. Looking to help businesses make the most of LinkedIn is Vulse, a startup executing on some really interesting ideas.

“We are supporting organisations to empower their employees and transform their teams into brand advocates,” explains co-founder and CEO Rob Illidge.

How they do this is with a web app that offers features to help individuals create and post effective LinkedIn content. 

It helps you see whether you’ve ticked all the boxes to please the algorithm and your employer’s brand tone of voice. It can even help you come up with ideas for content and use generative AI to help you write (if such a thing appeals to you).

But the real focus of Vulse is getting whole teams confidently posting to LinkedIn as effective brand advocates. That means there’s a team leaderboard to see who is making the biggest impact, and support to help those who aren’t. 

Illidge says that because Vulse is a separate interface from LinkedIn itself, it reduces ‘post anxiety’ from people worried about representing their employer’s brand, while helping them to not take too much time out of their day to do it.

The story so far

Illidge previously ran a social media marketing agency called Social Republic. They built the first version of Vulse as an internal tool to help themselves and their clients make more of LinkedIn, which was growing in importance as a business tool.

This was five years ago, and they were hamstrung by limited API access. Over time, they iterated on the product and Illidge eventually spun Vulse out as his own startup. 

Building a relationship with LinkedIn parent company Microsoft, Vulse improved its API access to bolster its feature set.

Indeed, Vulse has come a long way since I first tried it over a year ago. One notable feature they have integrated is the ability to tag users and companies in a post. This is a basic way to juice the algorithm for attention that many users utilise every day, but it turns out it’s tricky to implement in a third-party app. 

Illidge says they have worked with LinkedIn to gain a level of API access most third-party developers don’t have. This makes it possible for them to make tagging work.

Vulse began just as Illidge on his own. He grew the team over time, adding software developers, and then Annika Sanderson as co-founder.

Sanderson had been an early user of the product who worked in the recruitment space. After talking with Illidge for a year, she came on board at Vulse when the time was right, which turned out to be February this year.

Next steps

Now they have a well-rounded product, Vulse wants to move beyond its initial customers by working through its sales pipeline.

“We've seen a lot of interest, not only from smaller, growing businesses, but also enterprises who are looking to empower their employees,” says Illidge.

And with its eye on that lucrative enterprise market, Vulse is looking to tune its functionality to the needs of large businesses. 

One idea they’re exploring is support for incentive programmes, where companies could offer cash rewards to employees who perform best on LinkedIn.

They also want to offer tools that can help businesses avoid controversies. For example, if you plan to write about a certain public figure, it could warn you about a piece of breaking news that you might not have heard but might make your post look incredibly ill judged. 

I mean, there was a moment where Huw Edwards went from beloved BBC news anchor and Welsh national treasure to reviled public outcast in the space of a breaking news alert. Missing a moment like that could be incredibly embarrassing to some people, and potentially their employers too. 

This feature could also help keep employees from mentioning things their employer isn’t allowed to for contractual reasons, and comply with legal regulations around their communication.

While Vulse has largely been focused on the UK to date, they have their eye on the US market for 2025. 

And as leaning on a single platform is risky for any startup, they’re exploring user requests to integrate with other social platforms..