Dev iconDevJul 6, 2026 ~1 min source read

What 400 viral LinkedIn posts taught me: 16 hook formulas, now open-source Claude Code skills

The dataset 400 posts that outperformed their authors' baselines, spread across 10 verticals: founders, marketing, engineering, sales, HR, finance, design, data, product, and personal brands. see more"), the structure, the engagement split (comments vs reposts vs likes vs saves), and the author's baseline so a big account's average day did not read as a small account's viral hit.

What 400 viral LinkedIn posts taught me: 16 hook formulas, now open-source Claude Code skills

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see more"), the structure, the engagement split (comments vs reposts vs likes vs saves), and the author's baseline so a big account's average day did not read as a small account's viral hit.

This post covers what the data said, what surprised me when I pressure-tested the skills, and where to get them.

The dataset 400 posts that outperformed their authors' baselines, spread across 10 verticals: founders, marketing, engineering, sales, HR, finance, design, data, product, and personal brands.

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The useful part

I spent a month doing something slightly unhinged: I pulled 400 above-average LinkedIn posts across 10 verticals, ran them through a fleet of analysis agents, and reverse-engineered why their first lines worked. Then I turned the findings into open-source skills for Claude Code and Codex. This post covers what the data said, what surprised me when I pressure-tested the skills, and where to get them.

How it works

  • The dataset 400 posts that outperformed their authors' baselines, spread across 10 verticals: founders, marketing, engineering, sales, HR, finance, design, data, product, and personal brands.
  • The single strongest signal was boring and consistent: the hook does most of the work, and hooks are formulaic.
  • For each post I tracked the hook (first 210 characters, everything before "...
  • see more"), the structure, the engagement split (comments vs reposts vs likes vs saves), and the author's baseline so a big account's average day did not read as a small account's viral hit.
  • The same 16 first-line patterns kept producing the outliers, vertical after vertical.

What to take from it

Formula Example multiplier Platform Risk Anaphora 4,240 eng R.I.P.

Details worth keeping

Obituary ("the era of X is over") 3,822 Contrarian + Historical Receipts 3,083 Odd-Precision Money Ledger ("$4,217.38, not ~$4k") 9.4x baseline Paid-vs-Free Reversal 19.64x Year-over-Year Pivot 3.74x Curiosity-Gap Teaser 4.25x Time-Anchor Confession, Self-Proving Meta, Comment-Gate <td...

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