Ray Vellest

Helping founders and creators show up with clarity and authority—no fluff.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

Most founder systems are badly designed quest logs.

You open them in the morning and you’re back at level one, staring at twelve glowing markers with no idea which one actually moves the story forward.

You’ve got a CRM, a project board, a weekly review doc, too many tabs, and not enough decisions baked in.

It looks like progress, but it plays like a fetch quest.

The problem isn’t that the system needs you. Of course it needs you. You’re the player.

But having to rebuild the strategy every time you log in is not gameplay.

Which move matters?
Which lead matters?
Which client needs attention?
What is urgent now?
What is just side-quest nonsense dressed up as priority?

If you have to decide that fresh every morning, you’re playing the wrong game.

A better system frontloads the thinking: the rules, priorities, filters, and “when this happens, do that” logic.

The main quest is clear. The next move is obvious. The inventory is sorted before the fight starts.

Bad systems create more buttons to press.

Good systems turn yesterday’s strategy into today’s next move.

You still have to play.

You just stop respawning at the tutorial every morning.

P.S. I’m opening a few early spots for the system I’m building. DM me if you want in.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

Your content is consistent? Cool. So is wallpaper.

That doesn’t mean anyone stops to look at it. And I think this is where I’m still getting stuck. Probably where a lot of founders get stuck too.

We design content around pillars: hiring, culture, leadership, AI, growth... All the grown-up business words, neatly lined up like beige wallpaper in a meeting room where nobody has ever dared to raise their voice.

It covers the wall. It fills the space. It looks respectable.

Nobody gives a damn.

Not because the ideas are bad, but because we hide ourselves behind a safe social media voice that sounds like it was assembled in a conference room by four people trying very hard not to let anything human leak through.

And yes, I’m guilty of that too.

I keep picking the safe pattern, but I don't want to do that anymore.

People don’t remember wallpaper. They remember the crack in the plaster. The weird stain. The bit someone tried to paint over badly. The place where you can see there was actually a person in the room before everything got smoothed flat.

I'm peeling the wallpaper back one uncomfortable strip at a time.

What part of your content still feels like wallpaper?

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

Most engagement is just LinkedIn loitering.

You turn up in the comments, shuffle around a bit, nod at strangers, say “great point” like a man trapped in a networking event with no exits, then leave feeling weirdly productive.

I know the move because I’ve done it.

Open app. Reply to five posts. Drop something vaguely thoughtful under someone with a big audience. Pretend the little dopamine cough from a like means progress.

Beautiful little performance. Almost completely useless.

Because the goal was never to be “active.” That’s the lie that turned half the feed into people clapping at each other through glass.

The goal is to become remembered by the right people.

And that changes the whole job.

A random comment might get you seen for three seconds by someone who already forgot you before their coffee went cold. A specific reply, to someone you actually want in your world, repeated over time, with a bit of thought behind it? Different animal.

That’s not activity.

That’s how a conversation starts leaving fingerprints.

Most people treat comments like cardio. Get the reps in. Keep the account warm. Feed the machine. Stay visible enough that nobody can accuse them of disappearing.

Fine. Enjoy your treadmill.

But don’t confuse movement with momentum.

The good stuff happens when you stop spraying polite little sentence-shaped receipts around the internet and start choosing where your attention actually goes.

1. Who do you want to know you exist?
2. Whose trust would actually matter?
3. Who would you reply just for the sake of it?
4. Who matters to you in the long-term?

Start there, because a single comment is not a relationship.

It’s a knock on the door.

And stop knocking on every door in the street just because you like the sound.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

This might be controversial, but most founder thought leadership is rubbish.

Not because founders have nothing interesting to say. The problem is that too much of it feels like someone trying to sound clever before they’ve actually earned the lesson.

One day it’s AI, then personal branding, then building products, then social media, then business, then attention, then some random thing they noticed about people that morning.

And look, let’s be frank about this, I do this myself.

I’m still the founder talking about all sorts of things. I’m still trying to work out what my actual lane is, what I should keep coming back to, and how to make it make sense without forcing myself into some neat little box that doesn’t feel true.

The thing is, in my head, it all feels connected because I know the thread inside it. I know why AI connects to writing, why writing connects to personal brand, why personal brand connects to business, why business connects to attention, and why attention connects to everything else I’m trying to build.

But other people don’t live inside my head.

They just see one post, then another post, then another post. And if the connection isn’t obvious, they don’t sit there trying to solve the puzzle. They just don’t know where to put me.

It’s like opening a drawer full of useful things, but everything is mixed together. There might be good stuff in there, but it still feels like a mess because nothing has a clear place.

And I think that’s the bit I’m slowly learning.

People remember you when they can place you.

Not in a fake “personal brand” way. More like, “Ah, this is the person who keeps talking about that thing, in that specific way, from that particular angle.”

That’s what sticks.

Not every thought you’ve ever had. Not every topic you’re capable of discussing. Just enough of a pattern that someone can recognise you again.

So maybe the better question is not, “What else can I talk about?”

Maybe it’s, “What do I want people to slowly associate with me?”

Then you keep coming back to that. Not with the same post every time, and not by becoming boring on purpose, but with the same kind of concern, the same kind of problem, the same kind of honesty, shown through different examples.

That is probably enough.

You don’t need to become a content machine. You need to become easier to remember.

Which is annoying, because for me, that means repeating myself more than I naturally feel comfortable doing. But maybe that’s the work.

If you’re also in that weird place of building in public, trying to find your lane, and not quite sure yet how all the pieces fit together, send me a DM.

I’m figuring this out too. Maybe we can figure it out together.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

Your content calendar is probably tracking the wrong thing

It tracks what you posted, but not who showed up, and when you think about it, that makes no sense. Why is there so much advice on content but so little on relationships?

I learned that properly during a 2-week beginner challenge on LinkedIn. The plan was simple: post every weekday, send connection requests, leave thoughtful comments, and track it all.

I expected publishing to be the hard part. It wasn’t. I posted every day. Some posts went out later than planned, but they went out.

The thing is, a much more important problem showed up after publishing.

People commented, some more than once. A few conversations had follow-up potential, and some names started to feel familiar.

The best DMs weren’t “cool post” messages. They were follow-ups. People asked about the tools I’m using, how the LinkedIn challenge was going, and what I’m seeing in the market.

That’s when the limits of a normal content calendar became obvious.

Looking at my calendar for those 2 weeks made me feel like “work completed.” But it couldn’t tell me who replied twice, who liked multiple posts, who sent a thoughtful DM, or who was becoming more than a name in the feed.

So here’s my rule for attention now: if someone’s interaction creates a next step, it counts.

Most calendars don’t hold that relationship context, so you lose the thread.

Right now, I’m building a relationship layer that helps answer the question I care about most:

Who showed intent this week, and who needs a reply before the context goes cold?

When you look at your own content system, can you tell who you need to reach out to without opening every single post manually?

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

I just finished a 2-week Beginner Challenge on X.

I thought posting every day would be the hard part. But it wasn’t. Replying was.

The goal was simple:

- Post at least once every weekday
- Follow 5–10 people per day
- Leave 15–25 replies per day

The result?

I posted every day.

That was the main win. Not always at the time I planned. Some posts went out later because life, work, and fixing bugs on my own custom app got in the way.

But the posts went out.

The part I fell badly behind on was engagement.

I only followed around 6 new people, and I made pretty much zero replies on X.

So, if I’m being honest, I did the publishing part. But messed up on the interaction part.

Writing content was easy.

That was the biggest lesson.

But finding the right people to follow, reading enough posts, finding conversations where I had something useful to add, and leaving replies that didn’t feel forced was much harder.

A lot of the time, I would scroll through posts and feel like I had nothing meaningful to say.

So I skipped them.

I was also doing the same challenge on LinkedIn, and the difference was obvious.

LinkedIn felt easier because the audience was clearer and the conversations were more directly connected to what I’m building.

X felt more scattered. It seems like a platform where I would need more volume, more replies, and more time in the feed before momentum starts to build.

And that’s where the challenge exposed the real bottleneck.

It wasn’t ideas, or writing. It was attention.

X feels like it needs a much higher volume of participation to get traction.

And for the past two weeks, that was harder for me to sustain.

The good thing is that the challenge still gave me useful information.

It helped me restart the habit of posting.

It showed me that writing consistently is not the main problem.

It made me much clearer about how much friction there is in finding the right accounts, tracking engagement, and turning scattered activity into a repeatable workflow.

That matters because I’m building a tool around content, contacts, comments, messages, and engagement workflows.

This challenge helped me improve that system while using it in real life.

I’ve now opened a whitelist for early access, so people who want to try it during development can sign up and be among the first users.

If you want to gain early access, send me a DM and I'll add you to the whitelist.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

My best writing usually starts as complete nonsense.

The best of it only truly surfaces after I stop trying to sound coherent.

That’s why voice notes have become a serious step in my writing process. Not because they’re convenient, although they are, but because my thoughts don’t always arrive in order.

Most of the time, I’m at my desk, looking at the app I’m using to capture the note. Usually, that’s my own app. Sometimes, when I’m on the go, it’s an app on my phone.

The tool changes, but the process is the same.

Usually, I stop, make coffee, open the mic, and start with something like:

“Okay, so what I’m trying to say here…”

Then the first 30 seconds usually sound like a jumble of words with very little connection between them. A bit like trying to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for years.

Not elegant. But once the engine starts, the ideas begin to move.

I don’t always know what the post will be when I start talking. I might begin with an idea about posting consistency, staying top of mind, or reaching potential clients, and somehow end up somewhere completely different.

Like when I wrote a post about how much I hate advertising.

(That is an actual thing, by the way. I simply cannot stand advertising. It gets on my nerves.)

And that's exactly what I mean.

The point I start with is not always the point I end up writing about. Voice notes let the thought move before I force it into structure.

When I write directly on the page, I organise too early. I try to clean the sentence before the thought is even complete. That slows everything down.

Voice notes lower the pressure.

I can pause, mutter, sip coffee, lose the thread, restart the thought, say something that makes no sense, then find the point two minutes later.

Totally unpolished. But that’s the point.

The first version is not supposed to be clean. It is supposed to capture the storm of thoughts before they disappear.

For the last couple of weeks, most of the posts I’ve published started this way.

I dump the audio, paste the transcript into AI, and ask it to identify the ideas. Usually, I want titles for possible posts, with a brief summary of what each one could cover.

Then I pick the idea I want to develop, ask for a first draft, and sit down to do the actual work: editing, cutting, adding my own thoughts, remembering personal examples, and shaping the thing into something I can stand behind.

Voice notes are a massively underrated writing tool. For me, they work much better than trying to dump ideas directly onto the page.

And AI works much better when you give it real material. Something that happened. Something you noticed. A contradiction. A personal detail. A bit of texture from actual life.

Because then it has something real to shape.

In short, my process is: talk first, make a mess, then find the writing inside it.

How about you? Do you ever use voice notes to captures your thoughts?

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

I’ve been testing AI for writing since the early versions of ChatGPT.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

At the very beginning, it was bad as bad can be. Every output lacked basic structure, coherence, and flow. It was so bad I would not even use it as placeholder text.

But with the newest models, the output has changed drastically.

Nowadays, you get structure, coherence, relevance, and flow from a single prompt. You get something that, at least on the surface, looks like a good piece of writing.

And it is good.

But there is still a problem with it.

The problem is that it can still feel like something anyone could have written. It lacks the thing that makes writing feel embodied in human experience.

It lacks texture.

Good writing has ownership. It carries the person behind it. Their values, their judgement, their humour, their contradictions, their specific examples, their way of noticing things.

It’s the difference between saying “consistency matters” and saying “one break made the blank page feel heavy again.”

One is true, but the other feels owned.

That texture is what makes a piece feel like it belongs to someone.

Without it, the text lacks a fingerprint. It could be published by anyone, which means it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. That’s where AI still struggles.

It struggles with the personal layer.

The lived example that makes the idea feel earned. The small hesitation before a strong claim. The odd sentence that somehow sounds exactly like you. The joke you would actually make, not the joke a content template thinks you should make.

That’s the missing layer.

I’ve built a system around this for my own writing. It learns from how I write, what I write, and the patterns that show up in my voice. It keeps track of those patterns and uses them as a calibration layer.

Right now, I’d say it gets me about 70% of the way there in one pass.

Useful? Yes. Does it output a finished piece worth sharing? Not at all.

I don’t think people should pretend AI isn’t useful. It is useful. It’s inevitable. People need to learn how to use it properly, which basically comes down to this:

Prompt it well, and treat the output as a rough draft.

Then work on that draft until it captures exactly what you want to say, in your own way.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

Today, I have a short post to share.

This is it.

This is the post. Have a good day.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

I broke the rhythm over the weekend.

Then Monday came, and the blank page made it very obvious.

I wasn’t planning to post anything during the weekend, so nothing wrong there. The weekend went fine. Family time. Normal life. Then Monday arrived, and my goal was to write something early and post around 9am, like I did last week.

But I got busy responding to incoming messages from potential clients, which is obviously not a bad problem to have. Still, the post didn’t go out when I wanted it to go out, and by the time I came back to it, hours had gone by.

Not ideal.

I opened the editor a couple of times, stared at the blank page, closed it, opened it again, stared at it again, then went to make coffee because apparently my brain needed external support.

Eventually, I came back and started working on it.

I felt annoyed with myself, if I’m honest. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because the whole point of the challenge is to build the rhythm, and today was supposed to be one of those simple 9am posts that proves the rhythm is there.

But here we are.

And the only thing that came to mind to write about was exactly that: breaking the rhythm, staring at the blank page, and trying to get the thread back.

The blank page can feel like a problem, but I don’t think it is. The blank page is just where the real problem becomes visible.

Today, it became clear to me: it’s about putting in the reps.

Because last week, when I was writing every day and getting posts ready early in the morning, I didn’t really feel this. The ideas were not magically better. The rhythm was better.

One break made the blank page feel heavy again.

Writing gets harder when the reps get colder. That’s the hard part. Not struggling with the lack of ideas, but returning to the page when you’ve lost momentum.

You can plan consistency in a calendar, but you build consistency by coming back when the neat little plan has already broken.

That’s probably the real rep.

Not posting when everything is lined up. Posting when you’re annoyed with yourself, slightly behind where you wanted to be, and the only honest thing left to write about is the fact that you’re still here, trying.

If you’ve read my ramblings up to this point, hope you have a great week.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

I’m halfway through the beginner X challenge, and honestly, I’m exhausted.

Not in a bad way. More like: “Oh, right, this is a lot more social interaction than I’m used to” kind of tired.

Posting is one thing. But reading properly, replying thoughtfully, finding the right people, and staying present takes a surprising amount of energy.

Especially if, like me, social interaction doesn’t exactly recharge your batteries.

And I’ll be honest: doing this on X feels harder than doing it on LinkedIn.

My ICP is easier to find on LinkedIn. On X, there are definitely writers, ghostwriters, founders, and people building interesting things, but you have to dig more.

There’s also a lot more political content here.

That’s not me saying politics should not exist on X. Actually, one thing I do like about X is that people seem much more willing to exchange ideas openly, including ideas others might dislike.

LinkedIn feels more polite. X feels more free. Both have value.

But for this challenge, I’m mostly trying to find people around writing, ghostwriting, social growth, content, and building online. And that has been easier on LinkedIn so far.

So I’m starting to think LinkedIn may become my main growth platform in the short term, while X may become more of a place for thoughts, ideas, and less polished expression.

Still figuring that out. The good news is that the challenge is working.

It forced me to improve the system I’m building, especially around managing contacts, follow-ups, and who to engage with next.

And honestly, I don’t think I could have done this with spreadsheets alone.

A mess of tabs, notes, and spreadsheets would have eaten my brain by Tuesday.

So yes, I’m tired. But I’m also happy.

More like the kind of happy you feel when you’re building something you actually want to see exist in the world.

And that’s a pretty good place to end the week, if you ask me.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

One thing I keep seeing while spending more time reading people’s posts and writing comments, is how many people are posting about not using AI to write.

Maybe it’s the random luck of the posts I’ve stumbled on, but it feels as if a strong majority of people are advocating for some variation of:

1. Avoiding AI at all costs.
2. Writing everything yourself.
3. Keeping it 100% human.

And I get it. I really do.

There is a lot of soulless AI slop floating around. It is annoying to read. You can almost smell it before the second paragraph. Perfectly structured, oddly empty, as if written by nobody in particular. It has the shape of thought, but none of the pulse.

But after reading and interacting with so many posts on the topic, I can’t help feeling that trying to fight against AI completely is the wrong battle.

We’ve seen versions of this before.

In 1785, Edmund Cartwright patented the power loom. Mechanised weaving eventually displaced many skilled handloom weavers who had built their livelihoods around the craft.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T. By 1913, the moving assembly line helped push cars into the mainstream and changed whole industries around horses, carriages, stables, and blacksmithing.

In 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released VisiCalc for the Apple II. The spreadsheet changed office work around manual calculations, bookkeeping, and clerical updating.

That doesn’t mean those changes were painless. They weren’t.

When a new technology arrives, it doesn’t politely knock and ask the old world for permission. And trying to stop the technology itself doesn’t seem to work. The better question is usually:

What becomes more valuable because of this change?

And in the case of AI and writing, I think one answer is voice.

But I don’t think “having an authentic voice” means never using AI. The way I see it, an authentic voice is not about whether every sentence was typed without assistance. It’s about whether the writing is truthful to the person behind it.

Being authentic is expressing your thoughts, opinions, judgment, doubts, taste, and perspective with clarity. It’s making the written word feel true to who you are as the author.

You can do that without AI, but you can also use AI to assist you in that process.

The problem starts when people use AI to replace their voice entirely. That’s the part I think damages everyone. Not because AI was involved, but because the human disappeared.

Used badly, AI turns your writing into a polished beige paste.

Used well, it can help you find the words for something you already think, sharpen an idea you’re struggling to express, or make a messy thought clearer without removing you from it.

The real divide is not AI writing versus human writing. I think it’s this:

Are you using AI to express yourself more clearly? Or are you using it to avoid having your own expression at all? That’s where the line is for me. How about you?

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

The rest of the beginner challenge is now planned inside my own system.

Not fully scheduled, but planned. Everything looks neat, and seeing it laid out like this makes one thing very obvious: planning consistency is easy.

- You put the posts in the calendar.
- You pick the times.
- You create the structure.
- You make it look real.

Consistency looks simple when it’s planned in a calendar, but feels demanding when it has to be lived in real time. Because planning does not equal to execution.

The hard part is having enough attention and energy to show up every day:

- Read other people’s posts properly, not skim.
- Comment thoughtfully, not on autopilot.
- Send connection requests to the right people at the right time.
- Stay present enough to participate like a real person.

That’s the part I’m still building reps on. The system helps a lot, I might add.

So the first useful lesson from using my own system in the wild is this:

A good system can support consistency, but it can’t replace execution.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

A small update on the beginner X challenge. Yesterday I said I was going to:

- Post once a day
- Follow 5–10 relevant people
- Leave 15–25 thoughtful replies

What actually happened? I posted at 9am. And then I left exactly one reply on X for the rest of the day. A single reply. One.

Not because I forgot, but because I was also running the same challenge on LinkedIn, and that completely took over my attention. That my first useful lesson.

It’s very easy to say “I’ll be consistent on multiple platforms.”

But it’s much harder to do it properly when each platform requires actual attention, reading, thinking, replying, and participating.

Even more so because about half of my productive time was dedicated to make changes to the very system I'm using to help me manage this social media campaign.

I realised you can automate output. But you can’t really automate care.

Now I’m questioning whether running both challenges at the same time is realistic, or whether I need to treat one platform as the main experiment and the other as a lighter version. Either way, this is useful data.

The challenge has barely started and the first bottleneck is already obvious: It’s attention.

I thought the hard part would be coming up with things to post. Turns out the harder part might be having enough energy to actually participate on more than one platform.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

@OneJKMolina At this point in time, that’s the most basic advice for some users and the most advanced for others.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

I’ve had this X account for years. Back when X was still Twitter, growing an account mostly meant showing up, posting your thoughts, and talking to people.

But I neglected this account for too long. And now that I want to build something with it, I’m basically starting over like a beginner, despite having thousands of followers.

So for the next two weeks, I’m running a beginner X challenge.

Here’s what I’ll be doing:

- Post at least once every day
- Follow 5–10 relevant people every day
- Leave 15–25 thoughtful replies every day

That’s it. Simple as that. Just slow, basic consistency.

I’m curious to see what happens over 14 days when I do the boring things properly.

I’m going to be using a custom app I’ve built to manage my social media and help me stay consistent. This will be its first proper stress test in the real world.

I’ll post my starting analytics as a screenshot, then check back after day 14 so we can see what actually changed. I'm fairly confident the only way is up.

How do you think this is going to go? Leave your predictions below.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

Happy Friday! And...

Nothing special to say really, just stopping by to say hello.

Some days don’t need to be chased or conquered, just lived.

Hope you're having an easy day today. Talk soon.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

For the last 45 days, I've been focused on a single task.

I've transformed my content strategy framework into an app that helps me create and publish content on social media whilst also managing my social media contacts so I can focus on the one thing that matters most: building relationships.

The app is fully functional, and I'm using it for this very post. As an introvert, this is the exact tool I needed to help me take the stress of putting myself out there.

I want to build real relationships. Slowly, respectfully, and authentically.

So for the next days, I’ll be writing more regularly, talking about work, about the app, about things that matter to me, and yes, about my services too. I still need to get paid.

But for now, I guess I just want to mark this point in time with this post. The first post I've written with the help of both: my content framework system and my new app.

If you also struggle with feeling stuck between “showing up” and “trying too hard”, I’d love to chat. I'll leave you with this question: What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to posting on social media? Send me a DM with the answer and we take it from there.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

The post that could bring you your next client is still stuck in your head.

Not because you do not know what to say.
Because you think you have to be the one to sit down and type it.

So there you are at 9pm on a Sunday, staring at a blinking cursor, feeling like you have to choose between rest and marketing.

Then an email lands.
A client issue comes up.
The writing block disappears.

Once again, this is probably not the best use of your time.

A better way would be to capture your ideas and hand them off to a content operator. Your thinking is high leverage, but your typing is not.

The usual objection is authenticity. You think that if you do not write it yourself, then it will not really sound like you.

But that is not where authenticity comes from.

The most valuable ideas often come out when someone is talking through a recent client call, a problem they have solved, or a point of view they hold strongly, not when they are typing on a keyboard.

You could spend your time acting as a typist.
Or you can spend your time where it has more value.

[Ray Vellest @rayvellest]

I haven’t published a single post for almost an entire month.

Most people would feel the need to come up with an excuse to cover the algorithm gap, or even pretend the silence never happened. The reality is far less glamorous. I stepped back because the tectonic plates underneath my entire business model are shifting.

And frankly, it took all my energy to stay standing.

Over the last few weeks, I didn't schedule content. I sat in silence and used AI to completely rebuild the backend of three entirely distinct projects.

I restructured a digital magazine on personal branding.
I rebuilt a premium reference tool for solo operators.

In a world before AI, a solo operator attempting this would be clinically insane. Overhauling two distinct content platforms by handling the system design, database architecture, frontend, backend, and every line of copy is a six month roadmap for a full agency team.

I did it alone, in less than 30 days. But then, there's more:

I completely rewired my own personal content engine.

After this experience, I can’t stop feeling that the content game is over for anyone refusing to use AI as leverage. It is no longer about who is the most talented copywriter. The winners will be those who leverage AI to bring their workflow to a superhuman level.

You can either spend your time feeding the algorithm, or you can go silent and build the engine that feeds it for you.

I chose building the engine. Watch me run it.