Your post got reach. Someone tapped your name and landed on your profile: “CEO at Company”, the default banner, and an About section that reads “passionate about building innovative solutions”. They closed the tab. The post did its job, the profile threw the result away.
For a founder, the profile is a landing page. People arrive there after a post, after a comment, after someone tags you in a thread. Why a personal profile outperforms the company page is covered in our piece on LinkedIn for SaaS. This article is about the profile itself: what a visitor sees in the first five seconds, how to write the headline and About, what belongs in Featured, and which field limits LinkedIn will not let you negotiate.
What people see in five seconds
On mobile, the top card fits your photo, banner, name, headline, location and one button. Everything else sits below, and most visitors never scroll there. First decisions happen here.
| Element | Limit | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Name | 20 characters first, 40 last | Name only. No emoji, no “CEO”, no credentials: LinkedIn restricts accounts for stuffing this field |
| Photo | 400×400 px minimum | Face takes about 60% of the frame, plain background, the same photo across every network |
| Banner | 1584×396 px | One sentence on what you are useful for. Company logo small in a corner, not centered |
| Headline | 220 characters | Formula below. Mobile shows the first 60–70 characters |
| Location | Pick from a list | The city or country of your market. It is a search filter |
The headline: 220 characters that follow you everywhere
The headline does not stay on your profile. It sits under your name in every comment you leave, every post in the feed and every search result. It is the most-read text in your LinkedIn, and most founders fill it with “Founder & CEO at Company”.
A formula that beats the job title: who you help + what they get + proof. Title and company go at the end, where the Experience section repeats them anyway.
Examples:
- “I help logistics companies move order tracking from Excel to a CRM in 30 days. 40+ rollouts. Founder, LogiTrack.”
- “Building B2B sales in Europe for US SaaS. Launched 6 products in Germany and the Nordics. Founder, Bridge Sales.”
- “Making sure small businesses stop losing leads in Instagram and Telegram DMs. Founder of a scheduling tool with 3,000 customers.”
What breaks a headline: keyword lists separated by pipes (“Marketing | Sales | Strategy | Leadership”), words like “visionary”, “thought leader” and “helping businesses grow” that promise nothing, and trying to fit every project into 220 characters. One market, one outcome, one proof point.
The first 60 characters must read as a complete thought, because that is exactly where comments truncate it.
About: the first three lines decide everything
About holds 2,600 characters, but on desktop only about 300 show before the “see more” button, and fewer on mobile. That is two or three sentences, and you write them separately from the rest.
A structure people read to the end:
- Hook (under 300 characters). The customer’s problem in your words, or a number that surprises. Not “My name is”: your name is already above.
- Who it is for and what changes. Two or three paragraphs: who your customer is, where the work starts, what comes out the other end. Specific situations instead of “helping brands grow”.
- Proof. Three to five facts: customers, numbers, years, press. One fact per line.
- How to reach you. What to put in a message and what not to. This filters spam and lowers the bar for real people.
An example opening for the founder of a delivery tool for restaurants:
A restaurant loses 15–20% of orders because the courier “already left” forty minutes ago. I have spent five years building the system that shows an owner exactly where the money leaks. Below, without the pitch deck: who this fits and who it does not.
Three mistakes in every second About:
- Third person. “John is the founder of” reads like a press release. Write in the first person, the way you talk.
- Links in the text. They are not clickable in About. Put your website and email in Contact info, and in About write “website in contact info”.
- A biography since 2009. The career path lives in Experience. About answers “why should I talk to you”, not “who are you”.
Featured: three cards, not ten
The Featured section sits right below About and shows preview cards: your posts, articles, external links, PDFs and images. It is the only place on a profile where you get a large clickable card pointing to your product without paying for Premium.
What to pin if you want people to message you:
- A post with proof. A case study with numbers or a breakdown that collected the most comments. It shows how you think.
- A link to the product or a demo. With a card title that means something: not “Home”, but “How LogiTrack works: 3-minute video”.
- An interview, podcast or article about you. External validation weighs more than your own words.
Ten cards are worse than three: visitors swipe the first two or three and leave. Refresh the section monthly: a fresh strong post replaces the oldest one. A Featured post dated six months ago looks like an abandoned account.
Experience, the button, your URL and verification
Four settings that take ten minutes and that almost everyone skips.
Experience for the current role is a mini case study. Not a list of duties, but what the company does, for whom, and what numbers changed on your watch. Three to five lines. The logo only appears if the company has a LinkedIn Page.
Primary button. In profile settings you can make “Follow” the main button instead of “Connect”. If you write for a broad audience, this removes a barrier: following is easier than asking for a connection. Connecting stays available in the menu. A custom button linking to your website or a booking page is Premium only.
Profile URL. Change linkedin.com/in/john-123abc to linkedin.com/in/firstname-lastname in settings. That URL goes into your email signature, your Telegram channel description and your Instagram bio.
Verification. The checkmark next to your name is free and works through a work email or a government ID, but ID verification is only available in a limited list of countries. If you can get it, do: verified profiles rank higher in search and get mistaken for bots less often in DMs.
Checklist before you send traffic
Go through the list as a stranger would. Open your profile from another account or in an incognito window.
- Photo: face, good light, the same picture as on your other networks.
- Banner: one sentence about the benefit, readable on a phone.
- Headline: who, what, proof. The first 60 characters make sense on their own.
- About: a hook without “my name is”, first person, facts as a list, what to write in a message.
- Featured: three cards, recent dates, a product link with a clear title.
- Experience: the current role written as a case with numbers, logo showing.
- Contact info: website, email, Telegram or WhatsApp if that is where you reply.
- Profile URL: firstname-lastname.
- Button: “Follow” if you post for a wide audience.
When profile optimization will NOT help
- You have no posts. A profile with nothing published in three months is not revived by any headline. People reach profiles from the feed, not from search. How to build a posting rhythm without burning out is in our guide to personal branding for founders.
- Your customer is not on LinkedIn. If you sell nail services or food delivery to consumers, their attention is on Instagram and TikTok. LinkedIn will bring partners and hires, not customers.
- Nobody answers DMs. The profile sends people to your inbox. If a reply takes a week, the Message button works against you. Set a rule: a reply within one business day, even if it is “thanks, not now”.
The profile is done, now the posts carry the load. If LinkedIn is your main platform and X, Threads and Telegram follow, write the core idea once: in Repost21, Luna adapts it to each network’s format, drawing on a brand knowledge base with your cases and numbers from Google Docs or Notion. Try it free on your next post.