LinkedIn Thought Leadership Content for the CEO of SunBox
Overview
Julia Rivers is the founder and CEO of SunBox, a fictional* startup company with a mission to make home clean energy easy and affordable for every household.
They provide solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and EV chargers all connected in one smart, integrated system, and they offer finance options to make the investment affordable for a wide range of people. Their target audience is energy-savvy homeowners (B2C), along with housing associations, developers and architects (B2B).
Julia is an expert in the clean energy market, having worked in the field for almost 20 years. She has a passion for making clean energy accessible and addressing fuel poverty, motivated by her personal experience of growing up in a low-income family that struggled with energy bills.
*Both Julia Rivers and SunBox are completely made up. Because of the discreet nature of ghostwriting, I can’t share samples of my work for real clients. So, I created a fictional client for illustrative purposes.
The brief
Let’s say Julia wants to use LinkedIn to scale her message and grow her own profile as an expert on home clean energy and promote her startup, SunBox. By sharing regular posts about her insights and stories, she hopes to reach investors, talent and potential customers.
She wanted unique content to post on her personal LinkedIn profile every week.
Deliverables
Here are three examples of the posts I created for Julia.
Post 1: What trends are shaping the future of home energy tech?
What trends will shape the home clean energy market over the next few years? 🤔
This is a question I spend a LOT of time thinking about, as a startup founder… Here’s my top 5:
1. The "Whole Home" energy solution
We’re already seeing this shift, and it’s exactly what SunBox is built around. People don’t just want solar panels, they are asking for batteries, heat pumps, they want to charge their EV… And they want everything to work together seamlessly as one.
2. Virtual Power Plants
As the power system becomes more variable and distributed, we’re seeing a rise of so-called Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) where networks of batteries can be aggregated and called upon by the grid to provide stability or discharge power during peak demand. This is becoming another revenue stream for homeowners, too - they are paid for helping balance the grid.
3. Smart homes & AI-powered energy management
As more homes get batteries and EVs, we can intelligently manage when to charge, when to discharge and when to run appliances, all based on energy prices, grid demand, and weather forecasts. AI and machine learning will play a massive role in optimising these systems.
4. Growing electricity demand
This is an obvious one, but important. With the growing popularity of EVs and the gradual transition from gas boilers to heat pumps, the domestic demand for electricity is going to surge. This makes home energy generation (solar) and storage (batteries) all the more essential.
5. Climate adaptation
We’re already seeing climate impacts in the UK, like stronger heatwaves and storms so strong they can cause blackouts. And this means more people will start thinking about how to protect their home and family from its impacts. That means the energy security from a solar + battery setup will become even more appealing. Also, we don’t have much air conditioning in the UK, but that’s going to change. I’m already seeing increased demand for air source heat pumps for efficient cooling.
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What about you? Any other key trends you think will be shaping the near future?
Follow me for more insights about the home energy revolution, from the trenches of a clean energy company in scale up mode! 🚀
Mock-up of what this post would look like in the LinkedIn feed, created with BrandBird. Profile image is AI-generated in Canva’s Magic Studio. Engagement metrics are for illustrative purposes only.
Post 2: Lessons from my startup journey
Five years ago today, sparked by a particularly infuriating council meeting, I decided to start a business to make clean energy easy & accessible for everyone.
Here are the top 5 lessons I’ve learned on my startup journey so far:
1. The importance of relentless simplification for the customer
When I first started, I was so immersed in the technology. The kW output, the battery cycles, the coefficients of performance for heat pumps… And I thought that was what we needed to sound credible. But I quickly realised, to homeowners and even most developers, that’s just noise. Now, we focus on benefits and only explain the tech when people ask.
2. Building the right team is essential
Early on we leaned a bit too heavily on technical skills, but now we focus more on cultural fit and soft skills and provide in-house training where needed. Finding people who are not only skilled but totally aligned with SunBox’s mission has been transformative. I was so proud when we won the 2025 Glassdoor award for best startup for employee satisfaction.
3. Don’t depend on government policy
The clean energy industry is very dependent on government policy - feed-in-tariffs to VAT changes to heatpump grants. And all this can shift without much warning. I’ve learned the hard way not to depend on government policies for our business model. However, I’ve also learned the value of advocacy and adding our voice to the national conversation. We are active members of the UK Solar Council and the UK Green Building Council.
4. Never underestimate the value of branding
I made the choice to invest heavily in brand and marketing early on, and I’m so glad I did. I’ve had countless customers tell me they immediately went to the SunBox website when they decided to look into solar systems. There are thousands of local renewable energy installers up and down the country, but we stand out - largely because of our unique brand and national visibility.
5. Authenticity builds trust
As I grew up in a low-income family that struggled to pay our energy bills and keep the heating on in winter, I bring a very personal perspective to my work. I’ve learned that sharing my story and mission resonates deeply with customers, investors and employees.
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Follow me for more startup stories about building a purpose-led clean energy business. 🚀
Mock-up of what this post would look like in the LinkedIn feed, created with BrandBird. Profile image is AI-generated in Canva’s Magic Studio. Engagement metrics are for illustrative purposes only.
Post 3: The Davidsons energy story
Last week, Emma Davidson, one of our recent customers, called me in tears.
She was clutching her energy bill, which was just £20.19 for the first full month since we installed a SunBox system on her home. Just twenty quid! The emotion in her voice was palpable. She had clearly just been crying (in a good way!).
To be fair, it is May. But the average over the year is on track to be less than a quarter of what it was before.
The Davidsons live in a 3-bed terraced house in East Bristol, not unlike the home that I grew up in myself. Emma works as a teaching assistant and her husband, Tim, is the manager of the local supermarket. They have two kids just starting secondary school. Until now, they were constantly stressed about their energy bills. They still haven’t got over the 2022 energy price shock which almost crippled them financially and put them into debt. They would track their usage with almost painful precision - always turning lights off, nagging the kids about leaving doors open, poring over bills with a calculator in hand.
Tim first gave us a call after seeing a SunBox van in their neighbourhood.
At first, they were very hesitant, thinking it would be too expensive. But we talked through the options and projected savings, and eventually they decided to go ahead with one of our finance plans (where the cost is spread over 36 months, so essentially the savings pay for it). We installed a full system with 6kW solar panels, a battery and a heat pump.
"Julia, for the first time in years, I don't feel that knot in my stomach every time the postman delivers a bill. We're running the washing machine when the sun's shining, the kids aren't shivering in their bedrooms, and we're actually comfortable”, Emma told me over the phone.
“It's not just about the money, though that's huge. It's the feeling of control, of not being at the mercy of the big energy companies anymore. It’s an incredible weight off.”
She told me that when she opened that energy bill, she literally went out and stood in her front garden staring up at her solar panels with this deep sense of relief and pride.
This conversation gave me goosebumps. This is exactly why I founded SunBox, and stories like this make everything so worthwhile. Every family deserves this feeling. 💚
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If this resonates, follow me for more stories about the power of clean energy and reach out if you’d like to talk about a SunBox system for your home! ☀️
Mock-up of what this post would look like in the LinkedIn feed, created with BrandBird. Profile image is AI-generated in Canva’s Magic Studio. Engagement metrics are for illustrative purposes only.
What I did (and why)
Process
As a spec project for a fictional client, clearly my process was a bit different to usual!
I started with creating the fictional brand, SunBox, and its fictional founder and CEO, Julia Rivers. I based this idea loosely on other companies and my understanding of the sector. I considered the company’s offer and target audience and created a detailed persona of Julia, including her background, interests and current goals and challenges. The brand name I came up with, SunBox, is meant to sound fun and aspirational and lean into the company’s USP of combining complex products to make a solar-powered home easy and accessible.
I then leveraged AI (Google’s Gemini) to do an ‘interview’ with Julia. I shared a detailed prompt with Julia’s persona and asked interview questions about her views on the industry, resulting in an interview transcript with plenty of content ideas.
I drafted the LinkedIn posts, using many of the points from the AI interview transcript, but writing in my own words and changing some of the points to be more compelling and specific. I spent most of my attention on the hooks (first 2-3 lines) as these are particularly important for attracting attention and getting people to click the ‘see more’ button on LinkedIn.
Created mock-ups of how the LinkedIn posts would look using BrandBird and Canva, including creating an AI-generated profile image for Julia, using Canva’s Magic Studio tool.
Tactics and techniques
Crafted engaging hooks for the introductions of the posts. The first three lines are the only bit that shows in the LinkedIn feed before the ‘see more’ tag, so it’s essential to grab attention and make the reader feel curious enough to click.
For example, the hook about the customer calling in tears evokes curiosity because we naturally want to know what made her cry. It’s also ambiguous whether this is a negative or positive story - if it were negative, it could be a vulnerable statement to admit that a customer was upset. Using the customer’s full name also invites curiosity.
The hook about the key trends mentions the author’s role as a startup founder and that she spends a lot of time thinking about these issues, to give her credibility. This isn’t just a round-up of content other people have posted, it’s something she has direct experience with.
The hook about lessons from her startup journey opens with a moment in time (five years ago today) which primes our brains for a story which is naturally engaging, and uses emotional language (an ‘infuriating’ meeting) to grab attention.
Clearly organised the posts into lists of trends/lessons/etc, which makes the content easier to read and remember.
Ended each post with a clear call to action, such as following Julia for more content like this or reaching out to talk about installing a SunBox system.