BY DAVE KERPEN
Providing value for free is the growth strategy that’s outlasted every algorithm change.
When I wrote Likeable Social Media in 2011, one chapter drew more scepticism than any other. The advice: provide value to your audience — genuinely useful, expert help — completely free. Executives would push back in every meeting: “Why would we give away what we sell?” Fifteen years, several companies, and an eight-figure exit later, I can report the results: every platform from that era changed beyond recognition. Facebook reach collapsed. Twitter became X. Algorithms rose, fell, and rose again. And through every single shift, as I’ve told founders here before, exactly one strategy never stopped working: being genuinely useful, for free, in public.
It’s the closest thing to a law of gravity that marketing has.
Here’s why it works, and why it keeps working when everything else breaks. Every algorithm every platform has ever built is, underneath the math, trying to answer one question: what do people actually find valuable? The tactics that game that question expire every eighteen months. The content that honestly answers it gets rewarded by every algorithm, forever, because it’s what the algorithm is looking for. When you provide real value, you’re not optimizing for the platform. You’re optimizing for the thing the platform is optimizing for. That’s why it’s permanent.
But the deeper reason has nothing to do with algorithms. Free value is how strangers learn to trust you before they’ve risked a dollar on you. Every useful thing you publish is a free sample of your competence. A restaurant gives away tastes; you give away answers. By the time a reader becomes a buyer, the sale is already made — you made it weeks or years ago, one helpful post at a time. Nearly everything I’ve built, from my books to my companies to a LinkedIn following of 650,000-plus, grew from that single flywheel.
Now, the objection I’ve heard for fifteen years: “If I give away my expertise, nobody will pay for it.” Here’s what actually happens, in my experience across hundreds of brands: the people who consume your free value and never pay were never going to pay. They were never your customers — but they are your marketers, sharing your work with people who will pay. Meanwhile, real buyers don’t want your information; they want your implementation, your product, your time, your accountability. Knowing how isn’t the same as having it done. I can read a hundred free articles about how to sell a company; Carrie still built an entire M&A advisory practice, The Whisper Group, because knowing and doing are different products.
And in the AI era, this strategy now has a caveat and an upgrade. The caveat: generic value is now worthless. AI can generate infinite “5 tips for better marketing” posts, and everyone knows it. The upgrade: what AI cannot generate is your value — your real numbers, your scars, your specific stories, your contrarian takes earned from actual experience. The bar for “valuable” moved up, and it moved directly toward the people with real stories to tell. That’s good news for every founder reading this, because you have something the content farms never will: you were actually there.
How to run this playbook in 2026:
Answer real questions.
The questions your customers ask you every week are your content calendar. Answer them fully and publicly — don’t tease, don’t gate the good part.
Give away the how, sell the done.
Publish your methodology. Your process is not your product; your execution is.
Be specific enough to be un-generatable.
Numbers, names, mistakes, screenshots. If ChatGPT could plausibly have written it, don’t post it.
Stay patient.
This flywheel is slow for months and unstoppable for decades. Most people quit at month three. That’s precisely why it still works.
Every gimmick you’re being pitched right now will be dead by next year. Generosity won’t be. Be useful, be free, be everywhere — and let compounding do what it does.
Feature image credit: Adobe Stock
