If you are comparing companies that write LinkedIn and X content for founders, here is the straight answer on how to run that evaluation. Five criteria decide it: the extraction process, the voice standard, the strategy behind the calendar, transparency about who does the work, and honesty about results. Most providers pass the surface test on all five and fail the follow-up questions on at least three. This guide gives you the follow-up questions.
I run content at Megaphone, so evaluating this work is my day job from the other side of the table. Before this I was the first CMO at Copy.ai, where content carried real weight in the run from zero to $2.5M ARR in under a year, and my own accounts sit at 93k on X and 26k on LinkedIn from years of my own reps. I have hired writers, been the writer, and reviewed hundreds of provider drafts, and the same few signals separate the good ones every time.
One note before the criteria. If you are still deciding whether to hire help at all, start with the four-question decision guide on hiring someone to write with you. This article assumes you have decided yes and are now choosing between providers.
Criterion 1: The extraction process
This is the first filter because it predicts everything downstream. The content that works under a founder's name does not come from the writer. It comes out of the founder's head, and the provider's real job is getting it out. Interviews, voice notes, structured prompts that surface your stories, your numbers, and the positions your industry disagrees with you on.
So ask every provider one question early: where does the raw material for my posts come from? The strong answer describes a recurring process with your voice in it, a weekly call, a voice note workflow, a question bank built around your business. The weak answer mentions your website, your industry, and research. That answer means drafting from a blank page, and across our client base, when content misses, the root cause is almost always zero founder inputs rather than weak writing.
At Megaphone we call this Idea Capture and it is one of the eight modules in our system, which should tell you how central we think it is. You do not need a provider who uses our vocabulary. You need one who can describe their version of the loop without being prompted.
Criterion 2: A voice standard you can inspect
Matching your voice is the claim every provider makes. Very few can show you the machinery behind it.
Ask what their voice work produces as an artifact. The good version is a documented standard: your phrasing patterns, your banned words, the hooks you would never use, built from your own writing and speech and updated as batches ship. Drafts then get edited against that document. The weak version is a writer who "gets a feel for you" over time, which means your voice lives in one person's head and leaves when they do.
A useful test costs nothing. Send a finalist a paragraph you wrote and a paragraph of generic industry content, and ask them to tell you what separates the two. Providers who do real voice work will name specifics like sentence length, how you open, and the words you lean on, while providers who do volume work will say something about tone and confidence.
Criterion 3: Strategy attached to a named goal
A calendar full of posts only proves production. Strategy means knowing what the presence is for and choosing formats, topics, and schedule to serve it. Pipeline, hiring, dealflow, or the next raise are goals a provider can aim at. Visibility in general is a budget leak.
Ask how they would decide what you post in month one and what evidence would change the plan by month three. Strong providers describe a mapping step before any writing, an audit of where your customers spend attention and what you should be known for, then a plan built to match. Our version is a fixed weekly plan of five X posts, three LinkedIn posts, and one long piece, and every provider worth hiring has some deliberate structure like that with reasons behind the numbers.
If the answer to "why these formats" is that they work well right now, keep pressing. Formats shift, and a provider reading your results weekly will change the mix while a provider running a template will keep shipping it.
Criterion 4: Transparency about who does the work
The person on the strategy call is often the best writer the company has, and the person writing your posts in week six is often someone you never met. That handoff is where quality quietly dies, and writing well across many accounts is genuinely hard even with good tools, so team depth matters more than the pitch deck suggests.
Ask three things directly. Who writes my drafts, and can I meet them? What happens to my account if that person leaves? And how is AI used in the process? On the last one, honesty beats purity. AI can get a draft most of the way there, and the difference between providers is whether a human editor with your voice standard closes the gap or whether the output ships as generated. When founders complain that paid content stopped sounding like them, bad AI content slipping through the editing gate is a frequent culprit.
John Jantsch's team at Duct Tape Marketing runs a whole episode on evaluation questions in this spirit, including who owns your assets and who is on your account, and it is worth the watch even though it covers marketing hires broadly rather than founder content specifically:
Ownership belongs on your list too. Your voice document, your content archive, and your account access should be yours on day one and stay yours if you leave.
Criterion 5: Honesty about results and the ramp
This one is easy to test because the dishonest version is loud. Any provider promising inbound leads in the first month is pricing your hope. On a new or quiet account I anticipate six to eight weeks before we see much movement, because the algorithm has no foundation to learn from yet, and the first batch of content is the roughest batch by design, since the writer is still calibrating to you.
The honest provider tells you both of those things before you sign. They guarantee what they control, the system going live and the work shipping, and they talk about outcomes as evidence to read at month three rather than a number on a contract. Nobody can honestly promise behavior from a market, and a provider who does is telling you how they will handle every other uncomfortable truth in the engagement.
Red flags that end the conversation
Some signals are worth walking away from without a second call:
- Sample posts written for you before anyone has interviewed you. Confident invention is the exact skill you do not want.
- Guaranteed lead or follower numbers anywhere in the pitch.
- Nobody will tell you who writes your drafts.
- Lock-in past a single quarter before any trust exists. Confidence in the work shows up as short initial terms.
- Selling entirely on engagement screenshots with no story about pipeline, hiring, or dealflow. Impressions are an input. Your goal is influence, the state where the market comes to you, and engagement alone does not prove it is building.
How pricing maps to what you get
Full price analysis lives in the breakdown of what executive content support costs, so here is the short version for evaluation purposes. Per Mylance's 2026 pricing guide, entry-level help runs about $500 to $1,500 a month and buys consistency with little voice work. The mid market runs $2,000 to $5,000 and should include real voice matching, a calendar, and tracking. Premium work at $5,000 to $15,000 and up adds research, positioning, and a team.
The evaluation move is mapping any quote against the five criteria above. A $4,000 retainer with extraction, a voice standard, and weekly strategy is a different product from a $4,000 retainer that produces sixteen posts from a blank page, and the invoice will never show you the difference. Ask where the hours go. In the good version most of them go to extraction and editing, because the typing was never the product.
Our own numbers are public so you can place us on the map: Megaphone Deploy at $15,000 one-time for a 90-day install with an embedded strategist, where the guarantee is the install itself; Megaphone Studio from $3,995 a month if you keep us on after day 90 and expand into the company; and Founder Authority OS at $197 one-time if you want to run the system yourself.
Run the evaluation like a hire
Treat this like hiring a senior person, because the line item is similar and the blast radius is bigger. Shortlist two or three providers, give them the same brief, and score them against the five criteria: extraction, voice standard, strategy, transparency, and honesty about the ramp. The provider who asks you the most questions before proposing anything is usually the one to take seriously.
If Megaphone ends up on your shortlist, book a strategy call and run this exact list on us. You will get straight answers on all five, including where we are strong, where we are opinionated, and whether we are the right fit at all.