You spend an hour writing a brilliant post. It is full of value. It shares a hard lesson you learned building your company. You are proud of it. You hit "Post."
You wait. One hour passes. Two hours pass.
Three likes. One is from your co-founder. One is from your mom.
I experienced this constantly in my early days. It is frustrating. You start to doubt yourself. You think, "Maybe my ideas aren't good."
I have good news for you: Your ideas are likely fine. Your "Hook" is the problem.
The psychology of the scroll
I am a psychologist by education. So when I look at a failed LinkedIn post, I don't just see "bad writing." I see a failure to engage the brain.
Our brains are efficiency machines. To save energy, the brain constantly scans the environment for familiar patterns so it can ignore them. In psychology, we call this Habituation. If your brain paid attention to every single piece of information it saw, you would be exhausted by 9 AM.
When a user is scrolling LinkedIn, their brain is in "scan mode." It is looking for reasons to not read. When you write a standard opening line like "I wanted to talk about marketing," the brain recognizes the pattern (Corporate Noise) and filters it out immediately.
To win attention, you need to use a psychological concept called a Pattern Interrupt.
You have to present a stimulus that breaks the expected pattern. You have to startle the brain just enough to switch it from "scan mode" to "read mode."
The mistake everyone makes
Most founders accidentally trigger the "ignore" filter because they write like this:
- "I wanted to talk a bit today about consistency."
- "We had a great team meeting yesterday."
- "I am happy to announce a new feature."
These are "sleepy" sentences. They are safe, predictable, and invisible.
To create a Pattern Interrupt, you need to use specific triggers: Negativity, Curiosity, or Contrarianism. Today, I am sharing a specific AI prompt I use to generate these triggers instantly.
The 'Scroll-Stopper' prompt
Copy the prompt below. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever tool you use. Then, paste your draft post underneath it.
The Prompt:
"I am writing a LinkedIn post. The goal is to create a psychological 'Pattern Interrupt' to stop the scroll.
Read my draft below. I want you to ignore the current first sentence. Instead, generate 5 new opening 'Hooks' for this post using these specific angles:
1 - The Contrarian: A short, punchy statement that challenges common advice (Breaks the pattern of agreement).
2 - The Hard Data: Start with a specific number or percentage (Triggers logical attention).
3 - The Vulnerable Confession: Start with 'I used to think...' or 'I made a mistake...' (Triggers empathy).
4 - The Curiosity Gap: A statement that implies a story but doesn't finish it (Triggers the need for closure).
5 - The Negative Constraint: Tell people what NOT to do (Triggers loss aversion).
Keep all hooks under 15 words. Use simple, conversational English."
Seeing it in action
Let's look at a real example. Imagine I wrote a post about how important it is to talk to customers.
Original boring start:
"It is really important to talk to your customers if you want to find product-market fit."
What the AI prompt generates:
- The Contrarian: "Stop building features until you have spoken to 10 humans."
- The Hard Data: "We wasted $50,000 because we didn't send one email."
- The Curiosity Gap: "I almost shut down my company until one phone call changed everything."
- The Negative Constraint: "Never write a line of code before you sell the idea."
Do you see the difference? The original sentence is a lecture. The new hooks are Pattern Interrupts. They force the brain to stop scanning.
How we do this at Stix
You can do this manually with ChatGPT every time you write. It works, but it takes copy-pasting and context switching.
When we built Stix, we baked this psychology directly into the editor. When you draft a post in Stix, our AI doesn't just check your grammar. It acts as a behavioral psychologist, looking at your opening line and suggesting "Hook Variations" that trigger engagement.
Whether you use Stix or the prompt above, please stop writing "I wanted to talk about..."
Respect your reader's brain. Break the pattern.
