Mustafa Khan on Building a 350M-View LinkedIn Ghostwriting Agency

Mustafa Khan left professional services to build Draper with co-founder Sakib Ahmed. The LinkedIn ghostwriting agency now works with more than 50 founders and executives across the UK, US and Gulf, and says its clients have generated more than 350 million views. Its growth rests on a counterintuitive bet: as AI makes it easier to publish at scale, a recognisable human voice becomes more valuable, not less.

On paper, Khan’s career was progressing exactly as it should. He trained as a chartered accountant at KPMG and later moved to Alvarez & Marsal, two respected names in professional services. The work was stable, the path ahead was clear and each step looked like a logical continuation of the last. Yet that sense of inevitability eventually became difficult to ignore. “Somewhere along the way I realised I was optimising for a path I’d never actually chosen — I’d just inherited it,” he says.

The break from accounting did not begin with a viral post or a grand plan to start an agency. Years earlier, Khan had written an article for Islamic Finance Guru that reached perhaps 100 readers. The audience was small, but the experience stayed with him because it showed him how much a well-written argument could do. When he later had the opportunity to join a leading ghostwriting agency, he left professional services and began writing for CEOs, Y Combinator founders and senior partners. Within months, he says, his work had helped generate more than 160 million views.

That period provided the foundation for the company he now runs with Ahmed. The business launched as Signal before being renamed Draper, a change that accompanied a clearer positioning around premium, human-led content. Khan was willing to use AI inside the operation, but he did not want the technology making the final editorial decisions or flattening the differences between clients.

Building a human-led LinkedIn content model

Khan’s view is that most founders do not need to be convinced that LinkedIn matters. They already know they should be visible, but struggle to find the time, decide what is worth saying and publish consistently without sounding as though somebody else has taken over their account. “Founders don’t struggle with knowing they should post,” he says. “They struggle with time, ideation, and sounding like themselves.”

The available solutions, in his view, often fall into two unsatisfying camps. Traditional agencies can produce polished content that “sounds like nobody,” while fully automated tools can generate large volumes of what he calls “slop.” Draper’s alternative is built around a role the agency calls the “Content Engineer,” a human editor who speaks with the founder, identifies the strongest material and oversees AI tools trained on the client’s previous writing, call transcripts and voice patterns. The technology helps process information and prepare drafts, but a person still decides which story matters, what sounds false and what is ready to publish.

For the founder, the weekly commitment is designed to be manageable: one conversation from which Draper develops two or three pieces of content, including LinkedIn posts, carousels, infographics or short-form video. Khan and Ahmed say the agency has now worked with more than 50 founders and executives, including leaders from companies backed by Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, EQT and Lightspeed. Across those accounts, Draper reports more than 350 million views.

When LinkedIn content turns a cold meeting warm

The case study Khan returns to most often is Sahl AI, a healthcare technology company led by founders Ammar and Dr. Umair. While working with Draper, the pair grew from a combined 3,000 followers to 20,000. During the same period, Sahl AI secured a multi-million-dollar contract with one of Saudi Arabia’s largest hospital chains. “A hospital executive told them they were the most open and honest founders they’d met compared to competitors,” Khan says. “That transparency was built entirely through content. Every meeting now starts warm.”

Khan is careful not to claim that LinkedIn content closed the hospital contract by itself. The product still had to solve the customer’s problem and withstand the scrutiny of a serious procurement process. His argument is narrower: by the time prospective buyers met the founders, they had already spent time with their thinking, watched them discuss the company and developed a sense of how they operated. The content shortened the distance between a cold prospect and a credible potential partner.

Across its broader client base, Draper says its content and warm-outreach work has contributed to more than $20 million in client sales, including one account that reportedly closed £3 million in new business within six months. Those figures come from Draper and have not been independently verified. Khan also rejects the idea that any agency can promise a predictable number of leads from publishing alone. “Anyone who guarantees you leads from content is lying to you,” he says.

Instead of treating impressions as the main measure of success, Draper looks at who is engaging, whether prospects refer to particular posts during sales calls and whether the tone of a first meeting suggests that trust has already begun to form. The idea of the silent reader is supported by the 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, in which 56% of target buyers and 55% of less-visible “hidden buyers” said they use thought-leadership content when evaluating vendors. A decision-maker does not need to like or comment on a founder’s post for that post to influence how the company is perceived.

Related: How Ahmed Ghelle is using founder-led sales and LinkedIn visibility to build Merra.

Why founder stories come before thought leadership

Asked what separates founders who build commercially useful audiences from those who simply publish more, Khan points to taste rather than output. “Anyone can generate 100 posts in an afternoon now,” he says. “Which means volume is worthless as a differentiator. What people actually follow is a real person with a real point of view, making real decisions in public.”

His preferred content arc begins with the founder’s story. Readers first need to understand who the person is, what shaped them and why they chose to build this particular company. From there, founders can talk about the process of building in public before moving into broader industry analysis and advice. Khan calls this earning the right to sell. Many founders reverse that order, beginning with polished thought-leadership frameworks before the audience has any context for why their perspective should matter.

The same principle applies to how founders behave after publishing. Khan sees content as the beginning of a conversation rather than a finished broadcast, which means responding to comments, continuing relevant discussions privately and showing up as a person rather than a corporate announcement. “The ones who struggle are usually the ones treating LinkedIn like a press release channel,” he says.

Scaling quality while using AI

As Draper added clients, Khan and Ahmed had to turn editorial judgment into a repeatable operating system. They created voice documents, editorial rules and quality filters so that a client’s tone would remain recognisable even when different Content Engineers worked on the account. The company also operates on rolling monthly contracts and says it turns away founders when the team does not believe it can produce strong work for them. “Rolling monthly contracts keep us honest,” Khan says. “Clients stay because the work is good, not because a 12-month contract traps them.”

AI is used throughout that system, particularly for processing transcripts, identifying patterns and producing early drafts. Khan’s boundary is editorial judgment. “AI can process a call transcript, match sentence patterns, draft at speed,” he says. “What it can’t do is know which of your stories actually matters, ask you the question that unlocks the real insight, or tell you a post is technically fine but not you.”

That distinction is why every piece of content still passes through human review before it is sent to a client or published. “AI handles leverage, humans handle judgment,” Khan says. For Draper, the advantage does not come from rejecting automation; it comes from deciding which parts of the work should not be automated. “Consistent effort plus AI is the moat,” he says. “Pure automation with no human review doesn’t win long-term.”

The opportunity Khan sees in the Gulf

Khan wants Draper to become a reference point for founder-led content across the UK, US and Gulf, with the latter representing what he sees as a particularly underserved market. The region has substantial buying power and a growing technology sector, yet many founders remain far less visible than their companies’ ambitions would suggest. “Founders there are leaving millions on the table by staying invisible,” he says. “We’ve seen firsthand what happens when they stop.”

For founders who want to build their own presence, his advice is practical. Start with the experiences that explain why the company exists, then support those stories with real numbers, dates and names wherever appropriate. Continue publishing even when the visible response is modest, because the reader who later becomes a customer, investor or partner may never have left a public signal that they were paying attention.

The final test is whether the founder can still recognise themselves in the work. An agency can improve structure and an AI tool can increase speed, but neither should remove the opinions, details or turns of phrase that make the person distinct. “People follow people,” Khan says. “That hasn’t changed, and I don’t think it ever will.”

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Reporting note: Audience, client and sales figures were provided by Draper and have not been independently verified. Startup Muslim has distinguished those claims from independently sourced research throughout the article.