Paolo Perrone's No-BS Playbook for AI Creators

Paolo Perrone's No-BS Playbook for AI Creators

I stumbled on Paolo Perrone's profile while looking for creators who can talk about AI without turning every post into a buzzword smoothie. And the first thing that made me stop scrolling was the combo of 113,763 followers, a 71.00 Hero Score, and a very casual flex: "50M+ Views".

But here's the thing. Big follower counts are common. Real consistency and repeatable attention are not. So I compared Paolo with two other creators who also score high on engagement relative to their audience: Dagmawi Esayas (smaller audience, same Hero Score) and Om Nalinde (bigger audience, slightly lower Hero Score). A few patterns jumped out fast, and they explain a lot about why Paolo's content keeps spreading.

Here's what stood out:

• Paolo wins on cadence + clarity: lots of posts, tight structure, and direct language that technical people actually like.
• Dagmawi shows what "high signal" looks like at a smaller scale: proof you can get strong engagement without a huge audience.
• Om plays the "teacher" role to a massive dev audience: broad reach, slightly less efficient engagement, still a powerhouse.

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Paolo Perrone's Performance Metrics

What caught my eye is that Paolo's numbers tell a story of momentum, not just popularity. A 71.00 Hero Score with 13.8 posts per week is not "I post sometimes." It's "I treat distribution like a skill." And when you pair that with a headline that screams "No BS," you're basically pre-filtering your audience to people who want practical, slightly spicy engineering takes.

Key Performance Indicators

Before we go deeper, I wanted a quick side-by-side snapshot. Because success looks different depending on audience size.

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What Makes Paolo Perrone's Content Work

Paolo's style is not subtle. It's intentionally blunt, fast, and structured for people who skim. But it's not just "be loud." There's craft under the chaos.

1. The contrarian hook that earns the click

So here's what Paolo does better than most technical creators: he starts with a line that feels like a dare. It's often contrarian, sometimes a little dramatic, and almost always aimed at a common engineering mistake.

Think hooks like:

• "Vector search is a lie."
• "You shipped an LLM app without evals."
• "Most people skip Phase 2. Then wonder why production breaks."

These are not vague hot takes. They're precise accusations. And if you're the target reader (engineer, founder, builder), you either think "No way" or "Yeah... fair." Either reaction keeps you reading.

Key Insight: Start with a sentence that forces a technical reader to argue with you.

This works because engineers love being right. If your first line triggers their internal debugger, you've won the first 2 seconds. And those 2 seconds are basically the whole game on LinkedIn.

Strategy Breakdown:

2. Tight structure that reads like engineering notes

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Paolo's posts look like someone took a messy system and wrote the cleanest incident report for it.

He uses:

• one idea per line
• short paragraphs
• arrow bullets (→) and phases (Phase 1, Month 3, etc.)
• standalone thesis lines like: "You can't debug what you don't understand."

And that structure matters because LinkedIn is not a "sit down and read" app. It's a "scan and decide" app.

Comparison with Industry Standards:

3. Practical specificity (no "AI will change everything" fluff)

Paolo's "No BS" branding isn't just a vibe. It's enforced through details. He talks in the language of real work: LLMs, evals, guardrails, inference, vector search, Mixture-of-Experts, "production breaks," "we didn't know for 3 days."

You can tell he isn't trying to impress non-technical people. He's trying to be useful to technical people. Ironically, that often performs better with everyone, because clarity looks like confidence.

One subtle trick: he often anchors a post around a failure mode.

• "We shipped. It broke. Here's the minimum viable fix."

That "I messed this up too" energy lowers defenses. People don't feel sold to. They feel coached.

4. Cadence as a competitive advantage (and a filter)

Let's talk about the number that feels almost illegal: 13.8 posts per week.

That pace does two things:

1. It gives Paolo more surface area for breakout posts.
2. It trains the audience to expect frequent value drops.

But it also acts as a filter. Only people who actually like his style stick around. That makes the audience sharper over time, which usually helps engagement quality.

Here's a clean comparison of scale vs efficiency.

And timing matters too. Based on the recommended windows:

• Mid-afternoon UTC (around 15:00) fits "deep technical" posts that engineers can read between meetings.
• Early UTC mornings (around 02:00) fits educational, resource-style posts that get saved and revisited.

If you're posting for a global dev audience, that split is sneaky smart.

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Their Content Formula

Paolo's content feels spontaneous, but it isn't random. It's a formula that keeps working because it respects how people actually read.

Content Structure Breakdown

The Hook Pattern

Paolo opens posts like a friend grabbing your hoodie and pointing at the fire.

Template:

"You did X.
Now Y is breaking.
Here's the minimum fix that actually gets used."

A couple variations that fit his voice:

• "Vector search is a lie. You're duct-taping embeddings to a problem you didn't define."
• "You shipped an LLM feature without evals. That's not brave. That's roulette."

Why this works (honestly): it creates tension, then offers relief. The reader keeps going because they want the relief.

The Body Structure

This is the part most creators mess up. They either over-explain or they under-deliver. Paolo does neither. He escalates in specifics and keeps the pacing tight.

Body Structure Analysis:

The CTA Approach

Paolo's CTA style is direct and almost always aligned with how the post is meant to be used.

If the post is a framework or checklist, the CTA is usually some version of:

• "Save this for your next production incident."
• "Repost to save someone weeks of pain."

Psychologically, it works because:

• "Save" is low effort and benefits the reader.
• "Repost" is framed as helping someone else (social proof + generosity).

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Where Dagmawi and Om Fit in (and what Paolo can steal from them)

I don't want this to turn into a "Paolo is better" story, because it's not that simple. The fun part is seeing how three creators can hit similar engagement efficiency with totally different audience sizes.

Dagmawi Esayas: high engagement efficiency with a smaller audience

Dagmawi has 9,976 followers and a 71.00 Hero Score, matching Paolo's Hero Score at a fraction of the size. That usually means one thing: the audience is tightly matched to the content.

My read is that Dagmawi's advantage is intimacy. At that size, you can build a "tight loop" with your network:

• you recognize names in the comments
• people feel seen
• conversations can be deeper and more personal

If Paolo's brand is "No BS AI/ML," Dagmawi's reads more like "creative dev with a human core." Different lanes. Same idea: clear identity.

Om Nalinde: teaching at scale

Om has 138,690 followers and a 69.00 Hero Score. Slightly lower efficiency than the other two, but at that scale, even small drops in efficiency still mean huge reach.

What Om does well (based on the headline alone) is positioning:

• "I teach devs" is a promise
• "AI Agents" is a current obsession
• "CS @ IIIT" adds builder credibility and relatability

Om's lane is broader than Paolo's. That's a tradeoff:

• broader lane = bigger audience ceiling
• broader lane = harder to keep engagement ultra-tight

A positioning comparison you can actually use

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3 Actionable Strategies You Can Use Today

1. Write the hook like a bug report - Start with the failure mode ("You shipped X without Y") and promise a minimum viable fix.

2. Format for skimmers, not readers - One idea per line, arrow bullets (→), and a single "thesis line" that people can quote.

3. Post in two modes - Technical deep dives around 15:00 UTC, and resource or curriculum posts around 02:00 UTC to catch different reading habits.

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Key Takeaways

1. Paolo's edge is repeatability - high cadence plus a clean structure makes his posts feel like tools, not opinions.
2. Hero Score rewards fit, not fame - Dagmawi proves you can be "top tier" without a huge audience.
3. Scale changes the game - Om shows that teaching content can grow massive, even if engagement efficiency softens a bit.
4. The best posts feel like shortcuts - if someone can save it and use it later, you're winning.

If you try one thing from this, make it the hook: write a first line that a technical person can't ignore. Then earn it with a clear framework. That's the whole trick. What creator style do you think you could pull off without faking it?

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Meet the Creators

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This analysis was generated by ViralBrain's AI content intelligence platform.