TL;DR: Hannah (who you may know as @careerhannah) has built her brand around non-linear careers while working a 9-5 job. When she decided to build her LinkedIn presence last year, Stanley helped her consistently create high-performing posts and understand what works for her audience. Along the way, she tripled her following and earned a Top Voice badge.
Hannah Zhang is the definition of a portfolio careerist. She started working in investment banking out of college before pivoting into startups, tech, and now product marketing. But as a high achiever following a non-linear career, she struggled to find Creators who reflected that path—so she started sharing it herself.
Today, just 1.5 years later, Hannah has built an audience of over 162,000 across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack by sharing her experiences and advice for fellow ambitious professionals who feel stuck.
Like many Creators, she splits her time between content creation and a full-time job, building her personal brand during evenings and weekends.
When LinkedIn became a bigger focus for Hannah, she needed a smarter, faster workflow—and Stanley became a key part of her process.
Normalizing Nonlinear Career Paths
When Hannah quit her dream job in investment banking, she found herself directionless. She’d spent all of college working toward a path she no longer wanted.
“I had been chasing after money and prestige, but when I got there, I realized it wasn’t a good fit for me. I had a bit of a quarter-life crisis where I didn’t know what to do.”
What followed were years of exploration: roles in tech and startups across the US and Latin America. Traveling. Getting an MBA. Dipping into solopreneurship. All while obsessing over the same question: How do you build a life that makes you rich AND happy?
Most conventional advice says you have to choose: Get rich and be miserable, or find fulfillment and be broke. But Hannah refused to accept that.
She started creating the kind of content that didn’t exist when she needed it and built an online community to help ambitious professionals thrive in nonlinear careers.
“My journey has always been non-linear, and I didn’t see a lot of people in professional spaces talking about those kinds of experiences—especially coming from a high-achieving background.”
The first time Hannah shared her story online was in a Medium article. It didn’t get many views, but the experience was cathartic. Inspired to continue sharing, she launched her Instagram account @careerhannah in October 2024, gradually building an audience and expanding to other platforms.
Building Her LinkedIn Brand
It wasn’t until spring 2025 that Hannah decided to take LinkedIn more seriously. Despite her growth on other channels, posting on LinkedIn made her nervous—it was full of past colleagues and people that knew a different side of her.
But the more she posted, the more opportunities she got.
“It took off more than I thought, and it really just was from sharing my story. The authentic parts of my journey. And also learning how to make my content resonate with people.”
Hannah sees LinkedIn as the shortest path to go from idea to execution. Unlike most platforms, you don’t need to script, film, and edit a video to get a post out. And having a 9–5 job has helped, giving her endless real-time ideas to share.
But juggling content creation with a demanding job isn’t easy—so she started experimenting with tools like Stanley.
Turning Long-Form Into LinkedIn Growth
To balance her job with her Creator goals, Hannah has had to learn to delegate. And when it comes to LinkedIn, Stanley has become her editorial partner.
At first, she was hesitant to use an AI tool—she needed something that understood her voice and the nuances of LinkedIn.
“Before, I would just use Claude for drafts. But what I’ve found with Stanley is that it’s much more optimized for LinkedIn. Its deep knowledge of your past LinkedIn performance is what differentiates it from any other tool I’ve used.”
Hannah has limited time to put toward her Creator brand, so her strategy is all about finding ways to speed up her workflow and repurpose content.
For LinkedIn, her process usually looks like:
- Writing one anchor piece of content (like her Substack newsletter)—a deep dive that comes straight from her own brain
- Repurposing that anchor piece with Stanley, asking it to extract key ideas and repackage them into engaging content that’s optimized for LinkedIn
- Sharing high-performing LinkedIn posts that resonate with her audience and drive traffic back to her Substack
- Understanding past performance with Stanley, so she can understand what’s worked and use those insights to inform future posts
Hannah loves that Stanley asks her questions to draw out personal details from her experiences. And the voice feature helps her think through things out loud and capture her candid thoughts, so her content never sounds robotic.
The result? LinkedIn posts that perform well, sound like her, and fit seamlessly into her broader strategy—while cutting her creation time in half.
The Result: Growth That Opens Doors
In less than a year, Hannah has grown her LinkedIn following to 20,000 and earned a LinkedIn Top Voice badge. She’s also used her LinkedIn content to grow her email list, helping her hit 9,500 Substack subscribers this year.
But the real win isn’t just the numbers. It’s the opportunities.
Hannah landed her current role after the company discovered her through LinkedIn. What started as posting content became a living portfolio—proof of exactly what she’s capable of.
And by using LinkedIn as a top-of-funnel platform for her Creator business, she attracts an audience she can connect with in ways she can’t on other platforms: high-achievers who see themselves in her story.
Stanley helps her repurpose content into high-performing posts, understand what’s working, and keep growing—faster.
What’s Next: Turning Content into Community
Hannah has spent the last year building her LinkedIn audience, and now she’s excited to take the next step: developing new ways to support those who want to go deeper.
“You can only go so far with content,” she explains.
Every week, Hannah receives messages from people looking for more support and guidance, so this next phase is all about building offers to meet that demand. And she believes LinkedIn will play a pivotal role in that.
“Many people in my audience are looking to build careers that look more like portfolios than ladders.”
Hannah’s just getting started, and she’s got her sights set on building a Creator business that grows alongside her career.
Want to create top 1% LinkedIn posts? Discover why Creators like Hannah use Stanley to get better results and save hours each week. Get 14 days free.
Follow Hannah’s journey:
LinkedIn: Hannah Zhang
Substack: Nonlinear Techies
Instagram: @careerhannah
TikTok: @careerhannah
YouTube: @careerhannah
Website: careerhannah.com
