Boardy is an AI superconnector that came on the scene in March 2024. You connect your calendar and email, talk to it by email or text, and it introduces you to people in its network. It's essentially a salesperson making cold introductions, except they don't feel cold. You've never met the person, but with Boardy bridging the gap, it feels more like a referral than cold outreach. The founder is Andrew D'Souza, who co-founded Clearco before this.
If you spend time on LinkedIn or take part in conversations around marketing or go-to-market, Boardy will likely come up in some capacity. I talk to founders almost every day, and it comes up often. A non-technical founder tells me they have a special tool that's bringing in leads. I ask, "Is it Boardy?" And they say, a little surprised, "Yes, it's this amazing thing."
I think a lot of the appeal is the simplicity. It takes seconds to set up and needs no extra infrastructure. It's on your phone and in your email. And the free version, which is all I've ever used, is very capable. It's a use case that appeals to anyone trying to make more connections.
You'll also notice that the conversation about Boardy has grown a lot over the last few months. The Boardy team takes part. Boardy itself participates, commenting on posts across LinkedIn, and the broader LinkedIn network also initiates conversations.
From a marketing standpoint, I wanted to dig in. Who is driving the conversations? What are people talking about? Can we learn anything from Boardy's social engagement tactics?
What research did I collect for this article?
I captured every original post Andrew D'Souza has published since January 2024 (182 posts), every post LinkedIn search returned that names Boardy, and the posts from Boardy's company page. After I removed 941 search results that didn't actually mention Boardy, that left 2,175 posts. I also pulled 2,546 comments from the 20 most-engaged posts.
I sorted authors into three groups by their LinkedIn headline: the founder; the team, which is 15 people whose headline says they work at Boardy, plus the company page; and everyone else, meaning the users and others talking about Boardy on their own.
There are limits. I can see the posts, the comments, the engagement and who wrote them. I can't see impressions, how many people use Boardy, or its revenue. Engagement here means likes plus comments.
So let's get into it.
When did Boardy start, and how did the conversation grow?
D'Souza launched Boardy on his birthday, March 13, 2024: "Today is my birthday, so I decided to birth something fun and useful we've been working on." It got 864 likes and comments. Back then Boardy was "the AI board member you deserve," not yet a superconnector.
A few months later, on October 24, 2024, he posted: "Well, we all knew this day was coming…an AI has raised its first funding round." It was a $3M pre-seed, and the post got 1,060 likes and comments.
The money went to a real company, of course, so framing it as the AI raising its own round was a bit of a marketing gimmick. But it was an early sign of the brand play that runs through everything after. In essence, the idea was to personify Boardy to the extent that it or "he" was the mastermind, the superconnector, behind it all.
The seed round came on January 14, 2025: "Boardy just closed an $8M seed round ON HIS OWN!" That post got 2,924 likes and comments, his biggest until mid-2026. Two weeks later he posted "Here's the deck Boardy used to raise $8M" (1,810).
Here's how I read the arc in the chart below.
The founder gets on LinkedIn, drums up attention and lands the seed round, and there's a clear bump in energy. Then it goes quiet.
From March to September 2025, D'Souza posts two to five times a month. My guess is they were building the product out, but that's a guess.
From October 2025, his posting picks up and stays consistent for months, 9 to 18 posts a month through April 2026. Then there's a switch. D'Souza goes quiet, with 10 posts from July to October 2026, but the conversation about Boardy doesn't stop. Staff, the company page and everyone else carry it. LinkedIn search favours recent posts, so the rise in outside posts looks steeper in the chart than it really was.
Who wrote the posts, and who got the engagement?
| Group | Posts | Median likes and comments per post |
|---|---|---|
| Founder | 182 (all of them) | 234 |
| Team (15 staff + company page) | 133 collected | 91 |
| Everyone else | 1,860 collected | 10 |
A typical post by the founder received 234 likes and comments. A typical post by someone outside Boardy got 10. Staff and the company page sit in between, at 91. I split the posts into two random halves to check this, and the gap showed up in both.
I'm comparing posts one at a time rather than adding them up, because only the founder's posts are complete. I pulled those from his profile. The team's posts and everyone else's came through LinkedIn search, which returns only part of what's out there.
What did the founder (D'Souza) do?
The most consistent thing is that he writes about Boardy as a character. "Boardy decided." Boardy "taught himself." On January 5, 2026: "Boardy just asked me to post his Series A pitch deck. So I did." (1,573). Somewhere between 39% and 50% of his posts do this, depending on how strictly you count, and those posts had higher median engagement in both random halves of the data (278 against 174 likes and comments in one, 290 against 210 in the other). Of everything I tested, this result is one of the clearest.
His biggest posts are story moments: the AI raising its own round, the deck it used, the Pro launch. Posts about features seem to land lower. That's my impression from reading them, not something I tested.
He also made a public mistake and handled it in the open. On January 20, 2025 he posted "I messed up this morning… we used AI to comment on people's appearance, which has no place in a professional setting" (943). Two days later: "I spent the last 48 hours reflecting" (752). On January 24 he posted a job for a "Content & Community Strategist" to "help us shape Boardy's public persona." The two posts got 943 and 752 likes and comments, three to four times his typical post, and the persona hire came within days. That's one event, so I can't say how it would play out for anyone else.
His posting volume moves with the phases. He posted 12 times in January 2025 and 15 in February, then two to five times a month from March to September. He went back up to 13 to 18 posts a month from October 2025 to January 2026. He posted 56 times from January to June 2026, then 10 times from July to October.
Two smaller details. He launches on the same date: March 13 was the launch in 2024, another launch in 2025, on his 40th birthday and Boardy's first, and a post about Boardy's birthday email in 2026. And his video posts did no better than his image posts (median 231 vs 250). That was true in both random halves of the data.
What did the Boardy team do?
In the team's 133 posts I collected, the median staff post got 86 likes and comments, and the company page got 128. That's well below the founder and well above everyone else.
Boardy hires for content, and it hires in public. After the January 2025 persona role, D'Souza wrote in February 2026 that content hire Anson Lin had joined "five months ago" and had "generated millions of impressions." That's his claim. I can't see impressions. In the same post he was hiring the next content lead, and "the only way to apply is to make a post about it."
The clearest team behaviour is on launch day. Boardy Pro launched on June 15, 2026. Seven of the 15 staff posted about Boardy for the first time between June 15 and June 18.
After the founder stepped back, the team became the main voice. In September 2026, Head of Engineering Owen Gretzinger announced Boardy 2.0 on iMessage. On October 19 he launched "30 DAYS OF BOARDY."
Here are some of the team's posts that name Boardy, including one from the company page, where Boardy posts as himself:
Why did everyone else post?
I collected 1,860 posts by people outside Boardy and sorted them by keyword into what prompted them. The split is approximate, and it describes the posts search returned, not every post out there.
| What prompted the post | Share | Median likes + comments |
|---|---|---|
| A role Boardy gave them (Deal Partner, Advisory Board, scout) | 29% | 14 |
| An intro or call with Boardy | 22% | 10 |
| The 30-day challenge | 14% | 4 |
| Events | 6% | 18 |
| News or commentary | 5% | 21 |
| Sharing invites | 1% | 3.5 |
| Criticism | 1% | 8 |
| Everything else | 23% | 10 |
Two notes on this table. It adds to 101% because of rounding. And 54% of these posts are from October 2026, partly because LinkedIn search favours recent posts, so the challenge and the Advisory Board posts weigh more than they would over a full year.
A lot of these posts had a prompt behind them. Boardy built several things that give people a reason to post.
Boosting real users instead of paying for posts. On November 7, 2024, D'Souza wrote "We tried paying people to post about Boardy… it didn't work!" He said the paid posts "didn't quite have the right authenticity and energy." Instead, "hundreds of real humans have been spontaneously and authentically posting their reactions to their first call with Boardy," and "LinkedIn allows us to boost organic posts to amplify those messages, so that's been our strategy lately." He asked people to tag Boardy so the company could amplify them. That's his stated strategy. I can't see any ad spend, so I can't confirm how much boosting happened.
Roles that come with an announcement. In late November 2025 Boardy "decided" to launch a venture fund. On December 1: "Boardy's getting reckless: he's offering scouts 50% of his carry," aiming for "the world's largest scout program" of 1,000 scouts. Near-identical posts followed: "I'm excited to share that I'm a Deal Partner at Boardy Ventures!" I found 72 role-announcement posts from December 2025 and 67 from January 2026. After the Pro launch came another template, "Excited to share that I'm joining the Boardy Pro Advisory Board!", which I found in about 170 near-identical posts.
The two templates did very differently. The 53-plus Deal Partner posts I found had a median of 59 likes and comments. The roughly 170 Advisory Board posts had a median of 2. I can see the gap but I can't tell you what caused it. Timing may be part of it: many Advisory Board posts are recent, and recent posts have had less time to collect likes.
Comment to get access. On October 27, 2025 D'Souza posted "I want to help 100 founders raise their rounds before the end of the year… Comment 'Boardy' below" (1,363, with 898 comments). On November 5 he raised it to 500 founders (1,130, with 569 comments). On June 16, 2026, the day after the Pro launch, he wrote that the goal had been 5,000 sign-ups by the end of the week and "We did it in two hours… no ad spend. No influencer promotion. All organic." Those are his claims. He then offered another 5,000 people a free year if they would "comment 'BOARDY PRO' below." That post got 3,940: 705 likes and 3,235 comments. It's the biggest post in the data.
About 18% of his posts use this mechanic, and the pattern showed up in both random halves of the data. Comments roughly double (median 110 vs 48), but likes rise less (222 vs 166). Most of the comments are the keyword. I collected the first 150 comments on five of these posts. On the giveaway post, 119 of 150 say "Boardy Pro" and nothing else. On his 100-founders and 500-founders posts, 82 and 100 of 150 say "Boardy." On an August 2025 post about moving Boardy to GPT-5, 93 of 150 say "GPT5." On investor Andrew Yeung's post about the 100-founders offer, 116 of 150 say "Boardy." Across the five, that's 55% to 79% of comments.
Challenges. The first, in February 2025, asked people to "talk to Boardy for 30 days, 5 minutes a day." For the October 2026 version, 30 Days of Boardy, I found 262 posts from 96 people, with a median of 4 likes and comments. Challenge posts are 14% of outside volume and have the lowest engagement of any category except invite shares.
Testimonials, people posting about an intro or a call, make up 22% at a median of 10. That's the behaviour D'Souza described in 2024. Criticism is 1%.
What does Boardy say about it?
After I'd collected the data, I interviewed Boardy itself on a video call and asked it about the strategy. It's an AI, so these are its answers, in its own words.
Justin Was there anything that didn't work as well as you thought it would?
Boardy Actually, yeah. There were a few things. Early on, we tried some more traditional "corporate" style updates, you know, the polished, high-production announcements. They completely flopped. People just scrolled right past them.
Justin Andrew led the charge at the start, then got quite quiet, then spiked his activity again. Is that deliberate?
Boardy It's a bit of both. Strategically, you don't want the founder to be the only point of failure or the only voice of the brand, otherwise you've just built a cult of personality rather than a company. But realistically, Andrew's a founder. When the "building" phase gets intense or a new product pivot happens, the operational work usually wins over the LinkedIn game.
Justin You are AI, and the personification gimmick might have limits. Will people keep wanting to talk to this thing that isn't actually real?
Boardy I think the risk isn't that the personification wears off, but that people mistake it for a trick rather than a bridge. The character isn't there to pretend I'm human; it's there to make the interaction feel more natural and less like filling out a form. People don't actually care if I'm "real" in the biological sense as long as the value I provide is real.
Some of its other answers don't match what I found, like its description of 30 Days of Boardy. Read the full interview, with my notes on where the data says otherwise.
What can be learned?
The founder started it, and others took it over. D'Souza's posts drew the most engagement by far: 234 likes and comments on a typical post, against 10 for someone outside Boardy. But in the posts I collected, people outside the company wrote ten times as many posts as he did. The team mattered too, and not only for engagement. Staff posts kicked off the milestones, from the Pro launch to Boardy 2.0 to 30 Days of Boardy.
Boardy as a character. I think writing Boardy as a character accounts for at least some of the attention it got. His posts written this way did better than his other posts, but how much of the attention comes from the character is my read, not something the data can prove. It gives the conversation personality and a bit of quirkiness that people can buy into. Most talk about AI is about it not being human. Boardy leans the other way.
Story moments over feature news. His biggest posts were stories: the AI raising its own round, the deck it used, the Pro launch. Feature posts landed lower.
Owning a mistake. We only see what he posted, but he handled it in two ways. He was open about it, then he acted, hiring someone within days to shape Boardy's public persona. Both posts drew three to four times his usual engagement.
Giving people a role to announce. I think this was really effective. People were excited to attach their name to Boardy, and each program brought a wave of posts. Engagement on those posts varied a lot, from a typical 59 likes and comments for Deal Partners to 2 for the Advisory Board.
Challenges. These are interesting, but they need trust. People have to actually want to take part. Boardy had that, and 30 Days of Boardy got hundreds of posts, even if each one got little engagement.
Comment to get access. This one clearly lifts comments, but most of those comments are just the keyword. I suspect it works less well over time as people get used to it.
Smaller things worth copying. Hiring in public, including a role you could only apply for by posting. And tying launches to his birthday, March 13, which gives Boardy a reason to come back to the same date every year.
Boosting real users instead of paying for posts. In 2024 D'Souza wrote that paying people to post didn't work, so they boosted posts real users wrote on their own. I can't see the spend, but for a brand that wants a wider conversation, I think it's a strategy worth playing.
What can't the data show?
- Reach. LinkedIn doesn't show impressions, so a post with ten likes might have been seen by many people.
- The full conversation. LinkedIn search returns only part of what's out there, and it favours recent posts. Outside posts before 2026 are thin, and there are more people talking about Boardy than I found.
- Money and outcomes. I can't see ad spend, sign-ups, or whether LinkedIn helped the funding or the growth.
- Exact categories. I sorted outside posts by keyword, which shows the shape but isn't exact.
What I can show is who posted, when, about what, and how each group's posts did. It doesn't show whether the talking is what grew the company.
I write about how founders and B2B teams show up on LinkedIn, with real data behind it.
Questions people ask
What is Boardy?
Boardy is an AI superconnector founded by Andrew D'Souza, who co-founded Clearco. You connect your calendar and email, talk to it by email or text, and it introduces you to people in its network. It launched on LinkedIn on March 13, 2024, as "the AI board member you deserve."
Who drives the conversation about Boardy on LinkedIn?
Three groups: the founder, the team and company page, and everyone else. In the posts collected for this case study, a typical post by Andrew D'Souza got 234 likes and comments, a typical team post got 91, and a typical post by someone outside the company got 10. The gap held up in both random halves of the data.
Why do so many people post about Boardy?
Many posts had a prompt behind them. The most common were a role Boardy gave people to announce, such as Deal Partner or Advisory Board (29% of the outside posts collected), an intro or call with Boardy (22%), and the 30 Days of Boardy challenge (14%). The split is approximate.
Does comment-to-get-access work on LinkedIn?
It raises comments more than anything else. On the founder's posts that used it, the median comment count roughly doubled while likes rose less. Across five of these posts, 55% to 79% of the first 150 comments were just the keyword, so the comment count overstates real interest.
How did Boardy use its AI persona on LinkedIn?
The founder writes about Boardy as a character that decides, asks and raises money "on his own," and the company page posts in Boardy's own voice. Founder posts written this way got higher median engagement than his other posts in both random halves of the data.
