Customer LOVE story · Ville Tolvanen
5 months with Haamu vs. the 5 months before
Impressions
1.06M
vs. 205k
+417%
Posts
135
vs. 108
+25%
Reactions
11.9k
vs. 3.7k
+217%
Comments
1,751
vs. 416
+321%
Ville Tolvanen
Board professional
1/5
of the time it used to take
“The surprising thing for me is how little time this actually takes. I spend an hour in the interview and after that I basically just review and approve the posts. That’s it.”
Ville Tolvanen, board professional
Ville Tolvanen is a Finnish entrepreneur, strategist, and professional board member who has spent decades working with digital business and growth companies.
While Ville had been active on LinkedIn for years, the platform had not yet become a systematic channel for communicating his thinking about board work, leadership, and entrepreneurship.
Together with Haamu, Ville began building a consistent LinkedIn presence designed to:
Share practical insights about board work
Reach younger entrepreneurs and growth company leaders
Position himself as a reformer in the field of governance
Show more of his personality alongside his advisory work
Instead of requiring more effort from Ville, the process reduced his workload while increasing his impact.
Within months, the results were visible across reach, engagement, and inbound conversations.
Before working with Haamu, Ville had already been active on social media for years. He had written extensively about digital business, leadership, and entrepreneurship. But his communication had not yet been structured around a clear narrative about board work and governance.
One of the key goals was to bring more visibility to the topic of board work and help a wider audience understand what actually happens inside a boardroom.
“When you’ve been doing something for a long time, it becomes surprisingly difficult to see it from the outside. I realized that many people in Finland, even experienced professionals, have never had any real contact with board work. That made me think there’s a real opportunity to explain what boards actually do and what people should expect from them.”
At the same time, Ville wanted to shift how he himself was perceived professionally.
The goal was not just visibility, but positioning:
Strengthening his role as a professional board member
Reaching younger entrepreneurs and growth company leaders
Bringing his entrepreneurial and investment experience into the conversation
But like many experienced professionals, Ville faced a familiar challenge: time.
Running companies, working with boards, and advising organizations left very little room for consistent content creation.
Ville first came across Haamu through another well-known Finnish entrepreneur.
He had noticed a clear shift in the LinkedIn presence of Sami Lampinen from Growberries.
The content was suddenly more active, more engaging, and more consistent. Ville decided to ask how it was being done.
“I noticed that Sami’s LinkedIn had changed quite a bit. His posts were interesting, funny, and there seemed to be a clear rhythm to them. So I asked him about it, and the first thing he said was: this takes almost no time from me.”
The story that convinced him
Growberries — from 49k impressions in a year to 325k in five months →
That insight was what convinced Ville to try the Haamu model!
For him, the key question was simple: could this approach increase the impact of his communication without increasing the time required?
The answer turned out to be yes.
The approach
The collaboration with Haamu is built around a simple process: a monthly interview where ideas, experiences, and observations are explored together. Those conversations then become the raw material for LinkedIn content.
01
One-hour monthly interview
For Ville, the biggest surprise was how much knowledge surfaced through the discussion itself.
“When someone asks you questions about your work, you suddenly start explaining things you normally take for granted. You realize you have a lot of knowledge that isn’t in your active memory – it’s just part of your experience. The questions help bring those ideas out.”
02
From interview to content
This process also helped translate highly specialized topics into more accessible communication. As Ville points out, experts often struggle with this themselves.
“When you work deeply inside a field, it’s very easy to speak at too high a level. You assume everyone understands the same context that you do. What Haamu does well is turning those ideas into something that people can actually relate to and understand.”
03
Room to experiment
Another key element is experimentation. Not every post needs to be perfect, and it’s often impossible to predict which ideas will resonate the most.
“If you look at my ten most successful posts, they were all surprises. There’s no way you could have predicted beforehand that those would be the ones people respond to.”
04
Analytics and iteration
The process is therefore designed to learn continuously from the data.
“Most marketing is still based on internal opinions. What’s interesting here is that the approach is data-driven. You look at what works, learn from it, and adjust.”
Results
Within months, the impact of the new approach became visible in the data.
Ville’s LinkedIn content began reaching significantly larger audiences, generating more engagement, and creating more conversations around board work and leadership. The growth was visible both in overall visibility and in the consistency of performance across posts.
Key figures
Five months with Haamu vs. the five months before
Posts · 1.25× volume (+25%)
Five months before
108
With Haamu
135
Impressions · 5× reach (+417%)
Five months before
205k
With Haamu
1.06M
Reactions · 3× engagement (+216%)
Five months before
3.7k
With Haamu
11.9k
Comments · 4.2× conversations (+321%)
Five months before
416
With Haamu
1 751
Alongside the steady growth, several posts broke through on their own — multiple passing 50,000 views, and one reaching over 200,000 people on LinkedIn.
“The numbers are honestly quite incredible. Even doubling the results would have been a good outcome. Seeing this kind of growth in reach and engagement is fantastic.”
But the numbers were only part of the story!
Ville also began to notice a clear shift in how people approached him in professional situations. Prospective collaborators and companies were already familiar with his thinking before the first meeting even took place.
“I’ve had situations where I walk into a board interview and someone tells me: I’ve read all your posts from the past three months. At that point the discussion is already very different. The conversation is no longer about who you are – it’s about what you’re going to do together.”
In other words, the communication had already done part of the work before the meeting started. The content had created familiarity and credibility long before the first handshake.
In the press
Becoming a voice in your field
Consistent publishing builds something slower than reach: a public track record on the topics you care about.
Over time that turns into being recognised as a voice in your field, not just someone who has opinions about it.
Kauppalehti interviewed Ville about his LinkedIn presence – stories like that become possible once there is a visible body of work to point to.
Kauppalehti, 17.6.2026
Update · August 2026
This story was originally written in February 2026. The obvious question about any result like this is whether it holds once the novelty wears off!?
Here is what the next five months looked like, March to July 2026:
1.21M
Impressions
14% more than the first five months with Haamu
2 278
Comments
30% more than in those first five months
+736
New followers
Now close to 15 000
The pattern that stands out: comments grew faster than reach. The audience did not just get bigger, it got more talkative... which is the part that turns into conversations offline.
For Ville, the collaboration ultimately came down to something very simple: impact.
“You could say that Haamu helps translate expertise into communication that actually works. The ideas are mine, but they’re presented in ways that are often more interesting, more visual, and sometimes even more daring than what I would come up with myself.”
And for someone with decades of experience in business and strategy, that translation turned out to be extremely valuable. 🤝
Ready to build your own LinkedIn growth story? Let’s have a chat!
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