Run this 3-question test on any LinkedIn agency's work, including ours, before you hire them.

When an agency pitches LinkedIn growth as the offer, the real question you're asking isn't whether they're pleasant on a call. It's whether the work actually moves the number, or just looks busy while it doesn't. Most vetting for that happens through a testimonial page, which is the one piece of evidence nobody outside the agency can check. There's a better test, and it isn't mine.

A 3-Question Test From Someone Who Actually Built the Audience

Lara Acosta runs Kleo, an AI writing tool for founders and execs, and grew her own LinkedIn account past 400,000 followers doing it. In a post titled "Speedrunning my LinkedIn to 400k (LinkedIn Algorithm Cheat Codes)," published August 31, 2026 on her newsletter at thatsliterallyit.beehiiv.com, she lays out the three questions she runs against her own output before touching anything else:

1. "Am I engaging as much as I should?" Real engagement effort behind the work, not just posting volume.
2. "Am I writing hooks that capture a 'mass' audience." A hook with broad appeal, not one built for a narrow slice of readers.
3. "Am I adding 100 new people each week to my network." A concrete number, not a vague sense that growth is trending up.

Her framing, in her own words: if the answer is no to any of them, she fixes that one first. It's a triage list, not a score you average out.

How MDR's Own LinkedIn Work Holds Up Against It

MDR's LinkedIn operation runs on a different model than Acosta's. She's building a personal creator brand through posting and commenting. MDR runs outbound DM sequences and page management for clients. Different animal, worth saying plainly before forcing a comparison that doesn't hold.

Where it does map:

Question 1, engagement effort. Not a clean match. Acosta's engagement is posting and commenting as a visible creator. The equivalent discipline in outbound DM work is different: not sending generic, low-effort copy at volume. Every DM sequence runs a mandatory 3-message minimum, never a single one-shot message, with spintax variation built in so the same message doesn't go out identically to a hundred people. That's engagement effort applied to outbound, not to a feed.

Question 2, mass-appeal hooks. This one maps directly. Every DM opener has to be a genuine, specific question, never "I noticed your profile" or a variant of it. A generic opener is the outbound version of a hook that only lands with a narrow slice of readers, and it's checkable the same way Acosta checks hers: read the opener cold and ask if it would land with more than a handful of people.

Question 3, the number. Here's the honest gap. Acosta tracks a concrete weekly network-growth number, 100 new connections a week. MDR does not currently track or publish an equivalent number as a stated internal practice. That's a real gap, not a softened version of one, and it stays open until there's an actual metric behind it worth publishing.

Run This on Any Agency, Ours Included

Three things to ask any agency pitching LinkedIn growth as the offer. Ask if they have an equivalent to "engaging as much as they should," and what number backs it. Ask to see one outbound opener and judge whether it would land with more than a narrow slice of their list. Ask what they track every week, and if the honest answer is nothing, that's worth knowing before you sign.

Run this on MDR before you run it on anyone else. I'll show you exactly where the DM rules come from and where the gap still sits.