LinkedIn does most of its account cleanup in the first 90 days. A brand-new account that starts sending 40 connection requests on day one is not a power user, it is the easiest possible thing to flag. The account has no history, no trust, and no network, and it is already behaving like a script.

Warming up is not superstition. Your account carries an internal trust score built from age, profile completeness, network density, and how human your activity looks over time. The warm-up is how you build that score before you spend it. Here is a schedule that has held up across new accounts we have run.

Days 0 to 7: exist like a real person, send nothing

No outreach this week. The goal is to look like an account a human actually set up.

Complete the profile fully. Real photo, banner, headline, about section, at least two roles with descriptions. A blank profile sending requests is the classic spam signature.
Connect with people you actually know. Colleagues, classmates, real contacts. Accepted requests from real connections are the strongest early trust signal.
Browse like a person. Read your feed, view a few profiles, follow a handful of companies. You are establishing a normal baseline.

Weeks 2 to 4: light, relevant activity

Now you can start reaching out, gently, to people adjacent to your real network. Keep it small and keep it relevant.

5 to 10 connection requests per day, to people with mutual connections or a clear shared context. Network overlap matters more than volume here.
Engage a little. A few genuine comments, a couple of reactions. Activity that is not just outbound requests reads as human.
Watch your acceptance rate. If requests sit pending and acceptance is low, your targeting is off or you are moving too fast. Slow down before you push.

Days 30 to 60: begin real outreach, slowly

At a month, with a complete profile and a few hundred real connections, you can start deliberate outreach. Ramp, do not jump.

10 to 15 connection requests per day, with personalized notes.
Start first messages to new 1st-degree connections, well spaced, one follow-up maximum.
Keep weekly totals modest. The rolling weekly cap matters more than any single day. Above roughly 100 requests in a 7-day window, withdrawal rates climb.

Days 60 to 90: ramp to steady state

By the end of the first quarter a healthy account can sit at a sustainable cruising volume, around 20 connection requests per day with paced messaging. That is not a target to sprint toward, it is a ceiling to arrive at after the account has earned it. The full set of numbers is in LinkedIn’s daily limits, demystified.

Signals that say slow down

The warm-up is not a fixed calendar. If any of these show up, back off for a week:

Connection requests hanging at “Pending” for days, acceptance under 10%.
Search results truncating from ~10 to ~3 (the commercial-use limit kicking in).
The “people you may know” carousel going empty.
Any explicit warning, even a soft one. That is a full stop, not a yellow light.

The mistakes that undo a warm-up

Buying connections or following en masse on day one. A sudden spike of unrelated connections is itself a flag.
No profile photo. The single most common trait of accounts that get restricted early.
Outreach to people with zero network overlap before you have a network at all. It reads as “this is not how this user normally behaves” because there is no normal yet.

What Marno does for new accounts

Marno’s defaults are built for the account you want to keep, not the demo you want to impress. Conservative per-day volume with human-pace jitter, a per-timezone working-hours window, a dedicated residential proxy so your egress IP stays stable, and automatic pausing at the first session-kill challenge. You can raise the limits as the account ages. We would encourage you to let it earn them first.