Why 50,000 entrepreneurs signed up to this AI Linkedin App in 30 days.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me in the UK, Jim James. And today we're going all the way to Brisbane, sunny Brisbane, and we're gonna meet a man who's building a better second brain. Jason Tan is the founder of a company called Engage AI, and Engage AI has managed to garner over 50,000 users in less than 12 months on less than $1,000 worth of advertising dollars. So it's a brilliant product and it's helping people like you and me engage on LinkedIn. So if you are trying to engage and especially engage with personalization at scale, you know how much time that takes, just how difficult that is. And Jason Tan had that problem. He scratched the itch, he built the product himself. So Jason's gonna tell us how he's done that and about Engage AI, but he's also gonna tell us about some of the obstacles he's faced in getting to that 50,000 users, how he solved those obstacles. And he's gonna give us his big mistake and also his top tip. Jason Tan, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you so much, Jim. Has been a big fan for a long time, so thank you so, so much for having me this hour and the opportunity to share what we do for helping the unnoticed SMB owner to get noticed.

Jason, wonderfully, uh, you know, I reached out to you because of Engage AI, which I have as a LinkedIn, uh, plugin myself. So I was, you know, really, really delighted when you accepted my invitation to come on the show because, you know, I'm a fan, I'm a user. As someone that has now 12,500 LinkedIn connections, you know, it just becomes a bigger and bigger task managing those relationships. So tell us about Engage and how it works and what problem it solves for people.

Absolutely. So, uh, the biggest problem that we are solving for is for the SMB owner from unnoticed to get noticed. And there are many, many channels SMB owner, B2B SMB owner can go out there and market and advertise themselves. There are many channels. LinkedIn though is one of the very effective channels that SMB, especially the B2B SMB owner are using because it allows you to know exactly who the target audience is. And one of the very strategies that I and many of the SMB owners are using to get noticed from our target audience, assisting clients, is commenting for attention. What does that mean, commenting for attention? Basically, it means that when your prospects, when your assisting clients are making posts or sharing content on the LinkedIn platform, You want to be there to say something insightful. You want to be there to support them because who doesn't want a bit of engagement when they spend all the time, the energy, and the money in creating a post, right? So you want to be there. That has been a proven strategy for decades in many, many platforms. The challenges, however, in doing those things is It's time-consuming, it's energy-taxing, especially if you want to say much, much more than just thank you for sharing or great post. Oh, I love it. I mean, who is going to look at Jason's dad if he just keeps saying— I mean, Jim, would you look at me, my profile, if I continue to say thank you for sharing or great post? I mean, you wouldn't care, right? So, but if you imagine if you were making post and I add some extra point, help you echoing your message, support you in whatever way. If I do that 5 or 10 times, you're gonna pay attention. You say, who is this Jason Tan who has always been supporting me whenever I make a post? You're gonna have a look at me. And that is what the so-called commenting for attention. We are here to help people to get noticed. We help them to break the ice. We help them to start conversation. And effectively, that is what we do for Engage AI.

Jason Tan, you know, it sounds like this show is built for you and Engage AI is built for the show, you know, for my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs, because most of us are really using LinkedIn, you know, solely and not relying on other platforms. Engage AI, is it working on LinkedIn alone, or is it also helping on Facebook or X as it's now called, or Insta, any of the other platforms?

Well, it is only working on LinkedIn at the moment. Uh, I believe the key target audience that we are helping is the B2B SMB owner. So LinkedIn is all my focus. And rather than splitting our focus to get onto other platforms, we continue to innovate. We continue to improve ourselves. To make it working better and make it work for the SMB owner. And that comes with other few features and how we are thinking about it and how we have other features that continue to save time, continue to make it easier, continue to make the SMB owner to get noticed. So it works on LinkedIn only, but it's beyond than just a Chrome extension of making a few comments. We have a lot of things to help people to get noticed in a fraction of time.

Jason, I think that's a brilliant strategy, and more and more people are focusing, in fact, um, on one platform, and that being LinkedIn if they're doing B2B.

Yeah.

Tell us, how does it work from a practical point of view? Because many people are either outsourcing to a VA— I tried that, and then I worked with Simon Chapazot, who's a LinkedIn expert, and he said You know, let's look at that. And I was posting too frequently using a VA, and actually my engagement levels were terrible because I was kind of in effect asking someone to speak on my behalf. So we cut it right back to me posting only. And Simon has this strategy called a sandwich where you comment and like on 2 or 3 other people before you post your own Post, and then you again post comments and likes and shares on other people's— this sort of way of engaging. Tell us, from a practical point of view, with Engage AI, what work would I still need to do, but using Engage AI instead of spending what could be an hour of expensive time actually trawling through a feed and sometimes I miss the people I actually want to comment on. I just kind of see who's most recent in my feed. Take us through the workflow of how you solved that problem.

Well, there are so many, many things that unpack from what you have to say. You literally touch on 3 different things. And these 3 different things are number one, posting content. Posting content itself is a different strategy. Number 2, using a VA to make a comment. A lot of people do that. I myself do that, okay, as well. And then finally, using the strategy of commenting first before posting. So we will talk very quickly in detail on how those 3 different strategies, but there are literally 3 things that you just unpack. So the first thing first is Posting content and getting engagement and also getting traction, getting views is almost like advertising, right? So I often say in the old world, you know, we advertise on newspaper, you will know that a certain number of people look at it because that is this volume of newspaper that they sell. In the new world of the online platform, There's no guarantee because they got millions and millions of free content created for them. They are not going to show it to all of— show all of them to everyone. Instead, they rely on the algorithm to be able to show that. Now, to get eyeballs for your post really comes down to have a punchy headline, have a Clickbait title, like it or not, it is a world that we live in because there are just so many free content. We need to be able to draw people in, tell a good story, make use of different formats. I really think that is really one of the key points of getting eyeballs. So good content, good title, good starting point, using format. is the only way to get eyeballs. You probably want to work with some of the people to get a little bit more eyeballs. That is really the first point. Your second point in hiring VA or getting our own team member to manage our LinkedIn account to do that, that is actually one of the problems that many of our users are solving with our tool now. Now, hiring a VA, whether they're onshore or they are offshore, it doesn't matter. The biggest problem of having a VA is they don't necessarily have the diversified knowledge on different topics. They are not necessarily going to speak in your tone. While they speak perfect English with a lot of vocabulary, the biggest problem is how do they How do you get them to speak in a way that it sounds like an expert but not going overkill? That is where Engage AI is coming into the picture. The very first screen that you were showing is when using Engage AI, the first thing Engage AI does is it analyzes what exactly is the post is about. Then it chooses the tone that you It uses the tone that you choose that we preconfigure, or you can write your own custom prompt to build your own custom tone. That being said, whether it's VA doing it now, who can now speak in a very diverse topic, or equally, even when you are using it yourself, sometimes you've got the writer's block or sometimes you're not familiar with the topic, you can still very quickly come in Come up something that is relevant to say. And that is the power of Engage AI. That's the power of using AI that would take over the challenges that you have with the VA. Coming back to the last point before we go on to the workflow, I think we can talk a bit about the workflow shortly. But commenting as a strategy to get your post, I have read that before. I think I have tried that before. I'm not too sure if that is a very effective strategy. I know that myself and many of our users are not really using that strategy. I think really is about that engagement that you can do to get more views to your post. I think if you do it enough in your other time, that will accumulate anyway. But to get views to the post, it really comes down to the content. The way of structure and the way of writing. So that is my 3 things that I have to say. Content, first one, good content, good starting point, make people want to click to read to see more. The second one is how Engage AI is solving the problem when you are outsourcing the work to VA when they cannot speak in a diverse topic like an expert. including you can use it for yourself. And then finally commenting to get more views for the post. I am not 100% sure. We will talk about the workflow in a second, but did I, did that resonate?

And I apologize, I apologize. I'm just so excited by what it does that I've been bundled in. But also, you know, as we know, managing your LinkedIn is such a big part of people's jobs. So just to be clear, if I use Engage AI, I'm training it in, if you like, my vernacular, my tone. So for example, English or American English or Southeast Asian English. Does it also work across different languages? So French, Spanish, Mandarin, for example?

Yes, it works in multiple languages. And the best thing about it is it automatically figures out what the native language of the post is, and then it just writes out. In that language. So I have seen how people were writing in French and Hebrew. It's just amazing how it figured that out and then it just writes in whatever the structure. At this stage, it doesn't train on your personal tone. Training on your personal tone is in our product roadmap, is the thing that we will be doing. But you have the ability to write your own custom prompt. So Rather than just choose the prompt that we have already preconfigured, you could tell it to say, here is the way that I want you to say it. I don't want you to say over 300, and I want you to end it by asking a question. So that can be done in a custom prompt.

Okay. That's really nice. And then would it reference the content from the post that I'm commenting on? So would I say interrogate the post that's been just been posted, I'd like you to reference that post and add a comment of no more than 3 sentences with a question like, how do you feel about that? Is that right?

Exactly. So it will always speak in that— occasionally make mistakes, but otherwise it will always reference to that post. And that is the thing, the beauty about it. It doesn't speak nonsense. It doesn't hallucinate as much. I think partly I would say that it doesn't hallucinate much is because if you think about commenting, commenting is actually very short. Usually it's 2 to 3 or maybe maximum 4 to 5 sentences. So the very fact that it will hallucinate, the chances has always been decreased dramatically. So it doesn't hallucinate much yet.

That makes a lot of sense, Jason, because the context of the content it's commenting on is much more limited, isn't it, in terms of its parameters as opposed to an open general search. And do you set it and forget it, or do you have it there and you need to go in and, if you like, choose the post that you want to comment on? And that is the piece that then you could outsource to the VA, isn't it? Because, uh, it's not a, it's not a sort of an auto-generate across all Is that right? Tell us about how you can track certain people, Jason, that you might want to comment on.

That is a great question. And there are 2 parts to answer that. In terms of the philosophy, what we were thinking about the Engage AI, and that is very, very important. But let's address the biggest elephant in the room first. You have 13,000 LinkedIn connections. I have about 10,500. The truth is, I probably do not know 95% of those people. As a B2B business owner, I only care about 50 to 100 people at any given time. The very fact is, if I have 100 B2B business clients, enterprise clients, I would be very, very, very happy already. However, When I go to LinkedIn, LinkedIn doesn't show me those 100 people that I care about. They show me whatever they want to show me. And for me, just to find those 100 people that I really trust, that I care, that I want to sell my service, where I want to provide expertise, I need to find them. I need to go to their profile. I need to check whether they post or not. And all of those things is time-consuming. It's tedious work, manual work that I don't really want to do. So EngageAI has this platform where if you tell me exactly who they are, and I will monitor for you. In other words, when you log into EngageAI on our website, which is not on LinkedIn, you will be able to see a list of the people that you want me to monitor. You will be able to see that who has posted, what that post is exactly about in summary. And when you click on the link, it will take you directly back to LinkedIn and you can engage. That way, if you just saw that 100 people, your VA can take care from it right from there.

Jason.

And then finally, so in that sense, you sort of like set and forget, you monitor. Rather than having to remember to go and visit each of the profiles. However, the actual commenting itself, we want to have human in the loop. So we are not automating that. It's not going to automatically comment for you. It's not, and then press the button of posting because we believe that you should always have the chance to have the final say. We want to have human in the room. We, we don't want to build another bot to spam everyone on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I think that is principle, Jason. I think it's great. And at the end of the show, we're going to give people a coupon code so that they can try, uh, engage-ai.co, uh, is the website. We're going to give people a coupon code, so stay around, listen to Jason Tan explain a bit more. Jason, We could have a whole show about Engage AI, but you know, this is also a show about entrepreneurs and you are an entrepreneur. You built an amazing customer base of 50,000 users in less than a year with only $1,000. What obstacle have you faced and overcome in building out from Brisbane a global brand?

I would probably say there are primarily 2 big obstacles. Number one is the transition of running a consulting business to build a product business. So I have to pick up a lot of things that I never really understood. So I have to pick up a lot of new skill sets and then equally finding the people who build the product that is for global audience. from the very day one. So that is probably the very first obstacle. Number 2 is about, like many other entrepreneurs or SMB owners, thinking outside the box, how to get noticed with limited budget and get all those 50,000 people. I think that was a challenge, but I'm glad that we solved that. But otherwise, transition of the consulting business to a product business and equally how to get noticed, how to acquire users at a fraction of the cost without paying.

And how did you do that, Jason? What's been the secret sauce?

Well, the secret sauce is what I call eating our own dog food. So in the very first 1 or 2 months when we first launched, Literally, we were using Engage AI to go out commenting. Now, the differences of the strategy that we were using back then though is because I recognize that my product is a $30 monthly subscription. So I don't comment on my target audience directly. Instead, I comment on their target audience. So my target audience is the B2B SMB owner. But if I were to acquire 1,000 of them, I need to comment on 1,000 of them. And then the ROI is only $30 if they subscribe. It makes no sense. Now, if I flip the table the other way around, the asset B2B SMB owner, their target audience is the CEO of the MNC. Their target audience is the senior vice president of the FNC. They are trying to sell to those big corporates. So what we did is whenever those As an SVP, C-level of these MNC, they make a post. We have a LinkedIn profile to go on and comment on it so that, so all of those SMB owners, when they comment on it, they see us. And then when they see us, I make sure that I have a profile title. I have something that is interesting on the profile. To make them to say, who is this person? Number one, who is this person making this really good comment? I have to check it out. When they visit the profile, that is an offer that entices them to go to our website to try it out. That is interesting. That is eye-catching. So that is actually how we got started, that we acquired the very first 3,000 to 5,000 users in the first The first and the second one.

Jason, that is absolutely brilliant. Using sort of, if you like, the go to the honeypot, which is, as you say, the MNCs and the CFOs, CEOs.

That's good.

Those people are saying, and you're kind of in the crowd with the people that are also trying to gain the attention, but actually you're then getting the attention of those people you're standing next to there. What a brilliant— now you're a smart man and I know you've got postgraduate degrees in AI as well. So we haven't had a chance to go into your background, but you understand AI, but plainly you also understand marketing. Very, very astute, especially making the transition from selling high-value, low-volume consultancy. You've completely flipped that on its head to high-volume, low-value, or rather low price, but high-value AI. Is there a mistake, Jason, that you've made in the last couple of years as an entrepreneur on the marketing and getting noticed front that that you'd suggest people don't try at home, my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneurs, something to avoid doing?

I probably would say switching from selling to B2B for a large-ticket item to a small-ticket item as a product, it is a complete change of the mindset. I think that is probably number one. Number 2 that I would say, the biggest mistake I would probably try to avoid that I did it myself as well, especially for Engage AI, but I'm glad that we managed to control the damage. So the spending was not crazy, which is about the advertising. I really think that advertising is getting really, really expensive these days. And while we are still in the early stage, it's better off to speak with users, try to think outside the box rather than spending all the money on the PPC. Whether it's from Google or it's whether from Facebook, if you are not 100% clear about how you are serving your customer, how you're solving your customer, if, and if you are not a funded company, PPC is best to avoid until you figure out your funnel, your key messages, your USP, and exactly you will be able to retain the client. So I think we spent about a couple hundred dollars in the PPC, we probably got less than 5 clicks. So, I said, you know what, we got to stop that. We try something else.

Isn't that interesting? Because one would have thought that a product like yours would be eminently PPC-able. But you're not the first person to say that the advertising on LinkedIn, Facebook, X as it is now, has yielded almost no ROI, uh, for them. So that's very, very interesting. Jason Tan is the, you know, CEO and founder of engage-co.ai, um, which is a brilliant, brilliant product for those SMEs and those entrepreneurs working to get leads and generate demand out of LinkedIn and also avoiding the just the generic spam of inbox, which is actually getting more and more people to just feel abused, right? And I now just mark, you know, block, block, block, block, right? So that's a very smart strategy. If there's one thing that you've done that you say really doesn't move the needle as an entrepreneur, what would that be?

Ooh, what is one thing that I Do that doesn't move the needle?

No, no, that does move the needle. Oh, does move the needle. Yeah, no, not doesn't. But one thing that moves the needle that you go, okay, if you've got, you know, as an entrepreneur and you need to get noticed and you're down to your last few dollars, what would be the one thing you do recommend?

I would highly, highly say market positioning. And I would give a lot of credit to the market positioning. I must say, I must admit that to a lot of extent, we were lucky we got into this AI hype because of ChatGPT. There's no doubt about it. We're part of that cycle. But market positioning, I think, is why we got to where we are today. The very reason why I'm saying that is because before we released the Engage AI, I was absolutely clear that I would not be another AI copywriting tool. Because before we launched, there were literally already hundreds and thousands of the AI copywriting tools already. So I know if I just position myself as another AI marketing tool, I would go nowhere. There's no way I would be able to compete with the well-funded Silicon Valley companies. So what I say is, you know what, we know commenting for attention is a proven strategy. We all use that. We know a lot of people are using that. Equally, we know that is a pain that a lot of people are facing. So our market position is we are the LinkedIn AI commenting, or we are the ChatGPT for LinkedIn commenting. And it is what we are, and that is all we do. So because of that, as a first mover, the market positioning was very clear. And because of that, a lot of people can quickly understand that. A lot of people can quickly relate to that. A lot of people are trialing that out. And equally, it gives us all the exposure that the organic and the earned exposure, the earned media that we Don't have to go out and earn myself. Lots of blog, lots of influencer, lots of LinkedIn posts, lots of Instagram. All of them, when they want to say top 52, top 10 to blah, we were always there. So market positioning is really the one that I would say think about yourself to make that clear. It will move the needle. Like crazy.

Jason Tan, you've moved the needle and you won number 1 on Product Hunt. I can see there, for example, by being laser-focused. Jason Tan, you mentioned a coupon, something for listeners to have. Take us to where people can get a trial for Engage AI.

So they can always start it for free. They can even sign up a pro account for free, get a feel. They will get full access to all the premium features at zero cost for 2 weeks. And should they decide to go for it and decide this is really the right tool for them, and also we are building more and more features, but if they want to be the early adopters supporting us like many of our existing early supporters, use the coupon code of BFF. So I repeat, it's 4 characters. B for boy, F for friend. My best friend. Married 2 and then new married 3. BF33 to get $23 off and try it for $7 in the first month. And no, no contract, no commitment, no, no long-term commitment. They can cancel at any time.

Jason Tan, I wouldn't want to cancel you at any time. It's been a wonderful, wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. Jason Tan, if you want to find out and find you, where can they do that?

Well, LinkedIn or our website engage-ai.co. But otherwise, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn to be helpful to people, but equally understand how the platform works so we can continue to improve Engage AI for SMB owners.

Jason Tan, thank you so much for joining me today on the show.

Thank you so much. The pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, hasn't it been wonderful? Jason, thank you for coming. And, you know, we met on LinkedIn and I saw Engage and I saw the difference between what you're doing with Engage AI and all the other writing tools. Credit to them for what they're doing, but your application is unique and special. So for those of us that are listening, If you've got a desire, go to engage-ai.co, free trial for the first couple of weeks, and then money off, BESTFRIEND23 is your coupon for us at The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed this, please do rate the show on your player and follow the show because I wouldn't want you to miss another great tool and another great entrepreneur story like we've heard today from Jason. We've run over a little bit. Normally the shows are 20 to 25 minutes, but we kind of got a bit deep because loving what Jason's doing. I think it's so, so useful for you to understand what tools are available. So I'll rush off now. Thank you for joining me, Jim James. And until we meet again, keep on communicating. And with Engage AI, you can keep on commenting too.

Cheers. Thank you.