Adam W. Barney + Joe Apfelbaum Discuss LinkedIn Strategy

I'm just gonna introduce you.

Any way they introduce me is good. I'm good.

Well, I'm gonna go, Joe Apfelbaum is the CEO of Ajax Union and the mind behind Evie AI, an AI-powered engagement platform that turns LinkedIn into a revenue channel without turning you into a robot.

Let's do that. Oh my God, I love that.

That's perfect. Cool. All right. And then I'm, you know, I've kind of got, based on our previous conversation, you know, some questions that I'll go through. thematically kind of going from, let's say, hustler to AI humanist, how to automate without losing authenticity, how relationships work over reach, and then we can kind of outro from there. But let's do it.

I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go.

Awesome. This is the first one I've recorded since coming back from vacation, also a 2 and a half week California trip. So back on the horse.

Congratulations on that. That's huge.

All right. I'm gonna hit record then, Joe.

Let's go.

All right, welcome back to Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising, the show where we unpack what's real and what's just noise in today's performance marketing mess. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney, and today's guest is a high-energy disruptor who's not just building AI tools, he's building better relationships at Joe Apfelbaum is the CEO of Ajax Union and the mind behind Evie AI, an AI-powered engagement platform that turns LinkedIn into a revenue channel without turning you into a robot. Joe, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on the show. I love the way you said that. It was so smooth.

It's all about having fun in what we're building, right? So, so there we go. So to kick off, you know, I'd love to get into Joe. You've built companies, you've scaled communities, and now Evvy.ai is helping 20,000+ people show up smarter on social. What's the origin story there?

Well, you know the famous saying, if you build it, they will come? I built it, nobody came. I used to build websites for people in my 20s, my early 20s. And, you know, I would say, if you build it, they will come. I built about 100 websites, per year for people. And I built it for them and then I said, I'm done. And people would come back to me and be like, all right, you built me this website, now what? What do you do now? I was like, what do you want? They're like, I want customers. I'm like, well, you didn't ask me for customers. You asked me for a website. I built you a website, we're done. But then I realized that they were willing to pay a monthly fee for me to get them customers. So I started researching things like SEO and SEM and paid advertisements and all that. And I got really good at SEO and I started driving tons of traffic for people. And then that's how I built one of the fastest growing companies in the US, Ajax Union. We were doing SEO for companies. We serviced over 1,100 clients, generated millions of dollars in recurring revenue, very powerful. And I realized that not every client is created equal. Most businesses go out of business in 3 years. And so I, I realized the faster I help somebody grow their business, the faster they go out of business because they're not profitable. So if I take your business that's losing money and I put fire fuel into the fire, you're going to go out of business faster because you're not going to be able to handle the growth. And so that's what we saw. A lot of our customers are going out of business because we were accelerating their business and then we were going out of business and we were losing customers and our churn rate was very high. So I tried to ask myself, how do I get really good customers that have established businesses? And the answer was networking. And so I got really, really good at networking. And I realized that I can do really good networking on LinkedIn, especially when Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn in 2016, about 10 years ago. And I got really into it and people started asking me, Joe, you're so good at LinkedIn. You're generating millions of dollars in revenue from LinkedIn. Can you teach us? And I was like, I'm not a LinkedIn trainer. And then they're like, yes, you are. Teach me LinkedIn. And so I started teaching people LinkedIn. I got really, really good at teaching people LinkedIn. I made courses, generated over $1 million in courses. And then I realized a lot of the people I was teaching LinkedIn were not executing. Some of them were like Sarah, she generated $500,000 in revenue in the first 6 months from the strategies I gave her. But a lot of people were kind of like just buying the course, paying $10,000, and then sometimes just not executing on the things I would teach them to do because they had writer's block or they weren't sure what to, like, they weren't sure, they didn't have the time or whatever it is.

Yeah.

So I, I realized when I was in Mexico running in 2023, January 2023, I was running in Mexico and I was asking ChatGPT, I was like, Hey, listen, I have all this expertise. I have an agency, I have a training company, I'm doing all this. How can I really impact a million people? And they're like, SaaS, build a software. And I was like, I don't know the first thing about software. So I said, you know what, before I build the software, let me see if people are interested. I have 50,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Right.

I posted on LinkedIn and I said, um, is anybody interested in an assistant that's made out of technology, an AI assistant that will write up all your posts, comments, messages, and help you save profiles to lists and whatever ChatGPT told me to ask. So 100, 500 people said they're interested. So I was like, wow, that's, that's a big— a lot of people need this. And so I put it, made a checkout page on a Google Doc and I said, buy it if you're interested. And if I get 100 people to buy it, I'll build it. I'm not paying to build it without getting people.

That's the, the Liquid Death approach, right? To how do we can water? And we didn't can any, but we sold So much of it ahead of trying, right?

And so I sold 100 and then I said, okay, hold your horses. We gotta build something now. So I went and found developers and failed and found developers and failed and found developers and failed. And I realized, you know, it's really hard building software, even in the vibe coding world. It's really hard building real scalable, secure software. That's why it's so expensive. That's why the software's worth so much money.

Right.

So I, I went through the arduous process of spending a ridiculous amount of time, effort, energy, and money with my business partner. And we built a world-class software that now has 20,000 users in 37 countries with amazing testimonials. And you're a client, so thanks for being a client. And people are loving it. And then LinkedIn took notice and they're like, we don't want you to be a LinkedIn assistant. LinkedIn is a trademark. You can't act like LinkedIn. Because if you Googled LinkedIn assistant, we came on top of LinkedIn, number 1 on Google, because I'm really good at SEO.

Right.

And so we started ranking for all the keywords related to LinkedIn because we had linked the word LinkedIn 21 times on our website and everybody was linking to us. with the word LinkedIn. So LinkedIn got really upset and they made us rem— they didn't make us, but you know, they sent us their lawyers and everything and they said, if you don't remove this, we're gonna take action. And so we, we hired a law firm and they said, you don't have to remove it, but if you want to, we would recommend it. So instead of being a LinkedIn assistant, we sh— we pivoted. We're no longer a LinkedIn assistant. Now we're a sales assistant.

Right.

So we work on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We work inside your CRM. We work with ChatGPT. And it's like having a little savvy sales assistant that sits on the side of your browser. We used to work inside LinkedIn. We no longer work inside LinkedIn. Now we just sit on the side. And if you need us to write a comment on a post, whether it's on any social platform, including LinkedIn, we'll read the post and write a thoughtful comment for you within 2 seconds in your own voice, in any language, with any LLM. So we work with Claude, with Grok, with—

Yep.

With all the different, with ChatGPT. With Gemini, you can select and you get unlimited access. And that's kind of the origin story. I don't know if I went too long on it, but that's—

I dig it. And I have to say, Joe, you know, I appreciate you going there. You know, one of the coolest things I've seen as a client of yours with evv.ai is the AltG Comment Assistant and that persona-based post writing, right? So—

It just gets easier and easier and easier and easier because now, Now you just press Alt+G and a comment appears inside the comment box and you're like, how did that happen?

It's the magic wand, the magic wand. From your perspective though, what makes this feel different than sort of all the spammy outreach tools that are out there in the world?

There's really 3 reasons that we're very, very different. Number one is one of our core values is to be authentic. That's, that's, that's— so when I say be authentic, there's a lot of spammy tools out there that will just like send out automations. And we don't believe in automation. We believe in agents. We don't believe in like things just automatically happening by themselves. If you're on LinkedIn and you have eyes on a post, you don't want AI to read the post and to automatically create a comment and post it for you without you even being there. That's not authentic. I'm sorry.

Right.

It's authentic for you to show up, see the post of one of your prospects or one of your clients or one of your friends, and then not being sure what to say because you want some suggestions. And for AI to, to know who you are and know your persona and to suggest a comment that sounds exactly like you as your clone. And then you can decide if you wanna hit submit or you wanna spend 2 seconds editing it and then hitting submit.

Right.

That is how you stay authentic Versus, you know, just using the LinkedIn AI that's built into LinkedIn or whatever. It's complete and total trash. Doesn't sound like you. It's not authentic. And anyone that just randomly does automations and randomly likes without looking, that's just like, ugh, you don't want that. You wanna really be authentic. And that's what we truly believe makes us stand out. Well, we're not there to replace you. We're there to assist you. You don't need to replace yourself. What you need to do is you need to get assistance. If you wanna replace yourself, you can get a bunch of automations, but it's not gonna be you. And so like, what are you doing? Are you really networking if you just have some robot out there just clicking on things and you leave? Like, that's not called networking. That's called spraying and praying. And you're not gonna be able to build a real meaningful relationship when somebody says something happened to their father and then you have an AI respond, congratulations, when the guy's father just died.

Right.

And then you meet him on the street and he like looks at you with a dirty look. And then you're like, why are you upset at me? You're like, what do you mean? You saw what you did under my post? It was terrible. You know, you compared me to the Astronomer CEO, whatever. What do you think, we're in a Coldplay concert? Can you—

so, you know, I love how you've always framed up, Joe, that personalization is the starting line. It's not the finish line also. What's the next level once the AI cracks the door open?

I mean, the reality is it all has to lead to a conversation. If we and you are having a conversation right now, if my AI clone came instead, you would not be happy with my clone coming here. You might be happy with watching a course of my clone teaching you how to use LinkedIn. You'd be fine with that. And by the way, Somebody told me 3 years ago when we did this, when we, when we put up the, not 2 years, 2 years ago when we put up the poll, someone's like, yeah, if you're building an AI assistant for LinkedIn, you could for sure sell 100 of those. But try to sell a course on LinkedIn. Try to sell a course on LinkedIn and try to get 100 people to buy it. Well, I did that 2 months ago. I came out with a new course called 99 Hacks, and I put up a poll and I said, do you wanna learn the 99 LinkedIn hacks? And 171 people said they're interested. 151— 100 people paid. And I didn't even have the course. I just sent them a Stripe link and 100 people paid for the course. I don't have the time to create the course, Adam. So you know what I did? I paid $29 for HeyGen. I hired a virtual assistant.

Yeah.

And the virtual assistant created the videos in HeyGen that looks and sound like me. Doing each of the 99 hacks. We're about 50 hacks in and we're gonna be done at the end of the month and we're gonna launch the course. It's gonna be a $1,000 course.

Wow, that's wild.

Super valuable, super valuable. If anybody wants access to it, just text me the number below, say I want access to it and I'll send you guys access to it. But it's just insane what you can do now. And I was just, I drove 4 hours yesterday. I put up a poll. Just now on LinkedIn, but I drove 4 hours yesterday to go visit my son in upstate New York. He's like, once you get upstate, you drive 2 hours, you gotta drive another 2 hours to keep going further upstate to get to where my son is. I don't know why they— we put him up there, but whatever. He's having the time of his life in some camp near a lake. Anyway, while I was driving, I was having a conversation with an old employee of mine, and we were just talking about what's possible, and he was saying he really wants to launch a podcast. And I said, why don't you create AI podcasts for people? And he's like, that's actually a brilliant idea. 'Cause my biggest challenge with people is getting them to actually record normally. But if I can have clone their voice and record for them, right? Yeah. They don't have to do anything. They just pay me a monthly fee and then I'll do everything with their podcast. We're on a podcast right now. This is amazing.

Right.

But if you, if you just wanted to do an informational podcast that's super valuable, you can have your voice cloned and it'll sound exactly like you. Why not have someone do it? And he's like, you think you can get me 10 customers? I was like, I don't know, I'll put up a poll and see if anybody's interested. So we could look at that poll and I already at least have one person said he wants to buy it, wants to pay for it. That's thousands of dollars a year in services. Like that's, it's insane what you can do if you learn how to leverage LinkedIn properly.

Wow. That's wild. Yeah. Um, you know, and I see that as, you know, tools like with what you've built and what you're talking about here, These tools help make people better at sales and marketing, not just operate faster.

Yeah. Yeah. And the rights, I always say this, Adam, I say the right strategy will save you a decade. So if you wanna spend 10 years just hoping for the best, I was talking to Mindy who just became an Heavy AI Pro client. We upgraded her to Pro cuz Pro, she really wanted agents that research each. She has 5,000 connections. Yeah. And she wanted agents that can research each connection. and help create an about section for their LinkedIn with a click of a button. So Evie AI can do that. Evie AI can research all 5,000 people that she's connected to and then create an optimized about section for each person with a click of a button. And it doesn't cost anything. Like it's free, it's unlimited with Pro.

Wow.

And so she's, she, so I showed her how to do it and she was, her mind was blown. So she upgraded to Pro. She got the bundle, which includes $10,000 worth of training as well. So I was talking to her and she's like, she wants to close another $25K account. So I said, why don't we, why don't we do a strategy session and I'll show you how to do it? Because that sounds like every— the only thing you're missing. Your clients are sitting right there.

Right.

You're missing a strategy. So my point is she signed up because she needed the strategy. My point is, if you guys don't— are not making $100,000 a year in profit, it's just a strategy that you're missing. That's it. Nothing else. You're missing a strategy. Of course you need action after the strategy.

Right.

But you can, you can do energy. You can spend a lot of energy without strategy. You know, a lot of people in McDonald's are working very, very hard and they're not making anywhere near $100,000 a year. What's minimum wage in your area right now?

Uh, $15.75, I want to say, an hour.

That's $30,000 a year. If that person did a side hustle, they would make $30 additional per hour with their side hustle. And they would just need a strategy while they're flipping burgers at McDonald's, because there's a lot of downtime now because the machines are doing a lot of it.

Right.

They could be making $30 an hour additional for the full 8 hours they're working at McDonald's as a side hustle, still keeping their $15. Now they made the other— then they could choose to decide if they want to, if they want to leave or just stay at McDonald's because they love their coworkers. But you can make double the amount, $30 an hour, doing some side hustle if you learn the right strategy of how to. And that's how I'm on a mission to doing that. Um, so I really want to help people be able to make $100,000 a year in profit, but it's gonna take the right strategy. And that's why with Evvy AI, with the pro version, we give you a free version, a free strategy session.

I love it. Awesome. What's, what's your biggest challenge right now, Joe, in, in where you are right now?

I would say like right now, um, our community has 1,100 people in it. And getting leaders within the community to step up is a challenge. We have about 10 leaders. I'd love to have 100 leaders within the community to step up. And so that's kind of like what I'm working through right now. And, you know, people need leadership training. And so, you know, you're already a natural leader, but like in our community, imagine having 1,100 people. It's kind of like the same problem that Moses had when his father-in-law came over to him and is like, listen, what are you doing? You have 6 million Jews that you just pulled out of, uh, whatever it was, ridiculous amount of Jews that left Egypt. How many Jews? I don't know, 600,000 men. So there were like millions of Jews that left Egypt, and Moses is busy dealing with all the people. Like, he's like, you got to get, you got to get like 10,000 students to, to be the judges and to like help out with all the disputes and all the stuff that's going on. You can't do this yourself. So his father-in-law was his mentor. His name is Yitro. He was his mentor and he mentored him to kind of go create leaders. So now I'm in the process of creating 100 leaders within our community. And, you know, sometimes if you want gallons, you first need some leaders.

Right. I mean, building the community is always the challenge also, right? You know what I mean? Finding those— it all gets into the tribes that we're all trying to bring together, right? In this modern world where We're evolving there.

And Mindy, Mindy, when she signed up to Evvii Pro, she said, Joe, you know, I came for the software and I stay for the community because the community is such a powerful, beautiful— we meet with our community every day. And again, we have 1,100 engaged LinkedIn users. When people start with the community, they usually have 1 or 2 likes on their post. Now she has 40 comments on each post. Wow.

That's the That's the power there of what you help to showcase.

Yeah.

Awesome. Joe, this was such a fun breakdown of how to scale connection without, you know, losing the human. And you've made the case that automation isn't evil, it's just the misuse of it that's evil.

We need some automation. Like if someone texts the word demo, and I said Texas when we're in Texas. If someone sends a text, the word demo to 973-841-8868, if you send that, there is an automation that will respond to that. You know, there— automation is not evil, as you just said. I do believe in automation in the right way. But if you're just going to overuse automation and not in an authentic way, then it's a problem. Like, if I want to— if I want to leave 100 comments a day on posts, I can't do that manually. I, I can do that with semi-automatic, you know what I mean?

And so that's the full— That's a full-time job to leave 100 thoughtful deep comments on posts every single day. And think about not just LinkedIn, it's all the social platforms, all the, the, the, the worlds that we live in, right?

And you can do it now in any language. So for example, I speak Spanish. Do you speak any other languages besides English?

Um, you know, young, young kid language, I guess, is one, and then dog language, probably. But—

Maybe some sign language.

Yep.

What's— oh, so woof woof.

Woof woof. Yes, understanding. With dogs, you have to use the eyes though, more than you can anything else.

Really? Are you a dog trainer?

No, we have 2 dogs at home, but—

Oh, what type of dogs do you have?

Uh, they're 2 rescues. They're both poodle rescues.

Poodle rescues. Yeah, that's so nice.

They are sitting with my wife right now.

Oh, that's so cute. That's so cute. And do you have any kids or just Dogs.

2 kids, 2 girls, 9 and 5. Wow.

And I have 3 girls.

Yeah.

Wow. Very nice. My youngest just turned 9. So congratulations to you for having a 9 and a 5-year-old. That's beautiful.

Trying to do all this at the same time. And that's where the automation, that's where the beauty of authenticity and genuineness is where I've always come from and the way that I've always built, you know, my own network and I find it so critical. That's why you find me as one of your, one of your clients. And yeah, someone who I'd love to step up and become part of that, that tribe that you're building, that community.

Yeah, yeah, I would, I would love to do that. I'm going to tag you on LinkedIn and I'm going to put in, uh, the Skool community link. Have you ever heard of Skool?

I have been on Skool many, many, many different times, and it's a fantastic platform to monetize if anyone wants to riff on that more. As well.

Well, yeah. And by the way, I built several Skool communities and generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue within weeks just to kind of see if I can. Um, and it was just incredible. I built an AI automation community. I built, uh, a, um, an engaged thought leaders community, just kind of like as a test.

Yeah.

And it, and it, it worked. And it's so easy to collect payments on Skool. It's so, it's so like fast. You just pay $99. And then boom, you just connect your— they give you like a Stripe Express, which is a fast way to get Stripe. And then you could just start charging money and have a school community, which I love. But I really went into like the depth of school to try to figure out, okay, what's the best type of community to have and how do you launch it and how do you bring people together? So if you go to the school community that we have now, which is, we call it AI for LinkedIn because we just, from the SEO purposes, You know, they can go sue Skool for that if they want, if they have a problem with that. Um, but we called it AI for LinkedIn. But if it's, it's skool.com/evai, and you'll go in there and you'll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of engaged LinkedIn users in there. We have 1,100, but like, it's, it's just so fascinating that now you have like a little ecosystem of everyone that is kind of wanting to be authentic and wanting to support each other in a little cohabit— Co-community like that.

And that same intentionality is, is so incredible. The energy that it brings together, the conversation that it brings together.

It's incredible. And now we do AI research on every person. So we have agents that will research every little component, every nook and cranny of your business and every nook and cranny of every LinkedIn connections that you have. So I love being able to just click a button and know everything about somebody. That saves me a lot of time when I'm, I'm doing what I'm doing on LinkedIn. So I'll push a button and Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, they'll go and gather all the detailed information about each person. And when it gathers the information, it kind of just lays it out for me with conversation starters. So it says that you are an acclaimed executive leadership coach, energy strategist, and author. And then it tells me you work with, uh, executive and emerging leaders in, uh, finance, SaaS, media, and high-growth startups. And it tells me you provide them with leadership coaching, agency growth consulting, Google Ads profitability consulting, all this jazz. And then it gives me your email address and all your information. And then it tells me to ask you the following question. It says, how did your experience at Microsoft and Akamai inform you on energy coaching approach today? Wow.

I have to go back, Joe. I was working at Microsoft when they bought LinkedIn. So we, that's, that's a commonality there of the conversation. to tie things with a bow, I would say.

Wow. Wow. And it also asks me about to share a memorable story behind the Make Your Own Glass Half Full.

Let's say that book, Make Your Own Glass Half Full: The Empowered Path to Optimism and Autonomy, was built on the fact that in my corporate career, I was laid off twice. And I used those tools of optimism and autonomy to pull up my bootstraps and not just fall down and die in atrium. But get back up and try again.

You know what we need to do? We need to find the 9,000 Microsoft employees that were just fired, and we need to give them a copy of your book. You know?

I'm happy to do that.

Isn't that crazy? Do you know that they fired 9,000 people, right?

I do. I know people who were part of that. Part of that.

That's insanity. It's so sad. It's so sad. Microsoft is a big company. I just went to Seattle. I met a Microsoft employee in Seattle. We hung out. We had a great time. We had drinks. It was very fun. Now we're friends. But that person's not afraid of getting fired because they're very senior.

Right.

But there's a lot of— when you're working with a company that's the biggest company in the world, now Nvidia's bigger, but from market cap, Microsoft's basically the biggest company in the world. When you're working for such a company, it's like, it's like its own world. Like you can't know, you can't know 1/10 of 1% of people that work there.

Believe me, it's incredible. It was an incredible organization to be one of, you know, 300,000 global employees, be the tiniest needle in a haystack and still get that, that inspirational leadership from someone like Satya Nadella, who comes from that lift up the employee perspective. Versus the way, you know, say a Steve Ballmer was, was a little bit more aggressive and maybe a little bit more unpredictable in terms of how they were leading Microsoft. Still both effective leaders, but I was lucky enough to be under, you know, see that leadership, that sage leadership strategy from someone like Satya in that role.

Amazing. Amazing. Wow. You are such an impressive person. You have such an impressive background and I would've never known that you worked at Microsoft. I would've never known this if not for my AI agent. And I just introduced you to someone pretty senior at Microsoft. I just put it into the DM for you so you look at it later, you'll have it.

Awesome.

Who's a dear friend of mine who I think you should connect with and build a relationship with.

Cool.

And I'll tell you privately, like, you know, details about that. But I just want, I want you to know That is because the AI agent that supports me, that I'm able to then make your life and their life better as a result of it.

I love it. I love it, Joe. All right, well, thanks everyone for tuning into Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising, the show where we find the signal behind the noise. I think we definitely landed on that today, Joe. I'm Adam W. Barney. Subscribe, leave a review, and check the show notes for more and text Demo there to Joe at 973-841-8868. I was that second eight was a little bit a little bit hidden there.

Sometimes if you don't want to eat a date, you should eat an eight.

Awesome, Joe. Well, thanks for joining again today. Cheers, everyone.