Dan Curran + Joe Apfelbaum CEO of evyAI Networking

Buddy, the first thing that I do, I'm gonna share my screen if you don't mind, just to kind of show you what I do. That's because showing is better than telling or whatever, I think, at least.

Yeah.

Okay, I'm gonna press share. Can you see my screen now?

I can.

Does this guy's profile look together?

I know that guy, yeah.

Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna label you as a boardy intro. I'm gonna save you as a boardy intro here in a new list I'm creating. And I'm gonna press save. Um, and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up your profile right here with a little tiny square. And you see, I open up your profile here on the side.

Yeah.

And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna deploy an agent to research you in real time as we talk. So this is the first thing that I do whenever I speak to somebody. I deploy agents that tell me everything about them. So you're the CEO of chapters.io, uh, a company focused on helping individuals transform their life experiences into wisdom books, blah, blah, blah. You're a serial entrepreneur, founder of chapters.io, blah, blah, blah. Target audience, who you're looking to meet, key services, how you help clients, contact information, notable achievements, conversation starters, potential business opportunities. So this tells me everything about you from that perspective. Now what I want to do is I want to figure out what podcasts you've recently been on. And so I push a keyboard shortcut within my assistant and it automatically drops a prompt into the agent. And the agent starts showing me every podcast that you've recently been on, what you said, your key points, your unique perspective, and something for us to talk about during our conversation that relates to me and you. Like, how do you coach clients to develop confidence and public persona through their storytelling or whatever, for each individual podcast that you did? Then what I wanna know is I wanna know what are the problems you typically focus on to help people, just so that I understand who you are. You know, like what are those problems? And so I push a button, another keyboard shortcut, and it identifies your top 10 most engaged internet and content themes. All the themes, all the specific terminologies you use, and the industry problems you address. Then I have a whole series of templates that I can also use. For example, if I want to find out every single place that you're online, so let's look at Twitter, let's look at Instagram, let's look at Facebook, TikTok, YouTube for both you and your company and show me how many followers you have on each. It'll kind of break everything down for me just like that by pushing a button. And then if I want to find out if you published any books, I don't know. It says that you haven't published books on Amazon, but that's probably wrong because if you're doing Chapters.io, it's very likely you publish books. Are you sure he didn't publish books? I'm going to ask the agent that question because that would be really weird if it told me he didn't publish any books. Um, let's see. Okay. It doesn't look like he has any books.

Okay. Yeah, I can explain that.

Okay. It doesn't matter. Anyway, bottom line is I wanna find out everything about you. I can find out everything about you by just clicking a few buttons, like your pain points and your podcast appearances, your, you know, personal information, like, you know, comprehensive research about you or deep personal research. I wanna see if you're married or if you have kids or whatever it is. It'll kind of go through everything that we spoke about and tell me everything about you. No publicly information available about your family structure, spouse, kids. You're mostly focused on AI technology, editorial, blah, blah, blah. Here are your beliefs, your lifestyle, your recommendations for relationship building. Are you an EO?

Yeah, I used to. I was president of our chapter and—

Oh, wow.

I retired.

You're an EOer, so you know what Gestalt is. Yeah. If you were the president, you know what time it is.

Yeah.

So yes, I'm a longtime EO member. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm a longtime EO member. I had my stint on and off, whatever, but now I'm in their international chapter because I have clients in 23 countries around the world. So now I'm, you know, now I'm like doing that. So one of the things that I love to do is to leave comments on people's posts, but I don't have the time to do it myself. And so I'll go to your, I'll go to a post. Let's say you wrote a post from Chapters over here, and I'll just push a keyboard shortcut and it'll draft a comment in my voice. And so right now it's in the middle of reading your post over here, and I just drafted a comment. I can tag you if I want, and I can comment. And it says, wow, turning expertise into legacy in just 90 days is a fascinating concept. So it'll write all my posts. It'll come up with all my images very, very quickly. Like, you know, like, um, if I wanna write, you know, join the posting party, this is a post that I posted and this is me and Ava. Ava's one of my, uh, virtual assistants that I made up, you know, like I created her from my rib. I used one of my ribs.

Yeah.

Um, and then these are all my clients, my fake AI clients that I have in the background holding up stuff. So the prompt that I use was, you know, I took her photo, my photo, and I told AI to kind of put the prompt together within our little AI generator, and it kind of went ahead and did this in a few seconds. It kind of put this whole thing together. The idea is, what I'm really, really passionate about is helping people properly leverage LinkedIn and help them monetize it. I have to remove another Dan to add you because I'm at max connections, so I'm going to go here to my network, find some other Dan who's been a little bit of a flake and hasn't been responding to me. So let me go ahead, let me find another Dan. Uh, let me see, Dan.

Is there an, um, inbox feature or is that not— it's not, not part of your thesis?

We, we do, we do help you reply to messages in your inbox and we work with other tools that manage your inbox on LinkedIn, but we don't have any automation. So for example, this guy's the Elite Stack developer. I don't need to be connected to him. I'll switch him for you. So I'm gonna go ahead and remove his ass. And then I'll go find you again. And the way that I find you now is instead of looking at you on LinkedIn, I just push this button and now it loads, your profile loads. 'Cause I, you know what I mean? I saved you already.

Yeah.

So now, now you're already saved. So do you see, um, let me refresh this and see if your contact info shows up here. 'Cause it doesn't look like you have contact info here. Do you purposely not put your phone number and email here? You were born on my, you were born on my wedding anniversary. Look at that. And we connected a month before. Um, but yeah, but yeah, that's the idea. The idea is building a relationship with people, kind of getting to know them, and then using technology to just make things really easy. That's what I'm passionate about. Um, but yeah, we do have the ability to like send messages. So if I click on message and I click on over here, the content thing, I can just say, so glad to be connected to a former Entrepreneurs Organization member. And I'd love, I would love to hear your story about you being the president of your chapter. So now I push up and I press send and I kind of just did that. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah. Um, and what is your, um, who's your target persona or customer that you're working with now?

Like, uh, coaches and consultants, entrepreneurs. Um, yeah, I would say more coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs. And then the second thing would be sales reps, but mostly coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs because You know, lawyers, professionals, you know, all that type of stuff, all that jazz.

Since you started this journey, what's your, um, kind of from a dev or sales standpoint, however you want to look at it, what's your biggest surprise this last year or two?

How few people know how to use computers.

Interesting.

Isn't that crazy? Like, people in today's day and age do not know how to use a computer. They're like, and they're like, Chrome, which one's Chrome? Which, what do I click on? How do I How do I chrome that Chrome? And I'm like, okay, just forget it. Just, just close the computer and walk away. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Interesting. Um, but yeah, people need, people need tech support. Yeah. People need tech support.

More of an EO, um, question. What is, what about next year features or?

Yeah, I'm happy. I'm 100%. Yeah, we're do— we're becoming agentic. So right now we're an assistant. We're, you know, so we're fully just a, an assistant helping people out as an assistant. We don't do anything automatically. Next year we're going to be a full-on sales agent. So right now we're a sales assistant. We're going to go into being a sales agent as well. Whereas we're going to be reaching out, we're going to be doing stuff automatically, helping you network, build relationships, all that type of stuff. We already have the ability for you to talk to us. So if you go to strategy.evaai.com, you can actually fill out a form over here and talk to Ava. You know, remember I told you I built Ava?

Empowered LinkedIn content strategist.

Outta my rib.

Thanks for your interest in scheduling a session with me.

So this is Ava right here. And so you can actually have a phone call conversation. You fill out this form and then you just, you call her and you brainstorm LinkedIn stuff and she gives you a bunch of tips. So that's actually active, kind of like Bordi, same thing as Bordi, but for LinkedIn content. So we already have the brainstorming session. Just people don't want to talk to AI right now. Like that's not, People are not that excited about that. That's not something that's motivating our clients. Our clients want systems and processes to properly be able to use artificial intelligence, and they're not really interested in having conversations with AI yet. So that's kind of like, you know, that's kind of like the idea. Is this your cell, by the way? 4155?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Is the Gentiq, um, just in layman's— just Talk to me like a 3rd grader, as they say. Is it moving faster or slower when you have your dev hat on than you thought?

Slower, much slower.

Yeah.

Much slower. Yeah, so I'm a first-time SaaS founder. This is brand new to me. Building a software is brand new, building a technology. So there's a lot of challenges. Adoption is a challenge. Churn is a challenge. Safety and security is a challenge. Litigation, IP litigation is a challenge. Community engagement is a challenge. There's so many challenges from, I would say, 15 or 20 different areas that besides running a business and besides culture and besides operations and besides customer service and besides chargebacks, And besides all that other stuff, yeah, the barrier of entry to create a world-class SaaS software for individuals or teams to be able to purchase and to use is very, very high, very high barrier of entry to create the software that actually works properly, to maintain it in a way that it works at the level that customers expect. And then to keep up with what's going on with technology changing and shifting so fast every single day, something new is coming out. You know, Sora 2 is out now. What are you going to do? Nano Banana is out. This, that, blah, blah, blah. Everything's just happening so quick. Um, and how do you kind of stay front and center with everything? And the answer is, um, being able to have your clients very close to you is important. Not trying to go viral too quickly and trying to be the next best thing. And then making sure that you're not in the dead zone that Peter Thiel talks about in his book Zero to One, where I spent a lot of— I spent probably 10 years in my agency being in the dead zone. And when I left the dead zone, I jumped into the deadly zone and I almost was put out of business when COVID hit because I jumped out of the dead zone. But what he didn't tell you is if you're in the dead zone and you jump into the deadly zone, then although you'll be profitable for some time, But the risk is really, really high of having really, really big accounts that suddenly leave and drop a gaping hole, and you don't want to get rid of the talent, and then all your profit is lost, and then everything you made in the past few years you lose quickly unless you gut. And then once you gut, you can't grow again because it took 7 years to grow, blah, blah, blah, to develop the talent, to get the customer, to, you know, it's like a chicken and the egg.

Yeah.

And as it is, the agency business wasn't very profitable to begin with. You know, a customer that's paying me $5K, $10K a month, they think I'm making $5K, $10K. I'm barely pulling out, you know, $2,000 out of that. You know, like, there's no way you're making profit unless you're like a crazy, crazy— so you have to be charging $50K, $60K, $100K to make some profit. And who can afford that? Just the big, big boys. And the big, big boys are in bed with whoever they're in bed with. You know, so you have to, you have to know exactly what to do and how to do it and whatever. So it's not a very profitable game. On the low end, it could be very profitable because people buy things they never use. But that's not our philosophy is selling things to people that they don't use and charging them randomly. That's not what we're doing. We want to build a world-class business that has 1,000 engaged LinkedIn users that are using this technology every day. And then we're just basically shaping our technology around their needs. So I know what my clients' needs are because I literally meet them every day.

And no pushback from LinkedIn? They're friendly?

We are— we got a lot of pushback from LinkedIn. We had to change our business model because of that. And we used to be a LinkedIn AI assistant. We ranked number number one on Google for LinkedIn AI assistant because I'm so good at SEO. And then LinkedIn took out wind and they're like, you can't use the word LinkedIn on your website. And they tried to sue us for it. And so we removed it and now we're just a sales assistant. We work on Facebook, we work on Instagram, we work on Skool, we work on TikTok. So we're no longer a LinkedIn app, although we work very well on LinkedIn.

Mm-hmm.

But we're not, you know, LinkedIn doesn't want us to be a LinkedIn app. So we're not a LinkedIn app. We, if you go to Facebook and you try to use Evvy AI, it's just as easy to use Evvy AI on Facebook. You just go in here, You select your persona and see, I'm gonna go here. I'm gonna type in Facebook. This is my training that tells the AI how to be able to comment. I go to Russell Brunson's post, I send the post to the AI. You see, I just highlighted it, sent it to the AI. The AI wrote the post and I just commented the comment and boom, I just commented on Russell Brunson's post with a very thoughtful comment. That's much faster than going to ChatGPT. copying and pasting, putting in a prompt, waiting for ChatGPT to think for 1,000 hours, and then going back, finding the tab that you were just on, and then you lost it and you're like, fuck it, I'm not commenting. You know what I mean?

What about YouTube? Any thoughts on that?

Same thing. We, I'll go to YouTube. Watch this. I'm gonna go to YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. This is my YouTube channel right over here. You see, I do live cold calling, whatever. Yes. I am. So this is me live cold calling. I want to comment on this post. I could do the same exact thing. I can select all this like this. I can go like this. I can go like this. I can generate and then I can insert this comment. I could even summarize the whole article, the whole YouTube thing. So you see, I just summarized.

Yeah.

Boom. Hey there. I just watched a video of you calling prospects on YouTube into strangers. It's all about making genuine connections, right? Helping folks, da da da da. If you're looking to up your game, check out Evvii AI. You see, I'm promoting my own business under this. I mean, I could change the persona to be anything I want it to be, but that's the idea. The idea is I am sitting here and literally promoting. I can do it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, everywhere. So that's extremely, extremely powerful to do things like that. And then we have other, you know, we have other—

Yeah.

YouTube channels, like, you know, our YouTube isn't our biggest driver. Our biggest driver for revenue is LinkedIn. Because of my presence on LinkedIn. Um, I don't know if you took it, take it, took the time to look at my presence on LinkedIn.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like 40-some-odd thousand. You have a lot of good content.

Yep. Yeah. So last time I checked, it was a little over 50, but yeah, it could be 40, whatever, 53, whatever. But the key is just building relationships with people and getting to know them and connecting with them and like, you know, giving tips to people and, you know, all the different things that you need to do. And you could see over here, I have EO all over it. You see?

Yep.

But that's the idea. My goal is to teach people how to use LinkedIn. That's number one strategy. Number 2 is create a community of people around each other supporting each other. So I have— I use Skool. Have you heard of Skool?

No. Skool?

S-K-O-O-L. So this is our community. It's Alex Hormozi's and whatever. And Tony Robbins is now growing a community on Skool. So it's big. It's a really, really big platform. And so I use Skool for my community. I have 1,400 people in my community. You see 1,431, and everyone comes in here and supports each other. That's kind of like what we do. We have a calendar of events. If you click on calendar here, you see, I have events that happen. So we have an event at 12 that's happening right now with Fernando. He's meeting with our clients right now. I can tune in if you want, you want to see what's going on there, we can tune in. We have an accountability meeting at 5. We have another office hours at 7. Tomorrow at 10, we have an incredible strategy session with all of our clients. We're kind of meeting with them and building relationships and getting to know each other. And I'm teaching strategy for several hours. And then we have a social proof party with Rick. Everyone's going to support each other. Then we have onboarding with Tammy. Um, yeah. So every single day we have different things going on.

Are these, are these VAs? Are they full-time employees or?

Uh, everyone's different. So for example, this is me. I'm going to be doing this. I'm the CEO. This office hour is a full-time employee. This social proof party is a client facilitating. One of our clients is doing this. We have like our top clients. They are able to facilitate events within our community. Um, this is my business partner, Tammy, doing the onboarding. And this is Ayan, another part-time employee. Based in Canada.

And what's your pricing model?

We have 2 pricing models. There's the all-in model and then there's the dabbling model. The dabbling model starts at 50 cents a day, $180 a year, or $29 a month. That's about 50 cents a day, a little less for the annual package. That's called the premium package for people who just want to write content and, you know, some images and some posts and some comments. But they don't necessarily want like the whole package, the community, the strategy, everything. The community strategy and everything starts at about $2,000 a year and it goes up to $3,600 depending on what they need.

So that's, um, with all everything, a lot of what you showed me, but is it also more some concierge or agency type services? Like more—

That we, there's additional upsells for that. If you need that, there's additional upsells for that. So that could be, you know, a couple thousand a month to, you know, $20,000, $30,000, whatever. Like, well, we keep going up from there. that, but we'd rather not. That's not the profitable part of the business. The most profitable part of the business is when people are really, really happy and they get supported deeply, which is the, the Pro. If you're an EvAI Pro user and you're paying somewhere between $2,400 to $3,600 a year, that's the most profitable part of the business right now.

Okay.

And that gives you a lot of stuff.

Say that last part again.

I said that will give you the most bang for your buck because you're gonna get tons of training on how to use LinkedIn. We're gonna download all of your connections, turn them into a dashboard, help you monetize them, help you research them. You saw the way I researched you. So we'll give you unlimited AI research with 7 different agents that will research all of your connections. Then we'll help you organize them into lists, like the way I organized you into a list. So we have tons of different lists over here that have different things. And then you can, you know, do a lot more with it. So you click a button, um, and I'm able to do a lot more. I can add notes, you know, I can click on this microphone here and I can say he was an EO member previously and now he is running a company called chapters.io. And I met him through Bordi, which is a piece of technology that allows you to be able to network and connect with people. You see that? I just left a note.

Love it. You, uh, your sales Pipeline, it must be a spider web of a lot of different—

Yeah, it comes in, it comes in from a lot of places. I mean, you know, like I'll give you an example. This is, this is, I'm using GoHighLevel. So I don't know if you're familiar with GHL. Do you use GoHighLevel?

No, but I know of it.

Yeah. So very, very big fans of it. So if I click on my opportunities tab, I have leads coming in to wazoo. These are all my leads that came in. These are leads that came in today. So Tony, for example, He came in 2 hours ago. You see that? He said he's super interested. So I'm gonna click on this, right-click on Tony's name, um, look him up on LinkedIn with Evy AI. You see, Evy AI just pulls him up on LinkedIn just like that. And now I see who he is and now I can save him, research him, and I see he's a CTC International coaching guy. He's a coach. He has no idea how to use LinkedIn, obviously. You see, he never posted on LinkedIn. He's Mr. Connector.

Yeah.

Mr. Connector that doesn't post on LinkedIn with 200 followers. Yeah. You're not Mr. Connector yet. But you're going to become Mr. Connector if you're serious about growing your business. I'm going to help you become Tony. You see CTC International? I see he's right here. He has an AOL address. So he needs my help. He needs my help desperately. So I just pushed his button and the phone rings. And you see the phone's ringing right now. I don't know if you can hear it because I don't think I— I don't know if I shared my audio, but you see the phone's ringing?

Yep.

And so ring, ring, ring. He's calling. If he picks up, I'm gonna book a meeting with him right now. If he doesn't call, if he doesn't pick up, I'm gonna leave him a voice message. But I have a dialer built into this where I push one button and it'll call 700 people at a time. That's the crazy part about this. So this right now, local time, it's 9:00 AM for Tony, which is fine.

Yeah.

But this guy is a total qualified lead for me. This is a great lead. This is an excellent, excellent potential lead.

Leave your message for— Tony? Wow. You, um—

Hey Tony, it's Joe Apfelbaum. Hope you're doing fantastic. I noticed that you're a coach and that you're a connector. I would be thrilled if you can call me back, 917-841-8868. My name is Joe Apfelbaum. I'm the CEO of Evvii. Thanks for reaching out. I look forward to chatting with you soon. 973-841-8868. Talk to you soon, Tony. So do you see I left him a little voicemail over there? Now the whole voicemail, the recording, will be stored here. And then I move him from this opportunity to him being qualified. You see, he's more of a qualified lead and the opportunity for him is going to be $1,968. That'll be the deal I want to put him on. And now I moved him up in the pipeline from, you know, him just raising his hand 2 hours ago to me calling him, leaving him a thing, moving it over, and then me grabbing his LinkedIn profile along with all his information and then storing it in his record here. And then moving on. And then my team will follow up.

Yeah. What, what area is this? GoHighLevel right now?

This is, yeah, this is GoHighLevel. GoHighLevel is very, very, very intricate and very detailed. And as part of my agency, we decided a few years ago to become GoHighLevel experts and we offer GoHighLevel for less than what GoHighLevel charges for it because we have the unlimited package from them. And so we offer support. So instead of paying them for the unlimited package, $299, we offer unlimited for $249 instead. And we call it Unlimited Digital Marketing, and we offer support where we hold your hand. It does everything from social scheduling, CRMs, automated follow-ups.

It replaces your your whole stack, Target or HubSpot.

Yeah, everything, all of it. It replaces Calendly, replaces PipeDrive, it replaces Salesforce, it replaces everything at one time.

All right. First of all, I want to tell you. Do you have five more minutes? Ten more minutes?

Yeah, my team will tell me when I need to go because they'll just pull me off. They'll start yelling at me like Jane. Jane, you here?

Jen's here.

Jen's here. Okay, Jen. Jen, you'll let me know when I need to get my next thing, right?

Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Thank you, guys.

So I have a as an aside, I have a big family and I have a stepdaughter in. Williamsburg. So if I'm ever in your hood, I'll—

Oh wow, you have a stepdaughter in Williamsburg?

I have actually 3 in the state of New York. I have stepdaughter there, I have a stepson in, uh, and it's step— I, I raised them, so they're my kids. But, and then I have a son in Manhattan, both early in their career, both all engaged, blah blah blah. And then I have a— my— our youngest daughter is at Syracuse, a sophomore.

Wow.

So we're there quite a bit. So, um, so wait, let me, let me hit pause. I love what you're doing. I hope we can work together. I'm, uh, timing is good to think about this because I have a new marketing person that we're onboarding here. I'm still finalizing interview. But anyhow, um, let me just— I'm going to talk to you about us real quick, but I'm going to talk to you like EO as much, you know.

Yeah, yeah, you tell me, tell me.