Joe Apfelbaum on Scaling SaaS, Using AI, & Making LinkedIn Work for You

Welcome to the Speakeasy Podcast, where the real conversations happen behind closed doors with the boldest entrepreneurs, creators, and growth minds in the game. No fluff, no filters, just the raw strategies, personal stories, and mental models that move the needle. I'm Eric Berman. Now let's get into it. In this episode of Inside the Speakeasy Podcast, I am so pumped to bring on my good friend Joe Apfelbaum, who is going to absolutely It just overwhelmed me with this incredible journey from rabbi and living in the basement with 6 siblings, starving in the cities of New York, to now having so much abundance. He's out there dropping so many amazing nuggets that you're going to learn, especially when it comes to AI, LinkedIn strategy, and how he's been able to crush a SaaS business going from agency owner to crushing SaaS. Welcome, Joe.

Thank you for having me on the show. I'm really excited about being here and I love our relationship and the way that it flourished so quickly.

And it's like, you know, now, I mean, especially thanks to you, my eyes have been like wide open when it comes to the world of LinkedIn. We're going to talk a lot about LinkedIn today. I know you haven't started in the— well, maybe you did. We're going to learn a lot more about where your world started because you're one of the smartest guys I know and just a fire hose of info. And when it comes to leveling up our God, it's not even LinkedIn game. I mean, LinkedIn's part of it, but I think just you have such the ability to have understand the psychology of just communication and how to be efficient and smooth. And just like, like every time I talk to you, there's like, well, we could do it a better way, a faster way. So it's like, like you're the efficiency god. I love it.

And I like that you like systems and processes as a fellow agency owner. I totally get that.

Yeah. A suffering agency owner. Let's get into that before we talk about all this. And I know you're going to drop some really killer LinkedIn nuggets. Every time I talk to you, there's always something new and cool. Before we get into that though, I want to hear about the journey of Joe and how we got here. I know it wasn't probably like the rest of us entrepreneurs. It's typically the rocky road. Let's go back a little bit. What's the early Joe life?

So I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I was raised and grazed in Crooklyn, as they say. So I got thick skin being from that area of the world. And growing up, my father wanted me to be a rabbi. So we grew up Orthodox Jewish and, you know, like, this is what his goal was. And I was like, okay, well, if that's what you want, I guess that's what I'm going to do. But I always saw tension between my parents because my mother wanted him to make money so that we could move out of the basement apartment. I had 6 siblings, so I'm one of 6, and we're living in a basement with one bedroom. My parents are in one bedroom. We're living in the other bedroom.

Wow.

And it's very tight. And my father has a minimum wage job and my mother's not working and she's fed up. She's totally fed up. And she's like, I'm done with this. This is such BS. I need something. I need to make money. So she decided to take the entrepreneurial route 'cause she doesn't have any formal education. And she decided to open up a clothing store in the Lower East Side. So the Lower East Side of Manhattan is where all the immigrants were able to open up stores. They were able to just give them a place to go work. And she found a shop across the street from my uncle's shop. And she decided to open up a shop, and she borrowed money to get some sweaters to sell in her store.

Wow.

And so she started selling sweaters, and she started making some money. She started peddling sweaters, and people were buying it. And she started researching and learning about clothing and couture. And she eventually went from 1 store to 3 stores in the Lower East Side. She started selling clothing from France. And I remember every time that she would go somewhere, she would bring me with her along. Because she needed a bodyguard, and she couldn't take my father. So she took me, and I would go with her everywhere. I went to France. I went to buy fur coats in Kastoria in Greece. And she took me all over the world with her.

Wow.

And I would always watch how hard she worked, and it was very inspiring for me.

How did you get to travel over your siblings?

Well, I was the oldest boy, and I was very savvy at pushing all the different buttons. So every time she needed me to help her with anything, I would be able to figure it out very quickly. So she kind of—

natural skills started young. Okay. You look back on that.

Yeah. I'm like reverse engineering cash registers back in the day. You know what I mean? Like anything you need, I'm there for you to kind of solve problems. I didn't have a computer. We could not afford a computer, but I was really good at figuring out some video games. So my mother would gimme quarters and I would go to the store and play video games for hours. And the, like, you know, the Chinese pickle place over there and they had some video games and I would figure them out and I would, for hours I would play it and I would have such a great time doing that. And from a very young age, I loved figuring out mazes and puzzles and all types of stuff. But I saw my mother crying often.

Hmm.

And she would cry because she wasn't successful. As much as she worked hard, she wasn't quite making it. Her business never hit over $1 million in revenue. Forget about profit. Even in revenue, she never did over $1 million in revenue. And I would always ask myself why, and I would ask my mother why, like, what is it? And she always said that she didn't have good luck. Like whatever she did, she didn't have good luck in business. And, you know, for whatever reason, I knew that there was a missing ingredient there. I just didn't know what it was. But for me, I was committed to finding a path to financial freedom. And when I turned 17, you know, I was on the route to becoming a rabbi. Eventually I went to Israel for several years and I became a rabbi, but I came back and I started crying to my mother. And my mother's like, why are you crying? I said, because Dad wants me to be a rabbi. I became a rabbi, but I don't know how to make money. I don't know how I'm gonna feed— like, I wanna have a family. I wanna have kids, and I don't want my kids to suffer, and I don't wanna suffer, and I wanna have money. So she got me into a station wagon. We had a used old-ass station wagon. I don't know if you know what they look like, but there's basically— fits all the kids, brown panels on the side and everything. And she drives me to the Brooklyn Public Library. And for a religious Jew, that's not somewhere you go. You don't go to the place that has all the non-Jewish books.

Yeah.

And she's like, go in there and learn, learn how to make money. She's like, go in there. Dad has all the knowledge of the world. Go in there and learn how to make money. She said, formal education, going to college will make you a living, but self-education will make you a fortune. So I went in there and I learned computers. I learned web design. I learned SEO. I learned how to do things. And I started realizing that people will be willing to pay me thousands of dollars to build them a website. And so I was building 100 websites a year for people, generating a significant amount, a nice 6-figure income for myself.

And how old are you? You're like, what?

I'm in my early 20s, and this is what I enjoy doing. So I told my dad, I hope you're not upset at me. And I always thought my dad was upset at me. He looked at me as like, you're not learning Torah. Like, what are you doing? Like, why are you wasting your time trying to make money?

The Jewish guilt is—

Yeah. Like, he didn't say that to me, but I— exactly. He didn't say that to me, but that's kind of like the story I had running in my head, you know?

Yep.

I had a story running in my head that I need to be learning Torah and I'm wasting time trying to make money.

Right.

But at the same time, I'm giving charity. I'm making a difference for people. I'm getting married. I'm having kids. I'm doing all the right things. And what ended up happening was that I quickly built one of the fastest growing companies in America. You know, the famous saying is, if you build it, they will come.

Yep.

I built many websites, but nobody came to those websites. So I had to become very proficient at search engine optimization.

Okay.

And being good at SEO provided me with 2 things. Number one, results for my clients, which became viral. And number 2, recurring revenue.

Hmm.

When I built a website, I would have to start my project.

That's right.

But with SEO, clients would pay me somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $20,000 a year. And when you have 1,100 clients, you're making millions and millions and millions of dollars in revenue. And that's kind of what happened. We were number 178 on the Inc. 500. Now it's called the Inc. 5,000. But then it was called the Inc. 500. So we were one of the fastest growing companies in America. I personally didn't think it was a big deal because I had a little voice in my head telling me that I'm an idiot. No matter how much success I had, I always thought I'm an idiot and I'm just not good enough. And that's kind of like the little recurring voice I had in my head.

And the idiot was because you felt like you weren't doing the stuff that dad wanted you to do, or what part was the idiot part?

Combination of I'm not Doing all the right things because I'm not a rabbi. I'm not practicing as a rabbi. I'm a rabbi, but I'm not practicing as a rabbi. Number 2, I should have more money. I should be doing things faster. It only took me 3 years to get on the Inc. 500. I should have done it in 1 year, even though it's required to do it in 3 years. But a lot of it, after doing a lot of personal development and doing plant medicine and going back and looking back from where I am now, they say, looking back now, I can see everything clearly. When I was in 3rd grade, one of my teachers, when I got up to speak, he called me an idiot and told me to sit down because the whole class was laughing. I just got up to speak, to read, and I read in a very poor way, and he called me an idiot and told me to sit down. Now, that's what I heard. It doesn't mean that's what he said. That got ingrained in me saying, you're an idiot, you're an idiot, you're an idiot. And that's kind of like the voice that I kind of kept for my whole life.

Wow.

But I became, I've been on a mission to do 2 things. Number one, make people laugh. Number 2, the second thing I was on a mission to do was strategy.

Mm-hmm.

So 2 things, become really good at strategy and really good at making people laugh.

Mm-hmm.

And so I learned how to like be very strategic. So I look back at my mother lacks strategy. That's why she wasn't successful.

Mm-hmm.

As a reason I was able to get 6 figures in my businesses when I was doing all different types of businesses, including web design and graphic design and Sukkah building and all types of stuff that I did. I was very successful at that because I was very strategic. But in my business, once I realized this concept of recurring revenue, then I kind of took off and it went crazy. And then I did it both in Ajax Union, which is my marketing agency. I did it again with Evergreen, which is my business training company where we train people on how to use LinkedIn and how to use AI. And then I did it again with Evy AI. In the first year, we had over 1,000 clients. 1,000 paying clients in 37 countries around the world. We did that in a year, and we're just at the beginning of our business. We have 23,000 users, and we're just at the beginning stages of our business. We're just getting started. There's a book called Predictable Success. I don't know if you ever heard of the book or read the book.

Yeah.

There's different stages that a business goes through. We're at the fun stage. We're right just at the beginning. We got our first clients, and we're now just starting to roll. So we're so excited about the way now that, you know, with my agency, getting 1,000 clients and servicing 1,000 clients is a very difficult thing. We had 75 full-time employees in 3 locations. Now all of our employees are virtual. They're all global. All of our clients are from 40 different countries around the world. So it's all global. And in terms of like being able to handle clients, we can handle a million clients.

So let's back up a second because you said some very interesting things. So, A, it's great you closed the loop on what mom was missing— strategy. And can we talk a little bit about, you know, I mean, what are the big strategies you're funding now that's been working for you? Yeah. I mean, you said early on, you're sort of learning business and realizing that, gee, I could put SEO recurring revenue versus just getting a one and done. That was a strategic decision to say, I gotta like not just do what I'm doing, stay in the lane. I gotta add SEO and other things where I'm sure that if you went back to your mom, you probably would've said, you gotta change the strategy and say, hey, Like, well, actually, let's start there. What would you have told mom back in the day, knowing what you know now on what strategy she should, should take? And, and what are you doing? What have you done recently to help strategically evolve and scale like what you're doing now?

I'm on a mission right now to help people be more strategic in their business. And I teach clients strategy. I teach them LinkedIn strategy. I teach them AI strategy. I teach them how to create a business plan, a marketing plan, and a LinkedIn plan, and then how to implement it in a strategic way. So that's something that I'm teaching clients right now. I'm actually, Not even charging for it. I'm giving it all away for free because I'm so excited about watching people go from $0 to $100K in profit, or go from $100K in profit to $1 million in profit, just from the strategies that I teach them to be able to implement in their business. So if I had to go back and tell my mother something, I would look at my mother and tell her to hire a coach to work with in order for her to be more strategic. I would have her join the EO Accelerator program in New York City. and have her surround herself with other entrepreneurs that are building their business from $250,000 to $1 million, and then be able to help her be able to figure out, number one is, what is her business plan? How much revenue does she want to generate? Because she never had revenue goals. She's like, whatever God will send me, that's enough.

Hmm.

But really, she never thought of like the idea of like, okay, how many pieces do I need to sell in order for me to get to X place in order for me to hit $10 million in revenue? Like, is this the best location for me to be? What is the demographic? Who are the people? Who are my ideal clients? Who was referring business to me.

She just started running and then never took a step back to stop and look out, look at the business from the outside and say, okay.

Zero. And also like women in the religious world didn't have any support because they're like, what are you doing running a business? You should be at home with the kids.

Yeah.

And you should be at home with the kids.

I mean, imagine what you're going through in your own mind of the guilt. I mean, imagine what was going on through her mind of all the things that she was sort of doing that was not the norm. Oh, man.

I don't know if you ever heard of Landmark Education, but I did go to Landmark several times. And one of the times that I went to Landmark, they said, you got to reconcile with the people in your life, especially your parents. That's one of the things that they tell you. And so I decided I'm going to make the phone call to my father. This was like the 3rd time I went to Landmark. I didn't realize that maybe I have something with my father. So I called up my father and I said, Ty, I love you very much, and I know you love me very much, but there's something I never really told you. You always wanted me to be a rabbi, and I feel like There's a lack of integrity in our relationship because I'm not a rabbi and I'm not as religious as you want me to be and as religious as you are, because he's doing rabbinical stuff and he's doing kosher certification and he's involved with learning every day and all that. And I'm not doing any of that stuff. And so he looked at me and he said, I cannot be more proud of you. I'm like feeling emotional. And I was like, why?

Wow.

He's like, because you're doing God's work. You're helping people every day. And he's like, you know how many times people walk over to me And tell me, you're Joe's father? Oh my God, Joe changed my life. He's like, you tell me that over and over. I'm getting people coming over to him saying how I changed their life. He's like, whatever you're doing is much closer to God than whatever I'm doing. So keep doing what you're doing.

Tear up over here. That's amazing. I was like, wow.

And in my head, I had this story running that he's upset at me. Meanwhile, I'm doing God's work in his eyes.

Wow. Wow. I mean, what a moment for you. That must have been.

Incredible, incredible connection, incredible love. I've never seen him like that. I've never imagined that he would say that to me. And that makes me want to be there for my kids in that way as well, because I have 5 beautiful children. I'm a single dad. And, you know, going through a divorce process was literally the most difficult thing that I've ever had to go through. And, you know, going through the divorce process during COVID Yeah. where I lost 75% of my recurring revenue within 2 weeks. and then getting COVID and then dealing with all the BS that I had to deal with during that time. That was one of the most difficult times of my life.

Wow.

But it was because of my skills of knowing how to use LinkedIn that I maintained a 7-figure revenue in my business, even though losing almost all my clients, I was able to maintain over 7 figures in revenue, not have to fire even one employee and just continue to be able to service clients and make a difference for people. And then of course, really rethink what I want to do. You know, when you get to a revenue level that you're really questioning yourself, you start, you're almost like a seed again, and you start deciding, okay, what type of plant do I want to create if I was going to start over?

Right.

And the decision was, I'm not going to rebuild this agency to 1,000 clients. Instead, let me do a SaaS solution and get tens of thousands of clients in the door. And I didn't know the first thing about SaaS, so My dream a decade ago was to build a SaaS, and I've built many, but I've never launched them because I was afraid. I literally was afraid to launch them. I was like, what if I get sued?

Yeah. And I feel that fear too. I mean, I talk to my partner all the time. I'm like, it just seems so overwhelming with the support.

And it's a very high, it's a very high barrier of entry to do SaaS and a very difficult thing. And if you do the software right and you don't do the marketing right, you failed. If you do the marketing right and you don't do the software right, you failed. If you do the software right and the marketing right, then you don't do the support right, you failed. If you did the marketing right, the support right, and the software right, but you don't have adoption, you fail. All of it, you failed. And recurring revenue comes with a very high churn if you don't figure out how to add community. Oh, so now I have to be a community builder on top of a software builder, on top of a marketing builder, on top of a support and adoption builder. I have to do all that. Yes, you have to do all that and you have to do it excellently and flawlessly. Otherwise you will fail.

Wow. I mean, I wouldn't go down that rabbit hole. So, I mean, let's go back to COVID for a second. I mean, first of all, sorry to hear about the family stuff. I can't imagine how tough that must've been, you know, being a father of 2 new little ones myself, I can only imagine. But, you know, you got through. Tell me on the business side, 75%, I mean, you could talk either side, of course, but 75% of the business, how did you lose all that? What was the biggest reason for that?

I mean, we had clients that were doing $40 million in revenue and within one week of COVID they were doing $0 in revenue. Because the government said they're not allowed to do anything. Everything was closed. Got it.

And so all of a sudden, your client stack was dependent on this stuff.

Hospitality. I mean, we had a helicopter company that was spending $20,000 a month with us besides ads, just $20,000 a month. Imagine your recurring revenue somewhere in the range of $300K and your clients are spending $25K, $30K, whatever. And all of a sudden they have to cut all spend because what were they gonna do, bleed? They have no idea the world's ending. So the first thing they do is cut marketing and they're like, listen, we love you guys. You're one of the best agencies we've ever dealt with, but we can't spend a penny right now. That means we're done right now. We're done. We're toast. So we had to diversify what we're doing. Law firms, toast. So many people just, their revenue was standstill, zero, nothing.

Mm-hmm.

So we had to really figure out what we wanted to do. Thankfully, we had some clients on multi-year agreements. That were publicly traded, that were willing to weather the storm and stay with us.

Yeah.

So that was very good for us, but we made a strategic pivot to change our client base from the small business owner where it was like, you know, $10,000, $15,000 a year to $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a year. And that put us at risk of almost going outta business because those deals take a long time to close.

Yep.

But when they close, it's, you know, $45,000 a month in just agency fees. That's like unbelievable.

Right.

But, you know, it's hard to come by. They're hard to close, but once you close it, it changes everything for your game. So those are the deals that we were doing, and those are the types of clients we were servicing. But it was a very difficult thing. We needed a lot of employees for each client to service them.

And for those, you know, listening, I mean, doing some agency tips, I mean, sometimes you think it's glorious getting $45K a month clients, but I'll tell you what, when they leave, you got a mega problem 'cause you're sitting on cost and overhead. And all of a sudden, if you don't have somebody backing that up, With a new client, it's a pain in the ass having to go up and down to the firings and, you know, up, you know.

People think, oh, it's so much profit. It's so much profit. It's so much profit. I've never seen an agency that did more than really, that really real profit at 10% in profit. So think about it. You're paying somebody $10K a month and they're making after, again, if they might be undercutting their own CEO and paying their own staff, Sweat equity. But if someone's getting a couple hundred thousand dollars salary after that, what type of profit do you have? Agencies don't have a ton of profit. They're not highly, highly profitable. If you're getting 10% or 20%, you're doing some, you're very lucky.

As I say, unless you get to the 10, now probably 12 to $15 million revenue mark where you're a target to get, you know, acquired and rolled up and all that, it's just like you're stuck.

You're stuck and you got yourself a good job, but you're stuck and you're making good money. You're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year salary. But is that what you want to be doing? If you want to get to the next level, you got to go from being a business owner to being an investor. And that's kind of like the stage that I kind of had to learn to go from. And by the way, when I went from freelancer to business owner, when I went from freelancer to business owner where I was doing websites for people to actually owning a business, I had to do deep focus. I had to do some deep focus. I had to get rid of— I had 7 full-time businesses and a full-time job. I was a CMO of a luxury watch business and I was managing 200 people. Plus I had a little bunch of little side hustles doing, and I was doing great financially. You know, don't get me wrong, I had a 6-figure, multiple 6-figure job, plus I was doing multiple 6 figures between all my little businesses, but it didn't all equal to $1 million. You know what I mean?

Right.

With the agency, with the focus of the agency, I was able to do millions and millions and millions of dollars a year in annual recurring revenue. That was a very powerful thing and very profitable for me. And very successful and it was great. But, you know, COVID really blew us out and then the AI revolution was another hit. You know, we lost a lot of clients to the AI revolution that we won back after COVID.

Mm-hmm.

And all of a sudden ChatGPT comes out and clients are like, what are we doing here? Why are we paying you $10,000 a month when we could just hire an intern and have them use AI? Like literally, like overnight.

Let's get into that now, 'cause I wanna talk about that and really your evolution to where you're today, 'cause it's fascinating. So you're running an agency, you get past COVID, You turn it back around, things are great, AI's hitting, and your clients, what's the biggest thing they're starting to do that, what was the service that you were offering that they're now saying, I ain't paying this anymore, I got my intern doing this?

What were the big things? I mean, strategy, copywriting, research, like all that type of stuff that we were doing, blogging, social media, like all that stuff. They're like, listen, we're gonna go to the Philippines, pay somebody $5 an hour, $6 an hour, And then just get them to use AI and maybe we'll pay a strategist $50 to $100 an hour to kind of oversee them for a couple of hours a month.

Yep.

And then why would we pay you $15,000 a month? What are we doing here?

Yep.

And so they cut their costs down to let's say $5K a month or $3K a month and they still getting the same output, if not more output. So I'm like, I mean, I'm not gonna argue with that. I'm gonna be like, go do it. I mean, if that's what you wanna do, then do it. You're gonna need to like be more involved. But they're like, I'm willing to be more involved if I can cut, you know, $10,000, $12,000 a month or whatever it is.

You're seeing the writing on the wall and you're seeing AI and then—

I'm seeing the writing on the wall and I'm thinking to myself, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? And the answer is I become the AI.

Yep.

So a lot of my clients that left started hiring me to do their AI.

Yep. Okay. So you're immediately, and I'm just saying you're probably in this interesting shift of, You're naturally, you got this great skillset to run the agency, but meanwhile, this AI revolution hits and you're sitting here saying, wait a second, I love to tinker in this shit. I'm naturally, this is the game I wanna play in. You're probably going nuts. I bet there's many nights you couldn't sleep just looking at what's in front of you and saying, oh my God, the things I can now do.

Right away, I started training business owners on how to use AI. I started training other marketing agencies, and I still do right now. Marketing agencies hire me to train their staff on how to use AI, and I hired a bunch of coaches to teach me AI.

Okay.

And I have bought all the courses and all the programs, and anytime I see a program, I buy it and I spend an entire weekend obsessing over AI and automation and make.com and building my own NA10 and building my own Chrome extensions and vibe coding. And I am obsessed. I am deep in the world of it and I am constantly using it and all the different LLMs and talking to them. And one of the things that came out, I was chatting with ChatGPT on a beach in Mexico, January of 2023, And it said, it's time for you to build software. Get over your self-limiting beliefs that you can't do it and I'll help you. And I was like, okay, this is my chance. If I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it now. So I put up a LinkedIn poll. You know what a survey is on LinkedIn? A poll?

Yeah.

Most people don't know how to build one, but I put up a poll and I said, I'm building an AI that will help you be able to, whatever ChatGPT told me, write posts, comments, messages in your voice, blah, blah, blah. If you want to buy it, I'm gonna offer you guys a special deal for the first 100 people that wanna buy it at 50% off, but you have to pay in advance. If you're interested, let me know and just write yes on this poll. If you're not interested, write, I'm not interested. If you want me to keep you in mind in the future, write, I wanna keep you in mind in the future. And then I just put it up on LinkedIn. 500 people voted on that poll.

Wow.

80% of them, 400, said that they were interested in paying now and getting involved. I was like, holy moly, this is holy. This is my organic network. People are saying they're dying for this. I said, okay, I'm gonna create a Stripe checkout page. Okay. I'm gonna create a Stripe checkout page and I'm gonna send it to the 400 people that said they were interested. Within one week, 100 people paid. Now I'm sitting on thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in cash. And I had, don't know the first thing about how to build a piece of software properly. And I'm scared. So I partner up with a team that of developers, and I'm starting to get quotes from everywhere that I know. And I'm getting quotes from like $500,000 to build an MVP, and I'm getting quotes of $10,000 to build an MVP. And I'm like all in between. And there's a guy that wants to partner with me and I'm like, okay, do it. And I'll give you 50% of the revenue. And he builds it and he builds shit for me and it stops working. And my clients are complaining. The people that paid that are using it are saying it doesn't work. And I'm telling him to fix it. And he's like, I don't know how to fix it. And I'm having a lot of trouble. And finally I say, you know what? I'm gonna just hire a bunch of people to build it for me. And I hired a bunch of people and they all failed except one person that built me a perfect solution and it worked perfectly. And the guy quoted me $100,000, but he said, pay me the first $5K and I'll get you a working version. And then pay me $100K over the year and I'll get you something that has every feature you want. And that's basically what I did.

What country?

It ended up costing a lot more. Pakistan. It ended up costing me a lot more. It ended up costing me a lot more. But you know what? At the end of the day, I had something working and clients were able to start paying.

Yeah.

So I put everything I have behind this and I said this, I'm burning the boats. I'm putting in my savings into this and I'm putting my reputation into this. And I just started doing it and I just said, I'm going to go for it. And this is what I'm going to do. Not knowing that I was going to be successful. In the first year, we only generated, even before we registered the company, we only had like $20K in recurring revenue coming in. I didn't know what to do with myself, but eventually I figured it out with, together with my team, together with my clients. In the first 6 months, we were at $20K in recurring revenue or whatever. I couldn't figure out what to do. Within the first year, we had 1,000 paying clients and we 10x'd the business. And then, you know, the goal is to 10x it again in the next year. So we're basically in the beginning of year 2.

Well, you skipped over something important there, which is what the hell happened? I mean, how did you overcome the $20K a month? You said you figured it out. What was it? Just by asking the customers? Like, what was the biggest win you think in figuring this out?

The biggest win was rolling in a bundle and 10x-ing our prices instead of charging a couple of dollars a month, which I thought people would only wanna pay the price of ChatGPT 'cause they're competing with me. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna give you $10,000 worth of value and I'm gonna charge you $197 a month. Now, every client that signs up funds my growth.

Got it.

So instead of charging $20, I still have a $29 version, but I'm charging $2,400 a year. So think about if I get now the same amount of clients, I'm making 10x the revenue.

Yeah.

But I'm also delivering 10x the value, 'cause I didn't want to give away my $10,000 course. So we had to give away a $10,000 course, plus I had to build a community, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. And so just giving all that away, all that value to people, like even your team right now, I said, you know what, if you sign up to our Bundle Plus for you and Robert's account, Yeah. I'm gonna give you the Inc. 5000 list, which is a $15,000 value on top of my $10,000 course. And you guys just sign up right here and I'll give you a bunch of licenses to use. And they're like, this sounds like a crazy deal. We're gonna talk to Robert and Eric and we're gonna get started on this. This is crazy.

Yeah.

Because I'm giving you tons of value. And I learned from Alex Hormozi's book, The $100 Million Offers. I studied that book deeply, very, very deeply. And he says, make an offer that's so good that people would feel stupid saying no. So right now, when I get on the phone with somebody, the offer's so good, the offer's so nailed in. That people would feel stupid saying no once they talk to me.

I mean, it's easier said than done, like where everybody's trying to make a good offer. I mean, would you say what goes into good offers is really— well, talk about that a little bit.

There's a lot that goes into an offer, but I would recommend everybody read The $100 Million Offers. You know, the concept of naming the offer, the concept of perception of value, the concept of your guarantee, the concept of making sure that your offer delivers 100 times more value than what people are paying. So if somebody pays me $1,000 and I show them $100,000 worth of value right there, they're like, they're feeling so dumb if they don't sign up right now.

Right.

Like, that's the idea. And also it's like, with all the guarantees, as soon as you get signed up, you're gonna be on 5 conversations a day. You need conversations. You're on LinkedIn, you're not getting results. You sign up day 1, you have 5 conversations. How could you say no to that? For a few hundred dollars a year. It's like a no-brainer. They're going from no conversations to 5 conversations a day. Now they're going from no engagement to getting dozens of engagements on their post. They're getting unlimited posts, unlimited comments, unlimited messages, unlimited AI research. Now we dropped agents and we keep making it better and better. We have agents that will scour the web about every connection that you have, and we have an AI you can talk to that will help you 24/7 with your strategy. Plus we have live humans that sit on Zoom all day to help you out. If you need help, we have people that you can tune into and they'll help you.

So it's almost like you just keep thinking, what else can I offer?

What else? And I keep adding more and more and more and more. And if somebody wants a demo and they're listening, they can send the word demo to 973-841-8868 and they get a demo. Just send that with the word demo there.

Put those links in there. What we're talking about, by the way, for those that aren't aware, is Evy AI, and that's evyai.com. Really some of the most sophisticated killer stuff. Just, I was blown away when I saw it to just through LinkedIn and just automating the hell out of stuff you never even thought about automating.

Yeah. But the crazy thing is these are all the things that I always wanted that I was doing manually or hiring somebody for a few thousand bucks a month to do for me that now you have a piece of technology helping you out.

Yep.

Yep. I know every podcast you've been on, every article you've written. I have all your contact information. I have your Myers-Briggs And I have your DISC assessment all done while the phone is ringing.

Amazing. So great. So I'm going to go back to a couple of things. One is I want to reiterate a point you made earlier that we went over fast, but for those listening, there's an interesting, really big tip there. It was the simplicity of a poll. You know, Joe had an idea and said, shit, I got my own, you know, imposter syndrome, whatever it was. Don't know if this is going to be right. Maybe I like this, but am I biased? Threw it out on a poll and look at the response he got. And he asked for money and he got 25% conversion on those that wanted the money.

Well, yeah. What better way to know if people are interested? But I told that story 6 months ago on a webinar, on a webinar. I do webinars very often. They convert really well for me. So I'm on this webinar and I tell the story and somebody in the comments is like, yeah, that works for software. Would it work for a course?

Yeah.

So I said, I don't know. I don't know if it'll work or not. I'm a marketer. Marketing's about testing. So I said, did you guys wanna see me put up a poll right now and see if anybody votes? And everyone on the webinar says, yeah, go ahead, Joe, put up a poll. I said, what should I sell you guys? And I said, you know what? I have 99 hacks in my head. 99 LinkedIn hacks. I have an idea. I'm gonna put up a poll that says I have 99 hacks and a pitch ain't one of them. Okay? Because that's funny. I have 99 hacks and a pitch ain't one of them. And if you want my 99 Hacks course, I'm willing to give it to you. It's $1,000. I'm willing to give it to you for a dollar a hack if you're interested, but I'm only giving it to 100 people. That's it. 100 people and that's it. If you're interested, write, yes, I want. Okay? That's all. And I'm closing the door. And if you guys want it, let me know. It's not ready yet, but if you're willing to get it for $1 each, pay, and then I'll make the course for you and only give it to 100 people. Because I don't want to give my hacks away. It's $10,000 for my hacks. The course would be $1,000, but if you want it, I'll give it to you for $99. 171 people voted on that course. They said, yes, I'm willing to pay. 171 people voted. 151 said they're willing to pay. I send the Stripe link to the 151 people. And I kid you not, 100 people paid $99.

Jesus.

This is 6 months ago. I don't have the effing time to build a course. I don't. So what do you think I did?

You give them their money back or you just, I don't know, you offered them something else. You offered them something else.

I was gonna give everybody their money back. And then I asked Claude, I said, what do I do here? Claude said the following, why don't you use HeyGen? Because they have a new plan where it's $29 to clone you. and have HeyGen do the course and see if they're happy. And if they're not happy, give their money back. So I said, okay. I took one of my assistants who knows how to edit videos. And I said, I don't have time to deal with this. Go ahead and make me these videos. I said, you have 6 months to build it. And if you can't do it in 6 months, I'm gonna return everyone the money. This is 6 months ago.

Mm-hmm.

On Labor Day, the guy finished the 99 hacks and we published it. We published it and people are thrilled. People are thrilled. They are thrilled. I bought a .club domain from GoDaddy, so it's 99hacks.club. And when you go there, I even use Suno to make a rap that you're gonna love. So even if you're not interested in any of the hacks, and I'll tell you a hack right now, hack number 44. You ready for this one? Hack number 44. You can watch this hack. I put the example hack.

Yeah.

On 99hacks.club. Anyway, so hack number 44 is listen to this. If you want to book meetings with people, do you know what a Calendly link is?

Yes.

So if you search on LinkedIn through your first-degree connections, the word Calendly, you're gonna see all your first-degree connections that have a Calendly booking link on their profile. So hack number 44 is search Calendly, click first-degree. And just book meetings with all your connections that have their Calendly links there. Now, you're not gonna wanna sell them anything when you're booking meetings with them, because that's LinkedIn. It's a networking platform. You don't wanna sell things to them. What you do wanna do is you wanna educate them on what you do for a living and find out if they can make a referral for you. And you can see who your mutual connections are and ask them to introduce you. And 80% of introductions turn into meetings, not clients.

Well, of course you also wanna figure out what you could do to help them out too, along the way.

I'm not— Exactly what you could do to help them, of course. But that's a mutual thing. That's level 1. Level 2 is you go to second-degree connections on LinkedIn that you're not even connected to, and you book a meeting with them saying on the meeting request, I sent you a connection request and I saw you have a calendar on your profile. I figured I may as well book a meeting because I want to learn more about your services and see if I can refer you to anybody in my network.

Yep.

Boom. That's level number 2. Level number 3, you go to LinkedIn, you type in site colon, you go to Google, you type in site:linkedin.com space, calendly.com space your target market. Google will give you every single LinkedIn profile that has a Calendly link on it without even going to LinkedIn, even if you didn't have a LinkedIn account for your specific target market. That's hack number 44.

Wow. Boom. I can't drop this mic, but it is dropping. Can you, I got one more. Can you gimme one more?

I'm gonna give you one more. I'm gonna give you one more. Here's another hack. Have you ever been on a podcast and you want people to visit your LinkedIn profile?

Okay. Yep.

What are you gonna do? You're gonna say, go to http://linkedin.com/in/erikberman, spelled E-R-I-K. What? So what's the fastest way to get somebody from a stage? I'm on stage. I have 3,000 people watching me. I want them all to look at my profile. What's the fastest way to get everyone to look at my profile? What do you do? You could have a QR code, but that's not the fastest way because then I have to visual and da da da da. Someone's driving their car. This is what I do. I say, go to joelinkedin.com and I set up a redirect on GoDaddy. So for $8 or whatever it costs to buy a domain, you set up a redirect. GoDaddy has free redirect. If you go to joelinkedin.com. So whenever I meet somebody on an elevator and they're like, oh my God, you have such good energy. How do I connect with you? I said, open up your phone, go to joelinkedin.com. They're like, Joe LinkedIn, just joelinkedin.com. I'm like, yeah, go. And it goes straight to my profile. And they're like, how the hell did you set that up? I was like, oh, very simple. I have an arrangement with LinkedIn that allows me to— I'm like, what are you talking about? Just go to, go buy ericlinkedin.com, buy susanlinkedin.com, buy michaeldangelo, whatever the name is that's easy to remember, linkedin.com, and you're good.

Yeah.

Yep. Now, if you wanna take it a step deeper, and this video's on 99hacks.club, available for free for anyone to check out. If you wanna take it a step deeper, you set up a subdomain, which is posts.jolinkton.com. That takes you to my posts. articles.jolinkton.com, it takes you to my articles on LinkedIn. recommendations.jolinkton.com, it takes you to my recommendations on LinkedIn. And so now if I want to go straight to my posts, I just send people to posts. And they can comment on any of my posts just like that. Boom. That's a subdomain redirect straight to my post. How cool is that?

Love it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. So as we kind of phase out of here, a couple of last points. One is, I know you're so excited about the future. You got the SaaS going, business is starting to really crush, take off. You're serving a lot of people. You know, you're doing God's work, as your dad would say, in an exciting way. You know, what's your crystal ball with this crazy world of tech AI looking at for you?

I think people need to start building deeper relationships with other people. I think they need to join the Speakeasy Mastermind. I honestly, really, that's a secret sauce. That's really the secret sauce is building those relationships, meeting in person, getting to know people, getting on Zooms, getting to know real people because the only competitive advantage is not what you know, because all the information's available. The competitive advantage is not how fancy your degree is. It's not how even how much money you have. It has to do with your relationships because AI's gonna equal the playing field of how to make money. AI's gonna make money for you. You don't have to make money. Forget about trying to have the most money because AI will help you be able to do all that. Right now, what you need to do is build deep, meaningful relationships while you could still access people. Soon you're not gonna be able to access people anymore. You're gonna try to call me and my AI assistant's gonna pick up. You're gonna talk to my avatar. But if you know me really well, you're gonna show up to my wedding. You're gonna show up to my event. You're gonna show up to my community. I know you really well. I would fly to San Diego to have lunch with you, Eric, because we connected. We built a deep, meaningful relationship. But if I just interacted with your AI, I wouldn't know anything about you. The gatekeepers are coming back. Right now, the gatekeepers are gone. You can attach to anyone on LinkedIn, but soon everyone's gonna have an agent.

Brilliant. Well said. And you know, obviously that's why I'm fired up. I mean, you said it, tell me, how's your experience been in SpeakEasy so far, man? What have you gotten out of it? community.

I attended, so my first exposure to Speakeasy, I was referred to Speakeasy by a client named Rhonda Scher. She's a longtime LinkedIn trainer. So we train LinkedIn employees and LinkedIn trainers on how to use LinkedIn. That's how good we know LinkedIn. Go watch the 99 Hacks, will blow your mind. So Rhonda refers her clients to us, even as a LinkedIn trainer. She's like, go speak to this guy. This guy's like, he knows what the hell he's talking about when it comes to LinkedIn. So lots of LinkedIn trainers use our software. And use our training to learn how to use LinkedIn because we're always reverse engineering and figuring out ways around things like strategies that no one ever thought of. And we also interview the top LinkedIn influencers every single year and they teach all the different things. We have 1,500 people that attend the event. It's called the LinkedIn Influencer Summit, and we've been doing this for a decade. So for me, my experience was as soon as Rhonda said sign up to this, I spoke to you, I put my credit card down. I was like, yes, I'm in. That's how I think, you know, like I'm in, this is a good investment. You didn't have to sell me on anything. And then you said, Joe, why don't you come to the event in Austin? I was like, I have my kids that weekend. I can't. And then my ex called me up and she's like, can I have the kids that weekend? I was like, you know what? I'll do you a favor. Anyway, so I let her have the kids that weekend and I made it out to Austin and I met the most incredible human beings. By looking at the website, I didn't really realize the value. Meeting the actual people in person, every single person that I met was a high caliber, tech savvy, smart, capable, incredibly connected. Entrepreneur that I was like, any person in this room I'd wanna have lunch with. Any person in this room. I knew dozens of people already from JVMM and from EO and from YPO and from Vistage and from all different places. But you guys have this melting pot, not just like John Assaraf and, you know, the famous people that you have, like Mike Filsaime, who I went on a cruise with and I spent 8 days, like amazing guy. Not just those guys. But I'm talking about good diversity, like 50% women, good diversity in terms of every ethnic, every type of entrepreneur from all over the world coming together to share their best knowledge at a table. I don't think that there's a better organization that for people who are tech savvy, who are AI-centric, who are 7-figure, multi-7-figure entrepreneurs. Some people in the room are generating hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the place to be. I highly recommend it. If you believe that being in the right room with the right people is the way to go, there's no better organization than the Speakeasy Mastermind. Yes, be part of EO too. Be part of Vistage too. Be part of YPO. Don't leave those groups, but this is different. Speakeasy is the layer that you need to be technically advanced. Everybody's walking around with a, I forgot what it's called, with a Plaud device.

Plaud, yeah, yeah.

They have Meta glasses. It's like you're walking into the future when you walk into Speakeasy. That's what I think.

You're too kind. Thank you. I'm blushing. And I wasn't necessarily asking for such a beautiful testimonial, but thank you for that. And honestly, it's fun because just like you being able to— and I felt this in the way you talk about— I mean, as you build stuff as an entrepreneur, I mean, I get the most pride when I hear about the collisions that happen that I'm not even a part of and I don't get to witness. I hear about it afterwards. And I'm talking about the exciting versions of Joe meeting this person. And next thing you know, they're buddies and doing business together.

And it was because of what we've I got 10x ROI from the minute I stepped into the event. This is not a lie. Revenue in my pocket, 10x for what I spent. I got it from the day that I walked into in Austin. That one day I walked in during that session, I already 10x my ROI. Wow.

Well, that's amazing.

In revenue, in revenue.

That's incredible. Well, wow. That's amazing. I love, I love those. Thank you. Thank you.

Wow.

Joe, as we wrap here, and this has been such an amazing conversation, is there anything I didn't ask that should have asked, could have asked, and, uh, that I believe we're missing today?

I think you, you totally covered it. If there's anything I can do to add value to your life, I speak about Speakeasy at every place that I go to. I tell everyone to join it. And, you know, Elisa is a client of mine and a good friend. She's gonna be running Vancouver. I talked to Virginia. I told Virginia she has to sign up and run Speakeasy in, in her state. And she's a long-term client of mine as well and a good friend. And so Any way that I could add value to you, I'm here and I appreciate you. And thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm so humbled and honored that you're having me here. And if I can add value to anybody about anything, please hit me up. My strengths are ideation, strategy, LinkedIn networking, and personal development. Those are the, my top strengths as a person. And so I think that's a good question to ask people. It's like, what are your personal strengths? There's an assessment called the StrengthsFinder 2.0. I highly recommend every entrepreneur take it. And I think everyone should take that assessment and put their strengths on their profile on Speakeasy. And I think everyone should know everybody's strengths so we can lean on each other.

I love that.

Brilliant.

Well said. And right back at you. I think anybody listening, again, Joe, as you could tell, has got such a big heart. He's so kind. He takes so many. I'd say, please take advantage, reach out to him while you can still talk to the real Joe and not the future AI robot.

Not the future AI version of the agent. My cell phone's 917-865-7631 in case you want my cell. It's on my LinkedIn profile too. People are like, Joe, How do you put your cell phone number on your LinkedIn when you have 50,000 followers? I'm like, listen, most people that call me try to buy something from me, so why not put my cell phone number there?

There you go. There you go. I love it. Well, thanks again, and we'll talk more soon. Can't wait to, uh, continue our journey together. And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the real mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room.