Lessons from Startup Failure + Linkedin Posting Best Practices

Belgrade, Serbia.

Belgrade, Serbia. And I am in Brooklyn, New York today, and I'm so excited to be sharing this LinkedIn Live. So if you guys are live right now, let us know where you are in the chat below. Really excited about this conversation. Lessons from startup failure is a topic today, and Ivana has had previous startups in the past that hasn't necessarily worked out the way she wanted to, and now she has a very successful Chrome extension that we'll be talking about. And I reached out to her on LinkedIn because I heard about her Chrome extension and me and her have very similar ideal clients. That's one of the things that I want to educate all of you listening to this right now. If you're watching this, give this a like, please give this a like and leave a comment. Let us know where you are. But realize that you need to build relationships with the people that have similar ideal clients with you so you can support each other. Both of us are going to grow our businesses over the next several years and we're going to support each other. And maybe we'll involve somebody else also that has an ideal client within the same world. We both have Chrome extensions. We both want to target engaged LinkedIn users. We do different things. We don't compete with each other at all. I'm in artificial intelligence and she's in editing and she has a business called Author It Up. So I'm really excited about presenting Ivana to you guys and interviewing her about her story. So Ivana, thank you so much. Do you want to quickly just introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are? It's mainly my audience here, the people that are on LinkedIn watching me, but also you're going to be sharing this with your world. So just quickly introduce yourself to the audience so that they know who you are.

Yeah. So first of all, thank you for having me and for reaching out and scheduling this live. So my name is Ivana and I'm a founder of Outward Up. Outward App is an application for creating LinkedIn content and it is made for regular people just like I am. So not that much for professional copywriters, marketing agencies that need, let's say, 20 different channels to schedule posts to, but for people that are, that need help to communicate their stories and their knowledge on LinkedIn directly. Uh, yeah, long story short, uh, it wasn't the, the nicest path. Like I made the huge mistakes with my previous startups. I'm still making a lot of mistakes in Authored Up, and I'm happy to discuss how we ended up here. Lastly, we got about 30,000 beta users, and we had a huge— and we still have a huge awareness and understanding LinkedIn algorithm, content creation on LinkedIn, etc.

All right. I'm putting the link to Authored Up in the ticker on the bottom. I don't know if you guys could see that, but I put it up on the bottom over there so you guys could check out her website. Definitely check it out. So Ivana, I have a bunch of questions that I prepared to, to ask you about. Can you tell me, um, what the previous business was about and how was it different than AuthoredUp?

Yes. Well, first of all, uh, would you call something a business if you didn't have any users? That's a, that's a question. So, or let's call it like we had a company and, uh, so the, the idea was, uh, We were building a product or application for hiring managers and recruiters. When I say we, I mean my co-founder, that is the same co-founder in, in Authoredop. And we were basically looking to target recruiters, hiring managers, and anyone who really cares about hard skills during the recruitment process. Why? Because we had a lot of experience with, for example, testing hard skills. And we've realized that having take-home assessments is the best way to analyze the potential performance of the future employee. However, there are a lot of issues with that process. Usually companies are asking for, you know, like a few hours up to 20 hours of someone's time to do a skill assessment at their home. So, we were thinking about different nudges and strategies that will also support not only the company, but also an employee, usually a developer, QA, or designer, to do a skill assessment and then to show to the company basically their hard skills and knowledge.

That's awesome. So, you're helping people with their careers. That's really the idea.

Yeah, but we were basically mostly helping recruiters and hiring managers to assess hard skills while keeping the, you know, like candidate experience at the best possible level. Because on one side, you are asking candidates to, you know, like spend 5 hours of their time and because you want to test them. And then on the other side, you also want to understand what they really know, and you're basically giving them projects to work on during their free time. So that's a pretty tricky process, and it's especially tricky when companies, you know, do not send any feedback. So someone spends 5 hours doing a skill assessment and not even getting a no, you know, and or not getting feedback why the person didn't pass the next round of recruitment phase.

Very interesting. So a lot of people are kind of like lost in that recruitment phase.

Yes, yes. And you know, like you get like on Glassdoor, they're getting like 1-star, you know, like these kind of companies. You're also like having a negative visibility on the market if you're not providing feedback. And you as a company really want to be fair to candidates. So managing internal processes and also communication with candidates, that was the goal. So that was what we were building.

Yeah, guys, leave a comment. Let us know where you're dialing in from. Give this post a like so people can see, so that we can see this, so that we are engaged with the conversation over here. Um, and feel free to click the repost button if you see the repost button. Feel free to click on it so more people can see it. We want to be able to encourage more people to learn about this. So how did you come up with that idea for that first, for that first, uh, company? What was the What was the premise for it? What was the light bulb moment that you had?

Well, I was always looking for, you know, to hire people that are like top 1% when it comes to hard skills. And on the other side, also to be fair when it comes to diversity. And usually, uh, when you are doing a hard skill assessment, uh, you— there is no like name or surname, and there is no any kind of other information than what person can perform in X amount of time. So you're giving everyone the same task and then you can compare the results. And it's only about skills, it's not— there is nothing else additional, uh, that can influence your opinion. So, uh, that is why I really cared about that kind of a process. And also, like, uh, when you are hiring someone, especially when you are in a startup scene and not where I am, uh, you need someone who can perform. Because usually you cannot have a team of 20 people that are going to work on one specific element of the project. You need one person that will handle a lot of stuff. So, uh, you want to know how that person potentially can, can perform when it is hired in your company.

Awesome, awesome. So yeah, so really thinking about that could be really, really powerful. And what would you say was the point when you realized that this was a failure and it wasn't going to work?

Well, uh, I think that first of all, we didn't talk to potential, uh, customers or users during the phase of, you know, like 8 months while we were developing the project. Uh, so that was definitely like the biggest reason why we failed. Like, we would fail maybe from— for some other stuff, but we didn't have an exposure to potential users. Like, we had like a few conversations here and there, but we really didn't understand how important feedback is. So, uh, and we thought that we know what is needed. So we basically sit and we developed like 50 different features. So no MVP, like everything was from the beginning meant to be like a huge platform. So that was, I think, the biggest problem, not having a relationship with end users, someone who would say what they need or not.

I love that. I love that. And now I see on your website you have a roadmap with all the different features and things, and people are voting up certain features, and it's really exciting. So you learned that lesson that you need to communicate with your ideal customer and not just go out and create a bunch of features that you think are gonna be successful and do it that way. So you literally were just building the product without any customers, without any feedback, without anybody. And how long did you go and do that for?

Yeah, it wasn't like 100% without any kind of feedback, but it was maybe only a few people. not understanding the ICP almost at all. But we thought that because we were in, in the position of a recruiter hiring manager company, that because of that, we knew what is needed. And then maybe even though companies are not looking for that kind of solution, we'll be able to, you know, make the market for ourselves. So we've realized, like, at some point we got to the stage where we have a full product and where we don't really know what we are going to do with it. Like, how are we going to get and to acquire at least some beta users that are going to use it for free and then to give us feedback? That was, it was already late, but we didn't know that at that time. So, uh, that's when we started to use LinkedIn, uh, to create content and to see whether there is any kind of the interest, uh, from people that we don't know, uh, that are in these positions to use our product.

And how did you pivot from that business to the business that you're in right now? Where was— at what point did you say, you know what, we got to pivot and we got to change and we got to start something new? Like, what was— where did that idea come from?

Yeah. So we started to create content on LinkedIn and we, because we were not, we are not professional copywriters and like, but LinkedIn was the, you know, like native place for us given our target audience. So, uh, we started to, to create, like, to write some posts. Like, usually it was only text. And, um, very soon we realized that there are some elements of the post that are important, some that are not important, and that we would need some tools, uh, to help us, for example, to, you know, like, do some formatting to see how the post would look like when it is posted, like a preview post, etc. So that was the main goal why we even get into like content creation LinkedIn. And given my, my co-founder is, is very techie guy, he, and he don't like, like to do manual stuff. He made us like a very small, simple tool. It was a web app to preview posts and to add formatting in order to improve our own content. Then we gave it to a few people like that were in our community. We connected with people that are creating content, not targeting the same audience. But at least, you know, getting some feedback was important just to, to see what works, what doesn't, and to exchange some, some thoughts. And then they told us that they see that tool as useful and they started to use it. And that's when we realized, okay, so this seems that, you know, like potentially we knew that it is not a full product that, you know, like you cannot probably sell that. Uh, but that it is the, uh, tool that can get us the access to people that need tools for content creation on LinkedIn. So at least we can, you know, like reverse engineer so we can get into the conversations because we are providing something for free.

I love that. And by the way, this is the roadmap I was talking about over here. Um, you guys could see in between me and Ivana. Can you guys see this? Add hashtag analytics, schedule, and you can see the people that are voting here. So you could see when this idea came, they came up with, and really, really powerful to see all these different ideas. So if someone is like, hey, I, you know, I wonder if you can add this feature to the post, you're like, yep, we have it in our roadmap right over here. Um, really, really cool that you have all different types of ideas here and people are voting them up. Um, and you could even submit a feature request right over here. I love it. Really, really cool. This is the website over here. If you guys haven't checked it out, definitely go ahead and check out this website. So Ivana, so you learned lessons about communicating with your clients, not having 1,000 different features when you're starting out, making sure that all the features make sense. At what point did you say, you know what, we need a Chrome extension and we need a web app? At what point did you kind of say, okay, we're going to turn this into a Chrome extension and a web app?

Yeah, so it was totally 2 different moments. So, uh, first when we realized it needs to be a Chrome extension is that again we are targeting people like ourselves and we are spending time on LinkedIn, we are talking in DMs with people, we are commenting, and then, you know, we want to post something. So even though we had a free tool, uh, we didn't use it for, you know, like 4 or 5 posts out of 10 because you would open the LinkedIn editor and we would start typing there, and then, you know, it was like too much to copy that, to open a web app, then to get back to, to the editors. So that's when we realized like it really needs to be sticky and it needs to be, uh, available on, uh, on top of the LinkedIn. And that's, uh, when we realized, okay, so we are building a, a Chrome extension that will do just those 2 things. preview post and that formatting, but it needs to be available on LinkedIn.

I love that. I love that. So that's why you made the Chrome extension. At what point did you say we need a platform now?

So it was about like, so then we launched the Chrome extension. We got like first a few hundred people to use it very fast. Like in the first few days, we got like 200 or 300, 400 people to use. And then we started conversations. At some point, they came to us and told us, okay, so even though it's a Chrome extension, it works. It's beautiful. Sometimes we cannot access our, our LinkedIn website from our laptop, but we are, for example, on the phone, or we need, you know, but we have an idea. We added already drafts to the Chrome extension, and they wanted to be able to access these drafts to do some stuff outside of LinkedIn. And that's, we said, okay, so we'll right now even though we are starting with a Chrome extension, we'll do some features also available to solve specific problems. For example, create draft outside of LinkedIn on a mobile app, on a mobile phone, or, uh, preview your post, maybe preview for some clients or for your boss and stuff like that.

I love that. I love that. So you started with the Chrome extension, then people said, hey, we need this feature to be able to see it off LinkedIn, off the Chrome extension. Really, really useful. And then you decided to create the platform, which adds even more value because a Chrome extension can get banned from LinkedIn. I mean, that's, it's just, and from, and it can get banned from Google. Like Google can block you if they want, you know, you're relying your whole business on Google. You know, with my business, evviai.com, for those of you that don't know what this business is, it's a, Chrome extension that allows people to be able to leave comments on LinkedIn very quickly and generate AI content. We had an issue where they removed us from the Chrome Store because of something that they had on Firebase that they themselves had an issue with their own code on their own server. And they said, well, it's not, it's not safe anymore for us to be able to host this, so we're gonna like get it off. And we're like, hang on, but it's your server. It's like Google server and Google Chrome's not talking to each other and they're having an issue. So they removed us from the store and we were panicking. We're like, what is going on over here? Um, now they re-added us to the store. As you can see, we're back on here. And, um, and you could see it was updated November 9th and we have the latest version on here. But, you know, it was, it was pretty scary to like all of a sudden like lose the ability to have your Chrome extension on here. Um, do you ever feel like that's a big risk for you to be relying on Google Chrome?

Yeah, so we have our own— yes, I mean, like, that's a platform risk. Like, you have a plan because you are using— basically you're using Google, you're— you are also on top of the LinkedIn, and you're like, okay, so, uh, what can, uh, go wrong? And that's something that I'm thinking all the time. And that's why we, for example, uh, developed a tool. So we are not taking a cookie, we are not doing any automation. So, you know, like, we are good guys there. Uh, one of the reasons was not only because, uh, it was because we, we wanted to lower the risk, platform risk on one side, and on the other side to be the safe tool. So yes, that's something that, that we are thinking a lot, uh, regarding the Chrome extension. We also have our own build. So at any point, if something goes wrong, like, uh, we can deploy, but we wouldn't like to get into, into that Awesome, awesome.

I love that. And, you know, one of the features that I really love is being able to go to a post, open it up, and just reuse it just like that. You just click a button and reuse it. I really appreciate being able to do that, seeing all the statistics for all the different posts. I used to use a tool called Shield Analytics, and I basically canceled my subscription because you have all those features built into it. And I just, you know, said, you know what, I'm going to use yours because of the ability to draft posts right from the platform. That's really useful for me. You can see I have many active posts, how many of them I published from here, and so on and so forth. And you can see I can quickly republish them and so on. So it's, it's really useful. One of the features that I really like of your software is the ability to mention people in a post before, in a draft, like you can build out a whole post with like 30 different people that you mentioned. And then you could, you can then save it for later and then post it when you wanna post it, or you can schedule it with the native scheduler of LinkedIn. You know, I love your integration with LinkedIn's native stuff. So you can technically schedule a poll. What other way— Hang on a second. What other tool allows you to draft a poll and then schedule it for later, or draft a document and schedule it for later? You can't do that with other platforms. Buffer, which is another scheduling tool, they don't have all the editing features that you have, They allow you to schedule video out, and Hootsuite allows you to schedule video out, which is great. Native video, you can upload a video and schedule it out, and you can reuse it and so on. But I love the ability for you to mention people. I haven't seen that before on any real— any platform really. So that's a really great feature that you have. And so kudos on building this amazing software. I joined and then I became a premium member as soon as the trial was over. A lot of people have software where they have a free-for-life version, but you don't have a free-for-life version on your software. Can you talk about that a little bit and your strategy behind having a 7-day trial or a 2-week trial and then, you know, just either use it or lose it?

Yeah, so, uh, first of all, regarding the free users, like for us, like even when we started, we were for 13 months in free beta. So we were giving the tool for free to anyone who wants it to use and like no questions asked. And, uh, we were even doing support, uh, uh, personally. Um, and we realized like the experience that we want people to have with our tool is, uh, where we can support them, where they can write to us, where, you know, like we can help them. They even write to me in DMs and like being able also to improve all the time, uh, uh, the application. So not only to build new stuff, but also to be able to provide all the features as they are. So, uh, that usually means that, you know, when we start developing a new feature, something happens, we realize that potentially that can harm, like it can become a bug. So we get back and we are working on it. We just spent like 9 days rewriting some codes to make it better and more suitable. So that's how we are approaching. So for us, it's not about the amount of new features, it's about being really like the best possible tool. And when something we release, then it is released. So it's not buggy, et cetera. Obviously that can happen, but we are so much invested in, uh, making the tool really like with, with a good, uh, uh, good experience. So when it comes to free, uh, first of all, then you are all the time optimizing between free users, then trying to convert them, then thinking about different techniques, how to convert as much users as possible, how to, uh, build additional awareness about free tool and then do this kind of, of not only tricks, obviously that's a business model, but we really wanted to focus on people that need this tool. So, okay, I'm willing to pay, let's say, $20 per month because I'm going to post 20 posts. It's $1 per post, uh, and I'm going to get 100% or 50% better results. So if that doesn't make you pay for a tool, then, you know, like, why, you know, why we would additionally invest into, into something that is free. So that's why we really want to focus on people that are paying and not, you know, like, focus 50% or 60% time of those that are paying and then 40% of those that are free that we are trying to make them paying. And that's usually what, what companies need to do in order to survive when they do, uh, the free version. Obviously, there are examples where that works, but we really Want to serve less amount of people, but to serve them the best possible way.

Wow. So you really want to get people that are very invested in it. And you're like, if you're— if you don't really need this tool, then don't use it. And we'd rather you not use it at all. Don't, don't use it. Don't— we're not gonna allow you to use it and, and try to convince you to pay later. And, and that's— you think that's a toxic way of sales?

Uh, I don't know, like, I, uh, I'm not sure how I would perform because, you know, like, usually when you have a free tool, then you're not doing customer support, or you have some forum and then you need like some community support and all of that, you know, like you need to organize all of that. And I'm like, there are amazing companies, like look at HubSpot, like, you know, like there are amazing companies that are doing this kind of a playbook. I just don't think that it is the right playbook for Like a very small company like we are that is fully bootstrapped and that is super focused on, on, on customers. So yes, people are coming to us and you're like, when they unsubscribe or when they decide to stop using Authored App, we ask them why. And then, then they say like, it's expensive. And then you ask them, okay, so, uh, what can we improve? And they say you should be free. Okay. So we reached out to a few people that said that, and at the end they are using only one or two features. So they don't really need Authored App as it is, you know, like they need just one feature. And if you really need only one feature, then usually you can do it manually, you know, or some other way. That's why we really want you to utilize everything that we are building, because by using all of that on top of the stuff that we are building right now, uh, personalized that is coming, like you can really get like a few times better results on LinkedIn.

Yeah, 100%. I agree. By the way, guys, how often do you post on LinkedIn? We have A bunch of people that are watching live right now. Let us know in the comments, how often do you post? And tell us what your business is about. I'm always curious to hear from the audience. What is your business about? Leave a comment. Tell us how often you post on LinkedIn and also tell us what your business is about. Go ahead, leave us a comment. Give this post a like to encourage us to keep going over here. Let us know that you're here, that you're watching this, that you're enjoying this. If you're watching the replay, Just write replay in the chat so we can see who are the people that watch the replay and let us know how often you are posting. So Ivana, what advice would you give to somebody that's thinking about launching a piece of software based on your failures, based on what you've seen going? What would be your advice?

Well, the first is get as many people that are your ideal customers into your network. So, you know, like you really need not one tool, but you need to really like people and people that are fair and that are willing to provide you an honest opinion. So when I, when I ask for feedback, I'm like, give me honest feedback. Like, if you hate it, tell me I hate it. Or if something is not working, tell me. Like, I don't need someone to tell me how amazing I am. And whenever I get into call, I'm like, tell me what's wrong, what you don't like, what we can do better, etc. So that's the type of the questions you need to ask. Then it's about development. I know that, you know, like, there is a Right now, like, a lot of people are trying to build a product without having a good technical background or a good co-founder, founder with a technical background. I really believe that, especially right now, having all the AI tools, you can build some MVP. But if you really want to stand out, you need to have a good technical element for that product. So if it is a SaaS, then I believe that it is better if you can have, if you are a developer or you can get a really good CTO or you have, you can get a co-founder that is going to help you with that. So those are like feedback, the first thing. And then, and the third thing is definitely you will, you will probably pivot. So the idea that you have is probably not your final idea and maybe that idea won't succeed. But if you keep listening to what people are talking about, about their problems, because they will talk about their problems when you ask them, you can come up with potential solutions that they are willing to pay for.

Do you have a social platform where people are chatting about this constantly, or do you like do phone calls? Like, what's your method of communicating with your ideal clients?

I like whatever makes, you know, like whatever they do, that's okay with me. Sometimes I— they write, like they tag us on in a post, uh, and we get there as AuthoredApp or like as a company page on LinkedIn or me personally. And like it happened like a few times, like something is not working or for example they don't understand, they write a comment. If someone tags us, we are there, we are talking to them and trying to resolve the issue if it is an issue or to collect feedback. We ask questions. So we are, uh, on my posts, I usually get people that are asking me something or willing to, to provide feedback in DMs for sure. We even have users like power users like that are asking us like for a call to give us feedback because if we understand what they need, probably we will make a tool that or additional feature. And on top of that, like we are all the time in person or online talking to people. So I have a lot of calls. Um, all the time, uh, trying to collect. And it's the best option is if you can be in the space where you're, uh, where the person that you're talking to feels the most comfortable. Sometimes they will send you a voice, sometimes, you know, like they will want to schedule a meeting, sometimes that will be a comment. So everything works.

So you don't have like a Discord or a Slack or a Facebook page or anything like that where people are going and constantly talking about issues? You just basically allow customer service to come in either via email or on LinkedIn or, you know, just basically having very personal relationships on people based on who they are. And you really know who your customers are. And, you know, at this point you have thousands of premium customers that are using your software. How do you keep up with all your customers now?

We have a new team member that is helping us with customer success. So that's— and we definitely need to scale that part as well because we Didn't expect so many people to decide to go premium. And that's why we had to scale very quickly. We even lost a few deals because we couldn't cope with, with all of the stuff that is, that are happening. But right now we, we want to scale even more. But, you know, like at the end, it's about setting priorities. Uh, I didn't publish content even though I have a tool for LinkedIn content creation. I didn't publish content for like a few months. And like, from Friday I'm back and I'm like, okay, I wrote a post, I'm back, and then I, I'll keep, uh, writing content there. So, you know, like, it's really hard, but you need to find like a lot of different small places to, to nurture the, the relationships.

I love that. By the way, I'm looking through your help section over here and I'm like, she worked really hard at, at putting together this help section. I— this is a pretty robust help section. This is like, like a full-on tutorial on how to use Author.it Up. And I'm like reading through this and I'm like, hang on a second, I was wondering about how to turn it off and go to the native LinkedIn thing. And I, I had to disable the, the extension in order to do that because I was like, I had this thing's in my way here, I want to be able to see the regular thing. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you can do that here. So I gotta go through your user guide because you have a pretty extensive user guide that really walks through how to be able to use the platform really well. So thank you for putting that together. That is, uh, it's a lot of work to like put everything together here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have like, and we, uh, by the way, we still don't have onboarding, like proper onboarding. So that's like one thing that we didn't figure out. Like we didn't have time to invest and like the next few, few weeks I need to, to, to make it happen. But yes, like, and also like our help section has a very small smart search. So when you start to search like for a term, we are going to, to show you articles. When you go to our customer support, again, when you start typing, we'll suggest a few articles based on, on what you've wrote down. So maybe that will help. So, uh, we'll definitely come up like with a whole, uh, with the whole strategy to, to support people.

So besides, besides, uh, the issue that people had With the, the— besides the issue of building a software and not really talking to your audience and coming out with 50 different products, 50 different features, you know, that was cause of your failure of your first startup. What would you say was another thing that was a big deal that your other startup failed when this one succeeded? And now you're generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and you're successful in this business, and hopefully together we'll be generating millions of dollars a year and impacting millions of people. people. But the question is, like, what, what's another lesson that you kind of learned from your previous failure that you brought to this?

Um, I think that I was too restrictive, uh, and, you know, like, I— it's all— it's about ego, you know, like, it's about, like, me understanding what works, what doesn't, and also not understanding how people decide to try something out, to purchase, you know, like, how the whole flow really works, like how the marketing or sales, you know, like I, at that moment, I didn't understand like what is, you know, like cold calling. Like I never did, by the way, a cold call, but like, like cold emails. Like I didn't know a lot about all of these strategies and I would hear from people and, uh, but I would like be like, okay, we'll do this and then we'll do that, you know, and we'll test because everyone were talking about different strategies that work. But I didn't really have an idea how I'm gonna sell at all. You know, like, okay, feedback and building the product is one thing. It's like a product-led growth. So that's something that we are doing in AuthoredApp. But I, at that moment, whenever we were doing like the previous software, Talent Kit, like I really didn't know how I'm going to get from the, like, how is someone going to be aware of my product? And then what are the stages? Like how they are making decisions? at some point we realized, oh, this seems to be a product for like SMB sector, but like companies with more than 50 or 100 employees. So, you know, it's not something that you're gonna sell, you know, immediately, easily, especially, you know, like, and on the other side, we didn't know like about pricing, like how to do all of that. We didn't know where is our product in their system. Like what happened is that you know, whenever you start, even when we started to collect some feedback, they're like, okay, can you integrate with this? Can you integrate with that? And then you realize that you are solving one small problem. Even when they say that, you know, potentially that is an interesting solution, they're like, but we are using this and we are using that and you're in between. So we need you to communicate to all of this. And you're like, wow, you know, like I like, and that's additional one month of development. So those are the elements, but not understanding the how to sell. how people make decisions, your ideal audience is making decisions. Like, that was probably— even if we figured out this first part, like, we would fail probably on the second one.

I love that. I love that understanding how your ideal customers make decisions. That's a really, really big one. Um, we just added a new feature that will allow you to summarize a profile, and I send you a DM with it. So now you can add people to lists. I added you as a partner over here. Uh, you can save a profile, it puts it into Evie AI. Really exciting, um, that we just launched this feature here. And so I'm curious to know what people think about it, um, and I'm curious to know what you think about the summary, um, feature.

I will, I will check this, the summary. But you remember on our call like that we had, like I told you, like it's amazing that you have a personalization and that you can have a lot of stuff, you know, like inside. So, uh, that will make you add your voice to what is generated. So I think that that definitely makes sense, and that's why it's better than, you know, like using just ChatGPT on top of being, uh, an extension and supporting you with that. Like, I think that making it more personalized and then like using that output like as a comment and then maybe adding additional stuff on top of it, it still saves a ton of time And, you know, like, uh, gets you in front of many eyes.

I love that. I love that. Thank you so much. And I, um, I, I have an easy way for me to be able to see your profile because I'm able to, uh, comment on your stuff. If I go to, uh, saved profiles, I can click on see all saved profiles, and then I'm able to quickly just see that you are a partner. So I just select the list of my partners over here. Let's say, for example, Select this, I see this, I click on See Recent Activity, and then it just loads up all your recent activity and I'm able to just leave comments for you over here. So I just left a comment on your most recent post from 23 hours ago. Yeah, um, I think I've left a comment on this one.

I think you did. Yes, yes.

But now I left you one over here. So I'm really excited about supporting my connection. So guys, if you want me to leave a comment on your post, leave a comment on mine. I highly recommend you guys check out Ivana, connect with her on LinkedIn. You can find her Ivana Todorovic on LinkedIn. Definitely check out her profile, send her a message, let her know that you saw her LinkedIn Live. I don't know if you know this, but now you have over 10,000 followers. Congratulations!

Thank you, thank you.

Yeah, that's a post right there. What I would do is I would literally take this, take a screenshot of this like this, and then put a little arrow that says 10,000 followers and say, congratulations, we just hit 10,000 followers! And my last 20 followers are, and then you pull up your followers. So the way that you're able to kind of see your followers, if you go to LinkedIn, uh, My Network, and then you click on Followers on the left under Connections— it's Followers and Following— and then you click on Followers— they recently just changed that and added over there— you can see all the different people that are following you here. So you can just tag the people that are your— that got you over the limit, and this way you'll give exposure to 20, 30 people, and you mention all them in the post. And boom. And then, you know, that's an idea. I always love coming up with creative ways to mention people and reasons to mention people, but those are very active LinkedIn users. The people that are the most recent followers are the most active on LinkedIn. Um, and I would basically just go through every single person and just message them and say, hey, thank you so much for following me on LinkedIn. I really appreciate that. Or use— there's another Chrome extension that I really like called Apollo.io. I don't know if— have you heard of it?

Yeah, I'm using Apollo. Yeah, from time to time. Yeah.

Yeah. So what I love about Apollo is if someone's following me on LinkedIn, like for example, Nick is following me, I click on Apollo, I save them into my Apollo, and now I have his email address right here. So then I could just click on this little button here. I could select a template. Thanks for following. Follow. Um, I have a thanks for following email over here. Thanks for Follow, whatever it is. Basically, thanks for following. And then I basically thanks for subscribing, thanks for following, whatever. And I just sent him a quick email saying, hey, thanks for following me on LinkedIn. I just want to let you know that I appreciate you, and here are the three things you can check out on my profile. And boom, there we go. So very, very powerful. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with me here, for sharing with the audience. These stories are really important for people to know. why you failed, why you succeeded, why you're about— is there anything that you want to share with people about your vision for Author It Up and what you want to create?

Yeah, so, uh, my vision is to change, uh, like the understanding of LinkedIn content creation because, um, we like, you know, like whenever you see a strategy like, you know, how to grow your, your LinkedIn profile, you are usually seeing strategies from people that are super successful and that are influencers. And, you know, they get 100,000, uh, followers and then they are selling digital products. And I'm totally fine with that, but I identify more than 12 different strategies based on where you are right now, uh, with your profile and your goals. Because, you know, like, not everyone wants to become an influencer. Some people want inbound leads, some want social selling, you know, support, or someone hiring and recruiting, someone to, to find a new job or to build a personal brand. So those are all different, uh, things. And we are using a ton of data. Like, we did a huge analysis in Authored Up with more than a million LinkedIn posts. A new analysis will be with more than 3 million LinkedIn posts where we are identifying what works for whom, why. what are the X factors and stuff that are really important that not many people are talking about or not talking about at all, because you really need great data and a great analysis to understand, you know, behind the scenes. So I really want people to understand that there is no one strategy fits all and that, you know, like sometimes you are wasting resources even though you are following some influencers or trying to, to, to do the same that everyone are, are doing. So I think that, you know, like efficiency in content creation, spending time on LinkedIn and getting the results that you want is something that, uh, is the goal for, for Authored Up for the future, as well my goal with my content creation on LinkedIn.

I love that. Really, really cool. Are there any tips that you give people for how to best use best practices for Authored Up? What are the things that they should be doing to make the most out of Author.it, especially in their first 2 weeks trial?

Yeah, so one thing that works, uh, great is, uh, save your signature in snippets. So for example, I use like, my name is Ivana Todorovic and I'm writing about LinkedIn Insights. Follow me and ring the bell. Always tag yourself because when you tag yourself, people will click on your name And then they will go and they will follow you and ring the bell. So that's for the signature part. And these signatures work like magic because you get much more followers when you tell people, I want you to follow me. Uh, so that's one thing. The second part is use our hooks. We have more than 200 hooks, and those are not like we sit and wrote the hooks. It's like based on all of this analysis, what works, what doesn't. Different types of, of, uh, reasons when and tags when you will use those hooks. And again, that's important because you don't have an inspiration, you go, you check Outerdub hooks mistakes, and we give you like basically 7 ideas how you can write the post, how you can start. But you also— and last thing, with Outerdub, uh, we are the only tool if you already have LinkedIn content, so you already posted, you can go and scroll through your activity feed. While you are scrolling We are mirroring that data to Outerdapp, which means that if you publish, for example, 200 posts in, in the past few months, while scrolling, we'll collect all of these 200 posts and you have all your analysis in place in one day. So we are not start waiting to start charging you in order to show you some data. Like even in free trial, you can collect your posts, like mirror them in Outerdapp and see what works, what doesn't work. repost from there and do other, other, other stuff with the content analysis.

I love that. So pulling up all your posts like this, loading them up, will automatically put them into, into your AuthoredUp account, um, like over here like this. Then you refresh and everything is now suddenly there with all the updated, uh, with all the updated stuff. Hang on, let me see if I can— it probably is a refresh button somewhere here.

But there is, yes.

Okay, I just—

Yeah, on top, top right corner it should be.

Oh, right here, this little thing. Okay, cool. So if I hit refresh, it'll refresh all my posts.

Yes.

For some reason it didn't load this LinkedIn Live yet, um, but it probably will, probably will load it soon. Let me just refresh this page over here.

And then when it is, when it is finished, I think.

Oh, it'll do it when it's a post. Okay, cool. Yeah, as you can see, um, one of the things that I love about this, and I'm showing you guys this live right now, and between me and Ivana, is that you can filter for for all the different polls, videos, lives, entities, all these different things. I don't even know what entity is, but, um, but if you click on poll, you can see all the polls that I've ever posted. And you could see the top 20, but if you scroll, you could probably see more. Oh, load more posts. I'm going to click on load more posts, um, and you can see all the different, uh, polls that I've ever posted. So if you ever want to reuse a poll, or if you ever want to reuse an image post or something, or a video post— I'm going to go check out all my videos. I'm going to click on all my videos. It shows me 20. I'm going to load a couple more here, but these are my videos. Let's say, for example, I want to reuse this video here. I just click on it and then I can click the reuse button all the way here on the top left. That's one of the most amazing features that you have on this tool because a lot of people, they don't really know that they can just reuse their content by clicking on a button. That's something that I used to tell everyone, this is the reason you should use Buffer because you can reuse your content, but Buffer doesn't allow you to pull in all your old posts into it to reuse them. So, um, really, really great tool. It's, you know, this is worth the price of admission. I paid for the year, totally worth it. I'm a big fan of it. You can use this as a testimonial.

Thank you. I need to, I need to send you like a link. We are right now building a new website. Like, you're showing our website, I'm like, oh my God, you know, like, uh, much better is coming very soon. So I'll send you a link to, to send me a testimonial. testimonial, and we are gonna add it to the website for sure.

Of course, of course. Yeah, so, you know, one of the cool features is that you can analyze each individual post right over here and see all the information. So if you guys are serious about posting, write, I'm serious about posting, in the chat. I'm curious to know who there is serious about posting. If you're serious about posting, you want to get Authored up because it'll really help you be able to analyze your data. It'll be able to help you repost. It'll help you be able to create drafts. It'll help you be able to format your post. People say, Joe, How do you get these bold words there? How do you get, uh, how do you get bold words like the first sentence over here on this particular post? I clicked on it, it's not sticking. Hang on, let me just click and then hide in the bottom here. Okay.

Yeah, you need to click and then you can click like see more and then you can see the whole post.

Okay, but if I try to go to the right, it hovers over something else. Okay.

Yes, then, then we are comparing 2 posts. That's the feature where you can see one post versus another post and you can see why, uh, one was better than the other one.

Okay, so I'm gonna press compare. Okay, good.

Oh, compare this. Yeah, you are comparing. Yeah, yeah. So basically when you click on one post, like we— it's sticky. Then when you go to another, cover another—

I'm gonna click this one and I want to click on the show more button. Hang on a second, let me see this. Let me see if I could do this. Hang on, let's see. I clicked on—

Yeah, but you cannot be there. You need to be on the— it's sticky. Go to the, to the post and then click see more.

Oh, I have to go to the actual post and then—

No, you need to see, like, you see the post, like you see the image, you see the see more button on top of the image. Yes, click there.

Yes, got it, got it. Okay, now it's sticky.

Yeah, and now you should be able to see it.

What is this little pin thing here?

That's the sticky. That's when you want to have one that is sticky and then when it is not.

Oh, and then you compare that one?

Yes, that one too. Yeah.

Got it. I love it.

And when you have one sticky and you scroll, we saw— you'll see the same pin. Like, you can see it there. Yes. And you can see it down there. Yes.

Love it. Love it. Really, really cool the way you can compare one post to another. Um, so I highly recommend you guys mess around with this tool. Use it. Um, I used it and I even made a video about it, and I sent Ivana that video and be like, Ivana, check out this video.

Oh my God, we need to publish that video. Yeah, we need to publish it somewhere.

Yeah, you're welcome to publish it on YouTube and tag me, or on LinkedIn.

Yes, great place.

Yes, post videos. And I'm happy to— I'm happy to make you more videos if you want with the ways that I'm finding and using this tool. I'm, I'm like an ethical hacker, so for me, my goal is to like really help people find the hacks in life about how to use things. And I'm a big fan of there's no competition, everybody can work together, we can all succeed together. And so if somebody's using one tool like Uh, Author and Up. They could use Apollo and they could use Evie AI and they can use several other tools that will help them make their life better. So if you want to learn more, just write, I want to learn more, in the chat. We'll send you some special resources for the people that want to learn more. Just write, I want to learn more. Um, and also give this a like or give this a heart. Thank you so much, Ivana, for coming down and sharing your insights and sharing your thoughts and sharing your passion for what you're doing. We're excited to see what you're going to be doing next.

Thank you.

Um, you're actually going to be one of the presenters at the LinkedIn Influencer Summit in January, so I'm excited for you to come down and share all your tips on how to make stuff viral, how to make posts go viral. So if you want to learn how to make stuff go viral, just write viral in the chat and we'll send you an invitation to the LinkedIn Influencer Summit so you can watch Ivana present on how to make posts go viral. Just write viral in the chat. I'm curious to know who's interested in Learning how to do that, just write viral in the chat. Well, once again, Ivana, thank you so much for being here with me. Really appreciate it. Is there any final words that you want to share with my LinkedIn audience? There's probably going to be about a thousand people that will watch this video or so. On average, every post that I post gets about a thousand views. Some of them get 1.7 million views, and some of them get like a hundred views or whatever, or 169 views. I mean, I posted this morning about. I'm so excited about Evie AI, and 169 people saw that. It's still valuable if 169 people see it. If 500 people see something, it's still valuable. Yesterday I posted something and 5,000 people saw it, but today I posted something and 100 people saw it. You got to just keep posting on LinkedIn and not worry about trying to make every single post a banger. Um, but you know, just letting you know that every post— so is there any final words that you want the audience to know?

Uh, final words. Yes, um, LinkedIn content takes usually much more time than you expect, uh, and, uh, if you are thinking to start creating content, think about return on investment that you will have in the next 3 or 6 months and not immediately after posting a few or, or, or 3 times. So, uh, keep having in mind the return on investment that you can have and you can easily get there Uh, very soon.

Perfect. Remember, it's a long-term investment. By the way, this is why I recommend paying for the year. When people that pay— pay attention— if you want to get a much bigger discount on Ivana's tool, Authored Up, definitely go to the website. I'll put the ticker on the bottom again. Go to authoredup.com and buy it for the year. If you buy it for the year, you're going to use it for the year. That's number one. And number 2 is if you want to learn more, go to the website and sign up. There's no credit card required for you to sign up. So you could just start using it today for free. There's no credit card required, but it will expire after, I believe, is it 2 weeks right now?

2 weeks, yes.

So you could use it for free for 2 weeks. And if you're interested in using it, sign up for the year because LinkedIn is a long-term investment. It's not a short-term thing where you post and something happens. You got to build your audience. You got to expand your connections. And one thing that me and Ivana, with both of our tools, we both have in common is that we both comply with LinkedIn's terms and conditions because we don't automate anything. For her, she's just helping you draft a post and edit it and make it look good and analyze your content. For me, we're just having AI help you draft comments and help you draft direct messages and help you reply to stuff. There is a strategy, Ivana, that I do want to share with you that I think would be really beneficial for you to employ in what you're doing on LinkedIn. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull up my, uh, my, my LinkedIn and kind of just show you real quick the strategy that I think everyone should know. This strategy, if you go to LinkedIn and you click on InMail, um, you click on InMail, you'll see a bunch of people that send InMails all the time that are like salesy InMails. So what I like to do is I like to open up Evie AI and I like I like to be very friendly with them, um, and use my persona. I'm going to use the Joe Apfelbaum 2 persona. And then what I like to do is I like to say something like, not interested, not interested. However, I'd like you to check out my tool, but I don't want to be rude. So I have, um, I have ChatGPT draft a very nice message that kind of reads their message and replies with very nicely. So in this case, I, I replied to Gary And, um, I told Gary the following. I said, thank you so much for reaching out and sharing your work with me. It's great to see how you're helping fathers navigate through challenging situations and strengthen. While I appreciate your offer, I'm not currently in the need of your guidance. However, I would love for you to check out my new business, Evvy AI. It's an AI platform that leverages LinkedIn for B2B digital marketing strategies, and it would be really greatly appreciated if you can get feedback on it. Now think about that for a second. I just promoted my business to the people that are in-mailing me. I'm not, I'm not waiting and reaching out to people. They're reaching out to me 5 to 10 times a day. And then I'm using AI to help me draft a customized, well-written, long message that completely aligns with the long message they sent me. And it acknowledges them. It lets them know that, hey, I read your message, which I did not read, but AI read for me and it promoted my business. Now I have done this and I've had people sign up to my premium version of Evvy AI as a result of doing this. So I would encourage you, if you're in business, don't ignore those InMails that come in. Check to see who it's from. If it's from a spammer or from a cybersecurity criminal, don't obviously respond to it. But if they're a normal president of a company, CEO, professional, sales professional, whatever it is, respond to them and say, hey, and use AI to help you respond. And if you get our premium version of Evvy AI, you're able to also have ChatGPT-4, which is much smarter and the things that it says much wittier. So I'd be curious to know if you try that DM strategy and it turns into revenue for you. That's powerful. And, you know, we give unlimited, unlimited AI comments, even though it costs us for every comment. We're just giving it away unlimited. But we do charge, like I said, people that pay pay attention. So we do charge a small fee for premium. And I see that you also charge a small fee for premium for people to use your thing as well. So, you know, definitely invest in the tools, invest in AuthorItUp, buy it because you're going to get a lot of benefit. Anyways, I hope you like that tip. Ivana, what do you think?

I'm gonna, I'm gonna use it. I'm like, uh, you know, like, uh, where were you like a year ago? So, so yeah, I will, I will definitely, uh, try it. And I'm thinking how I'm gonna track those links and to see what will happen. Like, I'm literally gonna put my affiliate link or something like that.

That's a great idea. My God. And you imagine you make like $10,000 just from that one strategy. That's crazy. All right, well, thank you so much. I appreciate you, Ivana. I'm looking forward to talking to you again, and thank you for being here.

Thank you, Joe. Thank you. Bye-bye.