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00:00:00
00:00:01
Alex Boyd
0 Playsin 17 hours
Thanks for listening to our episode with Alex Boyd.
To keep up with or connect with Alex:
✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexcboyd/
✨ Website: https://www.useaware.co/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Origin Story
00:00:00
Speaker
i dont And all right, Alex, I am so excited to get to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for doing it. For anyone who doesn't know you coming into this podcast, could you just say a little bit about who you are and what you do?
00:00:13
Speaker
Thank you. Yes, I'm excited to chat with you as well. I am the co-founder of Aware. I started the company after using LinkedIn successfully for my last agency, which now I'm taken into the software side and it's just me and my co-founder so far. We've kept it small and familiar.
Leveraging LinkedIn for Success
00:00:35
Speaker
Can you say a little bit about your LinkedIn journey or what made you start using it? What made you think whether it was through agency work or software work, or you're like, there's something really here.
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah. I didn't use it at my last job when I was a head of sales because it was a heyday of outbound. When I left that to start consulting, it made way more sense, made it my thoughts, what I learned and see if Other people thought I knew what I was talking about, basically.
00:01:03
Speaker
fail And that went well. And we had multiple really good clients come through just me writing ah one post a week in 2017. Wow. um And um that just opened my eyes to it.
00:01:16
Speaker
And so within about a year, I was like, okay, there's some sort of system to this. LinkedIn was a different beast back then, but it was still very much working. I would see, hey, you shut up in my newsfeed, let's chat. And then... I would connect that six figures of invoices of the next year and a half. It was inescapably clear that basically sharing things that were relatively insightful in public kept you top of mind.
00:01:37
Speaker
And then people would reach out when they're ready. And then it warmed everything up. If i was going to reach out, the fact that they would have seen my posts before it made me much more familiar. Yeah.
00:01:48
Speaker
Eventually became much more of a system. But back then it was just like, this is definitely working. Let's do more of it. It makes sense. I feel like some two things you just touched on, like you can get so into the weeds with the strategies and the tactics and the aspects of LinkedIn. And I think it's worthy of all of that.
00:02:05
Speaker
Being top of mind and being familiar are so important. And it's but I think sometimes as clients folks might, they're like, I don't want to post just to post. And that's true. don't want to shit post just to get something up there.
00:02:19
Speaker
But at the time, if I haven't posted for a week or two and I post something, It's so common that then DMs or something come in or someone replies to an email I've been chasing on and it just saw the post and it just reminded That's actually super, super powerful. So I'm glad that you said that.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah. I love that effect too, because they weren't responding to my email. I finally, after multiple weeks, I get a response within two hours because you didn't see it, but there's clearly an impression that was made.
00:02:49
Speaker
and i Impression. Literal mental im impression, like the kind that we used to define that word as. Yes. All right.
Automation in Business Workflows
00:02:56
Speaker
So right now i am painfully deep into figuring out automation workflows, both for MedBerry and what our automation tools and systems look like.
00:03:06
Speaker
And then also increasingly we're advising clients on that. I wanted to ask you, are there tools that you're using alongside Apollo, like Aware or Zapier or other tools that you found to be really useful that are working well for you and that maybe work especially well for folks who are using Aware?
00:03:24
Speaker
I have in the past been too deep with automation tools, I think. And I think because like back in 2016, I was starting to get a handle on like Just taking all the data tools out there and pushing them to their limits, because ah don't know if you were doing this type of stuff back then, but 10 years ago, you couldn't really point click and build a list of 20,000 people if you wanted to, or 2 million people.
00:03:53
Speaker
Whereas now, ah back then Apollo, then Zen Prospect yeah was the only one who could do that. And I was talking to like Data Knives and these other companies, and I was just like, no, you guys don't get it.
00:04:03
Speaker
I want to send crap ton of emails. And they were like, we think we might be able to build that. And the Zen Prospect was just like, yeah, here you go. And I was like, this is we need. And we just, as many credits as we can handle and then kept going.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I think I am therefore Apollo's oldest actual person customer in terms of the length of time I have been a customer. wow They haven't been able to identify an older one across two organizations, but still the actual like point of contact because yeah, now it's a whole industry and yeah means GTM is now means three things, depending on who you talk to, but it often means, like you said, tying together a bunch of automations and systems.
00:04:45
Speaker
When I was doing that kind of consulting, i was hooking up Salesforce and Apollo and plugged in our B2B to staff and so forth. With aware, we're remarkably light on automation, at least for our own go to market.
Balancing Automation and Personal Touch
00:04:59
Speaker
ha To me, that still means marketing. Go to market it just means marketing, but um for our own, whatever revenue strategy, we have very little automation. The things that people are surprised about is when I reach out to new people who start free trials, I say, Hey, welcome to aware.
00:05:14
Speaker
And they say, Hey, nice automation. And I say, it was not, it was a Slack message that was broadcast of every person who added their first profile. And I clicked that with my own. hands and sent you a DM myself.
00:05:27
Speaker
Sure. Totally could. It'd be pretty easy to to automate a connect request. But the problem with that is if I knew the person expecting them to come in, yeah if they were connected to somebody, if they were an agency, not just normal solo user, I wouldn't have a great way of distinguishing that to figure out like those big flow charts. Everyone's posting. all Is this an agency?
00:05:47
Speaker
Do they fit this ICP and just graphing it out and building all these different paths. I'm going to keep my hand in the pulse of who's signing up for our product. And I love automation. I think people he often put it too early.
00:06:02
Speaker
So instead of doing everything yourself and figuring out what's working and then choosing the parts to automate, they're coming in and saying automation first, which it sounds like with MidBerry, you were doing a lot of this stuff yourself and you have
The Role of Tone in Client Communication
00:06:14
Speaker
the process that's working really well. Only now are you thinking, okay,
00:06:18
Speaker
We can probably make this go smoother. Um, that's kind of how I've approached it recently. That makes a lot of sense. And I think, yeah, i would say for Midbury, so much of it was just like very human touch over time. And I do hear you on the automation because, and I guess this relates to LinkedIn content too, but I feel like tone, nuance, and warmth are so important.
00:06:44
Speaker
And just like one phrase in an email can just make something interesting and make people feel like feel your intentions and authenticity.
00:06:56
Speaker
And there is the, it becomes such a numbers game so fast when you're really automating. Do you feel like there's a revenue or like a client touch number where you're like, this is when it's probably fair to start automating?
00:07:10
Speaker
I would say when at least one person is doing the process end to end, it's working well, they're starting to get bored and you've mapped it out. And so maybe not that connection request, but maybe the adding of those people to an email list, right? Like adding free trial signups who didn't put in their credit card to an email list, enriching our email sending system, which for us is intercom.
00:07:35
Speaker
um Just pretty simple things like that were before I was looking to see Before they add it to an email list, have they connected to their account? Have they built any custom lists? Have they used the product? And if so, how much?
00:07:47
Speaker
And then the email is different based on whether and how much they've used it. So like stuff like that, where I noticed I was actually copying and pasting. yeah But like you said, the warmth and human touch that you can't replace with automation is this ineffable, hard to put your finger on thing that people notice and feel and tell their friends about.
Automation's Limitations and Opportunities
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah. And so that's why I like automation when it's in the background. Any back office processes you're doing, really good target for automation. ah Avoid front office automation, in my view, like talking to customers, automation, everything else should be like what the customers don't see.
00:08:24
Speaker
That's much more fair game. I really like that and I appreciate it because I think that kind of aligns maybe with what I feel intuitively too or what feels correct to me. There are those LinkedIn posts where someone's, we generated 7 million of revenue last quarter through these three automations, et cetera.
00:08:40
Speaker
And even though I know when like, this is not real or this is not the way. There's a part of me that sees it and it gets a little bit of, I feel like like all these automations have the potential to stir up like an imposter syndrome where it's, damn, there's so much happening. If I don't understand every single tool, am I behind? But it truly is impossible to keep up.
00:08:59
Speaker
And I feel like identifying your needs and then finding the solution to fill them as opposed to trying to research every single tool that you potentially come across is probably the way Yeah, I feel that too.
00:09:14
Speaker
If it helps, the things I try to remind myself are multiple layers. So one, is it true? People often say things that just are not true. People lie on LinkedIn. Wow. And that's at least a chunk of it. I don't know how, what percent, but it's a chunk.
00:09:28
Speaker
Let's assume whatever thing is true.
Questioning Automation's Revenue Claims
00:09:31
Speaker
What did they have to invest to to get it there? Was the creation of a product that could be sold like that so effort intensive that they've blown through 30 million of venture capital to get that revenue?
00:09:42
Speaker
And are they talking about bookings or dollars? Is it 7 million of expected LTV booked, but not paid? We've all played with those numbers. I think we're in our heads of just, if we get bookings to here and cash collections to there.
00:09:56
Speaker
So there's a lot of things standing in the way of, I will say, i guess just, there's not a lot of free lunch out there. If it is, it doesn't last for a long time. Nobody's bootstrapping their way to 7 million per quarter with yeah Two people in a basement.
00:10:12
Speaker
Um, something else is at play there, i think in a lot of ways and. Oftentimes the automated stuff, it either doesn't last, it's an exaggeration falls in one of those buckets. Yeah. And the people who are top of their game and go to market, at least that I know are not the ones that have spent tons of time.
00:10:31
Speaker
They hire the engineers to automate stuff, but they have good customer relationships and at least on the executive side. So I hear you on the FOMO, but a lot of it's just not real for one reason or another, I think.
00:10:43
Speaker
i No, I agree with you and I like it. That's really a grounding perspective and advice and I really like it. What do you think? My next question was, if a brand was trying to maximize LinkedIn at scale, would you have a lean tech stack in mind for them beyond where?
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah. HubSpot free CRM as like a repository of data. Great. Plug that into aware so that you at least have all of the LinkedIn interactions in HubSpot.
00:11:11
Speaker
That's a good start is just to say, let's build this out with Apollo contact data from our entire addressable market in HubSpot to push all of your LinkedIn interactions into HubSpot. You have an enriched timeline of social media interactions with everybody, plus all your emails and so forth.
00:11:28
Speaker
It depending on... type of thing you sell, RB2B can make a lot of sense. You have to take their unfiltered output and heavily filter it with your own ICP.
CRM Systems and Data Management
00:11:40
Speaker
Because if you assume everything from RB2B is accurate, then it's not. It's about half accurate. So it's more the half that matches your ICP is much more accurate than everything, which is a complicated thing, but they even admit that that's how you should use RB2B.
00:11:56
Speaker
Assume it is not accurate first and foremost. And then use it like when it checks out with your gut. well Did this bookkeeper in Kansas with no LinkedIn profile visit our pricing page?
00:12:08
Speaker
Probably not. That's probably a misfire on their pixel in the knowledge graph. Yeah. Did this VP of marketing visit our pricing page? Actually, that's probably much more likely to be a real hit.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yes, some data you can put in the CRM and enrich it. And then basically like the lean tech stack is do the best you can without a lot of money to surface good things for your sales team or founder to go after in as little time as possible. Some of the best automation workflows, I think, end up sending 10 to 20 emails a day because that was the maximum you could find of...
00:12:46
Speaker
people that fit the right criteria, the right signals, the right everything. And any more than that would have been off target enough that it almost wasn't worth sending the email in the days of email having a higher marginal cost, i.e. your spam scores than it used to.
00:13:02
Speaker
You got to conserve whoever's selling the cleanest, easiest, warmest at-bats possible. I love that. That's super. going to be thinking about that. Thank you. ah nice I wanted to ask you, like, there's a fine line between streamlining and over automating.
00:13:18
Speaker
And where do you see brands or leaders unintentionally hurting their presence by relying on too much automation? Is there anything where you see you're just like, oh my God, like, just put a human on it?
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think there are. Definitely some cold email copy that goes, breaks that line. The emails that are like, hey, I saw away was doing really good things in the LinkedIn engagement space.
00:13:41
Speaker
Had a growth idea for you. A niche link insertions and blah, blah, blah. Okay. You had enough automation to figure out some information about me, but you didn't connect it to the value prop. And so any automation has to...
00:13:55
Speaker
be really good at connecting the signal to the value problem or is going to have a brand, especially if it acts like a human touch. So anything that acts like a human touch, it's so much more important to have that connection between what is the signal and what are you selling?
00:14:11
Speaker
If it's in the connection to here's what we saw, here's what we sell. That's where it mostly is breaks down because the buyer is going to be like, this wasn't actually you. ah The forwarded email from your CEO.
00:14:22
Speaker
Another area too. We know it's not real. There's telltale signs. Even if it was perfect, we would assume it's not real. and um The LinkedIn brand page auto comments on posts, not helping.
00:14:36
Speaker
ah um The best LinkedIn brand pages are built with like heart and soul on social media and like a lower volume rather than just sheer quantity. But those are some tactical ways that I'm observing people mess it up today.
00:14:53
Speaker
Thank you. That's really good. So want to talk about kind of public presence and scaling visibility a little bit through AWARE and just your kind of network and experience.
00:15:04
Speaker
You've worked with, my understanding is ah execs at really different stages. And I'm curious about what do you think is a difference between how an early stage founder versus more of an enterprise leader should approach their presence?
00:15:21
Speaker
What do you think they can learn from each other? Those have been two good learnings from different types of consulting I've done in the past before aware. Early stage founders are pretty much doing customer development and sales for pretty much free, no ad spend, right?
00:15:40
Speaker
And they're using it for more or less sign up for my product. Yeah. Whereas the enterprise the year is probably almost never going to have a direct call to action for a product themselves.
00:15:53
Speaker
And the enterprise leader tends to be more like, I would say like high-minded, right, in what they're putting out there. More like this sort of lofty executive viewpoints because when you are a public company, and there's so many more people to disappoint.
00:16:07
Speaker
Compliance. Are you making forward-looking statements? Are you revealing material, non-public information? Stuff that the founder doesn't have to care about. So by getting a little bit nuanced, the enterprise leader can say, okay, what are i real compliance restrictions? What are real reputational risks?
00:16:23
Speaker
And then still have that kind of compelling, maybe even sometimes sales focused message that doesn't breach the compliance restrictions. so And the earliest age founder can look at the high mindedness of the enterprise leader and say, how can i have some really good, compelling philosophy behind my just pitch post?
00:16:43
Speaker
yeah And that's how I think they can learn from each other is like the energy of the founder and the kind of philosophizing of the enterprise leader. and that's my goal is to have the aspects of both. now But you're never going to get spicy things from a SVP at a big go. It's going to work.
00:17:00
Speaker
But you can integrate. You can put a little spice on top here and there. um It gets into the can of worms of which agency and consultant do they pick. Because if you have a consultant who mostly works with young buck founders, they're going to do a terrible job at keeping big compliance stuff in mind.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah. Or vice versa. You get the enterprise, uh, ghostwriter working with early stage founder, it's going to be boring and ineffective. Yeah. so the team you compile has to be careful.
00:17:29
Speaker
No, I agree with everything you said. I think it's funny. but Yeah. Yeah. They've settled. We actually, we do have a house rule at Medbury, which is that for founders, we'll do CTAs, but for executives, we don't do CTAs. It's pretty straightforward stuff, but it just feels off. They're not on LinkedIn to show the product. They're on LinkedIn for a different purpose, to your point.
00:17:51
Speaker
And I really like that a lot. Thank you. What do you think right now for both, I'd say, brands and leaders or leadership teams? What is moving the needle when it comes to creating an audience for their thought leadership?
Thought Leadership: Substance vs. Style
00:18:05
Speaker
And where do you think people waste time? Moving the needle for thought leadership, I'd say there's two extremes and the middle one is usually the best kind of we've been talking about.
00:18:18
Speaker
On the one side, you have the kind of over automation, over over hack, over over AI and the total trend follower, right? Example of this would be, I wrote the million dollar sales playbook. This is an actual post that I responded to.
00:18:33
Speaker
Um, you yeah. So if he's reading it, like your lead magnet sucked anyway, the bullet points of it includes this and this comment playbook to get it. well I published my own the day before.
00:18:44
Speaker
Then he sent me this link to a notion doc and it was just like pure GPT Drek. It's like, okay, and this is the form of quality, but I don't think of this person as having good thoughts. It just didn't qualify as thought leadership.
00:18:59
Speaker
Now, on the other hand, you have really high quality stuff, poorly formatted for attention. Yeah. So that one's frustrating. Really good stuff that gets buried because there's no understanding of the algorithm or hooks.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah. um That's a much more forgivable mistake and easily fixable, in my opinion. But the executive who spends two hours writing an article that nobody sees is, um, what a shame. yeah Maybe a little bit of format structure and algorithm knowledge would have helped.
00:19:28
Speaker
ah This really good stuff seed light a day. So ideally, it would take good substance to start and then dressing it up rather other than saying, I have this really great style and pizzazz.
00:19:40
Speaker
Let's put some sawdust substance inside it and package it up and throw it out as lead magnet. So neither of those work, but if you get in the middle where it's like really smart person armed with some social media knowledge, then you have really effective thought leadership that people actually see, which is the point the whole thing.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. It's funny. I feel like everyone, many people have different perspectives on slightly optimizing for LinkedIn when it comes to a hook or formatting. It's a spectrum for sure. And everyone's got a spot that they're comfortable.
00:20:13
Speaker
There are a few clients we've worked with who I know, at first it was really like embarrassing for them to think, oh, i'm going to write a hook and then like a space down. But I'm curious for your take on it. Something I've just gotten more comfortable saying is that no one is immune to, no one can escape the algorithm. like No matter how incredible the content or how many followers you have if you don't have respect for the format that people are engaging and reading in this content and you're going to do yourself a disservice like just write a cool hook oh yeah it's tricky because occasionally you'll see someone that does yeah you'll see like a two full paragraph block post come out and it does really well yeah
00:20:57
Speaker
Okay, so the trick there is you have not built up what she or whoever has built up. Once you're at that point, when you've done enough in your career, you're getting plenty of engagement on your posts regardless. Then you can do the thing where I don't need to do format on purpose because I'm too cool for it.
00:21:15
Speaker
You will know when you're there. And if you're not there, be real with yourself. Yeah. is Do what it takes to get your posts popping off. And then you can, if you want to, dial back the formatting stuff.
00:21:28
Speaker
But yeah no, that's skiing down a hill you can't take because your friend did it and it looked cool. You have not earned what they have earned in terms of time on the mountain. Likewise with LinkedIn or with anything. It's just accept where you are on the journey.
00:21:43
Speaker
that the one or two examples that you see, like for example, in venture capital, there's always the people who fit that mold here and there. It's not something you want to imitate and should be a highly calculated expert move if you do.
00:21:54
Speaker
Not for the faint of heart, not for getting started on LinkedIn. Yep. No, I totally agree. i would also say, too, that we do have some really very accomplished clients with 50K followers, which, you know, not the hugest, but significant.
00:22:09
Speaker
And even for them, the posts that are optimized, they still do better. Every now and then there's the random unexpected hit where it's the dense paragraphs and it just like something clicks and it takes off. But it is interesting. Like it's the exception. It's not the rule. But so many people see that and they're like, oh, if they did it, I can do it. Yeah. And why put it on hard mode?
00:22:29
Speaker
You have to ask yourself, why do I want to do this on a harder difficulty? Because I want to look cool. That wouldn't work in any other area of business. You wouldn't invest in tougher startups. um Yeah.
00:22:40
Speaker
big Because you thought it looked cool and your friend is doing IoT when everyone else is doing AI. And so you're going to do IoT too. Okay, fair enough. But again, exception not the rule. Play your strengths. Stack the odds. Why not? Why not do these things? I like talking about the exceptions because...
00:22:55
Speaker
They're what people go to in their head when talk about rules. Talk about rules, smart people are going to think, what's the exception? So we get in out in front of that and say, okay, here's the rule. Here are the exceptions and why they remain exceptions, not rules.
00:23:08
Speaker
What is there something that you think right now, either brands or let's say executives are overthinking when it comes to LinkedIn? And what do you think they're not thinking about enough?
Establishing a Content Strategy First
00:23:19
Speaker
I really think they are overthinking the tools. It's funny to say as a maker of a LinkedIn tool, but a lot of people go to our support chat and ask these really complicated questions about what a tool can and can't do with these workflows that they've drawn up in their head and on a mural board. And I look at their profile and they've barely posted anything. It's like, dude, you have this backwards.
00:23:39
Speaker
um it's The chats always come in late at night. Late at night, you're thinking about tools, you're mapping out workflows, but you haven't said anything online. You have this backwards.
00:23:51
Speaker
The content strategy, the strategic narrative, not the tool workflow, what you're going to do with all the leads that eventually come from this. Get some leads first or some deal flow first.
00:24:02
Speaker
um But there's so much FOMO around. I got to have this plugged in. I got to be scraping everyone who likes my post and putting into this sheet. Okay, fair enough. But you're going to burn out real fast if you have only focused on that and not enough on what you want to say.
00:24:17
Speaker
yeah Just think in a chair for an hour about what you want to say first. But thinking about what you want to say is a great antidote to overthinking the rest of your tech stack, which is fine but ancillary to message to the market, which is ultimately marketing.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, I do. i'm sure you do too. Sometimes I know that teams are... An exec is, oh, I hear there's a lot of good opportunity on LinkedIn. And then the team invests in it. And then they're like, we need to track like the dollar for dollar ah ROI on this, exactly how many deals came through because of it.
00:24:53
Speaker
And I do think there's an element if you're really doing it well, where what we were talking on earlier, where And I'd say on the agency side, sometimes it's a little hard to say this and be like, look, those emails that are getting faster responses, those DMs that don't seem totally related to a post but came the day of the post, et cetera, like it's all part of it.
00:25:10
Speaker
And I think some teams are better than others at being comfortable, understanding and investing in awareness and like more top of funnel social things. And I presume that a lot of times the automation is like,
00:25:24
Speaker
the goal is not is often to just solve for the reporting yeah as opposed to I guess, another tactic a team could take would be to really seek to be persuasive about we just need to invest in being human here. but And I love everything you're saying. There's something like freeing and grounding about all your point of view on all of this. I really love it. like just focus Just relax a little.
00:25:50
Speaker
Do the basics. Be human. Try and do some good content. It was very killer. Like the over attribution is another thing people overthink. Cause they're just like, I don't believe that this works and that marketing is effective because whatever background or perspective I have prevents me from it.
00:26:06
Speaker
So we have to do a direct line from every word in the post I wrote to every deal. Whereas that just misses the point, you know, a great commercial by a large brand. They're going to run it and they're not going to be able to draw a line between that and you purchasing a Coke.
00:26:25
Speaker
These are some of the best marketers in the world. do you think they're full of it? Do you think they don't know what they're talking about? i'm So the over attribution thing for me is if you're so deep in it, you got to attribute every last dollar.
00:26:39
Speaker
I'll try to convince you, but you're probably missing the point, maybe fatally. Um, and frankly, it's nice to not be able to have to care about them so much. Not being an agency anymore. I can just be like, you don't get it.
00:26:51
Speaker
I get it. And I'm gonna do it for myself. Uh, too bad for you, but sucks when someone's so deeply misguided about the purpose of LinkedIn. And I'm like, I'll say my spiel, but up against a big wall of your skepticism. And I usually will not be successful in taking it down.
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, it is. And I was going to say maybe next time that pops up for me, I'll just send them a link to this podcast and be like, check out what Alex had to say on this. Yeah. But also I was thinking too, like sometimes sometimes clients or prospects are talking to this other group and they mentioned, or my friend said his agencies or this like marketing team he's working with is doing like like, and then I think sometimes there's this assumption that the more technical you are, the better you are the more competent as opposed. And it's tricky to navigate. You want to be open. You want to learn. You want to be
00:27:41
Speaker
mindful of their preferences and at the same time so much of it ah is like bullshit in the end and it's just a bit of a game more technical appeals to some but a lot of that work if you've run marketing teams you'll know that a lot of work that can be done is not useful but you can definitely pay for it you can pay for a lot of work to be done that's not useful tell your buddies about how much work is going on and how much reporting you get Doesn't mean you're making more money, pulling in more revenue.
00:28:14
Speaker
So yeah, that's another case of a hyper-technical person probably needs to have a life event outside of business to convince them that they shouldn't be so technical all the time. Or like a conversation with a mentor, right? That shakes them out of that perspective.
00:28:27
Speaker
It's usually not something that you can do unless you are their mentor. And even then can be difficult, but... Yeah. The over-technicalizing of LinkedIn is usually a mistake, I think, in my book. So from what you're saying, I think you have it dialed pretty well.
00:28:45
Speaker
No, I really appreciate everything you're saying. And I like how you're like, they just need to go touch grass if they're not about 3 a.m.
LinkedIn Engagement Patterns
00:28:51
Speaker
I do want to talk about your state of LinkedIn report, which was incredible. I think it was my top favorite social media report of this year.
00:29:00
Speaker
and Everyone on the Medbury team read it. We passed around to a few clients, too, actually. I thought just that was fantastic. So can you talk to folks about how you put it together? And I'd be curious to know if there were data points that really surprised you where you were like, oh, that's not what I thought the data would show.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. I'm so glad I worked on it for a very long time. used no GPTs in the creation of it. And in terms of what was surprising, I actually thought that some of the things you hear on LinkedIn about LinkedIn, meaning like the best time to post, best time of data posts and so forth would be, I thought I would get the data back and then be like, nope, that's not true.
00:29:40
Speaker
And it was true. And that so the surprise was that the rumors were confirmed. Exactly. And I was like, oh man, like there it really is. Not that I think you need to, but if you were to optimize the average um engagements by post is definitively higher than average at 5 a.m.
00:29:59
Speaker
Pacific, 8 a.m. Eastern and declines a little bit. It's kind of a liftoff when Europe comes online. Yeah. At least in our database is like, which is pretty US and Western Europe centric. Confirming the like influencer rumor, this is how it works. Things with data was the most surprising. I'm just like, this fits pretty well.
00:30:19
Speaker
um I also thought that the decline in a reach and engagement was just an empty complaint. And there is actually definitely a broad decline reach, um which makes sense.
00:30:33
Speaker
There's things that are mitigated by it, but people who are saying the algorithm is getting worse or that reach is down are missing the point. It's just redistributed. There's a slight reduction in reach total based on more ads, um but that's partially compensated by more people using LinkedIn. It's interesting.
00:30:53
Speaker
The complaints about LinkedIn reach being down are true. if You're not changing, not adapting, not doing all these things. But then we looked at the data we found that, for example, even just posting weekly is a great predictor of having more engagement than before.
00:31:06
Speaker
yeah Maybe it's just a redistributing toward consistent high quality content ah over time. My engagement right now, anecdotally, is way higher than it used to be. It's three times higher than it was two years ago.
00:31:18
Speaker
Wow. Okay. That's a better algorithm, not a worse one. So I think it's getting better. Most people are in the middle. They're not doing that much at all, for that matter. But it was fun. i had to pull 13 million rows of data.
00:31:29
Speaker
Oh, my God. And you can't even open that in Excel. you Excel has a max of one million rows. So I had to use Python to analyze it and write a bunch of scripts. And but it took me hours and hours to parse through it all.
00:31:41
Speaker
But that was really fun. I did use AI to teach me Python. So that's where I used ChatGPT is to help me analyze the data. That's funny you said that because when you said Python, I thought, I wonder if he knew that before, if he used ChatGPT to Python.
00:31:57
Speaker
The point about reach is really interesting and funny because for a long time people, we still talk about how like shitty they think most LinkedIn content is. And this idea that the folks who are consistently posting, nurturing their audience aware so amazing for being able to go in, comment, track the folks you want to track and being thoughtful about what they're putting out or working with folks have such an advantage because it would your take be that the algorithm is rewarding.
00:32:25
Speaker
both consistency and good content at the end of the day. It's getting better at dwell time. So for the people who use LinkedIn, scroll it, spend much of time on it and complain about it, it's okay. You're watching trash Netflix TV and then complaining about Netflix, recommending more trash TV to you.
00:32:45
Speaker
The algorithm is designed to keep you on the feed. Yeah. It's doing better than ever at its job at that. And if you don't like what get your own damn fault, I say that having unfollow aggressively.
00:32:56
Speaker
I removed 1500 connections of mine last month. And if you don't like it, it's in your control. The algorithm is getting better, not worse. You can't fault people for trying ah if it's working on you.
00:33:08
Speaker
um You have to have been a marketer for a long time to appreciate the the fact that this stuff works. Uh, if you hate clip bait hooks, but they do work, then you don't actually hate them. You secretly like them.
00:33:24
Speaker
Examine that. This is my call to people who think it's a bad feed is i don't think it is. I think it's a good feed. You are bad at pruning content. It's harsh, but I just can't see any other way. Yeah.
00:33:34
Speaker
And we're projecting a little bit. Yeah, that too. Mixed in with LinkedIn. I know we have three minutes left and I was like, I think we'll be under an hour. yeah Okay. All right. Thank you. One thought as you're talking, I'm really curious because I have a theory on LinkedIn video, which is that I'm sure you've seen some of the, so we got the video tab.
00:33:53
Speaker
LinkedIn says they're going to start pushing like videos. Yeah. and And then I saw some really interesting posts where I can't remember who it was, but someone was like, my horizontal video, I had, I don't know, 4,000 impressions.
00:34:04
Speaker
He did a really similar one vertical, got 300,000 impressions, but then also pretty low engagement and like no real return on it. yeah And my take is my theory. I'm curious for yours is I don't really think people want to watch video on LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn wants people to want to watch video. And so it's doing interesting things where it's like showing a vertical video clip to 300K people and no one bit.
00:34:29
Speaker
But what's your take? What do you think? Do you remember Clubhouse? I never really was on it, but I remember people talking about it. Yeah. No, they didn't just talk about it. They raved about it.
00:34:40
Speaker
For six months, Clubhouse is the future. Audio is the future. And then it died so fast. And if you have not been through that i remembered that, it's easy to think this shiny new thing is the future.
00:34:54
Speaker
Okay. Maybe to some degree. It's integrated into what you're doing, but it's not the future in the way that Clubhouse was not the future. Um, And then there's the definition of an impression.
00:35:07
Speaker
So an impression on a short form video is different and worth a lot less than impression on ah horizontal or normal video. Because where they show it in the feed is in a worse spot.
00:35:21
Speaker
So like somebody who watches your video for at least a couple seconds is a normal video impression. That's like a video watch. Somebody who just sees the video in the reels thing, like the reels bar, but doesn't actually consume much of it. Yeah. So an impression they don't distinguish.
00:35:39
Speaker
And it to gut check this theory of a short form video impression is worth maybe a 10th or 20th as much as a regular one. You can just see what the engagement was. So you have these videos with 60 likes on each of them.
00:35:52
Speaker
One gets 300,000 impressions. 3000. one gets three thousand Clearly something doesn't add up if the engagement rate is so far lower, it lends credence the idea that if there's a different class of impression.
00:36:05
Speaker
Uh, the heaviest and best is a normal horizontal video watch. And then there's like a text or image impression. And then the most plentiful and least valuable is this like mass short form video impression that If they were to distinguish for you, we'd be able to see, you but they're currently not.
00:36:26
Speaker
As with anything, if you've been doing this stuff long enough, things come and go. Sometimes you see things come and stay, but not be so crazy. And I think this is, it's here to stay, but it's not what everyone needs to be doing.
00:36:38
Speaker
I do video. I think it's great. I built video skills. I thought that was a valuable skill to build. um But I don't think it's what everyone should do, especially if you're not a creator or a LinkedIn nerd.
00:36:50
Speaker
FOMO about videos will burn you out and not necessarily help you develop your business, which is probably why you're here. Yeah. All right. Thank you. That's super interesting. I wanted to ask you just a few questions about Aware as a founder. Great.
00:37:05
Speaker
If you had to go back and start Aware again, is there a decision that you'd make way faster this
Product Development Lessons Learned
00:37:11
Speaker
time? Yes. We built a V1 and we burned it down two and a years in.
00:37:16
Speaker
Oh, wow. So we built a totally different, it's still a LinkedIn product, but a totally different product and spent a long time spitting our wheels on it and getting, don't know, a few thousand bucks of m MRR in the door and hearing that it was a cool product.
00:37:32
Speaker
If you've built a product and people say this is cool, then you have done something very wrong. And that was us. So I wouldn't do that. I would start with what's functional. If I was just a greedy person, I would have just gone all in as soon as possible on That would have been the fastest way to make money and a very annoying one.
00:37:53
Speaker
So I don't know if I would have done it. But I'm slowly getting more comfortable with the idea that our product can do things that i personally think are dumb and I can still sell those things as features.
00:38:06
Speaker
For example, our product due to popular demand has ai comments. And I was like, I don't use AI commenting. ah generally think people probably shouldn't, but there was enough demand that I was like, I'm a bad founder if we don't build this.
00:38:19
Speaker
There are some good use cases. Um, but that was one where I had to get over the hump of, I was not doing it because of a moral high ground thing, which is frankly my own stuff that I needed to jettison.
00:38:32
Speaker
I would let go of those things and focus on what are people going to want to use every day? Not what's cool. Not what I think is right. And just focus on the usable with maybe a tinge of like prescriptiveness and here's how we think it should be done.
00:38:46
Speaker
But I waited too long on that. I should have done that way earlier. Other than that, it's been really according to plan, but apart from those two gigantic things, AI earlier against my sort of opinion and holding my nose at it.
00:38:59
Speaker
And then the V1 of creating a not very usable, but cool looking product. Those are the two things that I wouldn't do again.
00:39:10
Speaker
Is there a common bit of startup advice or like founder advice that you were getting a lot and was just out there in the ether that you didn't follow and you're really glad that you didn't follow?
00:39:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's advice I took myself the first time building an agency, which was you're more successful with the bigger of a team you have. And then with the Aware, we haven't hired anybody yet, just me and my co-founder.
00:39:36
Speaker
And the advice I'm taking now, which is the flip side of that, is hire only when it's so painful that you must. Like bursting at the seams with cash and not with time, and you're so stressed that you must hire for a critical thing that has to get done.
00:39:52
Speaker
And people are going to hire as fast as possible. And that kills the best companies when they do that. And then you have the lean profitable team That's what I'm after for the rest of my career.
Hiring Strategies for Startups
00:40:04
Speaker
I'm not doing the giant teen blitz fast stuff. I don't know. That's been 20 years, but I really hope that I don't end up doing that because it just doesn't feel right.
00:40:17
Speaker
And it's been really successful for me so far. I'm 34, so I've got a lot of time left to see how this plays out. I much prefer this way of building a business and living life. The size of your team amazing.
00:40:29
Speaker
maybe inversely correlated with how well ah you're doing as a company in a lot of cases. It's necessary that you're doing better if you have bigger team. Some cases it is, some cases it is not. So going lean toward being careful to hire going forward.
00:40:44
Speaker
It makes a lot of sense. What is something that you believe about LinkedIn thought leadership or brand building that you think most people would
Building Brands on Core Beliefs
00:40:52
Speaker
disagree with? I think the best personal brands out there are built on a fundamental thesis that is their view of the way the world works.
00:41:04
Speaker
And think the best brands are built on that. I think Adam Roberts' brand is built not on website visitor identification, but why you must bootstrap.
00:41:17
Speaker
Mm-hmm. For example, Justin Welsh's brand is based on not LinkedIn, but on solopreneurship. That was the thing. He was like, I'm a fan of this. More people should do it. It's one simple truth that underlies really effective brands.
00:41:31
Speaker
one It's one message. But that's not a very popular thing. It's hard to hear that and think that's wrong, but it's really easy to hear me say that and think that's not necessary.
00:41:42
Speaker
I don't think it's necessary, but it's a huge power unlock for the brand when you do it. Yeah, it's funny, actually, like right earlier this morning I was working on, was like, do you know Sarah? I think it's Sarah Blakely. She's the founder of Spanx. yeah Yeah.
00:41:59
Speaker
And her posts are one idea skinned a thousand different ways, which is that she bootstraps Spanx from her apartment when she was totally broke. She figured it out.
00:42:11
Speaker
And if she can do it, you can do it. And the people who love her and follow her love every single time she tells that story through like just shifting the prism like one little minute turn.
00:42:23
Speaker
And the people who have never come across her content, each new post, I think, is like really good at bringing in a new audience. It's a really interesting little ecosystem she has going on and it's a great representation of that's her core idea and it's funny because I think sometimes with clients we've noticed in the beginning there's a bit of coaching around we are going to do the same kind of post for you month a few months in a row and yeah this is similar to what we posted last month because not everybody sees your content most people don't see your content and even if they saw it you have to remind them of this is your message but I really like that point and it resonates and I'm going to think about it more
00:43:00
Speaker
Yeah, you're totally right. Like that Sarah Blathey's got, if I can do it, you can do it too. Buy boring businesses. Like I can think of a lot of people who was just, it's one and core truth. And you can tell that story in a broader way, but it's one simple thing.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, totally get it on the needing to repeat yourself. Because when I was doing this type of agency work, people would be like, we talked about that two months ago. I was like, yeah, on purpose. And we're going to again in a different way or even going repost the same damn thing because people are not keeping track of your timeline the way you are.
00:43:31
Speaker
they Your own LinkedIn, you know it back to front. like, I talked about this thing and about a month and a half ago. Everyone else does not care, doesn't remember. Maybe starts to care a tiny bit, but your own self way better than anybody else.
00:43:45
Speaker
Oh, wore the same outfit week and a half ago. Yeah, nobody is noticing that, but you are. It's an exaggerated version of that on LinkedIn, basically. Yeah, I agree with it. But yeah. Yeah. Pretty true about that. It makes the agencies and clients' life easier too when you really can reuse the same ideas and that's good, not bad.
00:44:02
Speaker
Yeah. And the results are there. They're even better the next time. Right. Yeah. I feel I want to give you a moment in a second to just tell everyone where to follow you, where to learn more about AWARE, where to check out your report if they want it.
00:44:14
Speaker
But I do feel like you are so good at staying with your core, like you strike me as someone who's not pulled off of your core very much by other people's claims or concepts.
00:44:28
Speaker
And I really admire that. And I find it a very grounding presence. I've really enjoyed this conversation so much. Thank you. Thank you. I think I have fewer giant FOMO stories to tell as a result of it.
00:44:39
Speaker
Yeah. But I think I have a better inner world life as a result of not chasing shiny objects. Yeah. And it's hard to do. and You have Alex from OZ post about rise and grind, chase the money.
00:44:54
Speaker
ah want to be a billionaire. And you're like, man, should I be trying to be a billionaire? What should I give up for that? I'm just unhappy, ineffective most of the time and unhappy. And when you can just sit with, what am i going to say no to? i really appreciate that. It's been groaning and it's great to be here and share too.
00:45:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's a hard vibe to figure out where do you need to be open and learning versus where can you just be like, that's not me. That's not for me. And we're in alignment with yourself. Where can people sign up? Where can they learn more?
00:45:23
Speaker
Where can they read your amazing report? Where can they follow you? Useaware.co is the website. I'm always going to have handy links to everything I'm working on my LinkedIn profile. um I think if you Google or do LinkedIn search Alex Boyd Aware,
00:45:38
Speaker
get it pretty easily. I didn't feature the link to my report, but if you send me a DM, I will DM it to you happily. um So just say that you heard this on Content People and I'll send it away.
00:45:52
Speaker
We'll put all those links on the show notes. So if you're listening, right just go down. Alex, I'm so glad that we got to have this chat. Thank you so much, Meredith. Thank you.