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Navigating the LinkedIn Labyrinth: Ivana Todorovic's Journey with AuthoredUp
186 Plays10 months ago
In this "AuthoredUp" podcast episode, Ivana Todorovic discusses her entrepreneurial journey and the creation of AuthoredUp, a tool enhancing LinkedIn content creation.
She highlights the pivot from a startup to a successful business, focusing on maintaining authenticity while growing a global user base.
Ivana shares insights into LinkedIn's evolving role in content marketing and the challenges of content creation on the platform.
The episode also explores AuthoredUp's alignment with LinkedIn's policies, its transition from a free beta to a paid service, and the importance of community engagement in business growth.
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Transcript
LinkedIn's Evolution: From Job-Seeking to Content Hub
00:00:09
Speaker
Years ago, LinkedIn was the place for people to find jobs and recruiters to find people. It wasn't terribly exciting unless you were looking for a job or looking to hire someone. Today, LinkedIn is a different beast. It's a platform to create and consume content and a necessity for many businesses to drive brand awareness and position themselves as thought leaders and options for customers.
00:00:34
Speaker
LinkedIn has also become an attractive platform for entrepreneurs looking to tap into its 950 million users and 160 million daily active users. And just as entrepreneurs have created successful businesses serving platforms such as Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, and Google,
00:00:53
Speaker
LinkedIn is a seductive creature. Imagine what could happen if you built a service that helped users drive more utility, value, and ROI from LinkedIn.
Ivana Todorovich's Journey and Authored Up's Genesis
00:01:04
Speaker
My guest today is Ivana Todorovich. She's one of those entrepreneurs. She's the founder of Authored Up, a platform that helps people create and analyze content for LinkedIn. It's a service that I've used for a year. I consider it to be a key part of my LinkedIn and content creation arsenal.
00:01:22
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, Ivana. Thank you so much for having me Mark. Can you share your journey before starting AuthorUp? What inspired you to create the company and what was the key moment or experience that led you to dive into the exciting and terrifying world of entrepreneurship?
00:01:41
Speaker
Yes, of course. Long story short, we, my co-founder and I had a previous startup and we basically spent almost a year building a ton of features. It was a SaaS tool for recruitment. And at some point we realized that we need some better users or anyone that is going to give us a feedback. What was the place to go? Everyone told us go to LinkedIn and start posting on LinkedIn and that's where
00:02:10
Speaker
everything will flourish. You will get people will get interested, etc. That didn't happen. We couldn't find users for our first app. However, we realized how hard it is to create content for people that are just regular people. So not professional copywriters or content creators, but people are willing to create content in order to attract someone, some leads or
00:02:37
Speaker
to nurture their relationships, to support their networking, et cetera. That's how we ended up with this big question, how to create content on LinkedIn.
Pivoting to LinkedIn Content Tools
00:02:48
Speaker
When did you decide to make the pivot? One of the realities of being an entrepreneur is you're eternally optimistic. You believe in the product that you developed. You spent a year building it. Was there a moment in time where you realized that what you had built wasn't going to work?
00:03:06
Speaker
and that there was a better opportunity. Was it a moment of inspiration or was it something that built up over time when you realized that the current business didn't really have a shot at being successful?
00:03:21
Speaker
There were like two things that happened in the same time. When we started creating content on LinkedIn, it was very hard for us and we were looking for different tools. And most of the tools that we found were scheduling tools where you can create posts and then schedule on 10 different social media platforms. So that is something that we were not looking for. Or you had LinkedIn, the sales tools. And again, we didn't need them. We created our own solution. It was just to preview posts and to do formatting.
00:03:49
Speaker
It was a standalone app and we use it by ourselves. And also we shared it with a few people that were also starting to create content just to help them out. That's when we started to make some small tools that are going to help us at least. And we were not imagining that as a product in the future. That's the first moment. And then when you start creating content, then you realize, okay, this is the issue that we need to solve. I would like to have drafts. I would like to do acts. I would like to...
00:04:18
Speaker
And then we realized, okay, so we have two options. First option is to pivot and at least build something and see how market will react or keep building what we are already doing. For the first startup, we didn't have any traction. And you also realize what mistakes we made and that would be very expensive in time.
00:04:40
Speaker
We will need six months at least to pivot like a technical solution because we made big mistakes in assumptions. And so that was the moment. These two things happen in the same time. And then we realized, okay, let's try something
Navigating LinkedIn's Ecosystem Challenges
00:04:53
Speaker
new.
00:04:53
Speaker
LinkedIn, it would be fair to say operates in mysterious ways. The algorithm constantly evolves, new features pop up from left field. They seem to happen without much consultation with users, including creators. Sometimes you wonder what LinkedIn's strategic and tactical roadmap looks like and why they're doing what they're doing because
00:05:21
Speaker
There are many features that they've launched to much acclaim that have been complete duds. I'm curious about what it's like to be a company that plays in the LinkedIn ecosystem and
00:05:34
Speaker
What authored up relationship is with LinkedIn because from the outside looking in, it seems that there are some companies that LinkedIn is happy to play with. And there are other companies that LinkedIn feels violates its terms of service. For example, there are companies that organize pods or DM outreach.
00:05:54
Speaker
And LinkedIn has made a lot of noise of a clamping down on those companies. Two questions here. What is it like to work with LinkedIn? And how do you stay on side? How do you remain an ally as opposed to a competitor? You should ask my co-founder. He has more than 20 years of experience and he's a senior developer in numerous languages. So it's really hard to be in their ecosystem. That's for sure. And it's even harder when you want to be in line and to support
00:06:25
Speaker
content creation on LinkedIn without violating terms of use, which is our positioning. And from the moment when we started creating Outered App, we knew that we want to be there to support creators and not to destroy creators. And LinkedIn wants better creators, better content, and we also want our users to provide that. From the very beginning, we never took a cookie, LinkedIn cookie, which is basically a username and password.
00:06:54
Speaker
And we never did any automation on LinkedIn. So it is one of our core values. And we are talking and discussing that all the time, especially because it's very expensive in resources, in time, when you are doing like we are doing rather than doing like the automation way, because you can make similar features the other way as well.
00:07:22
Speaker
A couple of questions. In your view, you're doing something pretty straightforward, helping content creators create content. Another company that I've used in the past, Shield offers analytics. It would seem to me that this would be low hanging fruit for LinkedIn. These are features that they should
00:07:41
Speaker
embrace because the analytics and content creation features on LinkedIn are fairly basic. Are you surprised that LinkedIn hasn't moved into your territory and at the same time allowed, authored up to thrive, as we said at the start of the conversation, the company's doing really well. But do you ever wonder whether LinkedIn is going to wake up one day and say, we got to improve our content creation features and do what you guys are doing?
00:08:04
Speaker
we believe that LinkedIn should invest in creators more. On the editor side, on the analytics side, on anything that they can do to support creators. I think that also in the past two years, we are seeing more and more features that are on the creator side. Two years ago, there was not something like that. We can see also that they are investing in company pages. They are trying company pages to become a separate entity.
00:08:29
Speaker
In the feed as well, you have messaging for right now for company pages, et cetera. We believe that they will come at some point and that they will improve and they are adding stuff here and there. We can see that they are improving their editor and also they improved analytics. It's not great for sure, but it is better than it was. There are things that they are doing on their side and I think that they will do it even more in the future.
00:08:56
Speaker
What advice would you offer an entrepreneur who looks at LinkedIn, has an idea for a service that LinkedIn isn't meeting right now? And they come to you and they say, Ivana, super excited about LinkedIn. I have this idea, but I don't wanna be offside. I wanna be a friend to LinkedIn as opposed to a direct competitor. I don't want them to shut me down before I get started. What advice would you offer those type of entrepreneurs?
00:09:25
Speaker
First is to assess what exactly are you doing and do you harm LinkedIn or do you help them out? So if you're harming, for example, scraping data, that is definitely something they don't want you to do or to spam people because when you build a tool that is for spam or
00:09:41
Speaker
enables for example sending hundreds or thousands of messages to people that you don't know, then you are harming their platform and their profits because people are leaving the platform and seeing their DMs as a big no. I think that the assessment of what exactly are you doing with LinkedIn and also with
00:10:01
Speaker
your potential users. If you're going to build a tool that maybe you won't be harmed but a typical user will get banned in a month or two, do you want to build that type of a company or project even though it will make you money? On our side, it's a big no, but we know that companies are going into that direction as well. The obvious question would be if you're building something or launching something, should you
00:10:29
Speaker
reach out to LinkedIn and say, hey, we're building this tool that's gonna enhance the LinkedIn experience and make it more valuable. Do you communicate with them to make sure that you're on side, or would you recommend that you stay on side by not scraping, by not automating, launch your product, and then if LinkedIn has a problem, they'll come to you. Are you proactive or reactive?
00:10:54
Speaker
We were reactive. We are still reactive. We read our terms. We said, okay, we will behave according to that. When you are starting an application like this with a very small team and on the other side, you have an enterprise with who knows how many managers you don't even know, what am I going to do to write to customer support and say,
00:11:12
Speaker
I would like to do something like this. Do you like that idea? There is no way for direct communication and they don't know even how I would like, what exactly can I communicate to them? That's why we said we'll behave according to rules.
00:11:28
Speaker
And on the other side, we'll do something that doesn't harm LinkedIn, even more importantly, doesn't harm our potential users and ourselves. So that's how we set up the stage and that's how we operate from the day one to day is the same.
00:11:44
Speaker
Fair to say that so far so good, the LinkedIn powers that be have deemed you to be a good partner as opposed to a competitor. That's great. Looking at your entrepreneurial journey with Authored Up, what unexpected hurdles did you encounter when you're trying to grow the company and how did you overcome
Expanding Authored Up's Features
00:12:02
Speaker
them? And can you share a learning experience that you've had with the Authored Up, the key takeaways that you could offer to other entrepreneurs trying to grow a business?
00:12:11
Speaker
We had a few moments where we were thinking like what to do. And when we started outered up, that was like a very small tool that was in front of the LinkedIn editor. And it only enabled people to do a preview and add Unicode formatting. Then we started to add features and we added drafts, et cetera. But at some point we realized that we cannot live in that capacity and that we need
00:12:36
Speaker
a bigger tool. First of all, nobody wants to pay for just these two features. That has any business sense. Obviously, maybe you can sell a lifetime deal for 29 bucks, but that is not something how you can survive. On the other side, we also have the whole community. We have an open roadmap.
00:12:55
Speaker
So we were getting a lot of feedback. We need this feature. This is how it's going to help us. So it was very hard to decide what to do because we had to make a decision whether we'll keep doing in this small window or we are going to rewrite basically a whole application. And we did the second thing. We spent almost two and a half or three months
00:13:21
Speaker
redoing most of the features that we already have plus a bit of a small additional features and launching Authored Up 2.0. I've been a Authored Up user for a long time. I started using it when there was a beta and it was free. I'm curious about the background around Authored Up's business model and how that has evolved.
00:13:43
Speaker
Obviously, free beta is a great way to attract users and spread the word and to learn along the way about what users want and what they don't want. Can you talk about how the company managed the journey from free to paid? Some of the things that it learned along the way, how much pushback you got when you decided to turn on the free service and what are the things that you did to encourage or motivate users to become customers?
00:14:12
Speaker
First of all, our startup is bootstrapped from day one. It's still a bootstrapped company. We decided to do it like that. Even though we had a lot of interest from investors, we wanted to have not only the ownership, but also to make decisions according to values that we have and also feedback of our customers. From day one, it was a bootstrapped. When we launched, we knew at that moment that we cannot charge or even if we can charge again, it doesn't make sense. We wanted to
00:14:41
Speaker
use beta to be like our main marketing channel to provide a tool that looks like a paid tool that has more and more features to build in public, to do releases as much as possible, and then to pack.
00:14:57
Speaker
the solution as it should be for our ideal customers. We spent about 13 months in Free Beta from the first launch to the moment when we started to charge. And in that period, we had obviously ups and downs. We spent two and a half months rewriting because we were bootstrapping and basically spending all the money that we earned already in our previous jobs. It wasn't that easy.
00:15:23
Speaker
We were supported by Science and Technology Park here in Serbia, so that was a positive thing. We are still in their office. We, at some point, realized, okay, this seems like a full pack. This is a solution that really solves the problem that we addressed, and we can start charging. By that moment, we had more than 30,000 beta users. It was basically people that created account and altered up and installed the extension and did something there. Then we made the campaign.
00:15:53
Speaker
That was one month long and we said, okay, for early adopters, everyone that stayed with us will give them a special price. It will be 25% lower than the price that we'll put as a regular price on the website. When we launch, we'll immediately have two prices. First is regular and the second one is for early adopters. Only those that were in beta, at least for one day you had to beat beta, to be allowed.
00:16:20
Speaker
And that's when we started the campaign. First, we just announced the payment. Also, we gave a month for free from 15th of August to 15th of September. More or less, we basically told to all early adopters, if you decide to, first of all, here you are one month for free. We started to charge, but you can use it. And then if you want to use it, you'll have 25% off. And if you decide to be our early adopter, as we call this campaign,
00:16:48
Speaker
will lock your price, so it won't go up in the future. What you're paying right now, you'll pay in the future as well. And we converted a lot of people in that time frame.
00:17:00
Speaker
I'm curious about if you want to disclose it or not, whether it's a state secret, but in terms of how well did that campaign work? What were your conversion rates of these 30,000 free users? Was it better than you expected? Was it worse than you expected? It was 2.5 times better than we expected. I can just give you some ideas.
Competitors and Growth Strategies
00:17:21
Speaker
First, what we were looking at were weekly active users.
00:17:24
Speaker
Even though we had 30,000 emails and people that installed altered up, we were just looking for those that are using because they are the ones that potentially are willing to pay. We had about 7,000 of these. Out of the 7,000, we converted more than 25, 30%. From a competitive standpoint, who keeps you up at night?
00:17:50
Speaker
Is it LinkedIn's native tool? Is it people working in Google docs, which is something that I used for, for many years as a repository? Is it word, are there other LinkedIn content creation tools out there? How competitive is the landscape and what's your unique value proposition? What differentiates you from the other options out there?
00:18:15
Speaker
When people are unsubscribing or descending to uninstall extension, we have a questionnaire, a few questions. And what keeps up me at night is Notion. That's something that I see as an answer. What is the alternative? Do you want to use Outered Up? What are you going to use? Usually it's Notion. Google Docs as well, but it seems that Notion is really, is killing in that space. Also due to the templates that they have. Then you have LinkedIn native editor and
00:18:44
Speaker
everything that they are building, I think that it will become better and better in the future and that we need to run faster than them in order to succeed. And also to be able to collect feedback faster and to address pain points of our typical customer because LinkedIn has
00:19:03
Speaker
almost a billion or a billion customers right now. And we are addressing a specific type of user. And then regarding the competitors, there are competitors. I think that even more competitors are coming in the next year and not only in content creation, but anything that is related to B2B space content slash social selling slash sales on LinkedIn recruitment, et cetera. We'll see more tools as people are seeing obviously an opportunity.
00:19:33
Speaker
It will be very interesting to see how and if LinkedIn builds that ecosystem of companies that are supporting the platform. So far, it's hard to tell
00:19:48
Speaker
what that partnership ecosystem looks like, whether this is something LinkedIn wants or whether it's going to be very protective of the platform. In terms of growing Authord up and spreading the word and driving brand awareness, what are the marketing strategies that have been most effective for the company? You're bootstrapped.
00:20:09
Speaker
You don't have a big marketing budget, I suspect. What kind of programs or channels is authored up using and how do you leverage LinkedIn itself as a platform for marketing, authored up?
00:20:24
Speaker
First, we have a clear positioning that we are just a content tool. For regular people that want to create content on LinkedIn, our solution needs to be simple, and our communication needs to be simple and straightforward. Outdoor app is still growing based on word of mouth. Beta helped us a lot.
00:20:43
Speaker
And most of the customers are coming based on the referrals or word of mouth. We still don't have a referral program that we are building right now, but that's one thing. Our marketing budget was zero. We didn't pay any influencer to talk about us, but providing something for free made people to want to share their experience or at least say thank you.
00:21:04
Speaker
We are getting a lot of comments or posts on LinkedIn about Outered App or mentioning that people are using Outered App for their content creation. We are also communicating and we are there in comment section when Outered App is mentioned as a company. We like to
00:21:21
Speaker
have an authored up company patron LinkedIn to be an entity and to communicate, discuss, share insights, address issues, if there is anything. So we are there, we are transparent. We are saying, sorry, we are saying this is not how it works. We are saying this is our issue. This is LinkedIn's issue. It's about transparency, networking, and word of mouth.
00:21:44
Speaker
As the company moves forward, do you envision raising venture capital so you can do more aggressive marketing, so you can expand the platform, expand internationally as that part of the roadmap? As a bootstrap company, it's great to be independent. It's an amazing thing where you don't have to listen to investors who may have a different vision and mandate than the founders. Is it something you're exploring right now, or do you see yourself staying independent for the time being?
00:22:12
Speaker
We don't plan to raise any funds. And we believe that we are solving a specific issue, a specific problem for a specific group that we don't need to promise that will be valued 100 million or a billion. We don't need to become a unicorn. And when you're raising funds, they are asking you at least 10x the value of the company, right? We don't want to
00:22:35
Speaker
be so aggressive and to prioritize stuff that are important to growth rather than the product quality and existing customers. So the second thing on top of not taking a cookie, etc., is how we operate. And that's from day one. We believe that existing customers are more important than the new ones.
00:22:57
Speaker
When I say more important, feedback from people using OutertApp, paying for OutertApp, they need to be satisfied with existing features. Whenever we are thinking about something new or addressing something that needs to be resolved, we will do a bug fix or something like that. We believe that by making it a real company and not startup that needs to grow, even though we are really having a great growth rate, but to do it a bit differently rather than trying to take over the whole market, because we don't need the whole market. We just need to serve.
00:23:27
Speaker
specific group of regular people, corporate influencers, et cetera, that are willing to share their thoughts on LinkedIn. It's an interesting perspective because venture capital is seen as the ultimate goal for entrepreneurs. It validates your success. It tells the world that what you're doing is working.
00:23:47
Speaker
And it's a very tempting creature because you can put a big check mark beside your company, but at the same time, I often say that once you take venture capital, you give up control of your company. It's no longer in your hands, regardless of whether you're the main investor in running the company. The other thing in terms of customer service, and I can attest to this, is that if I have a problem, it's amazing how quickly you respond or somebody responds. So I give you a lot of credit, especially at a time when it's hard to attract
00:24:16
Speaker
new customers. It's easier and more powerful to keep what you got as opposed to trying to get out there and attract new ones. I think you could do really good work on that side. Final question, and this is a bit of an, I don't know, esoteric or high level question is,
00:24:31
Speaker
How do you perceive the current landscape for LinkedIn content creation and the role of creators on the platform?
LinkedIn's Role in Content Creation Evolution
00:24:40
Speaker
In your view, how is LinkedIn evolving as a platform for professionals? And what do you see as their vision for content creation? If you take a step back and you listen to the content creation community, it's a bit of a love hate relationship with LinkedIn. On one hand, creators feel like they're driving the platform forward. They're making it more valuable. They're driving.
00:25:01
Speaker
engagement and they should be rewarded for their efforts. And on the other hand, they feel that LinkedIn doesn't give them enough love. The tools that they launch don't align with what they see as valuable or useful. LinkedIn will launch things and then pull it back or they'll change the rules of engagement or they'll punish people for no reason. It's a bit of a minefield when it comes to
00:25:24
Speaker
to managing LinkedIn. The question here, if there's a question is how do you see LinkedIn evolving as a content platform and what role
00:25:35
Speaker
will companies like Author.Play in terms of supporting that vision? I think that the big question is how LinkedIn as a company is making decisions. We are always thinking that there is one entity, one person, someone, one board that will make decisions about everything that is related to creators. I believe that there are teams that are trying to make their KPIs, their metrics, and one of the metrics is release new features that are going to help LinkedIn
00:26:04
Speaker
like this. It will make LinkedIn revenues for ads 1% higher. When they are making decisions is not only based on creators' feedback and what creators feel is right. The power at the end is on the platform because we are all there and trying to compete between ourselves for part of the feed. I think that the decision making is a bit different and that even though if
00:26:30
Speaker
it was only one person that we can talk to and say okay so listen we really need this feature it will help us save us time we'll get the feedback but like this when you have an enterprise you never know how exactly they're making decisions and what KPIs they are measuring to
00:26:48
Speaker
get higher or to succeed to get the bonus, whatever. Then it comes to what do we believe it will happen in the next years. First of all, LinkedIn will get even more into extract phase. So I believe that a lot of users is already there, that there is not
00:27:07
Speaker
much place to grow even further. And they will start, what does it mean? It means even more ads. We are seeing more ads in the feed right now. We'll see them in the future even more. That for company pages, they will really need to be super innovative to get a part of the feed and the organic engagement because for company pages, it can become a pay to play game. They are starting with these features, at least testing them with
00:27:35
Speaker
creating more creators with the AI, et cetera. And on the other side, ads or some revenue share with content creators where a company page right now can support and pay ads for their employee to start creating content or supporting one specific post, boosting it. It becomes more and more. It's super easy right now. You don't need to go to their ads. I think that it will be, they will do ads.
00:28:04
Speaker
And on the other side that, that they will become more and more creators. Final question is where can people learn more about you and authored up? They can find me on LinkedIn. Obviously. And for authored up, authoredup.com is our website. They can find it on from store where they can get the extension. They can also find the authored up as a LinkedIn page. We are trying to engage in the feed as well. Those are the main channels that we use.
00:28:35
Speaker
Thanks Ivana for telling me the story about authored up and your entrepreneurial journey. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and share it by social media. If you're a B2B or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads, but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. I work as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor.
00:29:00
Speaker
My services include a 90-day marketing sprint that combines strategy and tactical execution to move the needle quickly. And one more thing, I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark. It's more of a guide than a book. It features tools, templates, and worksheets to jumpstart your marketing and brand storytelling. It's perfect for entrepreneurs and you can of course find it on Amazon. You can reach out to me via email, mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.