Episode 5: He built Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs. It's pretty good

Here is the transcript so ChatGPT and other AI tools can scrape this episode to give us more SEO/GEO 😄

Mitchell Tan (00:00)
gadget I can set up that might help. ⁓

Daniel Greenberg (00:03)
Let's

go, you got all the gadgets. William, everything sounding good?

Mitchell Tan (00:12)
I have a slight. Okay, cool. All right. And then you want me to share condo. So let me just go make sure I have that ready to share.

Matt Huang (00:13)
Nice.

Daniel Greenberg (00:14)
Perfect.

Mitchell Tan (00:31)
Okay, so yeah, I think I'm good. ⁓ Once again.

Alright, okay, so I have focused

Daniel Greenberg (00:45)
Do you

have any questions for us before we get started?

Mitchell Tan (00:47)
no! ⁓ I do not. I'm here to answer questions, not ask them, I guess.

Matt Huang (00:52)
Haha, am I right?

Fair, fair enough. ⁓ Yeah, we'll try to keep it as conversational as possible, Mitchell. And honestly, if there's like anything you think of halfway through where like, you know, you think it would be a good thing to bring up, feel free to do so. Otherwise, like Daniel and I will just tag team questions and ⁓ yeah, let's just have fun with it.

Mitchell Tan (01:09)
Hm?

Matt Huang (01:19)
Awesome. Cool. I can kick things off. and then let's just cool. Awesome. So welcome to this episode of the connection accepted podcast today. We have a really exciting guest. have Mitchell Tan, who's the co-founder of condo Mitchell. Thanks so much for joining us.

Daniel Greenberg (01:24)
do it.

Mitchell Tan (01:40)
Thanks for having me. I accept the connection, I guess.

Matt Huang (01:46)
Perfect. Amazing. ⁓ So could you just start with like giving the audience for their benefit, a quick background on who you are, what Condo is, what you're building, what even led you to the point where you wanted to build this tool. Let's just start there.

Mitchell Tan (02:03)
Yeah, sure. So ⁓ I guess I've been running around the startup space for a while. ⁓ In one job, was doing go-to-market at an early stage startup. So sent a lot of LinkedIn messages. I think this was a bit earlier days in LinkedIn, where the ⁓ outreach reply rates were even higher than they are now. So it's a lot easier than email then to get execs on the line to chat with them. So I was sending lots of LinkedIn messages at that job.

And then ⁓ after that, I ran a recruiting firm where, as you can imagine, I also send a lot of LinkedIn messages. And in both those roles, I was really frustrated day to day with how much admin time I was spending going through LinkedIn, ⁓ updating a spreadsheet with when I'm supposed to follow up with the guy next, ⁓ write text.

manually labeling people in a notion table or some other tool. And all this time, this was years, and all this time I was like, hey, my other parts of my workflow look pretty cool. I have this thing called Superhuman for my email. I have all these fancy tools for literally everything else I do except LinkedIn, where I'm still stuck with basically a spreadsheet companion.

always, mean, at any point in that time, if you had asked me for like 50 bucks a month to give me a superhuman for LinkedIn, I would have been like, yay, here it is, let's go, right? But yeah, I shopped around and there wasn't such a tool. And I was just assuming someone was going to build it, but no one did. And so I guess when the time came around and I was like, oh, let's go build a SaaS, right?

one of the shortlist ideas, right? Because it was something I would have paid for. And then I guess I found people who would have paid for it too, and then we went and built it. Yeah. So that's basically how we landed on Condo, which is essentially a superhuman-like experience, but for your LinkedIn messages instead of your email. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with what superhuman is, you can look it up. It's like this email app, which basically helps you do your emails a lot faster.

than Gmail or other.

Daniel Greenberg (04:32)
It's funny you say, you know, for those who don't know what superhuman is, were talking in our previous podcast with Jason about how we're in such a bubble that most people, Mitchell, don't know what Clueless is or a lot of things that we talk about every day on LinkedIn. So could you run us through, ⁓ like share your screen and show us what condo, how you use it and the best tips for people to use it.

Mitchell Tan (04:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, of course. basically, Condo, let me show my screen. Screen, window, OK. So Condo plugs in. So this is my LinkedIn inbox in Condo. Condo basically plugs into your LinkedIn inbox and turns it into something a bit more like email. So here are all my LinkedIn chats, right? And then I'm

we kind of built this app around this idea of inbox zero. So instead of leaving all your messages piling up and having to scroll through them all the time, you can kind of take a few key actions here to keep this organized. So one thing I can do is I can label Cole as a customer. Cole's the founder of Pelicone, so I can say customer. And then he's going to auto sort into this separate folder of customers. So you can prioritize different groups of people into different folders. So for example,

⁓ If I want to go with this guy as a friend, for example, then I have a friend folder. So you can just email, split your messages up into different tabs. ⁓ So that's first thing you can do. The second thing you can do is ⁓ set a reminder. So let's say I want to get back to Cole tomorrow if he doesn't reply to me. Instead of having to scroll down and remember it or star it or mark it as unread, which is what you do in LinkedIn, here you can just set a reminder, say tomorrow, and he's gone.

but he'll be back tomorrow or when he replies me. So this way I don't have to remember or write down somewhere else when it's time to follow up. ⁓ And then in your LinkedIn, there are probably some people where you're just done chatting with them. You don't have anything more to say to them right now unless they message you again. So you can easily hit Archive ⁓ to send them to the archive. So the idea here is you can sort your inbox out, ⁓ set reminders, keep it clean, and then obviously,

you can actually do the messages in here. So if you go into these messages, you can type and ⁓ use keyboard shortcuts to write a bit faster and stuff like that. Yeah, so that's what it is at a high level. ⁓

Matt Huang (06:59)
That's really interesting. Thanks for that demo. ⁓ Thanks for that demo, Mitchell. Curious one question, because I know there's LinkedIn DMs and then there's in-mails. Does this work with both?

Mitchell Tan (07:13)
Yeah, there are actually a few different types of in-mails. ⁓ If you get in-mails in regular LinkedIn sometimes because you have an open profile and something like that, you do get that in Kondo. ⁓ We are also finishing a Sales Navigator integration. So as you can see, some of my chats here are from Sales Nav. So yeah, you'll also be able to get Sales Nav messages in here as well.

Daniel Greenberg (07:43)
Do you have any formal relationship with LinkedIn or have you just made this totally on your own?

Mitchell Tan (07:49)
Yeah, no, we don't. We're third party tools, so we don't have like, you know, we aren't commercially related to LinkedIn in any way. ⁓ Just like other tools in the market, right? ⁓ Yeah, so no, LinkedIn doesn't have a partnership program for like messaging tools. The only partnership programs they have are for like, if you're a greenhouse or, you know, Ashby or like have an ATS or...

maybe if your Salesforce a hotspot, But they don't, there isn't a way we can like partner officially with LinkedIn if we want to build a messaging app.

Matt Huang (08:30)
Really interesting. So Mitchell, I kind of want to switch gears a little bit. Obviously, you're promoting a tool that ⁓ is for LinkedIn users and you're a pretty frequent poster on your own LinkedIn account. Curious how you sort of approached marketing condo. Are you only marketing it on LinkedIn? Are you guys going through other channels? I'm assuming LinkedIn is your main marketing channel.

Mitchell Tan (08:56)
Yeah, I'd say ⁓ at least for now, actually, most people find out about us, not through any marketing we do, but they just hear about it. I actually don't know how you guys heard about us, but yeah, the grapevine, friends, something like that. Sometimes our users, we release a new feature, they're happy, they talk about us on LinkedIn, or they tag us. So I'd say...

A vast majority of discovery of condos still happens not because we do something. I post regularly, but I'd say that brings in 5 % or 10 % of signups. ⁓ And most of the signups come, I don't even know, I often show up to a customer call and I'm like, how did you find out about us? Was it my post? And they're like, nope, definitely not your post. Never seen your post before. There's some other guy somewhere. So yeah.

I obviously post on LinkedIn because it's where our users are and it's where people learn about updates in a product or ⁓ how the company is going and what we're learning along the way. But yeah, I would say most of demand is not marketing driven right now. It's just ⁓ word of mouth driven, which is a blessing and a curse for a business. The blessing is like, yay, it's free and you don't...

have to do anything to get it. But the curse is that you can't, like, you can't, if people are talking in product, you can't, like, make that go exponentially by spending more money, right? It will grow, but by itself and on its own rules and this, yeah, unlike marketing, you can't just, like, you know, scale inputs to scale outputs.

Daniel Greenberg (10:44)
Well, Mitchell, think you have to give yourself some more credit. You've got, you know, nine, almost 10,000 followers. And that's how I first came across condo, seeing one of your posts. And I've also seen you ⁓ run those thought leader ads, which we were also talking to Jason about in the previous episode. Can you run us through your thoughts or I actually think let's start with how you write the post and then get into why you

Mitchell Tan (11:09)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Greenberg (11:12)
are using the Thought Leader ads and how those are going. So how do you write a post when you're going about it? Tell your audience of 9,000 followers.

Mitchell Tan (11:20)
⁓ I don't really have a kind of repeatable method, to be honest. I aspire to have one. ⁓ there are temp. I mean, like if you go do a LinkedIn course or read one of these LinkedIn influencers, there are frameworks around how to build one. But I don't use them. I don't have a framework of my own. ⁓

I usually have some inspiration in the day of what's an interesting story or something that will be either entertaining or valuable. And then ⁓ if an idea strikes, I try and write it down. And I have a small bank of these ideas. And sometimes when I run out of ideas, I go back to that bank. But it's really what I feel inspired to talk about that day. And sometimes that makes it really hard because sometimes I'm...

know, deep in something else. I have no inspiration. But yeah, I just try and find something, a story that's like, I feel will be educational or entertaining ⁓ and turn that into a post. And this tends to revolve around a few, it has like, as it's played out, it's revolves around a few themes, right? One theme is like, we tend to like make fun.

LinkedIn a lot. for example, a post that did really well is I said, LinkedIn has 10,000 engineers and 500 product managers. And if you just took one product manager and 10 of those engineers, you probably ship a better inbox in a month or something like that. But they do not. I wonder why. So that's a post I made.

What was that inspired by? I was sitting at an airport and I was like, oh, like, you know, I wonder how many engineers LinkedIn employs. I didn't know the number, so I went to look it up and I was like, oh, this would be a cool post, right? So that's one theme. And other themes, like we try and like share how it's like building a company. So a lot of people don't realize this, but the condo is just like me and my co-founder. And until very recently, that was it. Now we also have an engineer, but yeah, it's like three of us supporting

now like more than a thousand paying customers, right? So why are we in this situation? Because we chose to bootstrap, we chose not to raise venture money, we chose not to build like a bigger team, right? And so that's like, I'd say that's not like a one person unique journey, but like that's a slightly different path from many other SaaS companies, right? And so we try and share some of the learnings or like why that's hard sometimes, right? We're also doing this for the first time, we haven't found it.

multiple SaaS companies previously, so everything is kind of new to us. And I try and pick a story that something I learned this week. last week I shared, I broke my app. We did something silly, and we broke the app a while. And that sucked, right? And we try and talk about that. ⁓ Yeah, so that's another theme. ⁓ So there are a few themes, right? ⁓ And other themes, just sometimes I random musings about the world. For example, a recent post I made was like,

Matt Huang (14:18)
Yeah.

Mitchell Tan (14:30)
⁓ you know, there's all this like buzz around like 996 and you know, startups like grind, like grinding really hard. And my reflection on that, like, which is my actual reflection was that, Hey, when I, you know, got my first job in Singapore, like everyone ground really hard and I wasn't even working with startups, like some random, like you guys know, like consulting, right? you, you people in consulting work a lot, but

people in consulting don't go around the world saying, like the only way to be a successful consultant is to work, you know, like 10 or 12 hours. Like no one makes that big a deal about it, right? It's just like life, right? ⁓ And, but startups seem to make such a big deal about it. So I was reflecting on that and I was like, I have like, I feel like I've like a, you like somewhat of a unique point of view on this. And so my pose was like, Hey, it's not that big a deal that's that startups you work really hard. Like lawyers work really hard.

bankers work really hard, doctors work really hard, everyone in Asia works really hard because the boss makes you work really hard. Whether it's right or wrong, good or bad, it's fine. You can go debate that. But to me, from my personal point of view, that's not what makes a startup different. ⁓ That's not special about startups. What makes startups special for me is, hey, some of the people working 12 hours a day actually enjoy it a lot and they choose to do that.

And they actually see that every extra hour I put in translates to like growth in the next week for the company, which translates to like my equity getting more valuable or my career going a lot faster, right? And that kind of like immediacy of the impact of the hours rather than like it being like just because your boss told you to or just because the way it is, right? Like to me that stood out when I first worked for a startup. anyway, to circle back to your question, yeah, I kind of have settled on some topics that

I feel like I have something to say, right? And then I keep that in my head. And then every day I'm like, oh, I wonder if there's new I have to say on one of these topics. And if I don't, then I don't post. And then if I do, then I post and see what happens.

Matt Huang (16:42)
Yeah, I think, well, first of all, a couple of thoughts. Man, where do I start? I definitely agree with you, I think like in consulting, for example, and I worked at BCG and I'm no longer there. So I'll just say what's on my mind. there was like a general conception that, you I worked out of the New York office and New York among the offices in the US was considered to be definitely one of the

Hmm, how do we put this? Offices with longer hours. ⁓ but then when we compared ourselves to say like our Asian counterparts, and at some point I was looking at a, ⁓ transfer, temporary transfer program where you could go to Singapore, you could go to Tokyo and you know, it sounds really fun in theory, but after I talked to consultants who were working out at those offices, they were like, steer clear, man, unless you want to be like sleeping and living in the office, ⁓ just be wary of the work culture in these other countries. ⁓ the second thing though, want to

to touch on is like, I think you're absolutely right. The best way to come up with content, especially if you're a creator or founder is honestly to just talk about the stuff that you're currently doing or take a topic that is trending or that a lot of people are talking about in the space and then just put your own spin onto it. And I feel like you've done this really well. And I was looking at a lot of your posts before this. I've noticed Mitchell, you've also played around quite a bit with different.

formats of posts. So some of them you have like infographics, others you have just plain text. You also have a fair number of posts that are, you know, video as well. So I'm curious if you've noticed any differences in engagement or ⁓ trends with different types of posts that you put out there recently.

Mitchell Tan (18:18)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ I don't like, have multiple formats, not actually not again, not out of deliberate experimentation again, like there, there is like a better way to probably run my content. Like if I was like a content agency, like trying to run my content, I'd like, you know, like go like be clear, like be more like structured about the way we do this and like, you know, I experiment and, and, and, have like questions, answers questions, like which formats work better.

⁓ I think the reality is I have different formats because I have an idea and the idea blends itself. For example, if I'm going to announce a new feature, it only makes sense that you see the damn thing. A text post is weird. Even if you thought text posts were the best format, it'd be weird to announce a new feature for your product without showing people what it does, how it looks, what's the button.

Right? ⁓ So that, so like, I think that's fairly simple, but like all the product announcements, something in some kind of image or video. And then I, and then with the video at first, if you like kind of look back, I, I, there's this like typical format where you screen studio and like, you know, founders have the square in the corner and then like they, you know, like they zoom in, it zooms into like the buttons and it shows you, Hey, here's a cool new feature. And then I was like, huh, the problem there is I'm this square in a corner. And then like, you know, like,

that you have to use the mouse to point at it. like, and then I was like, why don't we do it TikTok style? And so like, I started experimenting with like the video software has gotten better. It can like remove your background. So it's like, if I'm going to point to a button, I might as well like be the head, the top, the head that's like with my finger pointing at a button. So I did the kind of that style and I was like, well, if the button is the top right and I can move my head to the top right too, cause like it's right there. And so I think that led to this whole like bunch of video stuff. And then in the same way, like,

⁓ We do some customer testimonials and I think ⁓ if the point of the post is someone's experience using the product, then you do want to see the guy's and know who he is and know he's real and know this isn't some post I manufactured and got them to approve. You get it in their own words roughly and you see the guy's face. And so I think a certain type of format of post has like...

it comes from, at least for me, it comes from what the post is about. And does the format lend further to it or not? For example, some posts where it's like, there's a really strong hook. If you said something, for example, when I did that post, LinkedIn has 10,000 engineers and 500 PMs, right?

it would be kind of weird, or the effect would have been really different if I gave you an infographic or I put a video on it. The point of that post was like, OK, so what? I want to know more. And then it lends itself to text posts quite well. I'd say ⁓ there are, I don't know, ⁓ maybe for me, it starts with what's the idea, and then like,

what roughly is the story, and then what content format supports that story versus what format a post does well and therefore what content do we fit into that format. ⁓ Yeah, if that makes sense. I think my overall reflection on this is I'm very haphazard about this. I don't approach this like a content agency would. I approach it like I have an hour of time. What do I do?

I'm building a LinkedIn tool. my gosh, I need to post something. What do I say? Right.

Daniel Greenberg (22:19)
So have you seen, so I mean, and if you don't know the answer to this or have any strong opinions, because ⁓ Matt and I might about this topic, but have you seen any difference in engagement between your videos and non-video posts?

Mitchell Tan (22:32)
No, I think I've seen a difference between like good posts and bad posts. Yeah. Again, I haven't analyzed as well. if you try to look at my post, me if I'm wrong. But I the biggest difference is that you know, like if, I think it even comes down to like, okay, so number one, like if the hook is strong enough, you get likes, right? Like you get reads and you get likes.

So if you're not getting as many likes, probably the hook wasn't strong enough. ⁓ One of my strongest hooks was, my co-founder spent $8,000 on a laptop. Here's why it was worth it. ⁓ It got a lot of impressions and a lot of likes. So example. ⁓ Then number two is dwell time. I think if people read all the way to the end, and then there's some kind of engagement bit, like what do you think, or like, know.

Daniel Greenberg (23:28)
catch my bait

Mitchell Tan (23:28)
Right. Yeah.

Like some kind of prompt to like, what should I say in a comment or like what, like what, in what format should my response be in a way which like keeps this conversation going? Then I think you will get comments. ⁓ and if you don't get enough comments, it means that the start, like people didn't read to the end and feel like they're sufficiently bought into this conversation to keep it going. Or like you didn't like, or it's too vague. What kind of comment people should like.

respond with. so they're like, think, think. I have some opinions, but I don't know what to say. Right. Like, okay, next post. Right. So in my, I think about it psychologically, right. If like, let's hook strong enough, I'll stay here and I'll leave a like, because like, cool. You stood out and you stopped my scroll. And then like, if the story is interesting enough and you have like some prompt for me to like respond or talk back, then I leave a comment. and so I try and optimize it for it that way. And I do see like my better hooks get

more likes and my worst hoax get worse likes, right? But video or not, it don't matter.

At least that's how I see it. ⁓

Matt Huang (24:42)
What do you think about the recent engagement bait posts that are like comment word and I'll give you this 10 step playbook or, you know, I'll give you this guide and then it gets like 2000 comments. What do you think about those?

Mitchell Tan (24:56)
Yeah, lead magnets, ⁓ I think they obviously work. ⁓ And needless to say, better the thing on offer, the better it works. For example, some of the best examples I've seen are this guy, He's a YC founder building ⁓ an app that helps non-native speakers learn like

business English. I think it's called Fluently is the company. So he does this quite well. Whenever he does something like, here's, I gathered all the decks that YC startups use to raise the seed around, something like that. ⁓ If the content is actually valuable and the guy put it in work, got a bunch of stuff that you would otherwise find hard to get, ⁓ does pretty well. I ⁓ think the problem with that is,

Like not everyone, like, okay, there are a few problems with that. One problem is I keep hearing like whenever people like leave that comment, they don't actually get the thing. Like some people just don't get the thing. And like, you know, if you told people you'll get the thing, you should send them the thing. And so some people get upset because they don't get the thing. Um, to like a lot of like, it's like very low investment for me to go like leave a comment if I really want the thing. like, if your hope was that you would get like qualified engagement or like you'd get a lead out of it, I'd expect like.

very few of these people actually be leads, which is why, if you're kind of like, play it out, which is why people don't send the thing to everyone, which disappoints some people, right? So there's some like bits of this mechanics, which, you know, feels a bit iffy or like leaves some people with poor experience, but it works, right? If your goal is like game the algorithm, right? To like get reach to go up because like it basically artificially manufactures like comments that are not like real comments, then I think it will do better than like...

not doing that. ⁓ But I think if you zoom out even further and ask, is this healthy for the ecosystem? I think no. I ⁓ think the point of a common thread is a back and forth conversation where you can see different people's views and you can engage on it on a topic. ⁓ A bunch of people leaving, give me that. The common thread for that thing is useless.

you might as well make it like a lead gen form where I fill in my email and I'm like, right, you get what mean? Like, I don't think these having more of these posts, like if this takes up 10 % of all posts, then it's like bad because I will spend a lot of time in like useless comment admin. Everyone will spend a bunch of time in useless comment admin basically, rather than actually like saying what they think, right? Or like leaving an actual comment.

Right? So yeah, I think you should do like, if your goal is to get leads, it's a great way. I don't do it because I think it takes a lot of time to make and whatever. I'm too busy. And like, again, most of our demand right now is organic. But if you're an agency or if you have a service and you have like a good resource, right, you should do it. It helps you. But I don't think, I think if everyone did that, like it'd be bad. Right? So I wish LinkedIn would move.

in another direction. ⁓ And that direction might be, I have this valuable thing. Get it for free. Don't need to leave a comment. Here it is. Here's the link. I made a guide on how do you do xyz. Here's the link to it. Go to the link. The end. And then if I find it interesting, I'll leave a comment. I read it. And I have a question. Or I'm curious how you put this together. Or is this written?

I think that kind of conversation is more interesting than please give it to me.

Daniel Greenberg (28:50)
I agree and there's no condo for comments. So it's hard. All those, you know, 2000 comments will get, we get lost. So once you have that viral post Mitchell that, you know, you have your hook, you have your engagement bait, which is a great phrase that I love. We honestly need a, a LinkedIn guide of just LinkedIn lingo, because I'm sure you have a lot, but once you have that post, what is your thought process like to, to push ads behind it?

because I've seen some of those on your page with one of those thought leader ads. We were talking to Jason Alvarez Cohen, the CEO and founder of Popple, how he does that. And I'm curious to hear how you use that in your marketing strategy and how it's gone for you.

Mitchell Tan (29:31)
I'm still learning, right? I'm very new to basically paid marketing. My strategy right now is to retarget people which sign on our website and our company page. So the idea is not everyone who comes to our website and sees content on LinkedIn climbs up. You need 20, 30 touch points with someone before they sign up if they're qualified. one way to get more touches is like.

make more organic content and hope it shows up. like thought leadership ads is a good way to take a post, like new post that might not organically reach like the same people and just get them to see it. Right. So that's kind of the overall theory for me. Like it's like, like you're already somewhat aware of interest in condo. How do I like increase the number of like impressions you have of my brand per time. Right. So that if you

You would otherwise have taken three months to sign up. Now you take maybe one month because you've seen us in more places or something like that. ⁓ So that's why I spend money on them. ⁓ How they've went, I think, I'm still figuring. We've gotten some signups attributable to that in some way. ⁓ But I've struggled for a few reasons. One, thought leadership ads, unlike regular display ads, have lossy attribution.

in a regular display ad, there's a CTA button. There's a button that says, like, learn more, sign up more, blah, blah, blah, right? And it goes straight to your landing page. And then, like, like, that funnel is, a lot more trackable. In a thought leadership ad, there is not a CTA. You can put a link in your post or, you know, sometimes people click through to your profile or something like that. But, like, it's, harder to, attribute the clicks back to that ad. So, like, maybe you got some signups because the person saw three thought leadership ads, and then the next day, they're like, oh, my God, my LinkedIn inbox sucks, right? And then they go over our website and they sign up. And...

they might be having some effect. But it's hard to ask how much effect they are having compared to a display ad where the guy just clicks a thing and done. So we definitely have seen some. I do see examples where people see the Stall Leadership ad post. And they're like, I saw it. And then they sign up. And I talk to them and ask them, how did you find us? And then you see some of the like.

You told me, hey, I saw some of your posts, thought of your ship ads, right? But it's hard to quantify, are you getting your ROI on the spend? Because it is like you are spending money per impression, ⁓ unlike the organic posts. And so I'd say I'm still iterating and figuring out how to be sure. Because if they're working, do I go spend 3x more? How do you decide if you're going to increase your spend?

You only increase your spend if you know that you have payback, right? You have at least like 100 % ROAS, right? I don't know for sure. My thought leaderships have 100 % ROAS. So I don't know whether I allocate more of my marketing budget on it or not. And I'm pretty sure there's some experts out there who will be perfectly qualified to teach me how to do this right. But I'm still figuring it out, right? And so I think they're working to some extent.

I don't know how well they're working. And I don't know if I should spend more money on them. I think, but I have some ideas on how I can get clearer on this. One idea I have, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, one idea I have, which I haven't tried, is like incrementality testing. example, let's say I know I get, say, 20 signups from San Francisco a week, right?

Matt Huang (32:55)
Let's yeah, no, no, please. Let's dive into that.

Mitchell Tan (33:13)
⁓ we can track where people already sign up. If I targeted thought leadership ads only at people in San Francisco and spend say like thousand dollars on it a month or something, does my weekly sign up from San Francisco go up like X percent? ⁓ If it does, and I wasn't doing anything else just in San Francisco, which I'm not, then...

That's one way to go about it. You don't care what the click stream is. You can ignore all the lossiness in click attribution and multi-touch attribution. You can just say, hey, if I go spend an unusual amount of money in distribution to one split place or one type of job title, does my signups of that tiny bubble go up?

And then if it does, and the only thing you did was increase ad spend on that thing or spend any ads at all on that thing, then that's one way I think about it. But I haven't like, yeah, I feel like I've learned that running ads is somewhat of a full-time job, especially if you're not an ads expert. yeah, I got to prioritize it appropriately.

Matt Huang (34:30)
Yeah. And actually, because this is really interesting when you do run these thought leader ads, I'm assuming, you know, you're selecting a post that has performed really well organically, but like at what stage are you like, okay, it's time to, it's time to put some money behind this. it like a week, two weeks after the posts do you kind of not really have a time span?

Mitchell Tan (34:51)
⁓ Yeah, think about

it the other way. I start from, there are some people who are landing on a website and like seeing a coming page who are not like... I know for sure, like not every single one of those thousands of people like see my content every week, right? Like sometimes they see a post and sometimes they don't. ⁓ But they are like somewhat warm and they have not signed up or made a condo account yet, right? How do I reach them? Well, I can buy a display ad.

Well, I can like code email them, right? ⁓ Or I can show them a post of mine three times a week, right? And then, OK, like what post should we show them? right. They know what condo is already, right? ⁓ They might be considering it, right? So I show them like, ⁓ hey, here's a new feature demo. Or hey, here's what someone who uses it has to say about it, right? Or ⁓ something like that. I probably don't show them like,

a post like, hey, I broke my app and here's what I learned from the bugs in it. Like, like, like, I think I started with like, who are we going after? Like, what are they thinking about? What would help move them down the funnel? And then like, sponsored, sponsoring my own posts, ⁓ driving distribution inorganically to them is just like one content path into it. Right. It's like the asset which you can like use for that funnel. ⁓ Yeah. I don't think about when I posted it.

I think about, or even how well it did organically, actually. ⁓ I think even if it's like underperforming, but it's organically, but the content's like a good fit for like that stage of the funnel, I do it. ⁓ Yeah. And why? Because ads work by the way, like some people buy display ads on LinkedIn and they work. Display ads have no organic performance. The, all the likes come from like their distribution through an ad channel, but and

Sure, not all of them pay back, but some ads pay back. not, no one's going get like, if not, what on earth are CMOs doing? They are not just like burning money. Some of them are getting money back, right? So some display ads work. Display ads have no organic performance, but they still work. So like even your underperforming organic posts would still work, right? Like ⁓ so long as the content is good enough. And then the organic performance is just like a litmus on like, it's like one signal of like, is the content good enough? Like is the content like,

relevant enough to your ICP. didn't perform, if it zero likes organically, it's probably bad content, right? ⁓ But if it's 10 likes versus 20 likes versus 30 likes, you know, maybe it was like really good content for the 10 people who liked it and maybe like something else, like the organic distribution when it arrived or whatever you posted on a Sunday afternoon or something like that, right? But don't matter, like if the content's good, like just go try to spend some money on it and see what happens. Yeah.

Daniel Greenberg (37:48)
So you're doing this for your thought leader ads, but there are lot of other ads you can run on LinkedIn and other channels to grow. Whether you're putting ads behind your company page or hiring a ghost writer. Have you thought about doing those two things, Mitchell to grow? And you know, what was your thought process like that led you to thought leader? Maybe you even consider these options.

Mitchell Tan (38:12)
We also experiment with display ads from the company page. So I think that they're just part of the mix. again, you evaluate them by asking, what's a row as, and try and approximate your way into it. So ⁓ yes. And then my learning on the display ads is, hey, the attribution's a lot clearer. You can see the click signup. then maybe some people get turned off because they seem like they look a bit more like ads. And therefore, your cost per click is much higher.

⁓ So yeah, I see like thought leadership ads and other kinds of LinkedIn ads as the same thing. And we also tried some Instagram ads. then, so I think all ads should be like compared in experiments with the same metrics. ⁓ Hiring ghost writers is a bit different. That's like saying, hey, organic impressions are actually very cheap. They are free, basically. So if I'm posting three times a week, ⁓

what if a ghostwriter would let me post seven times a week and I get all these extra impressions, right? I think that's how I think about it. ⁓ I actually asked earlier on, I shopped around and I was like, can someone ghostwrite my stuff? And then I got someone and then I said, okay, step one, go audit all my stuff and tell me what I can be doing better. And then someone told me, hey, actually it would be very hard for a ghostwriter to replicate exactly what you're doing because some of these stories are like...

Pretty personal, And you have to spend a lot of time talking to me and stuff like that. So I don't know. Just the style of my posts, sometimes I come up with funny meme posts. I'm sure that there are some meme post specialist ghost writers. But it's not clear that you can repeatably come up with meme posts that I do. ⁓ And so I think just because of how quirky the content has been, it's harder for me to imagine a ghost writer replicating the same thing. ⁓

But maybe. ⁓ I think it's on the cards, but not priority number one to go find one, because I'm able to write some of these myself at least three times a week. And it's not a huge blocker. It doesn't take up all my time, or it doesn't really take up enough time where it's a big problem. Yeah.

Matt Huang (40:38)
Yeah, that's really interesting. recently when we talked with Jason Alvarez Cohen, the CEO of Popple, he had also shopped around and also I believe worked with a ghostwriter and he found it helpful at the beginning, but then over time actually found that the amount of time that it took him to catch them up on business updates and things just happening on the day to day.

in his words was taking almost as much time as he could have taken to just write the post himself. And it sounds kind of like a similar situation, but also for you that some of the post ideas that you get are very quirky and, ⁓ you know, it can just be easier and more fast for you to come up with a post, just send it and do that as opposed to, hiring someone to manage your entire LinkedIn content.

Mitchell Tan (41:11)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Also, is important, right? My goal is not to become a LinkedIn influencer. My business is not dependent on me attracting all the eyeballs. My business is dependent on the product and the brand attracting all the eyeballs. So you could argue, if I can pay someone to write on my thing, why don't I pay someone to write on their thing? The spend on ghostwriting is not

a different order of magnitude from paying an influencer to go post about condo on their own LinkedIn. I get extra distribution, which is their following. And if the content's good, I mean, yeah, like, you know, they could write a story about how they use condo, right? So I think that's, yeah, if I'm going to spend on something like the other, like, again, there are other ways to spend on it.

So what if my account doesn't post all day? That's OK. ⁓ Think about consumer apps. Do you see consumer app founders posting on their own socials all day? No, they just make random content and get a whole bunch of UGC. And you don't even know who the founder of these D2C brands are, but they still go crazy. So why is that so different from B2B? ⁓

And there are important differences, I'm just saying that it doesn't like, yeah, mean, founder content is like interesting, but founder content doesn't have to be like the only thing, right? And it doesn't have to be like the first thing you spend your money on or the only thing you spend your money on or the only way to spend money. Yeah.

Daniel Greenberg (43:20)
That's fascinating. And you actually have been diving more into LinkedIn influencer marketing too. I saw Charlie Hill, who might be a future guest of the show. And he's someone who's been helping you market condo. How has that been going for you?

Mitchell Tan (43:39)
⁓ I mean, Charlie is great. He was like one of our early users. He was like one of the first to like pay us money for an annual subscription. So yeah, we definitely didn't get into that thinking we'd end up like, you know, having any kind of partnership. ⁓ Why, how is Charlie going? I mean, he made a post for us. He got us a lot of eyeballs. ⁓ Right. And I think there is some kind of like, I mean, part of it is like,

He actually paid for the thing and used this thing before we even paid him any money. And I think we like that kind of partnerships. I think basically all influencers we have spent money on first used our app themselves and paid for it themselves before we reached out and said, hey, want to do something together. Or they reached out and said, hey, I have an audience, blah, blah. So that's probably why we

That's the context for working with Charlie, how that's gone. Attribution is very lossy with influencer posts. Why? Because it's not like you don't know this thing exists, and then you see influencer posts about it, and then everyone who sees and needs it buys it now. Sometimes you see one influencer post about it, and then the next week you see someone else post about it, and then you see something else about it, and then you share something about it, and then you go and buy it.

And then which influencer should we credit that sign up to? They definitely didn't use the first influencer's link. ⁓ So I think that's what I've learned. I've talked to users and say, have you heard about us? And they said, I've seen a few people post about you. And this seems legit. And therefore, now I'm here. But the first influencer definitely did not get any credit for it in terms of clickable attribution. ⁓ And I think probably with Charlie and a vast majority of the influencers we have worked with, the answer is like,

attribution is lossy. So some influencers, there's a lot of direct attribution. And I don't know why. I'm still figuring out. Some people, they do a post, and we instantly get 10 clicks on the thing, which sign up and pay and all that stuff. I don't know why some influencers drive faster time to purchase and others less. And just because.

you don't get direct attribution immediately doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in them. ⁓ I'm still learning how this works. But yeah, we'll keep doing some paid partnerships with people who already use our product and our product users and are talking about us anyway. Yeah, how much we spend, who we spend on is like work in progress.

Daniel Greenberg (46:24)
think a common theme Matt and I have been hearing a lot now is the difficulty of tracking these spends, whether it's a thought leader ad, whether it's an organic post, whether it's an influencer post, it's kind of impossible to know how someone came to condo. Because even if they told you, Mitchell, that they saw an influencer post or they saw Charlie's post, they may not know it, but subconsciously your thought leader ad could have come up in their feed before. So it's a really interesting problem to

to think about how you're getting these customers, because there's no total 100 % surefire way to tell where they signed up from.

Mitchell Tan (47:04)
⁓ I got this advice from Gal Aga, he's one of our users. ⁓ And he spends a lot on ads himself at Aligned. Aligned's like a digital sales room, right? ⁓ But Gal told me that I should basically take whatever attributable signups I get through a paid LinkedIn thing and like to exit. Basically, like you would just assume that there's some kind of dark funnel going on. Like for everyone who clicks a link and sign up, there's someone who doesn't click the link but still signs up because they saw the thing. And so you're just like...

roughly assumed that if you got 10 signups who clicked the link, then you've got 10 signups who didn't click the link but still showed up anyway. And he said that's a good rule of thumb for him. so I don't know how to measure whether the advice is right, but I just take it because I trust the guy. And he spends way more money on LinkedIn's paid stuff than I do, like 100x more or something. But yeah, so that's one way to think about it. ⁓ If an influencer makes a post and they put a link and

zero people click the link and sign up, then probably close to zero people click the link and sign up. And if 10 people click the link and sign up, then possibly some people didn't click the link but then saw the next guy's thing and then next guy's thing and then sign up. So I think that's how I approach it. You must see some evidence that it leads to a full funnel conversion. The magnitude might not be correct, but like,

Sure, if the post gets 100 likes, but zero clicks on a link and zero signups, then don't do another one. If it got 10 and you won it 20, maybe you actually got more. So I'd do it again. That's how I think about it. And another thing is we ask in our signup flow, how did you hear about us? And then one of the things says influencer, and there's a field where you can fill in a thing.

And some people actually built, like you mentioned Charlie, some people like click influencer and type Charlie Hills in the, in the box. And I'm sure not everyone does, but some people do. And you get some, you know, you get, again, some indicator that if people are doing that, then I'm sure Charlie sent us more people, but only some subset of them chose to go write Charlie Hills in a box. but if no one, like if people are writing Charlie, but no one's writing like Tom, right. Then probably like, and we're spending the same amount of money on Charlie and Tom, then probably like Charlie's.

working better, right? I don't know, right? ⁓ So I think it's an imprecise science. And I think if you're ahead of marketing, this is your job to go figure out how to approximate the right signal to make the right decision on allocating spend. as a bootstrap company with a limited budget, I just try and err on the side of, is it yielding?

results on an order of magnitude, I can see through whatever attribution I have in place that suggests I could possibly be making my money back. And if the answer's like, it's a long stretch, then I stop that spend. And then I find, which means I missed some things that could be working, but I just missed it because I don't have the right tracking in place. But I err on the side of what's the thing that I confirm.

Definitely making my money back. And if I'm definitely making my money back, then I'll go do more of that. ⁓ Why? Because I have a limited budget. I didn't raise VC money, right? I'm optimizing for sure returns rather than total returns. Yeah.

Matt Huang (50:42)
100 % agree with you, Mitchell. And like, I think the word is multi-touch attribution. Like how do you ⁓ determine who actually influenced a buying decision? Right. And as, as someone who has run sponsorships before on my, YouTube channel, completely separate from my LinkedIn, every sponsor provides me with a UTM unique tracking link. But besides that, there's no way for them to really know.

If someone saw a video that I posted and then like later clicked onto someone else's video and then bought through that link, they have no way of knowing. So I think that's one of the biggest challenges that, you know, marketing in general and CMOs have, ⁓ currently today is like, how do you do that? And obviously we're seeing like, like popple, for example, we keep bringing it up today because we talked to Jason recently. They're trying to tackle the issue of.

you know, attribution from in-person events, which for a long time was really difficult. Like, how do you know someone who attended an event where you invested, you know, if you're sponsoring the event, throwing like tens of thousands of dollars into it, how do you know what the real ROI on that is for your business? Right. But then, you know, for a fact, you probably should be investing in these types of top of funnel activations, but it's a difficult question for sure. Mitchell, I want to switch gears a little bit now actually, because so you've been quoted

Mitchell Tan (51:51)
Okay.

Matt Huang (52:09)
you know, saying, and I'm going to read here, cold emails are in the gutter, unless it's someone you know, or very well crafted note, people aren't responding anymore. And I think that's a really interesting idea that, you know, cold email versus LinkedIn outreach seems like today, LinkedIn outreach is, is doing much better than cold email, but curious, you're thinking when you wrote that and any thoughts you have.

Mitchell Tan (52:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Just final point on the measurement. I think we should mention Pranav Piyush here. He runs a company called Paramark and Pranav is really big on incrementality testing. So I think he would say for the events thing, what's your last month baseline if you go sponsor three events this month in some city or in some country or something, what went up? Throw away all this kind of...

technical attribution models and just see what happens. ⁓ So I think that's another way to do it. like, yeah, I think that's how Pranav would advise CMOs, but like, yeah, go check his stuff out if you're thinking about attribution problems. ⁓ And then to your question here, I think cold email is... I think cold email is just like really hard, like right now. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't, like some people still make it work, to be clear.

Right? Like some sales reps get go book emails, true call email. Right? So like it kind of, it's not dead, but it's just really hard. ⁓ And like every 10 founders I talked to like one or two like, yeah, call emails on main channel is working. Right. But like eight are like, we tried it. And we got, we sent like every thousand emails we send, get one positive reply or something like that. Right? Like it's just really like, ⁓

That's the sense I get. ⁓ Especially if you are sending lots of that. I don't know if you are handwriting one by one email, how well you do. I suspect not as well as you would have done if you did the same thing three years ago or five years ago. ⁓ So I think it's just emails super spammy. There are all these like...

A, all these technical barriers to getting into people's mailboxes, you've got to the right infrastructure set up. And then let's say you've done that and got it your primary inbox, people are still getting lots of mail in there. And then people have seen every variation of personalize subject lines and clickbaity subject lines. And we're so inundated with these things now that it's really, really, really, really hard to stand out. And then after you get me to open it, you have to get me to read it. You're giving me a reason.

Yeah, and there is no limit on who you can like and I don't know who you are. Like I open a call email, like I have no idea who you are. I don't know if you're real, I don't know if you're fake, I don't know if you are like a fake persona, I don't know who you so you are right? Like there are all these like barriers to trust and relevance, right? And noise that I think that's why I call emails hard. Why is LinkedIn like less hard on those same dimensions we just talked about? You have no like technical issue, like that you have...

your deliverability of a LinkedIn DM is 100%, right? Like it will always land in the inbox. I mean, with some maybe small qualifications there, but like you send a DM, it will show up. Whether the guy reads it or not is a different story, but at least we've like crossed one hurdle that you don't have to cross the cold email. Number two, the people you send to like could, like you have ways to let them know who you are before they read your thing. You have a headline, you have a link, you have like a real profile. People can...

If they want to, go click your link to see where you worked, who you really are, that you're a real person, and that you are really, I don't know, the founder at a company or a salesperson at a company. And you can push content into your feed if you make good enough content and you're connected with them. And so they could have seen you before you send your DM. ⁓ And so I think for those reasons, ⁓ and then once you get people, you can follow up with them and...

you like you'll keep being in the inbox. So I think basically LinkedIn has like less hurdles to like actually like show up in people's inboxes. And also like you overall get less spam in your LinkedIn inbox and like your email inbox. And that doesn't mean it works for everyone. It just means that like, if you have a relevant message, a credible and relevant profile for the right person,

And that person happens to check their LinkedIn inbox somewhat regularly. I would bet on that instead of cold email. ⁓ If that does not apply to you, yeah, sure, maybe not. If you are prospecting people who aren't on LinkedIn, then don't go LinkedIn DM them. But if you're prospecting, say, founders who are on LinkedIn all day and definitely check their LinkedIn inboxes and you have something super relevant for founders, yeah, go try that instead of cold email. I'd try that first.

Daniel Greenberg (57:24)
when you're doing these.

When you're DMing people on LinkedIn, one of the things that can make you stand out is having LinkedIn Premium, that ⁓ iconic orange, maybe yellow badge. I see Mitchell, you have LinkedIn Premium too. Do you think that makes a difference in cold emails? Or?

Mitchell Tan (57:46)
No, no, I don't think so.

I don't think anyone can, like, I want to, like, maybe I'm in the wrong bubble, but I want to go meet the people who are like, if you don't have premium, you're not legit. Right? I don't like that. Some people who don't even know what on earth the premium badge or the verified, this was a verified badge, right? Like, I don't think so. Like, I think what matters more, like, okay. And I

to be corrected, maybe I'm in the wrong bubble. But I think what matters more is your headline. Your headline is the description under your line, especially connection requests, you see it like that thing. I ⁓ think that your first chance of showing your relevance of ⁓ legitimacy for me as a person you are reaching out to is your headline. ⁓ So I think that matters more.

I mean, whatever, the picture, you should have a picture and the picture should be like your face and you know, it should look like a real whatever, right? But beyond that, I think the hitliners gets you in. think like the preview of your message, if you're sending cold message, like matters more. I don't actually think these like extra badges and stuff like that matter that much, but I might be wrong. Yeah.

Matt Huang (59:00)
So I

personally, and I don't know about you guys, but I do have premium, but I actually hide my badge. So you can't see it if you go on my profile. I don't know if you even knew that was an option, like, I honestly think the verified badge that shows up next to my name is probably more impactful than like a gold, hey, he paid for premium that pops up. Daniel, I don't know if this is a hot take, but yeah, that's just.

I agree with Mitchell. think like the description, the headline probably matters the most. then, and then maybe the verified badge, but I haven't, whenever I see someone with a gold LinkedIn badge is the first thought that comes to mind is just like, ⁓ okay. He's like paying for LinkedIn premium. Maybe he just wants to see who's viewed his profile.

Daniel Greenberg (59:52)
Why do you pay for LinkedIn premium? I just don't get it. Why do you, Mitchell?

Mitchell Tan (59:52)
Bye.

⁓ why would you? Wait, why would you?

wait, wait, the answer to that is very clear. It's that you get more connect requests every week. And I think there are some other frills, like maybe some enhanced search or something. I haven't looked into the details of that recently. But ⁓ if you are a salesperson or whatever, if you're trying to connect with more people and that makes you money in some way, even if you're trying to get a job and you're trying to build relationships with hiring managers.

you get 200 connects a week instead of 100. And that's why you pay for premium because you can 2X the number of people you connect with, whether they actually accept your connect request or whether they reply to you as like a downstream problem. But 100 people is not a lot if you're a salesperson a week, right? So like 200 feels like a lot more. That's why you should pay for premium. That, and then the other reason, which I don't know if LinkedIn's happy me saying this, but who cares, is like,

It's a pay to play, I think actually LinkedIn writes this somewhere in their terms. I don't have a link, but there are certain basically soft rate limits. If you don't have a premium profile and you send too many messages or something like that, they get mad at you. They're like, oh, you're not like a...

you're not like a serious business user, you're like doing too many things for a regular casual user and therefore we're going to like lock your account or something for a while because it must be like some bot that took over your account. if you're sending a lot of messages, viewing a lot of pages, I think if you like open a lot of profile pages, there are some limits on that where LinkedIn will kind of shut your account down temporarily if you don't have like premium. ⁓ So yeah, that's why you pay for it.

Matt Huang (1:01:40)
Yeah, just chime in. main reason that I have premium is I run an agency. so the sales navigator subscription is actually pretty useful because a lot of the times I'm, you know, building lists of like a thousand prospects for my clients. And then we're, you know, you going off of those lists and even for myself, like when I'm prospecting for potential clients, like I'm going on sales navigator, building a detailed list. They have way more filters than just the native search bar and all those.

filters so like you can get way more in depth. ⁓ So it's really valuable for like BD salespeople all that sort.

Daniel Greenberg (1:02:19)
Mitchell, you've sold me on LinkedIn premium. I'm gonna have to get it right after this. I had it and then I was, you know, I'm not sure about the connection rate limit as I'm about to check out right now looking at all the features that they sell me on and there, I think there are way too many options as well, but that's a separate point. But even for like the slight chances of an algorithm or message boost, in my opinion, I think it's probably worth the 20 a month.

Mitchell Tan (1:02:46)
Now, I'm pretty sure right now you can only send around 100 requests a week. You would just go test it yourself. But then when you get a premium, you get 200. You just go count the number. If you hit the limit, they will tell you, no, you can't connect with more people. You've reached your weekly limit. And I'm pretty confident that if you don't have premium, that limit is lower. And again, everyone can go test this for yourself. If you don't have premium, just go max out your connection request and roughly how many did I send.

Daniel Greenberg (1:02:56)
Heh. Heh.

Mitchell Tan (1:03:16)
Right? then go get premium and then do the same thing. Right? Don't take anyone's word for it. Just go experiment and see for yourself.

Matt Huang (1:03:24)
Yeah, I actually agree with-

Daniel Greenberg (1:03:25)
Do know which

version of premium you have, Mitchell?

Mitchell Tan (1:03:27)
I think any version

of premium unlocks the 200 connection request limit. ⁓ yeah, like Matt said, the sales nav gets you like better search within sales nav, that kind of stuff. But I think the connect request is just like premium or not.

Matt Huang (1:03:45)
Yeah, the sales nav is the most expensive, Daniel. So it's like, it's like 120 a month or something. And then one thing on the on that point, like the connection request limits. So I probably send, I don't know, 25 a day. So that's like 175 a week, I think, if I'm doing my math correctly. So I'm right under that 200 limit, haven't run into any issues. But I was working with a client that didn't have premium. And he kept hitting the connection request limit. But he was, he was pretty

I think he was trying to do 25 to 30 a day and he hit that limit and we had to wait until like the end of the week to refresh. So that's an interesting, interesting point there. I didn't realize that with premium, they probably increase it.

Mitchell Tan (1:04:24)
Mm-hmm.

See.

This is why, this goes back to why it's easier than email. It's actually not easier than cold email. Like, it's just like easier to get a reply because ⁓ there's no 200 request limit in email. Like can email as many unique people as you want, but you can only send 200 requests in LinkedIn a week. And so it, right. And therefore like less people get messaged, like if you think about it, like less people are getting messages because everyone can only reach out to max 200 people a week. ⁓ And this,

I think actually LinkedIn built this probably well. It does reduce the noise on the platform. And people have to go accept your connection request before you can send them. Or you can send them an email, but you kind of bug people repeatedly if it's just an email. There are some constraints on who you can message, how much you can message them in LinkedIn, which may reduce the noise overall versus email, which gives you a better chance to reach people if they're there.

Daniel Greenberg (1:05:29)
Okay, so a live fact check. I just got premium and I was out of connection request before this podcast started. I just bought it and I still don't, well, I honestly messed up. Okay, I'm gonna retry that. So live podcast update about LinkedIn premium. I just got the premium subscription. I paid $20 a month. so I hit my weekly connection limit.

before this podcast started. And now after buying premium, I still hit the connection limit. So it might go in next week and I will keep you posted how things go. You too, Mitchell, I'll let you know.

Mitchell Tan (1:06:09)
I bet

LinkedIn takes time to refresh these things because their systems are slow.

Daniel Greenberg (1:06:19)
Okay, so what Mitchell, what else are your LinkedIn conspiracies or algorithm things if you have any like LinkedIn having a certain amount of connection requests for people that are premium?

Mitchell Tan (1:06:34)
Well, the biggest LinkedIn conspiracy is like, why do they want you to play Sudoku and like ZIP that much? you know, like the thing that LinkedIn seems to push the most, like, okay, there was a recent like change in like post analytics and something like that. And they made some noise about that, which is great. But yeah, like everyone, like every like loud thing I've gotten like is like, have you played ZIP yet?

Or like, check out new Sudoku. We got the people who made the real Sudoku to make this thing. So ⁓ I think why does LinkedIn push games so much is interesting. I mean, there are some obvious explanations for it, which is it gets you more usage time. If you get people to play a game, they'll need to go play it more. But then what has games got to do with everything else you do on LinkedIn?

finding a job or like, you get me? it's not, it's not like, you know, is is this now an entertainment app? Is that, is that like, why, why does, why do games belong on LinkedIn? Right. Like, ⁓ is it because they just want more ad space and time? Maybe like, like, why, why should you pay? Like, I don't know. Like, ⁓ that continuous puzzle me and I post every now and then about it. ⁓ but.

Yeah, why does LinkedIn have games?

Daniel Greenberg (1:08:07)
Before we wrap up, Mitchell and have a very exciting segment. there anything else we didn't cover in this podcast that you want to cover either about LinkedIn about condo, anything else?

Mitchell Tan (1:08:18)
⁓ No? I feel like I've said too much. Might piss off with the gods.

Matt Huang (1:08:24)
You

Daniel Greenberg (1:08:27)
Any other, well, okay, I'm actually curious too. Is there any other good LinkedIn lingo we should be aware of? I just learned the term engagement bait today from you and I'm gonna start using it.

Mitchell Tan (1:08:38)
It's not LinkedIn lingo. It's like click bait. It's not LinkedIn lingo. I mean, same thing. ⁓ What? Yeah. No.

Daniel Greenberg (1:08:49)
Okay, well we can move on to the good

idea, bad idea segment if you want then.

So how this is gonna work is I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven ideas for you, okay? And you're gonna tell me in the audience if they're a good idea or a bad idea and feel free to either give a one word answer or give some explanation as to why. So the first one is an idea for condo and I've used it. I'm now used to the platform and it's to auto complete your message just like on email. Is that a good idea or a bad idea?

Mitchell Tan (1:09:26)
⁓ Neutral?

Daniel Greenberg (1:09:32)
Neutral, what are two options, Okay, we can move on then. Schedule sending messages.

Mitchell Tan (1:09:35)
⁓ Yeah.

Matt Huang (1:09:37)
Next.

Mitchell Tan (1:09:42)
A good idea, but ⁓ we will likely not do it in condo out of respect for the LinkedIn Terms of Service, which prohibit automating message sends. ⁓ And so if you think about it, if you can schedule messages, then you can schedule 100 messages to send at the same time. ⁓ And then how different is that?

from an automation tool? Like, I can schedule to send you three successive messages at different times. And maybe if you respond, stops. Then isn't that basically the same kind of automation that you do for cold email? ⁓ LinkedIn very explicitly says they don't allow any third party tools to automate messages. And so we don't do that. ⁓ And ⁓ we're trying to stay in line with their general idea

of trying to keep interactions on the platform authentic. so, yeah, that's a problem with scheduling. It's a great idea generally, but then you can turn that into an email gun or a LinkedIn DM gun. And we think that's bad, or at least LinkedIn thinks that's bad, and we try to respect them.

Daniel Greenberg (1:11:04)
That is a good call. So my next idea was to schedule connect with people for when people have hit their rate limit like me, but now I understand that that would be against their terms of service. And I'm gonna move that into the bad idea. I'm gonna answer for you, Mitchell. Okay, the next one is replying to comments. When I'm scrolling on desktop on LinkedIn, I out of habit want to hit command return every time.

I'm replying to a comment and any thoughts there and replying to comments on your own post. It could be good with the meta too of, you know, comment for this guide.

Mitchell Tan (1:11:42)
Yeah, they are a good idea, but for a different tool. There are some tools which have tried to address this workflow on the feed kind of problem. ⁓ And yeah, we're not focused on that at Condo now, but yeah, I think it's a good idea. I would like that.

Daniel Greenberg (1:12:04)
I respect it. You know your audience, you know your product and you're sticking to the core. The next one is an auto excuse generator. If someone asks to have a call with you and you don't have an idea as to why you need an excuse for you can't make it, it comes up with excuses for you. Thoughts on that?

Mitchell Tan (1:12:22)
Great. mean, yeah. Why not? It'll probably give the person a laugh and remind that very clearly indicated you don't want to talk to them ever again. Yeah, I don't know. Why not? Better than non-funny excuse generator.

Daniel Greenberg (1:12:44)
Okay, perfect. Second to last one here. use a, second to last one here. I use a software called Typegrow, which is free, that I can preview my LinkedIn posts, how they look before I post them. So the thought here for condo is you can see what the notification would look like on a mobile phone or on a desktop before you send the message. So you can optimize that, almost like you would optimize the subject line of an email. Good idea, bad idea?

Mitchell Tan (1:13:13)
I think seems good, but not like I wouldn't pay for this. ⁓ Very marginally good, net positive, but not by much. ⁓

Daniel Greenberg (1:13:28)
I was thinking more of a feature idea for you in condo in case you wanted to add it so I can optimize my DMs in the future.

Mitchell Tan (1:13:34)
I would rather we help people write shorter, more concise, more to the point. I'd rather we build a coaching feature to help you write better, rather than optimize technically for how the thing appears. another response is, well, the first five words of your thing should be like,

Good, right? And then that way, you optimize for all the notifications and all the where it appears and just do that. ⁓ So yeah, you can do it yourself. The first word counts more than the second word, which counts more than the third word, which counts more than the fourth word, and so on. And just optimize for that, and you'll be good.

Daniel Greenberg (1:14:17)
I now know why I am not the co-founder and CEO of Condo. Okay, the last one, Mitchell, is more of a wild card and it's condo for TikTok. We all know TikTok's messaging needs to be upgraded. It barely works. It's laggy and it needs a condo. Are we gonna see TikTok for condo anytime soon?

Mitchell Tan (1:14:34)
⁓ That's

a great idea. My answer to that is someday we will condo them all. We'll condo the WhatsApp, we'll condo the iMessage. Someday. Every DM platform has its power users and I'm pretty sure none of them have an awesome UX for messaging. ⁓

Daniel Greenberg (1:14:39)
Hahaha

Mitchell Tan (1:15:00)
It's definitely a good idea to have it. The question is just who will build it and will Kondo build it before Daniel builds it for TikTok.

Matt Huang (1:15:11)
Thank

Daniel Greenberg (1:15:12)
Yes is the answer and build it better. Well, Matt, do you have any more questions for Mitchell?

Mitchell Tan (1:15:14)
Thank

Matt Huang (1:15:20)
No, I think this has been a really interesting conversation, Mitchell. And thank you again for.

Mitchell Tan (1:15:25)
Can you rate me as a guest?

Can I get like a guest rating? Like how do I compare with you?

Matt Huang (1:15:33)
out of the... there's only... what? how many guests, Daniel? three guests so far?

Daniel Greenberg (1:15:39)
Yeah, three

guests. They're a lot more common.

Mitchell Tan (1:15:45)
Yeah, so how would you rate me?

Matt Huang (1:15:45)
I feel like

Daniel Greenberg (1:15:50)
Well, I can go. I think you were a great guest, Mitchell. You were brief in your responses. I was very impressed with how you could convey a message in as few words as possible. That's something I try to do a lot and not as good at. I thought the demo was very crisp. I can tell you've practiced that a lot. I thought we had a lot of concrete takeaways from how you write posts with hooks and engagement bait to talking about ads and...

Matt Huang (1:15:50)
I feel like...

Daniel Greenberg (1:16:18)
I rate this overall episode a five out of five.

Mitchell Tan (1:16:21)
Nice.

Matt Huang (1:16:22)
Yeah,

on my end, Mitchell, I audience should definitely do the same. Mitchell, I feel like you had you have a lot of knowledge on LinkedIn ads. And it's clear that you're testing a lot of this stuff and the ideas you had around incrementality testing. was pretty impressed by and ⁓ you should definitely let us know if you do end up running any of those experiments what you do find 100 % five out of five episode.

Daniel Greenberg (1:16:23)
and the audience should do the same.

Mitchell Tan (1:16:25)
You

Cool. I feel like as a guest on some podcasts, I never get feedback on how to be a better guest. So y'all should leave me how to be a better guest note sometime.

Daniel Greenberg (1:17:07)
I really don't have anything that comes to mind right now. I thought this was a really, really good episode. And when I have something though, I would later tonight or tomorrow's we're debriefing. We'll let you know, Mitchell.

Mitchell Tan (1:17:18)
Yeah, thank you for that. ⁓

Matt Huang (1:17:20)
I do think I guess one thing that just came to mind. It would be cool. And Daniel, maybe this is just a note for us in the future is like, getting guests to show us like the back end analytics on some of their posts. I feel like it would have been cool to see some of the the metrics behind your different posts, Mitchell, especially like the different formats. But otherwise, yeah, no other feedback.

Daniel Greenberg (1:17:46)
Would you

have been comfortable sharing that?

Mitchell Tan (1:17:47)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, as in, let's say like which post did the best and the worst and like, and then like break down like why you think it did good and worse. think it's like kind of interesting. Actually, yeah, I think, I feel like that would be like a great, like even like async content series for y'all, right? Cause you talk to these people and you ask about their posts. Um, that, yeah, I think, I think that's great engagement bait for you.

And yeah, like, not? Like, why would I not want to share? What you got mean? Like, what reason would I have not to share that if we're talking about LinkedIn already, right? ⁓

Matt Huang (1:18:13)
haha

No, 100%.

And people are so curious, too, like about, hey, how did this post reform? How many impressions did it get? Because you can only see the engagements. And that's like a rough proxy. But I've had posts where like, the engage the impressions to engagement ratio is like very different from another post. Like one post gets a ton of impressions, like a decent amount of engagement, but the other post gets like 3x the engagement, but like half the amount of impressions. So

I think it'd be pretty interesting to people seeing the back end for every guest if we can do it, Daniel.

Mitchell Tan (1:19:02)
Yeah. And also now you get link clicks. Like LinkedIn tells you, if people click the links, so you can kind of like workshop whether, like, you know, maybe some posts get more engagements, but you don't get link clicks, but like other posts get like really low engagements, but they get a lot of click-throughs. So, you know, like this kind of analytic, like y'all should do this for like actual LinkedIn influencers who get paid money to do this stuff, because as you have...

mentioned, it's like a kind of black box and people like really like, you know, staying up at night trying to figure out whether their spendings going anywhere and like some of this like insights like super helpful. Yeah.

Matt Huang (1:19:43)
Awesome. Should I close the episode here?

Daniel Greenberg (1:19:47)
Yeah, let's close it in. We hope to have you on again sometime, sometime, eventually dive more into that stuff.

Matt Huang (1:19:48)
Okay.

Mitchell Tan (1:19:53)
Yeah, of course.

Matt Huang (1:19:54)
Yeah,

appreciate the time, Mitchell. This is, like I said, super interesting conversation. ⁓ if the audience does want to, you know, check out condo or look up your socials is the best place for them to go your LinkedIn profile or the condo homepage.

Mitchell Tan (1:20:08)
Yep, tricondo.com ⁓ or like, yeah, look for Mitchell Tan on LinkedIn and look for the guy with the post box, the writ post box next to his name. Yeah. And then tell me how bad my posts are. ⁓

Matt Huang (1:20:24)
Amazing. Well, that's a wrap.

Daniel Greenberg (1:20:29)
Thanks again, Mitchell. We'll send you all the clips and stuff when they're done. ⁓

Matt Huang (1:20:38)
There you are, Willer. Squillie just popped up out of nowhere.

Mitchell Tan (1:20:45)
⁓ Yeah, so you'll clip it up or something. I assume you edit it down or something like that.

Nice.

Daniel Greenberg (1:21:08)
Great work everybody. Thank you.

Mitchell Tan (1:21:10)
Cool. Have fun. How's your job, Daniel? You started?

Daniel Greenberg (1:21:17)
⁓ I gotta stop recording. I gotta...

Matt Huang (1:21:19)
Ha ha!

Mitchell Tan (1:21:20)
F for for.

Matt Huang (1:21:22)
Yeah.