How the “Mom Test” books this founder 50 demos every week

Transcription

Daniel: Everyone reads like the same books like 0 to 1 and the e-myth and you can name all the top 50 business books. It always felt like it wasn't deep enough because it never [bleep] at that time, he started a hedge fund, which, of course, every kid in their 20s starts a hedge fund because that's normal. I've had comments where we've driven 15 demos off of one comment where it gets 20,000 impressions and blows up. Almost a year ago to today, we had zero customers, zero, not one. That's the best way to validate a product. How do you work on towing that line of showing you're better and name-dropping your competition, but also being objective at the same time? If you were to give one piece of advice on how to grow on LinkedIn, there's a big point people miss with the 100 connections is like... Welcome to Connection Accepted. Today, I'm so excited. We have Jack Porter, who's the founder of BirdDog on the pod. Jack, thanks for joining us. Matt: Thanks for having me, guys. This is awesome. Amazing. Jack, can you just start with giving the audience a high-level overview of just like who you are, where you're from, what you're working on? Jack: Yeah. So obviously, I'm Jack. I grew up just outside of Philly, went to Michigan. So go blue. Huge Michigan fan. And now for the past almost two years, I've been working in the sales kind of intelligence, sales tooling space. And so I work on a tool called BirdDog, and we help sales teams do research on the people they're selling to. Matt: Amazing. And how did you and your co-founder, Noah, meet? Jack: We actually met at Michigan. So the first time I ever met Noah was freshman year. This kid rolls in, I kid you not, in dark red, like, you know, the blue light Huberman glasses, like dark, dark, dark red Huberman glasses, a bomber jacket, books falling out of his backpack, and comes and sits down at my table. He's like, hey, I think I saw you at some investing club. Do you like options? Which of course, every guy in their 20s starts a hedge fund because that's normal. So he's running the hedge fund. We're doing the investing club together. We do a bunch of internships in like Wall Street and mutual funds and all that kind of stuff. Really checking all the boxes that like a traditional finance path would go on. And so when we graduate, I end up going into real estate development. He's still working on the hedge fund and he starts a investing platform that was like, essentially finding news before it hit like the Wall Street Journal. Really cool idea, like essentially helps you find investment ideas, helps you get to the opportunities first, which is going to sound very familiar to what we do today is for sales teams. But he started that, was running it. I get bored at my job. I'm like sitting at home at six, seven o'clock. Like, what do I do with my night? I don't want to watch Netflix for the 15th time this week. So I give him a call. I'm like, Hey Noah, like, like what you're doing. Like, is there any way I can help? No, I don't want equity. Matt: I don't want money. I don't want anything. I just want something nice to fill my time. And he's like, sure. Like come help us sell the thing. Like we're trying to like figure out how to do a paid plan on where users are free. Come help us do that. And so that's how we met. That was kind of the original idea we worked on. And then from there, through a series of pivots, twists, turns, failures, explosions. We ended up with bird dog. Daniel: First of all, your, your co-founder is cracked. That is the perfect way to describe it. I don't really know too many people who start a hedge fund while they're still in college, respect. And second of all, okay, so it sounds like there was this initial idea of getting research quicker than the Wall Street Journal. So whoever is investing can, you know, get access to that data sooner. And then eventually there was a bunch of pivots that led you to building a similar, but different tool, more geared towards sales teams. Do you want to walk us through that journey as well? Because I know a lot of founders also sometimes are probably wondering, should I double down on this idea or is it time to pivot? Like at what point do you decide, all right, we've invested so much time into this, but it's just not working out. We should change. Or should we just like stick with it? Matt: Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm happy to, because I think I had the same questions when I first started kind of on this journey, maybe like three years ago. It was like, I always wanted to, you know, be a founder. I always wanted to have my own thing at some point. Never really knew how to get there. Always felt like everything was pretty kind of surface level. Everyone reads like the same books, like zero to one and the e-myth. And you, you could name all the top 50 business books. It always felt like it wasn't deep enough because it never really shows the reality. Like once you get into the game. And so when I joined that first investing platform, we had about a thousand users at the time that the kind of prior three, four founders of that business had grown to. They had just like done it through word of mouth and through Twitter and just organically kind of posting and having users join the platforms. Set the stage, thousand users. They're all free. The platform kind of works. It's not very pretty. There's no like known publicity. Like no one really knows about it. It's still very niche, very small. And so our goal, right? We had raised a little bit of money at the time, was to essentially turn profitable. We were just burning money every month. Zero revenue. Big fat zero dollars. So I joined. I'm working nights and weekends on it, trying to figure out what's going on. So I started interviewing all the best users. I'm like, hey guys, what do you like? What do you dislike? Tell me more. Make a bunch of tweaks, launch this essentially pro platform, which had a lot of feedback these users had given. Matt: And I go back to them and I'm like, hey guys, well, would you pay $20 a month for this? Like we just did a bunch of changes. We fixed a bunch of things. You know, I have what you want. Pay $20. Get denied by every single user we talked to. I go to all of them again. I say, okay, like I understand, like we're a new company. Like get $20 maybe a stretch. We go from $20 to $15 to $10 to $5 to ultimately me asking for $1 a month. You know, would you pay this $1 a month to do this? Denied by everyone. I still remember the last call we had. It was like our best user was posting us all over Twitter, loved us, referred a bunch of people to us. I go like, hey, would you give us a dollar? Here's no. I call Noah. I'm like, Noah, this is not working. Like we've been at this for four or five months. Like we've done a bunch of tweets. We've done a bunch of fixes. Like the platform kind of works. It doesn't really generate a ton of results for users. It's kind of like a nice to have, not a need to have. And so I'm like, we need to figure something else out, whether it's a pivot into this space, pivot into this other space. Like we have to do something. And so at the exact same time, by luck, by fate, by something, divine intervention, two sales guys are on the platform. They message us. They're like, hey guys, we like what you're building, but not for investing. We're using it for prospect research. And I'm like, what is a prospect? Like, I have no idea. I've never done anything with sales. And so we talked to them, get on the phone. We're like, oh, this is actually kind of interesting. And they're like, well, can you build this feature for us? We'll pay you $50. Keep in mind, we still had zero revenue. So $50 was a lot more than zero. And so we go, sure. Let's do it. That seems like a good use of our time. We build the feature. They love it. And we're like, maybe there's something here. And so then Noah and I, we go essentially like a cold email campaign. So we're both Michigan guys. We go through the directory of all the Michigan alumni. Start filtering by salespeople and cold email every single person. We're like, hey, we don't know what we're doing. We have this idea. Here's what we've been working on. Do you have 30 minutes to talk to us? 15 minutes, five minutes to talk to us. I just want to hear what's going on in your job. What are the challenges? What are the common pain points? Where's the industry going? Like, I literally know nothing about this. So we get on about 250 calls over the next two months with a bunch of Michigan people. And we learned that like, our original kind of inkling of an idea, like this research is a huge problem. Everyone has it. Certain subsectors didn't have it. So we were able to like refine the ICP, like to use like sales terms, like refine our ideal customer pretty quickly. Because when we talked to like the farmer reps, they were like, yeah, I don't really need to research. Like I know all my Damn, that is a wild story. Daniel: Yeah, it's amazing how sometimes those unexpected pivots can really lead you to the right path. It's all about finding what really sticks, right? Matt: Also, you're a great storyteller, Jack. I was on the edge of my seat, Dan, I don't know about you, but wow. I think the takeaway here, Jack, is that you have to keep being persistent and see when someone's willing to pay and if no one's willing to pay after hundreds of attempts, then that may be the time where you need to pivot. Is that kind of the takeaway for you? Daniel: Yeah, I think the easiest way for like, okay, there's two lessons that I made, like I learned very early on that were like huge mistakes in that first business. One is like not following the money, which sounds super trite, sounds super like cliche, but like, honestly, that's the best way to validate a product because like, a lot of times, even now, like when a founder comes to me and it's like, hey, do you like my idea? I'm like, yeah, it seems like a cool idea. And like, they'll take that as validation. But like, even if I am like the target ICP, like, I still may not pay for that. Like with Mitchell, you got the guest channel on last week, like Condo, he came to me and I was immediately like, no, I'm not sure about that. Like, I'm not sure, like, I'm not sure about that. But ultimately I paid, right? Like, that's validation that there's probably something that idea. And I keep paying every month because it's awesome. But that's the validation of the idea. So like, if you don't have that moment of like, someone's willing to pay you 10 bucks, 5 bucks, a dollar, kind of a red flag, even if you're getting a lot of like good feedback. So that would be the first thing is like, separate good feedback, like positive, like I like this. And this is the whole premise of the mom test, which is by far my favorite book on startups of all time. It's what transformed that first business into what BirdDog is today. First, try to separate like kind of good feedback from actual dollars, which are real feedback, real validation. The second thing is, is knowing when to cut losses, right? So like, you need to be able to move fast enough and test enough ideas at a quick enough velocity to get to a viable solution before you run out of time. Because like every founder has a limited amount of time, right? It could be five years, it could be two years, it could be a year that they're willing to dedicate to kind of going all in on being a founder. If you spend all five years at that time, work on one problem that isn't working, well, now you just wasted a bunch of opportunities. But if you're retesting ideas every three weeks, now you've tested, you know, hundreds of ideas in that five-year period. And you're bound to find one that works. Those are the kind of two laws, like, test a bunch of different ideas and then make sure you're actually able to get to like dollars pretty quick, whether that's like a presale or even just selling something simple. Matt: Or for our case, like literally selling our manual labor as like a product, right? Because we could start that from day one without having to build a bunch of stuff and make a cool platform that looked really nice. Daniel: Yeah, I love that because it was almost like you guys were, like you were making sure that this was actually a service that people wanted before you spent the time and energy to actually build out a platform for it. Even though in the short term, it was obviously way more work for you guys. I can't imagine doing all of that manually every single week, but wild. And I think for, for the audience's benefit, can you just like give high level overview of what the mom test generally is about for those who haven't read the book? Matt: Yeah. So the whole premise of the mom test is as the title kind of alludes to, is when you're looking for product feedback and we get this all the time, like, I'm sure you guys get this too. If you're like, you start to come up in the space, like start to be, have some, some success. So even very small success, you'll get a lot of founders coming to you saying, Hey, can you try my idea? Hey, can you give me feedback? And what they all do is they come with the idea first. Here's my idea. Do you like it? Yes. No. The mom test kind of flips that on its head. It says, okay, founder, like if they're coming to me, okay, Jack, what is your problem? And I just start spewing problems. Then they validate if their idea matches that problem. Daniel: So instead of pre like loading or pre kind of seeding your ideas being good, it says, okay, does Jack's kind of like flow of consciousness, are the problems that are top of mind for Jack aligning with what you're trying to go after? And if they are not, you know, you're probably focusing on the wrong thing. And as the title says, like, if you were to tell your idea to your mom, like your mom's of course going to go, oh, sweetie, that's great. Like, very cool business idea. But that's what most feedback is, right? Because you give them an idea and you say, this is my baby. Like I, I want to do an AI voice platform, right? And of course, like, if I see you're passionate about it, you're working on it, Like I'm not gonna be like, your idea sucks. Like it's never going anywhere. And like, I still could be wrong, but even when I think it sucks, I'm never gonna say that to you. Matt: So the feedback is 99.99% of the time going to be, oh, that's nice. Very cool. Or like, I would totally use that, which are all the wrong signals because like, That's not actual real feedback, right? That's not what I'm thinking about daily. It's not a problem I'm trying to solve. It's just me being polite to kind of save your feelings. So that's the gist of the mom test is like, ask problems first to validate your idea versus giving your idea and hoping that they are not polite enough to give you real feedback. Matt: What is the mom test for BirdDog? Because I'm sure the audience isn't as dialed on sales as, as you are now and neither are me and Matt. Daniel: Yeah, the mom test occurred during that period when we were doing all the interviews with the Michigan kind of salespeople is we went into those calls with, you know, I, I mentioned like what we said to them roughly, but we didn't say anything about our product when we messaged them. So the email essentially looked like something like, Hey, I saw you work in this industry. Noah and I really are passionate about this. We think we have an idea. We didn't mention what it was. Do you have like 15 minutes to tell us about your problems? What's going on in the industry trends? And we left it at that. No like kind of preempting, no kind of, they had no idea what we wanted to do when we went into the calls. And then when we got on the calls, we literally just opened with like, Hey Sarah. Hey John, what are your problems, right? Like what's going on in the industry? What are the challenges? What are the trends? Where are things going? And if it seemed to align with what we said, which a lot of times when they said research or figuring out who to talk to, we started double click on that. We go, Oh, tell me more about that. Is this a problem? Are you looking at signals? Are you looking at this source? Are you looking at that source? And we started to kind of validate the idea that we knew without telling them to see if that was the real problem. So they weren't jaded to kind of like pleasantries and giving us good feedback with that. So that's what the mom test looked like for us. And after we had about 200 of those calls, we felt comfortable enough to say, Hey, this is pretty clearly an issue. And then we do it all the time. I mean, we're constantly testing one now with new features and any of that kind of thing where we say, Oh, is this a problem for you? Hey customer, like how is this working? Right? Or like, what is the problem here and the challenge here? Like, show me how you're using the platform. And then we kind of build the features that solve that without saying, Hey, is this the feature you want? Matt: So Jack, like Daniel and I, we, we're a little bit more familiar with BirdDog, but do you mind just giving a, like a very high level or maybe not high, maybe a little bit more detailed, like overview of if I'm a customer of BirdDog, like what exactly does that look like on the inside? And like, you know, when am I, am I getting messages every day? When am I getting them? What, what do these messages have? Things like that. Would love to just like dive in. And even if, if you want to like even share your screen or something, like you can totally do that. I just want to get a deep dive into the product. Daniel: Yeah, for sure. I'll give like a, I think the easiest way is like a very simple example. Well, I just pulled up the platform here. Daniel: So let's say, I mean, we'll record every type of company from contractors who help build buildings to like, I mean, GPU companies to marketing firms, manufacturing companies. Literally we've probably worked with almost every company at this point. Uh, but the easiest example, and then the one I always like to give is like, imagine you're a up for every kind of single company that I'm tracking. So if you're like upwind, they have a new VP of sales for North America. So this is a good opportunity that I can go chase and say, Hey, I see you got a job. You're probably thinking about how to kind of crush pipeline in the next six months. Go after them. And so that's what we do for, I mean, you name it. You give me a thousand examples, but in a nutshell, we go look for opportunities, go look for kind of details that you can help use to close deals. Matt: Solid. And where are you guys, like just out of my own curiosity, is BirdDog just going out and scraping a bunch of sources out there to try to get the latest and greatest? Daniel: Yeah, yeah, we scrape like almost everything. Job postings, news articles, press releases, earnings calls. Like if something is mentioned on like an earnings call, earnings reports, we're doing interviews now, the company website, all the way from the homepage to like the privacy policy no one reads. Like maybe there's something in there with like, usually like SOC 2 compliance is something we'll find in there. So like if you're selling like a Vanta or a comparable product, like you'll want to know, is the company SOC 2 compliant? Because like if they are, like, obviously you can't sell them. Like they've already been sold and it's done. So helping teams do that where we can identify like what opportunities are not for them and what opportunities are for them. That would require someone actually going, like manually searching that, right? Or like not knowing and then emailing that company 50 times thinking it's a good deal, but they've already been sold and they're never going to buy. So like how do we help sales teams optimize the way they're doing their outreach and who they're targeting is really what we solve for. Matt: So, okay, so today BirdDog, obviously you guys have a bunch of customers. You got the wall of logos and you know, clearly you guys are solving a problem that people are willing to pay for. In the early days, how did you think about marketing the product once, say you had a few users, initial product out there, you know, today you're posting a ton on LinkedIn, but curious how the marketing strategy and approach has evolved over time. Daniel: Yeah, so the way we thought about it is like, Noah and I started from zero. So like we had no connections. I know almost no one in the sales space. Like my dad's a salesperson, but like other than that, like literally I have no family, no friends that are in the sales space. Like Noah and I started from zero, zero customers. Matt: And what we did is we just went on LinkedIn and started cold DMing people. That's how we got the first kind of, let's call it three customers. And then after that, we're like, okay, it seems like we might have something here. We got some feedback. Like the product sucks less than it did when we got the first customer. Like let's start kind of pushing growth. And this is December of 2024. So I'll give you kind of a timeline. We started in July, took us six months to December-ish to get like a somewhat working product that did what we said it would do. So all right, time to market. And so what we looked at is like, okay, you have a bunch of different options, but like there's not that many out there. You have like Facebook ads. You could go TV. You could send a bunch of newsletters out. You could pay influencers. You could go on LinkedIn. You could post on Twitter, right? Like there's probably 25 to 30 different options to go and kind of market this. And what we said is like, okay, well, where do salespeople hang out? Like what is the like golden, like I call it a honey pot, but like, where's the golden pot that you can go chase after where your customers like to hang out, whether it's a forum, like a Reddit forum is good times for us, it's LinkedIn. Like salespeople are always on LinkedIn. If you look at the biggest influencers on LinkedIn, they're salespeople most of the time. That's because salespeople use LinkedIn all day to sell other people. So you're kind of like in the cross traffic as they're like messaging people. Like your post is popping up on their feed. So it's a super active niche on LinkedIn. So we were like, that seems like a perfect place to go ahead and market it. And so that was the original kind of like decision to go on LinkedIn was like, it's as simple as like, there's a bunch of salespeople on there. Seems like a good place to start. So that was the kind of origin story of why we chose LinkedIn. It was like, it's just, it's the best place for salespeople. Daniel: But like the comparable is like figure out what the best place is for your product. Like if you're selling something to moms, it's probably like Facebook. So you decide on LinkedIn. And then what's the next step you take? You're like, okay, I'm going to post multiple times per day. Am I gonna keep connecting with people and then DMing them or, are you sending a connection with a note? What's how's your strategy started and now evolved? Matt: Yeah, so first kind of three customers came from connecting with a hundred people a week. So that's like roughly the connect, like the limit you'll get. I went through all of our competitors' posts. Cause you want to make sure you're connecting with people who are actually active on LinkedIn. There's a big point. People miss with like the hundred connections is like, they just connect with anyone who has a title that they can sell to. But a lot of times like, shoot, they might not even have the LinkedIn app on their phone. Daniel: Like they might not even ever logged in to LinkedIn since they created their account. So you don't want to target those people because you only have a hundred connections. Like you got to make each one worthwhile. So I was like, oh, how do I figure out who's like active, who's liking posts, who's engaging with content? Because I want those people in my network. Because like if I, if they like that content, like they might like mine. And so I went through all of our competitors' LinkedIn posts, looked at all the titles of all the different people and essentially just cherry picked a hundred people each week that I thought like would be the perfect ICP and were also engaging with other people's content. And so I did that till about 3000 followers and was just cold DMing every single person. Like you connect with me five minutes later, you got a message and then like, if you responded, you got a message back like a minute later. Like it was like a complete LinkedIn bot, but I was like always on there all day just messaging people. And so that's how we got the first few. And then at that time I was posting too. So I started to post, but these posts did absolutely atrocious. Like I'm not kidding you, like two, like, like it was, it was so bad. But there's totally a rhyme and a reason, a skill to like how you got to make a post on LinkedIn. Because it's like anything, like certain YouTube videos do really well. Like if you look at Mr. Beast, like the reason he does so well is because he essentially studied the YouTube algorithm for like 10 years to develop the perfect like five second hook to every single video. And then like these mini re-hooks throughout. So like, that's the perfect strategy for YouTube. And now you see all the biggest creators on that platform using that same thing applies to LinkedIn, right? It's text. So it's a little bit different than a video a lot of times, but there is a process. There's hooks, there's re-hooks, there's the way you format things. There's the way you break things up to make them readable. So there's a complete strategy. And the way I like to show people this is like go on your feed. You'll see two types of posts. There's only two types of posts. One that has 10 to 20 likes and one that has 200 likes. Read them both and they're gonna be clearly different. There's the tone is different. The hook is different. The topic is different. If they have any videos or content, it's completely different. And it's as clear as day when you compare them side by side. And after a while of doing that, you can essentially predict what posts are going to go viral. You can say, Hey, this post is going to do well. This post isn't. This post is, this post isn't. And so it becomes a skill. And obviously you aren't going to get everyone, right? Because like, even now I still post like completely flop, but you get better and better and better at it. Daniel: And then you can identify when things will do well or when a moment in life is like a good opportunity to post on LinkedIn, which for us, like a lot of our biggest moments have been from like just a handful of posts. Like if you looked at my LinkedIn impressions chart, it's like spike, spike, spike, spike, every kind of couple months. And so that's been a big part of the LinkedIn growth too. Matt: There's so many ways you could take this. Matt and I have talked about the power law of content extensively. The same thing with my content, Jack. When you know, you used to see it by day and not cumulative, the impressions. I would see the same thing. I'd get a post 200,000. And then it's like, you know, you're at this new high and then you slowly have this baseline just climbing up. I'm curious how you write posts now. Like, what's I'll try to reverse engineer the LinkedIn algorithm with ChatGPT once or twice. It's funny because all the previous guests, Jack, have done the exact same thing you have with having a Notion or a notes app or whatever it is with hooks. And actually, the famous rapper does the same thing with hooks of his song. He'll write out the first, second, squarely. You actually should probably bleep out his name, but he does the same thing where he'll write down the first hook, and then when it comes to going in the studio, he knows a hook, what do the song off of. It's just so cool to see how you have such a similar workflow to everyone else you've talked to. Daniel: Yeah, I know. Yeah. That's very interesting, but obviously it seems to work. So like, if you try to create content, like I feel like that's got to be the way, right? If everyone does it, then, you know, that's a good solution. Matt: Jack, do you think about bucketing your content into like different categories? For example, I guess the simplest way would be like top of funnel content that's more focused on brand awareness versus like more conversion-focused bottom of funnel, like clearly pitching BirdDog a little bit more type of content, which probably isn't gonna get as much engagement, but might get more people to actually book a demo. Daniel: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like, you got to balance it too. So for us, like, my biggest goal is to tell the story of what we're doing, right? Like, I think it's very cool. And like that's honestly kind of selfish because like, I wanna look back on this one day and be able to read, like I said, a public journal of everything we were going through, all of our thoughts, challenges. Like you'll see I posted, like this week, like, we lost half of our revenue in 2024 in February, I guess, no, 2025, February. It's like, I post everything. I just think it's just a cool way to like send your journal and think about what we're doing. And that also like just so happens to grow the business. So that's the one part of it is like, I want to tell the journey that's a high level purpose of what we do. Daniel: But then yeah, like you sprinkle in some content, particularly like around, like, if you have really good data points, like for us, like we just tested against one of our competitors called Clay, and we found 15 more 15 times the signals that they did. Like we found 51 signals, they found 7 on the same set of accounts. It was like, okay, clearly like, clearly we won there. Like we outperformed in that category. So I think that's worth showing. But that's also like somewhat educational too to say, hey, like, this is the data you're getting by paying a lot more for it. And like, this is what you can do, whether it's with us or someone else, like by leaving that ecosystem. But yeah, so like we'll bucket into like some more bottom of funnel content, some more like founder just narrative story content. But I don't honestly think about it too much. I just try to avoid like bashing on competitors too much, too often. So like, that's the one conversation I have all the time is like, you know, keep it generally positive, keep it generally like about the story. But otherwise, like just try to keep a nice mix where it feels organic and fresh. Matt: Yeah, I like that. It's towing that line. It's the same thing we talked about with Jason Alvarez Cohen of when he was talking about Cooley's marketing and Jason tries to do the same thing and that, you know, sometimes those TikTok videos, it actually cost him his seed round, you know, it was like $5 million or whatever it was over a TikTok because some company didn't want to work with him after that TikTok. How do you work on towing that line of like showing you're better and name dropping your competition, but also like being objective at the same time? Daniel: Yeah. I think the one thing is, is we can speak to a lot of proof, right? So like our biggest competition, like if you were to say, like, there's two companies out there that we take the most customers from, it's probably Sixth Sense and Demandbase. It's like, it's such an intent data tool. It tracks like web search. So you could say like, hey, this company just searched, like, we want AI data center. Sounds really cool in practice. I think most sales teams we talk to, which could totally be like confirmation bias, find that they get essentially no results. We signed up two customers in the last like week or two that came from these companies. And they said after spending $60,000 on these tools, they got zero meetings. I think it was zero or one meeting. That's it. After six months and spending $60,000, that's the only result they got. And so I feel pretty comfortable with that because that's obviously something that's just like my mind, either unethical or just like bad business. Like you're taking all these money from these people and then delivering no results. Um, and so a lot of times for us, like when we deliver no results for someone, because we do inevitably, like they have a different ICP that we haven't tested or whatnot. We'll just usually refund them. Daniel: We'll just say, hey, like, that's on us. Like my bad. Take your money back. And so when I see businesses not operating that way, it feels very slimy to me. And I always like to, like, essentially bring that to light and say, hey, this is what's going on here. This is where things could go wrong. And then obviously, like, here's other alternatives, which is usually BirdDog. So that's why I feel comfortable with it. But obviously, there's, you want to align, like, I just don't want to, like, bash them to bash them because like, people do that. But again, it doesn't really work. Like there's no proof behind it. There's no substance behind it. It's just complaining at the end of the day. Matt: This is less related to LinkedIn, but I just have to ask you this because you mentioned Clay and I think they recently raised a ton of money. I know you guys are bootstrapped. So I would love to just like dig into that. What's kind of like the thinking behind that versus like raising money. I'm sure that you've probably been approached by lots of investors and yeah, how have you and Noah thought through that? Daniel: Yeah. I think the thing from us is like, we had done it the other way before. So like we had raised money before. We had seen kind of the way that that business plays out. And then we also have a lot of other friends in the space where, like, we got to see what happened after they raised their seed round. We saw what happened if they raised their Series A round, their Series B round, right? How diluted you get, right? Because by Series B, I think the average founder owns maybe like 10 to 15% of the company at that point, something like that, which is, it doesn't feel great. Like you spend all this time, it's your baby, you built it up, and then you only own 15%. And right. Like it's of a bigger pie, which is the argument against it. But now you also have bosses, right? So now you got to answer to investors. Now you have to jump through all these hurdles. It puts more pressure on you and more pressure on the business to succeed. That's why we see a lot of these VC backed companies kind of explode is because they have essentially a pressure cooker going on where it's like, you need to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. If you don't grow, right, you don't get your next round. But the issue is, like, most of those companies outspend their revenue. So like we have a lot of competitors where they're, I mean, we've done the math and like we've talked to their founders, like, they're outspending their revenue by hiring teams of 50 or 60, right? And they're burning, let's call it a couple million dollars on salaries a year, but their revenue is only, you know, $2 million, right? So now they're burning money every year. So they got to keep growing faster and faster. But if they don't reach that hurdle, they don't make the next round and then they explode, right? Because now they have no money. They don't have a VC investor to come in. Daniel: So we've seen that with a lot of competition in the space and generally VC backed companies. So we saw that and we're like, no. Like, we don't want to do that. It's way, way, way, way harder to bootstrap. Like it wouldn't have been possible if I didn't stay at my job, if I, you know, didn't have a co-founder like Noah, who was willing to essentially work for free, literally zero salary for like almost a year and a half. Right? So like, there are some very unique circumstances for us that allowed us to do that. That might not be for everyone. That might not be even possible to do. But that's how we did it. That's why we did it. Matt: Yeah, I guess I should bring it back to LinkedIn. This is fascinating, Jack. So does Noah post on LinkedIn or is it mostly you sort of leading like the marketing side of things? Daniel: Yeah, so Noah also posts on LinkedIn. So he does a similar kind of strategy, like two posts a day ish, maybe a little less. Matt: Got it. And do you guys sort of, do you have like a coordinated LinkedIn strategy or is it kind of like, you know, let's just both just ship at least I've been this because you have to be very picky in the way you do it because obviously you don't want to just pitch because just pitching is never going to get you deals, but you also have to like be either funny or relatable or add something in a conversation that comes from personal experience that like AI is not going to give you or just kind of mass spray and praying, like a bunch of comments and spending three seconds on each kind of thing is not going to give you. Daniel: So I take a much more kind of tactical approach and say like, hey, like did someone post something about signals or the space that we're in or sales tools, right? Focus on those first. Focus on like the biggest kind of accounts. And then try to add something in the conversation or kind of twist it in a unique way that leads back to bird dog or even genuinely just make a joke about pitching bird dog and then pitch bird. But you definitely have to be creative in the way you do it. Otherwise, it just becomes, again, noise. Like you're just like commenting to get like 200 impressions per comment, but like the quality of those impressions are almost not and you're never going to book anything else from them. Matt: I totally agree. I like to even call comments mini posts because they're effectively the same thing. They go to your whole network and you're trying to do the same thing with hook and using emotion. Daniel: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think the engagement side, like not enough people are, maybe in our bubble of people who actively post on LinkedIn. Yes, people know that. But I think in for context, like I run an agency where basically I talked to a lot of founders that want to post on LinkedIn. And a lot of them are like, oh yeah, step one is I definitely need to start posting, right? And I'm always like, yes, content is like an important part of that, but the engagement is actually like just as important. Daniel: You need to be like engaging with people that, you know, other accounts that your customers are probably following or engaging with their content. You need to be liking. It's a social media network. It's not just you blasting out your own thoughts without interacting with anyone else on there. And that actually kind of reminds me because I've noticed on posts that perform really well, oftentimes it is people within your network that maybe also have really large followings, a really engaged followings that are liking, commenting on your posts, and that just boosts the reach even further out to their network. So the relationship building aspect of it, I think cannot be understated how important that is. Matt: Yeah. Like that is, if you were to give one piece of advice on how to grow on LinkedIn, like over, if you were saying like, I'm going to start today, I'm going to give it a year on LinkedIn. I want to be like a relatively big following, right? You can post, you can comment, you can message people. The one thing in my mind that like kind of overarches all these and like most people miss is like actually building a relationship. It's like people see these as like transactional. Like I'm gonna leave a comment once, right? And I don't know who this person is. I'm going to make a post once. I'm going to DM this person once. What I saw was like, okay, let's do kind of the opposite of that and let's actually build relationships here. Because like, that's how you build a reputation in this space. Like if no one knows who you are and you're just kind of a ghost appearing and disappearing, you aren't going to build that following, that critical mass that's sticking with you, that's sticking behind you, because that's how you grow, right? Otherwise you're going to reach like 20 different people each time instead of it going from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 as you're growing these relationships and all these people are supporting you, liking, commenting on your journey. That's where I think most people get it wrong. So like in the beginning, I just spent a ton of time like messaging people, talking about weekends, talking about golf, like talking about family plans, like whatever it was. Because one, I genuinely enjoy that. I think it's cool to like meet people and learn from them. And obviously I'm trying to collect a bunch of ideas for bird dog. But two, like that's very, very helpful in building a network behind you, right? People who know you, who know what you are, who know about you outside of what you're just posting, but like actually have a conversation with. They're much more likely to kind of help support you along the journey because now you aren't just another nameless, faceless person putting content out there. Daniel: Right. Speaking of which, like Jack, I think you messaged me first when I connected with you. And we did, you did ask me something about like, what are you doing this weekend? And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. Daniel: Like no one's really asked me that on LinkedIn before. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to play pickle ball. I think you said you were watching a Michigan game. Um, and instantly that stood out, right? Because most people who are getting DMs on LinkedIn, it's usually something that comes across pretty salesy. There's probably some pitch in the initial message. And I wanted to actually dig in with you on LinkedIn DMs because obviously most founders that are posting or salespeople, the ultimate goal here is to get calls booked, right? You're, let's say you're doing the content, you're making good content. It's resonating. You're engaging. And now you're getting some inbound and you're also doing your own outbound messaging. How do you approach the, the DM sales process so that you don't come across just like every other like salesy message and still make sure that you're converting that traffic and interest into actual demos? Matt: Yeah. I think for the way I think about it is I don't even think about converting it into demos. Like it is interest or traffic. Right? Because none of these people have actually shown interest or traffic until they indicate that. And indicating that means messaging you saying they want it, right? Maybe leaving a comment post saying this is really cool, right? Maybe liking a post that's about your product, right? Those are indications that someone is actually interested. Otherwise, if you're just cold DMing someone, there's no interest. They don't know anything about you. They know nothing like about your business, what you do, the value props. So like thinking you're going to convert that person from zero is a very difficult challenge unless you're very skilled at, like, your essentially your marketing pitch, right? Like, how do you create interest and want in essentially 150 words? If you're very good at that, you can just spray out a bunch of messages and like it's essentially as good as running a Facebook ads campaign. It's like the way I like to think about it. What I do is a lot different. So like I say, like, okay, I don't want to do any of that. I don't want, I'm not a great marketer in the sense of like writing a great 150 word pitch. I'm not a great salesperson in the sense of like converting random people into demos. With that, I was like, how about we just don't pitch at all? Which sounds insane. Sounds like it would never work. But by putting the content out there and just by making genuine relationships, after enough time, if someone is interested or can actually be helped by your product and you're clear enough in your posting, they'll come to you. They'll say, Hey, I saw this like post. Can you help me? I've been following you for 12 months. Like, I want to reach out now. And so that's how I view it. It's like you're essentially putting like coins in the bank with each comment, with each connection, with each conversation. And you don't know when that payout is going to come. It could come in two months. Daniel: It could come in 12 months. It could come in two years. But you do enough of those and you start to build up a flywheel where you're getting 10, 15, 20. We do like 30, 40 demos a week now booked off LinkedIn. And so that's kind of how we built it where we don't actually pitch at all. Like if you looked at my conversations, like rarely am I ever saying like, so do you want to try BirdDog? Oh, could you use this? Like, have you thought about a signals tool? Almost never. Do I say that most of the time it's them coming to us and saying, Hey, oh, I really like your tool. Like, can you tell me more about it? Oh, Hey, can I get a demo? Oh, Hey, can I run some sample data? That's where it comes from now versus it being like, I'm reaching out to a bunch of people. And like you saw, like, I'm just saying, what's up? Like, how's the weekend? How's the family? I saw you live in Madison, Wisconsin. I was just there three weeks ago. That's what I'm doing. 99.999% of the time. Matt: It's so cool to me, Jack, because you've really built a movement more than a company. Like when you're posting on LinkedIn, you're appealing to everyone's emotion. And especially when you're on something like LinkedIn, where your like radiates to everyone you follow. I think that speaks to the community you've built even more because people are willing to like your stuff and be part of this signals movement that you've really created with BirdDog, which is pretty cool. Daniel: Yeah, thank you. I think it's cool. I'm like, for me, it's very fulfilling because I feel like there's been, and then for people who don't know or aren't in the sales space, like there's been so many years of these big, large tools that have done really well. Demos or someone no-shows, I'll spend that 30 minutes responding to messages or answering questions or working on customer support or coming up with a new idea. But our primary focus is on demos. We do a bunch of demos a week. We probably do 30 to 50 demos a week. And then any customer support questions, we try to answer within a minute to five minutes. And so everyone has us in Slack, and then they can just ping us whenever something goes wrong. And we'll try to answer as quick as possible. So really, we have two priorities, new demos and then making sure everyone who's on our platform is super happy. And everything else outside of that, including LinkedIn, it's kind of secondary and it's kind of pushed to free time that we have. Matt: Jack, 30 to 50 demos a week is really impressive. Outside of just LinkedIn posting that you and Noah are doing, are you guys doing anything else to market the product, or is that the primary channel? Like literally just inbound from LinkedIn. Daniel: Yeah, it's that, and now there's some word of mouth happening, but it's still early stages. Vast majority is through LinkedIn. Matt: That's incredible. You're not running any LinkedIn ads. I was going to ask about that next. Daniel: No LinkedIn ads. Matt: No ads. That's crazy. Okay, that's a new one. Matt: I mean, and BirdDog, like just to give an audience a sense of the scale too, like how big is BirdDog? Just a company that you built off of organically posting and DMing on LinkedIn. Daniel: Yeah, let's put it this way. A year ago, almost a year ago to today, we had zero customers. Zero, not one. We got our first customer in December of 2024, and then now we have customers, everything from individuals all the way up to, we just signed a publicly traded company this summer and like five enterprise deals. So we've exploded. I think the latest stats was 393% growth since June in revenue. So yeah, we've been humming along. It's been very fun. I feel very fortunate. Matt: Incredible. So Daniel, I don't know if you want to transition to the good idea, bad idea segment, or if you had anything else you wanted to cover. Are there any other things, Jack, we should ask you about LinkedIn that we didn't yet, whether about your experience section, the skills you put, your about section, your profile photo, LinkedIn Live. I don't know, anything else? Daniel: Yeah, I'll give like the quick five-minute, essentially make your LinkedIn the best it can be. Matt: Okay, let's hear it. Daniel: So let me, I'll pull my account and we're gonna use this as an example. Let's do share screen. Let's go to my profile. So I think the first thing, like very, very simply, just have a very clean photo, like super clear. Make your face as big as possible. It essentially becomes your brand image. And maybe it's just me, because I'm probably an idiot, but like I remember people more by their LinkedIn photo, because I think humans are very visual creatures. Matt: I'm the same way. Daniel: Than their name. Like I'll see someone's photo, I'll be like, oh, I remember that guy. Like you give me their name and I'll be like, oh I don't really remember them. Uh, so I think that's the first thing. Like pick a really clean photo that just kind of works. Don't need to overthink it. Next thing is the banner. Everyone always talks about this. I was always against it. For the longest time, I had a photo of the Michigan football stadium. And I thought that was kind of the saving grace. I think it does work to some degree, particularly when you're smaller, because then people don't feel like you're instantly gonna pitch them and then deny you. So that's one thing, but you can kind of mess with it and play with it and see what your connection rates are. But what we did was once we got big enough is we added this probably two months ago, which is essentially shows like what we're about. Gives you a little idea, gives you some social proof with some of our customer logos. And then we have a couple of different value props on here. So that's really simple. That's the banner tagline. You can make it very simple. I think leave your title first. I think most people now try to put this kind of like what I do upfront. But the way that shows when you're connecting with people is it just shows this. It doesn't show your title. Matt: And I think what's really crucial here, Daniel, is understanding how these algorithms work. It's not just about the likes or the comments anymore. It's about how long people are actually engaging with your content. Daniel: Exactly, Matt. And breaking it down like that makes it approachable for your audience. Short sections can really boost readability, keeping people on your post longer. Matt: And when they spend more time, LinkedIn takes that as a good sign and amplifies your content to more viewers. Just like a well-optimized YouTube video that keeps viewers watching till the end. Daniel: Right, and that's what everyone needs to focus on—crafting content that's not only compelling but also keeps the conversation going. Matt: Very simple, very skimmable, tells a story, very clean, easy to read. This post has nothing. It's one line. That's all you can read. It's a quick scroll by. And so that's a great example of why short posts that are either nothing's there or long posts that are very hard to read, don't do as well as these kind of formatted, very simple to read kind of the Mr. Beast. And it's a terrible example. But like there's a formula LinkedIn, right? Optimizing for that read time. So there's a difference in the post. That would be like the other thing that most people mess up on is you can see like these posts, just like they do different. Like this one has 20,000 impressions and 172 likes. So it's not linear where you can say like every post performs the same if you're just looking at likes and comments. It almost, just to draw a parallel to like the mom test discussion from earlier, people paying for something is almost like the impressions because that's like, literally people are spending their time dwelling on your post versus the engagements. I do find it varies depending on like if this is something people want to show up on their feed and if it's like a really raw, emotional, like personal post, then like it tends to get more engagement, but it's almost like, yeah, like the mom test parallel. It's like what people want to say to your face versus like their actual thoughts is more like the impressions and the algorithm picks up on that because if someone's spending twice as much time on a certain post, even if they're not engaging or commenting, like clearly there's something going on there. Yes, that's the way I think matters. You want to optimize for time reading on the posts. It's like, if you really want to maximize the ROI on LinkedIn, I would look at that and then you see like my content shifted from like engagement focused to more of like an impressions focus. Like overall likes comments is like maybe flat to down. But, you know, while a lot of other people are struggling to get impressions right now, my impressions have shot up over the last kind of three months Essentially what happened is, Noah and I made a post about ZoomInfo versus us. It was a comparison between what we were doing in ZoomInfo, and a couple of the guys over at ZoomInfo commented on it and like, let's run a head-to-head test live on LinkedIn. I'm like, yes, I'm all over that. And so what we did is just started setting it up, like going back and forth. And then all of a sudden it got like kiboshed by upper management. They're like, no, you are not allowed to do that. Like, do not do that. And it got killed overnight. And so I made a post essentially calling that out, literally taking a screenshot from Noah where he told me like, they backed out. And then put it out on LinkedIn. I was like, this is hilarious. Like essentially, ZoomInfo, this big company, just spent $200 million trying to compete with us, backed out of a test. And they went nuts. Daniel: So that's one of the biggest ones. But even if you look at, like, you can look at the back end here, like, look at impressions. Like, you'll see the spikes here in the last kind of year of when these posts happened. Because it is very spiky. It is very nonlinear if this thing ever updates. Matt: Yeah. So you can see like, Yeah, you can see like all these post spikes where it's doing 200,000 impressions per day, um, you know, in each of these. So very interesting how this works. So impressive. Like 500,000 impressions on one post, too. That's nuts. Daniel: Yeah. It's crazy. 3.8 million is very impressive. I, I really don't like how they change it to the cumulative by default. Matt: Do you not like that change either? That is so weird. Daniel: I don't get it. I don't get it. Uh, it doesn't make any sense. I'm in awe by this and so impressed. Matt: Yeah, I mean, in literally a year ago, you would have had like maybe 1,000 followers. If that. I mean, I started from scratch, so I had a, I still have, there's another LinkedIn account out there from my prior job. So when I was running both at the same time, I made a second LinkedIn account. I ran it by like my company, but like made a second LinkedIn account and then blocked everyone at that other company and then started posting on this account that I have now. Daniel: So there's, there's two Jack Porters out there. The one is a dead account that I need to delete. But like, this is my main account. But that's how I originally started. So like I had a full-time job, had to like the accounts, the one I didn't use was dead, but like, yeah, that's how we started this whole thing and literally started from scratch. Like didn't even have like friends, family in this LinkedIn account. Matt: That's so cool. And I want to show, okay, before we get into a good idea, bad idea, I want to show you my impressions too, Jack, because I am right now at 3.8 million too. And I literally just started posting in February and I have half the followers you do. And it's just hilarious, uh, to see that too, how followers can vary so much. Like, I'm not, or at least, you know, I, I've posted about a million things. I didn't have a niche like you did or anything like that. And now I'm starting to figure that out. Like, you know, with, with me and Matt, what we're doing, it, it, it was just crazy to me because I'm about to hit 3.8 million too. Daniel: Yeah. That's awesome. It's the best. It's the best. You can, I mean, you know now, like it's amazing what you can do even like for you started in February. It's amazing how quickly it happens. Like if you dedicate enough time, you can see it on a chart. That chart is proof. Like, look at what happens like to the first, you know, four months, right? It's learning. And then you have one hit, two hits, three hits back-to-back. Like it works and you learn the system. You learn how to play the game. And then once you figure it out, it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Love it. Matt: Now one, one last question, actually, Daniel, if you'll just humor me. So Jack, really quick, if you were the CEO of LinkedIn, is there anything that you'd change about the platform? Daniel: I honestly don't know. I don't, I don't think so. I love what uh Mitchell's doing at Kondo. I think the LinkedIn, like I can't message anyone on my phone. Like it literally broke. Like it just, I click on it, it's a blank screen. So if they could fix messaging on my phone so I can actually respond to people, that would be awesome. But otherwise, I think it's awesome. I think it's like, it's a fun, weird, quirky thing where they try to gatekeep all the data and keep bots off the platform. And it's very, it's a weird, funky kind of like subculture, but it's hilarious and it's a lot of fun. I don't know if I'd change anything, but like one thing had to change, like I want to send messages on my phone again, please, please LinkedIn, help me out. Jack, I, I just thought of this too. We're adding a lot of different segments and definitely going over, but I have some LinkedIn trivia for you if you want to participate. Matt: Let's do it. Before we get into it, we'll start easy. Who's the parent company of LinkedIn? Daniel: Microsoft. Matt: Okay. How many users are on LinkedIn worldwide? Daniel: Worldwide. I'm going to guess 500 million? Matt: 1.2 billion. What percent of that 1.2 billion is in the US? So what percent of LinkedIn's user base is in the US? Daniel: 15%. Matt: 20. There you go. And in final question, what percent of the US is on LinkedIn? Daniel: I could probably do that math. You got 100 million. Let's say like 20, 25%. Matt: 20%. Yeah. Which is just crazy to think about that, you know, you're really advertising to 20% of, of LinkedIn's user base, which it's pretty cool. Daniel: Crazy. It's crazy. Sneaky big. Yep. I had no idea. Although I did get connections from all over the world. Like somehow, like, I look at you, you can look at like the engagement by geography. It's always like Europe, India, the Middle East. It's crazy. Like compared to the US. Matt: We're going to transition now into what we call the good idea, bad idea segment. I'm going to give you an idea I have for BirdDog. Now that I understand the platform a lot better, some of these may not be as good as I originally thought when I was writing them, but there are six. And before I forget too, I have to tell you that my dad went to Michigan and my aunt as well. So Michigan is, is in my blood and my dad always was talking about how he founded the Michigan party. I don't know if that's still a thing or not, but he was a huge fan of that. Daniel: That's sweet. So the first idea is BirdDog for founders. So it gives you updates on investors. Maybe they just raised a new fund. You can ask them for more money or stuff like that. How's that idea? Matt: Let's do it. It can be, it's possible in 15 minutes. Daniel: I love it. That's awesome. Matt: Okay. So then I assume it's then easy to do that for VCs too, to get updates on the founders. Daniel: We have some of them on the platform. Yep. Matt: Okay, let's go. Matt: What about BirdDog for recruiting? So, you know, with consulting and banking recruiting, you're trying to keep tabs on 50 people and whether they've posted on LinkedIn, had a birthday, whatever. Can you, can we use BirdDog for that? So we don't scrape people because LinkedIn will sue you like they did to Zoomers and Apollo. And then they kicked off. You heard Apple market about them. Daniel: I have not heard of them. Matt: VC backed company, raised a bunch of money. Super cool products, super cool founding team. They scraped LinkedIn for that data to have signals on people. Both founders' profiles deleted overnight. Company profile deleted overnight. Gone. Disappeared. Off the radar. So we don't touch people. We don't touch any of the data that's private to LinkedIn. But what we do do is for about 30% of our customers who are recruiters, we help them find businesses that they can recruit for. So what businesses are expanding, opening new locations, offices, factories, et cetera, where they can help fill those positions. Daniel: Okay. Good to know. And I actually had one before that, Matt, before this, it was to be a reality TV show called The Signal, where you follow sales teams using their platform. But apparently that's already a show on Netflix. Matt: What? I'll have to watch it now. That's awesome. Daniel: But, but I felt like The Signal is such a good name. Matt: Yeah, it's a good name. I like that. Daniel: And lastly, the last one is, you know, I know you're a huge football fan. I've met some of the guys in the University of Louisville football team and all the NIL recruiting is through Instagram DMs. Is there a way, you know, we can figure out how to a CRM plus BirdDog to see, well, not knowing we can't really scrape people, but that was the last idea. I guess what you could do if you're looking for NIL money or like