How To Scale Companies: The Powerful Way To Automate LinkedIn! With Stefan Smulders
How can you scale companies in a world where digital software dominates? It’s simple, use the right tools to navigate the digital world! You can have one such tool in your toolkit. Introducing Mitch Russo’s guest, Stefan Smulders. Stefan is the Founder of the world’s safest software for LinkedIn Automation, Expandi.io. Stefan’s Expandi is a powerful automation software that helps you connect with your ideal clients. Join in the conversation and discover Stefan’s journey on building Expandi to where it is today and how it’s helping others scale fast! Jump in!
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How To Scale Companies: The Powerful Way To Automate LinkedIn! With Stefan Smulders
As you guys know, I know what bootstrapping a company is like. I bootstrap my own software startup. I even went 2.5 years without a salary. My persistence paid off. As many of you know, I exited from eight figures years later. Our story is about another entrepreneur who did something similar and his story is fascinating. It includes all the ups and downs you can imagine but he learned incredible lessons along the way. He’s here to share that with us since we are always interested in learning how others fix their mistakes, which is better than making those same mistakes yourself. Welcome, Stefan Smulders to the show.
Thanks for the great introduction, Mitch. As a fan of the show, I’m very excited to be here.
You are in good company because there are many people reading who want to know how you did this? Before we go there, let’s go back to the beginning. How did this all start?
Let’s tell you the true story. My name is Stefan. I’m located in the Netherlands. I started years ago with my first SaaS software. It’s called Lead Express. It still exists. It’s a very intelligent IP tracking software where we try to identify as many website visitors as possible. It’s a nice software to have with the local database and a bit similar to software like Kohlberg’s Growth, Lead Forensics, Leadfeeder. The only main challenge of all these types of software is, which we found out after a while, is that it’s nice for people to see for small to medium business owners who are visiting their website but it’s very hard and what’s the best way to follow up? I saw in the early days that a lot of my customers try to pick the phone and call reception. “Stefan here. Can you please forward me to the colleague who visited my website?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.” As you can imagine, after trying it out a couple of times, they blame me that the software was not working perfectly for them. That challenged me to look for ways and help people to do outreach in a much more modern way.
We are talking about years ago. I start my new adventure on LinkedIn. I was a newbie on LinkedIn. I had 140 connections and I pushed myself a bit harder. I subscribed for the Sales Navigator. After doing that, I immediately was in love with all these filters and options to search for my ideal customer profiles along with all LinkedIn user-based. The only mistake I made was that it wasn’t that easy to engage with these people. It was easy to find them but writing the right copy, sequences and messages were a bit hard in the beginning because I was only talking about myself, “I’m Stefan. I’m that cool guy. I can help everybody with everything. It will not cost that much money.” As you can imagine, not a lot of people were accepting my regress or engaging with my follow-up messages. I needed to do a better job. I studied for more than three months to learn everything about what’s the best way to approach people on LinkedIn and engage. After doing that, a couple of months later, I can say that LinkedIn became my number one lead channel.
The other software company that you had started before this, what is the disposition of that company? You said it’s still around. Are you actively still developing the software or is it dying slowly on the line?
The main reason why it’s dying slowly is because of the impressive growth of our software Expandi. We automate decisions, “We’re going to spend all the time on Expandi because it’s growing so fast.” There are 1,000 users still on the websites that we are tracking. We do the maintenance of it but we are not updating or approving anymore.
What would you say was the main lesson that came out of that experience?
The best way to grow is to scale fast, especially for bootstrap founders. Share on XI was in my early thirties when I started with that. I came from school with less knowledge also in doing marketing. It was a nice software to have but it did not solve the main problem. In the end, people want to engage with people. They want to have appointments, so they need to do some actions to achieve it. That was one of the most difficult things to manage on a proper way to adjust that piece of software, besides the fact that we want to grow it in a traditional way with traditional marketing and paid advertisements like almost everybody is doing. Comparing with what we are doing now with Expandi. We did it for bootstrap. We use only growth tactics and in-depth hacks to scale fast. These are the best way to grow, especially for bootstrap founders, who want to scale fast.
That is the traditional route. You’re describing what I think most of us would have tried or have done. It’s the hard way, which is to build a great product, get client feedback, improve the product then go to market it. The way most people would attempt to do that is with some form of paid advertising or sharing on social media. Typically, that alone doesn’t move the needle. Let’s talk about your company. It started out of the need that you were trying to solve with your first company. Didn’t quite hit the mark. When you began Expandi, what was the thing you were going to do differently this time than you did last time?
First of all, to end up my introduction story, to give all the readers a better overview of the idea of Expandi. LinkedIn became my number one lead channel. I decided to help some complaining customers of our lead express software to manage their profiles, as in done for new service or as a starting agency. I’m trying to get appointments, book for them on LinkedIn, by optimizing their profiles, finding the ICP, do the copy and outreach. After managing five customers, you can imagine with two left hands and one Excel sheet that are running out of time. I thought, “Let’s be clever and try to find some software that could automate some repetitive tasks on LinkedIn.”
I’ve tried out from that time of each and every tool out there in the market from reach out to LinkedIn, I go to Midland, Alfred, Fantom, Bursar and so on. The first challenge I faced with all of these offers is that LinkedIn is not that amused with all these third-party apps. They already test in past some of these tools. It means that people can lose their profiles. People are scared of losing their profiles but everybody wants to use automation to speed up outreach or engaging with people. The huge problem is of all these tools is that as soon as you close your laptop, all automation will stop running.
The second problem is that LinkedIn’s inbox is not that comfortable. It means if you do a lot of outreach and refresh your inbox, you lose the conversations in LinkedIn and you can’t find them back on easy way. Also, these tools do not cover the LinkedIn inbox if you do a proper outreach and you want to keep track of all the metrics and everything. Also, the metrics were a pain point. If you want to manage more profiles, more safe seamless, do that with a third-party app. From frustration, I shared everything that my technical Cofounder, Glenn and that 53 connections on LinkedIn. He got very confident and shared with me, “Let’s build real safest tools in the cloud. We provide every user with a dedicated IP.” We make it easy for agencies like me to manage more profiles, keep everything up and running, build sequences and automate everything. That’s what we did. That was the idea why we designed Expandi.
The things we did different here is that all our competitors are hiding from LinkedIn because everybody is scared to be caught by Bill Gates. We try to do a different because most of our clients are agencies, growth hackers who are managing tons of profiles. Some of them manage hundreds of profiles and want to do that in a safe and seamless way. Besides that, they also want to know who’s behind this software. Therefore, we have a personal approach where we show ourselves, where we engage and interact with all our users to build a relationship like as it is in a normal person.
You said that all your competitors are the people who are publishing software or selling software that does some of this connection automation stuff, which LinkedIn doesn’t like. You said you overcame that. Do you have a relationship with LinkedIn? How do you know your software is safe?
It’s quite simple. LinkedIn wants to crackdown, especially on the part of the search kinds of third-party apps. It was very easy for them to do that with some of these Chrome extensions. That’s what they did as well because the fact that we are cloud-based, it’s very hard for LinkedIn as well to find this. We also do not use any official LinkedIn RP to reach the platform, walking our users and run actions on it. It means it’s hard for our developers to build workarounds and change because we are talking to it like a black box. This is the same for them. We have more than 12,000 active users in our system. We provide them all with undereducated and country-based IP to run the operations. Nobody ever received a notification from LinkedIn that they found out that someone was running on Expandi for access.
You’ve never yet had a problem with anyone being banned by LinkedIn for using your system. The other thing that I heard and I want to confirm is that you’re doing more than automating connection requests here. You’re working with the client directly. The reason I’m repeating some of these things, people, is because I’m interested in this. As Stefan and I had chatted before, as my clients and readers know, I build certification. A good part of the things that we do, I build my program with my coaching clients as well. We use LinkedIn very actively. This is of interest to me. Stefan, I want to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole because we have a good product. It sounds like it’s working. You have 12,000 clients. That’s proof of concept but what was it like to grow from 50 to 1,000 clients? Layout for us some of the lessons you learned and mistakes you made as you made that transition into being a larger company with a lot more clients.
My Cofounder Glenn promised me after sharing this great idea with him, “After three months, I will provide you with fearless data.” It took six months in the Summer of 2019, he gave me access to my first data of Expandi. I start using our tool to contact people who are using my Lead Express software because I have a solution for them on how they can follow up these website identifications in a much easier way. It wasn’t easy for us to get our 300 people who are interested in using our Expandi software. They were all located in the Netherlands and with a LinkedIn profile but they are not that active on LinkedIn. We went with all these people’s demo calls. We found out that it was a bit hard in the beginning. We first had to sell them LinkedIn. They were not that familiar with LinkedIn. It took me twenty minutes.
After twenty minutes, I had to sell them automation, “You also can automate and speed up some things for 40 minutes.” If they decided to give it a try, they came back later on because they need education, “What do I have to send?” Otherwise, they are making the same mistakes as I did manually in the beginning. After it looked like it was not that scalable, we decided to step back and analyze what we did. From there on, we thought, “Let’s focus on a global market. If we focus on people like myself, where the real problem and a real lead, agency owners, growth hackers, people who are already used have left LinkedIn who are using other third-party apps already.” Because I’ve used all these tools myself, I knew everything about these tools and the find assist comparing to what we’ve built with all the love we’ve put in. What we did is we did 50 of these 300 people who are testing our Expandi for firm offer to buy an annual subscription and in where we help them move forward with building templates and campaigns to gather the first 50,000. These 50,000, we used to do our global lounge, mid-November 2019.
We call that in the US missionary cell because you had to be the missionary who went out into the jungle to recruit people and convert them. As opposed to finding those already converted and showing them a better way. In effect, you realize trying to do this with end-users was hard so you went to agencies first. Are you back to soliciting individuals and people who are actively using LinkedIn? Are you still feeling like the agency is your best way of promoting what you do?
That is still our main focus, agencies and growth hackers. We grow so fast and have many traffic on our website. Single-users also sign up and 1/3 of our customers are also single users. We want to start doing automated time for each on a different device.
This is great information here, people because if you’re building a company and you’re not getting traction with your end-user, go to where the end-user goes, which is what Stefan did. He went to the agencies. They go to an agency when they need help. Another thing I shared with Stefan before we started the show is, I send my clients to an agency because we’ve never had a tool that I can reliably count on to do what Stefan’s tool does. I may be shifting my strategy as well. I welcome the chance to figure this out for me first before I go and put my clients into it as well. You got to the point where you had this realization and you can’t try to convert everybody into LinkedIn first. You’re working with the growth hackers. How did you get from 1,000 to 2,000? Was it with the same exact strategy or did you then have to evolve yet again?
We almost use the same approach as we did in the beginning. We were alive for 80% on inbound strategies.
Is it the outbound part of this? Is it based on LinkedIn? As they say, are you eating your dog food here? Are you using your software to find clients for your SaaS-based system?
Getting feedback from your clients is an absolute must. Share on XTo be honest, only the ways on how we have to use LinkedIn are changing. We are changing and also adopting these new kinds of approaches and how we launch our product. That’s a valuable story for the readers. After making such a decision to go global and to focus mainly on audiences and growth marketers and hackers, what we did is that I did a look up on one of our largest competitors in terms of numbers, to discover that social media channels. I found out that they had great social media channels and groups to communicate with their customers. We use some scrape tools to scrape all their audiences in these groups and convert these email addresses into LinkedIn profiles and because I was using these tools myself, I knew what the benefits were in comparing to them.
I started to create and comparing pages. From that point on, we uploaded that CSV file with LinkedIn profiles in our own software. We start making connections with these people where we refer to, “We are both about part of the same Facebook Group. I’m struggling. I’m using this competitor software as well. Let’s be connected or stay in touch.” From there on, as a follow-up in the sequence, we tried to ask people for feedback, “I am a great fan of the competitor sovereign as well but I faced some challenges. Therefore, I developed my software. Before I launch it, I need feedback from experienced users like yourself, Mitch. I hope you can help me out.” That’s how we book more than 40 calls on average per person, per week.
I know that you’ve built your business on integrity and honesty but it sounds a little sneaky, which you did. You weren’t a user of those products when you went into those groups and said, “I’m a user of so-and-so and I’d love to collaborate with you.” Where were you ever upfront? It sounds like at a later point you were but in that first outreach, is that still what you do? Is that still how you would recommend your clients? That did raise a little bit of a note in my mind that, “I’m not sure I would feel comfortable using that approach.” What do you think about that?
I can imagine that. I was part of the group and I’ve used that software as well. What I knew for sure is that it was exactly the right audience for me at that time. To be honest, I ask the feedback.
You did say you are a user of the software, which I guess is true because you did try to use the software.
Along the time ago.
The reason I’m bringing this up again is because there are ethical boundaries that I would never cross and I would never advise my clients too either. One of the examples that you gave and which I love. If you’re reading and you’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking, which is I sell a SaaS-based platform for coaches. There are coaching groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. If I could scrape those names out of those groups and send them through email or connection requests, “We’re both members of the same group. I thought you might be interested in a product that I’m now launching, which I would love to have you take a look at. Would you be interested?” That is perfectly ethical and is completely above board. You’re saying that your company and your platform have the ability to execute that.
In the next step, we wrote everything down. We did it ourselves to achieve these 40 appointments. How we scraped it? Which tools that we connect? We provided templates, results and everything. From that point, it starts with our content distribution. The first thing I did, I made a LinkedIn drama post. LinkedIn outreach is that nobody is replying to messages. I wrote a guide on how you can book 40 appointments and get 73% acceptance. If you want to have this guide, please leave a comment. Besides my wife, 2 friends and 4 colleagues, nobody will like such a post. We use an engagement to boost that post to the marks. It achieved more than 160,000 feeds and thousands of people commented. There was a lot of traction straight from the beginning, and we scraped with Expandi all the people who like and commented on that post because that’s a feature as well, which we could easily outreach and share that valuable guide with them and put some small retargeting.
That engagement tool is part of your product. You said we used an engagement tool.
It was another tool and it’s called Lempod at that time.
Is that a product that you still recommend? Is that something that is currently in use?
It’s still in use but there’s some more competition, I should say LinkBoost. I hear some great stories about that one as well.
Guys, you are getting an incredible education here on how to use LinkedIn to market. Before we move to the next segment of the show, Stefan, I wanted to confirm that your primary marketing system is LinkedIn. Does the software also work with Facebook and Facebook Groups or is it just LinkedIn?
It’s just LinkedIn and email.
The idea is, go into LinkedIn, find your people and tribe. From there, you move to email and start communicating with those people through email. Is there a problem with permission on cold outreach? Isn’t that like what spam is when you don’t have permission at first? How do you do that?
We will make sure that everything is GDPR compliant so you can decide. For example, you only want to shoot over an email. It could grab the business email.
Help people become a better version of themselves. Share on XIf you got their email address by scraping a group, then do you start out by saying, “We’d like to send you an email. Can we have your permission,” or do you start sending emails?
The starting point is never sending an email. It’s all raised an engagement or an action on LinkedIn. It can be like a post, visit the profile, follow that profile, make a connection request and send an open InMail. If people are not engaging with that, then we can shoot over an email if it’s in business email and refer to the different engagements we already did on LinkedIn to try to get in touch, maybe they missed it because they are not that active on LinkedIn. It’s a warm referral reminder.
We’re going to be moving to the next segment of the show. This is the part I like the best. It’s the part where we get to know you a little bit better. We do that by asking you what I call my two key questions. Some people call them silly questions, which is fine. They may be silly but they’re also very revealing. I love the answers I get and the perspective that people have about them. Here’s the first question. Who in all of space and time, anywhere in the world or the universe, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?
I should say Ian Naylor from Hyperise.
Who is he?
He is a SaaS owner. He owns the world’s leading software in hyper-personalization. It means through different channels that can be on your website, email, LinkedIn. He can help with personalized images and animations on a high-end level. That’s amazing.
Why aren’t you able to connect with him? I assume he’s still alive.
He’s still alive and I am in contact with him, but I never met him in person because of all the restrictions and the things due to COVID and the limitations over there. When you start talking about walking the park, I thought that would be a great opportunity. That should be possible.
First of all, I’ve never heard the name before and the name of the company, Hyperise.com but this is the power of what we’re doing. We’re getting a peek inside of your world and it’s important to understand what people think. You’d love to speak to somebody else who’s doing maybe a more advanced version of what you do in a different segment so that you’d learn and you would grow from his experience as well, which is all of why we’re here and all of what we’re doing. Thank you for that. The second question, we call the grand finale, the change the world question. What is it that you were doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?
Let me say like that if I can help people to become a better version of the sales by doing outreach and they thank me afterward by sharing so much value that gave me such a proud feeling. Also, the confidence and the energy to keep on going with that personal approach, that makes me happy.
Your version of changing the world is me and many people’s versions of changing the world. I’ll summarize. For me, I always believe helping people is the ultimate mission that we all have. How we do, it is our own individual personality and the thing we’re potentially good at. When I asked this question, most people say something related to their company, like, “We’re already doing that with our products and our services,” but there are those who want to help others. I believe that’s part of what I understand in what you’re saying as well. Certainly, you do help with connections that your product. More importantly, you understand the value of having served 12,000 customers at this point. That’s incredible. I know you promised a very interesting free gift, which I will be needing and using myself. Tell me a little bit about what it is that readers are going to get.
Write everything you’re doing. Share on XFor the ones who are already active on LinkedIn and doing outreach, everybody knows that one of the main challenges on LinkedIn these days is to get success, to use the right copy and the right strategies. Therefore, I developed, together with some LinkedIn influencers, an eBook where each individual of them shares with you that own personal approach. They use to get a client for their businesses for different purposes. These are all packed together in one eBook with templates, sequences, examples, strategies behind this. It’s in-depth that everybody can copy-paste and use it themselves to get or improve their LinkedIn outreach game.
There are only a few of the free gifts that are offered on my show of which there’s now been about 250. There are only a few that I would personally use but this is critical. What you have done is you’ve collected the intelligence of thought leaders and boiled it down into a very simple way of sharing what it is that they’ve done to become successful. The other thing that Stefan has done is, he has a very active blog. I don’t know of another blog. I know that blogs like medium are very active, but for an individual company blog, he says he’s getting about 50,000 visitors per month. The name of the blog is, Expandi.io/blog. Stefan, this has been an incredible learning experience for me. I hope for you as well, readers who have read to Stefan explain what he did and what he’s doing. Thank you, Stefan. I can’t wait until we get started. I have a lot to you about after the show is over. Thank you.
It was a real honor to be here with such a great entrepreneur like yourself.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Stefan Smulders
- Hyperise.com
- eBook – Top 10 Proven LinkedIn Outreach Templates
- Expandi.io/blog
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