A pre-launch outreach plan, micro-influencers and customer communities, including how Expandi got its first 150 beta users
Stefan Smulders · Expandi
Published September 1, 2022Stefan Smulders, Founder of Expandi.io, shares:
- 3 things we did opposite of competitors
- Linkedin cold outreach playbook (steal competitor)
- Growth through content distribution of winning playbooks
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Stefan Smulders shares Expandi growth lessons around pre-launch outreach, influencer relationships, customer communities, content, and hands-on follow-up.
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“The pre-launch. To put some things in perspective, I think for the ones who are already a bit familiar by using LinkedIn, it's good to know that everything is about safety. A lot of people want to use LinkedIn automation to speed up things, to do more business. And on the other hand, nobody wants to get flagged or in danger using such kind of a tools.”
“global launch. And mid-November 2019, we we launched Expandi on the global market. We were mainly focused on gathering T-shaped marketers, uh growth hackers, agency owners, recruitment agencies, actually people who are managing multiple profiles on LinkedIn, and people who already were using LinkedIn automation for a while.”
“terms of a sale. Um we reached a lot of micro-influencers. And these micro-influencers, they became our best friends. And they gained a lot a lot of revenue for us. I will tell a bit more about that in a second. Also groups and communities. Creating our own closed Facebook group helped us to get the best feedback from customers, but also to”
“personal approach we take to grow Expandi and this became one of the main drivers since uh since the early days which we used to gather feedback from customers to ask questions about what we should build, how we could improve it. And we really engaged there a lot. We make it kind of exclusive. I will show in a bit some examples which uh”
“more than 1 million in affiliate revenue for Expandi. I offered him when the war started to to host his family at my home together with my wife. And the funny thing which came out of this was that uh he managed after a couple of weeks to uh on a magical way to leave the country as well. And Max became to everything he lost our CMO since April. So,”
“$50,000 Email …not easy! We reached out to our beta users with a special offer: If they get a yearly subscription (and pay upfront) …they’ll get a discount and we’ll help them with content to sequences. We had 62 users accept this offer, which translated to nearly 50k euros in subscriptions”
“How we got first $20k of MRR … in a sort of surprising way Searched for the right Facebook groups where our audience is located. Scraped their names using Phantombuster Turned their names into LinkedIn profiles Made awesome content to get in touch with them Turned them into leads by using Expandi (The safest LinkedIn automation that works 24/7 in the cloud)”
“Linkedin Connect Request to 527: 380 accepted and 185 responded to message 72% Acceptance 49% Response on follow-up 42% Booked demos”
“Hundreds of Comments on Each FB Group Post We increased the amount of distribution channels and we had: Quora LinkedIn posts Growthhackers IndieHackers FB groups.”
“FB Group to 2.5k Members …The LinkedIn Outreach Family! Website POP-UPS and CRO Blog articles banners LinkedIn message templates Newsletter mentions Ebooks soft approach 60% activity”
Video
Free Customer Formula: How I grew Expandi from $0 to $7m in 20 months - Slide Deck
Stefan Smulders is a SaaS Entrepreneur. He is the founder of the world’s safest software for LinkedIn automation — Expandi.io, which was bootstrapped to €3M ARR in just 1 year. Stefan is a father and vegan.
Stefan Smulders · Expandi
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Craig Fuller · FreightWaves
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Founder500 Sept 2022 Stefan Smulders Founder Expandi.io Free Customer Formula: Bootstrapped $0 to $7m in 20 months … without spending money on ads.
Over the Next 20 Minutes: 3 things we did opposite of competitors I’m going to show you PRE-LAUNCH DISTRIBUTION COMMUNITY How we got first 150 beta users $50,000 email that converted beta users to paid Linkedin cold outreach playbook (steal competitor) Content retargeting hack Our first $1m in ARR Growth through content distribution of winning playbooks Make friends with micro- influencers How we got 2,500 in our FB group
Expandi.io Revenue Growth
Pre Launch I’m going to show you LINKEDIN BANNED 150 BETA USERS FIRST 50K
How Industry Problems Became Marketing gold Avatars → personal approach Nobody walked the 10x talk? → step-by-step playbooks Profile banned → World's safest software
Similar Tools (Albacross Playbook) … copy we tested that worked over and over again LinkedIn Connection Request Follow-up Message 1 (1 day after accepting connection request) Follow-up Message 2 (5 day if no reply on message 1) Follow-up Message 3 (7 day after no reply on message 2)
$50,000 Email …not easy! We reached out to our beta users with a special offer: If they get a yearly subscription (and pay upfront) …they’ll get a discount and we’ll help them with content to sequences. We had 62 users accept this offer, which translated to nearly 50k euros in subscriptions
Distribution I’m going to show you PLAYBOOK CONTENT HACK $1M RUN RATE
How we got first $20k of MRR … in a sort of surprising way Searched for the right Facebook groups where our audience is located. Scraped their names using Phantombuster Turned their names into LinkedIn profiles Made awesome content to get in touch with them Turned them into leads by using Expandi (The safest LinkedIn automation that works 24/7 in the cloud)
Linkedin Connect Request to 527: 380 accepted and 185 responded to message 72% Acceptance 49% Response on follow-up 42% Booked demos
… a look at that first message we sent (185/380, 47% response rate)
The Best Content Retargeting Hack on LinkedIn Scraping everyone who liked and comment on ugljesa’s post with Expandi
The Best Content Retargeting Hack on LinkedIn
Expandi.io Revenue Growth
Expandi.io Revenue Growth $1M ARR … we used our own tool Using Expandi for Outreach Creating playbooks of LinkedIn growth hacks Manual content distribution Reaching Micro influencers Groups and communities
Let’s jump in to Section 3 I’m going to show you DISTRIBUTION MICRO INFLUENCERS FACEBOOK GROUP
We Hit 60,000 Sessions in Jan 2021
Micro Influencers
Facebook Group hit 2,500 Members
How to Get 100k Views on 1 Linkedin Post
… tell a great story (661k impressions)
Hundreds of Comments on Each FB Group Post We increased the amount of distribution channels and we had: Quora LinkedIn posts Growthhackers IndieHackers FB groups.
We Got Super Targeted Users … by repurposing content on Linkedin, niche sites, and Facebook
Influencers …not easy! Ilya Azovtsev from Lempod (left), Houston Golden from BAMF (middle), and Max Makarenko from Docsify (right)
FB Group to 2.5k Members …The LinkedIn Outreach Family! Website POP-UPS and CRO Blog articles banners LinkedIn message templates Newsletter mentions Ebooks soft approach 60% activity
FB Group to 2.5k Members …The LinkedIn Outreach Family! Website POP-UPS and CRO Blog articles banners LinkedIn message templates Newsletter mentions Ebooks soft approach 60% activity
I just showed you: 3 things we did opposite of competitors PRE-LAUNCH DISTRIBUTION COMMUNITY How we got first 150 beta users $50,000 email that converted beta users to paid Linkedin cold outreach playbook (steal competitor) Content retargeting hack Our first $1m in ARR Growth through content distribution of winning playbooks Make friends with micro- influencers How we got 2,500 in our FB group
September 2022 Stefan Smulders Founder of Expandi.io