Free Customer Formula: How I grew Expandi from $0 to $7m in 20 months

Coming all the way from the Netherlands, please help me in welcoming Stefan Smolders from Expandi to the stage. Hello everyone. My name is Stefan and indeed I'm coming all the way from the Netherlands. And actually this is the very first time ever I've been in the United States. So give me a second. Give me a second to enjoy a room full of bad ass founders.

I see everybody is a bit too relaxed. Are we ready to receive a couple of real value bombs? Yes. Some practical practical value bombs. Do we have some power users here? Some LinkedIn power users. Who is using LinkedIn really heavily? It will be really interesting next 20 minutes. Let me see how it works with the slides.

But uh as a small introduction, as a former agency owner managing and done for you service on LinkedIn I uh I was able to managing hundreds of customers. Mainly C-level decision makers in the Netherlands. And actually out of frustration and a lack of everything all these tools had, I decided to design Expandi. We are safest

software for LinkedIn automation. And in upcoming 20 minutes I'm going to show you a couple of things. I tried to divide these things as properly as possible. Because in the uh yeah actually in the past 20 months so many things happened. I will start with telling a bit more about the pre-launch. Actually everything happened before we launched and put in our Stripe mid-November 2019 at $0.

We did a lot of things in distribution. So I tried to wrap up a couple of practical uh strategies we used which drove us very easy to a 1 million in revenue within 6 months. We used and took advantage of communities to grow our business. When we created winning playbooks and actually also did a lot of things in terms of engaging with micro-influencers. So, that are the things I will share. If you have any questions afterwards, feel

free to hook me up or send me an email or just send a connection request on on Twitter, for example.

Our run rate we hit in our Stripe account mid-November 2019 at $0. Within 1 year, we closed at somewhere around 3.1 million. Last year, we hit 6 million in annual run rate, and recently we reached a 7 million. Our next milestone will be hitting the magical 10 million revenue run rate as a bootstrapped company.

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.

What we did was actually taking advantage of all the legs and the problems the industry has to design our marketing strategies. And these three things became our marketing gold. From agency perspective, I faced a lot of challenges over there. There was a huge a huge buzz around safety, especially 3 4 years ago.

Some tools were cracked down and everybody was a bit in panic. The panic was much more than actually the profiles which were banned. Um which means that everybody wanted to use these kind of a tools, but nobody wanted to get flagged. On the other hand it was a very hard as a user to get in touch with all these third-party apps. There are mainly hundreds of tools which

can automate the repetitive tasks on LinkedIn. And it's a very hard to get in touch with all these companies. They're using emails avatars, so we thought if we want to and break into this market, we have to do things differently. We have to came up as a new kids on the block with a total different approach. And instead of hiding ourselves from LinkedIn, we decided to just put ourselves in the front, show our faces, be available, get in touch

with each and every customer we could reach. And secondly nobody was actually providing playbooks to learn people how to achieve great results on LinkedIn. All the tools out there on the market at that time point, they were just pronouncing 10x here, 10x there. We have this feature, we have that feature, and nobody was actually walking the talk and learning people how to get indeed these

10x results. So, actually these three problems industry problems we used and that became at the end our marketing goals. So, we took a personal approach, we kicked in as a new kids on the block. We designed the best playbooks out there to help people moving forward getting results on LinkedIn. And we pronounced ourselves with a very intelligent technical architecture and a cloud-based infrastructure as well safe

a tool for LinkedIn automation. And that was the best thing we could do at that time point. To attract our first beta users, I knew from own experience that a lot of small business owners who are using tools like Albacross leads forensics, they all really like to see who was visiting people on the website, but they were all challenging with what's effectively the best way to follow up. So, I thought,

"Okay, if you want to pre-launch this, maybe it could be an idea that if you reach out to all these people to help them finding better ways to approach all these identifications." So, I used a tool like like BuiltWith, maybe some of you already know it as well. We put in the scripts for all the people who are using Albacross. And we scraped a list of websites in the Netherlands from

um actually websites which are using Albacross. So, we used these ones because we knew exactly that all these people were struggling with how you can effectively follow up. The exact playbook we used to approach these people. So, we used first of all BuiltWith. Afterwards, we converted these uh we found the marketers from these websites due to LinkedIn. And we uploaded the CSV file in Expandi and with a couple of custom

placeholders, we were able to personalize as much as possible and test our tool. It went really well. We found more than 150 beta users which were able to use Expandi before we launched it officially. The main problem of this and the challenge we faced was that it cost me 20 minutes to convince these people that LinkedIn was the platform for them to

engage with their audiences. Secondly, it was a very hard uh to convince them afterwards that LinkedIn automation as a next step should be a perfectly fine thing. And after 1 week, they came back to me that it was a bit of a more challenge. Got no results because they did not know what to send. So, we decided that if you want to scale Expandi,

we needed to do it a different way. We needed to find all the audiences. And at some point, I thought, "Okay, let's see if we can find more Stefans, previous agency owners, which were already in love with LinkedIn, which could not miss automation anymore." And that was what we did. The learnings we took from these beta users was it what Sorry, was that it was not the right audiences for us. Um it means that we had a second

problem. And that second problem, I think we all recognize it, is that we were running out of money, out of our own money. And I kept things or I hid things secretly from my from my wife, so she was not not aware. But together with my technical co-founder, we needed to find on a creative way raise to gain some extra money because he promised me within 3 months we have optimized everything, and at the end it

took a little bit longer. Maybe it's a developer thing. And with two left hands and no coding skills myself, I I believed him, but we we were challenging a bit on every change approaches here, how to launch, what to do. And from there on, we thought maybe it's a good idea to approach all these 160 beta users we had to to do them an offer, an annual offer. And with our agency experiences, we

could help them with designing kind of a sequences so that they could get results. And 60 of them, they took advantage of that of that offer. So we gained more than 50k. And we were so damn happy that we start renting our first first office. It was a very small office. We still have that office. And unfortunately, we do not use it that much as we all work in remote. Um but it also helped us to prepare a

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.

What we did to prepare our launch. I knew exactly from a couple of competitors what the lack of the tools were. So one of the things we did to start was actually scraping and finding their social channels. So for example, we had an uh a competitor and they had a Facebook group. So we used a tool like PhantomBuster and

afterwards Texau to scrape that Facebook group, gather these emails, and we converted them to LinkedIn profiles. We uploaded that CSV file into Expandi. And then we start engaging with all these people. Hey, we are in the same group. Uh super super cool. Uh I face some challenges using these tools due to safety. Therefore, I decided to uh to design an own tool. Do you want to help me and give me a feedback before I launch it?

Um and actually all these people were quite happy. And this strategy helped us to book more than 40 appointments each and every week with all the three of us which were doing outreach in the early days. Uh so, this is a bit of the summary of what we did. We scraped these Facebook groups. I think at that time point we used PhantomBuster to to gather these emails and convert them into LinkedIn profiles. Um and then we uploaded that CSV file

into Expandi. These are results of that specific campaign. And with a more than 72% acceptance rate and a huge engagement on the follow-ups. We see here some examples of people which were using our competitor's tool but really happy to engage with us. And they were all happy to book a call. From there on we made a comparing page. And when we dived in these calls, we

actually asked instead of selling, we are just asking a feedback on what their challenges were with using that particular tool. Uh from there on they actually summed up the same list as we put on the comparing page. And then it was actually quite easy to just ask if we can solve these challenges for you. To uh to be able to move over to uh to our Expandi tool. And a lot of them did. They became kind of our early adopters,

our first users. The tool was buggy as hell, but we kept pronouncing in the early days that we were real safest tool for LinkedIn automation. And people recognized us due to that. People really believed that at time point that we were different. We were real people. We showed our identity and we took a personal approach. And from there on we decided to create playbooks.

And because it was a lack kind of a thing in this specific niche that nobody was actually learning people to achieve these great results on LinkedIn. So, the first thing we did was that we wrote a playbook how we got all these appointments with examples, with results, with the sequences we used at that time point. And we start distributing

all of these pieces of content with very targeted audiences. I will tell a bit more about that in a second. And we also started to do a couple of storytelling posts where people could leave a comment. And then we would follow up them and provide them with a specific playbook and guide. And that content retargeting hack, it's still one of the best strategies we all can use at the moment on LinkedIn. Later on, I will show you

why Nathan himself is using it as well and how he is using it. I will grant you that if you use this strategy that it make much more sense than running a simple basic or in sales navigator search with just two boring filters. What it's able to do is that we've built in a very intelligent way in Expandi to scrape anyone's post on LinkedIn. And we were actually using it ourselves. Within

an eye blink, we can import all the people who engaging with that specific piece of content. No matter if it's your own post, from a competitor, from a colleague, we can scrape anyone's post. And that what what we were using ourselves. So, if you search by keyword in the basic search bar of LinkedIn and you enter a keyword, you will get tons of results. If you select the tab post, it will pop up the most interesting posts related to

us that keyword. And uh yeah, you'll be able as you see on the next slide, just by copying the post, importing it in Expandi to scrape in an eye blink all the people who are liking and commented on the specific post. You can export it as a CSV, you can use it for retargeting, you can approach and outreach these people by email, and but you can also do it through Expandi on LinkedIn.

Um instead of using kind of a spray and pray approaches, it's uh it's a much more easier for people to engage with you if you have something in common, right? Hey, I also saw you're a fan of Stefan's post about topic XYZ instead of hey first name, I came across your profile. I also see you're working at company, let's connect. Um using these strategies and creating

playbooks out of it by using Expandi, it helped us within 6 months to get towards the magical 83K MRR after our launch. And from that point on, this were actually the only things we did so far. We used Expandi for outreach. And it was the best proof that our tool was great to use and to achieve amazing results. And we just created playbooks. Playbooks

of LinkedIn growth hacks and tactics. In- in- in-depth and we break down everything we did to achieve these results. People loved it because at that time point, nobody was doing such kind of a similar things. We invested a lot in manual content distribution and up to what's the one mill- million in annual run rate, we did not even optimize any article in

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

kind of build build kind of an army. There was a huge I told it before a huge buzz around safety. Which tool is the best? And there are a couple of Facebook groups where people and especially the founders were always pronouncing themselves. We never did that. We always took an humble approach. And due to the fact that they were always reachable, that we came in and kicked in in this niche as kind of a new

kids on the block, people were very very likely to help us to promote us. And Expandi is the best tool. They have the best support. They are the most reliable. They are always reachable. And of course they provided the best playbooks. So we never ever did on our end kind of a promotion. And it was always kind of an Expandi army of people who really loved us since day one. And also because the fact that we were helping them

to reach specific goals. Uh make changes to optimize the product, listening to their stories, how we could help them getting more and better results. And after that we we we yeah, we gained a bit more money. So we were able to to do more things in distribution. We teamed up with some very interesting agency, an agency which was specialized

in sale optimizing. And they rewrote all our articles based on sale. And at a certain point, we uh we reached about 50-60k unique website visitors per month. And I think that was uh after a year, something like that. So, we gained a lot of inbound leads. I think 90% of all our revenue came from inbound. Hundreds and hundreds of leads we

received. And it sounds like a joke, but until 2 months ago, we do not even had a proper onboarding. We do not even used kind of onboarding flow or um a lot of things to optimize at least. But, it's maybe a very natural thing that if yeah, things going very well that uh that you also lose some attention and traction to to do things better because at that moment you do not feel the pain.

Um micro-influencers maybe quite interesting because actually it's it's it's it's a free promotions which we used. We always liked the bootstrapped way, the growth with the growth hack mentality. We tried to do things differently. And one of the things we did in since since actually day one of our launch, and which still help us very well, was that we searched on Google and in the beginning we did that manually for all

people, authors, who were actually writing something about LinkedIn automation. We put them in a CSV file with some custom placeholders, and we approached these people. Um with some custom placeholders we could personalize everything, the title of the article, the website where we found it. And we just want to became friends with them. We did not want to sell anything. And

we always took a very humble approach with kind of a soft selling. So, we never pushed people to sign up for Expandi. We never pushed them to promote us. And due to the fact that we became friends, we were able to to use them in a later stage. And I will tell in a second a couple interesting names we we became really good friends with some industry leaders, some influencers. And

the third part I talked already a bit about that were the Facebook groups. These Facebook groups we made kind of exclusive and I will tell in a second a bit more about the strategies we used to grow that Facebook group, to keep it engaged because growing is kind of easy for everyone if you know what to do. But keeping it engaged at more than 60% is uh is sometimes a much or a bit more challenging. Houston Golden from BAMF, maybe

we all know his partner in crime um Josh Fetcher. It was uh yeah, one of world's best growth hackers and marketers at that time point. And we approached uh with the strategy I just shared Houston. He was one of them. And uh as you see here, he was immediately interested in a catching up with me. He was using GrowthLead and some other

underground tools and they were lacking because we were using themselves as well. And we uh we helped them uh until now to uh to to manage his agency much more better with Expandi. It resulted these kind of a building building these kind of a relationships that resulted in uh um in that he helped us with a video testimonial on our homepage.

Uh we gained much more larger names due to to the fact that we had Houston on board. Rowan Touhy and the Asana most followed GrowthHackers, Nick Kosmin from Sales Process. Uh that are just a couple of examples of names which became our friends and we never ever pushed them to do something. We just helped them. We provide value to their communities to help them moving forward, get provide them with strategies and ideas so that they could achieve a much more better results on

LinkedIn than they did before. Um I just mentioned it as well. We had uh kind of a uh 60K unique website visitors per month after a year. And let's see we are now on this sheet. Cover this. The Facebook group. We have a closed Facebook community which we called the LinkedIn Outreach Family due to the

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

which quite interesting to uh to uh uh to grow your group or things you can take to to approach people to get gain as followers towards your group. And one of the best strategies we used in the beginning of Expandi after launching that playbook where we booked 40 appointments and taking advantage of the community from one of our competitors was doing LinkedIn posts. And as you see

here on this first page, we easily achieved a more than 125k impressions and thousands of people who are commenting on all our posts. With kind of a storytelling, we asked people what they could achieve if they left a comment. And a lot of people did that. We sent over the playbooks you to the expandi automations. And to boost these posts for the ones who struggling with with reaching much

more engagement on LinkedIn. Because let's be honest, if we uh not have that much followers on LinkedIn, it's quite of a hard to uh to uh to achieve a lot of engagement. And beside my wife, two colleagues, and maybe four friends, usually nobody will like any any of my posts. Actually not in the early days. Um we became friends with uh with with Ilya. He is uh actually was the growth

marketer of Lemlist. And Lemlist helped us a lot since day one to boost our content. It's an engagement bot. And in the early days, especially in the beginning, you really felt yourself like kind of a rockstar because every post gained more than 100k views each and every time. And hundreds, not even thousands of people who were engaging with all these posts. We could scrape them in in in a split second, import all these people, and do a lot of really nice things with them

to using expandi. We wrote articles about that, how we did it, and we start distributing even more heavily all these things. And that strategy is still performing really, really well. Um in the next sheet, we have an example here of the great news. And I think we all saw that uh founder Pat raised a 145 million recently. And also Nathan did did a post about it.

And he achieved more than 661k impressions. And he used Expandi to follow up all these people. Maybe some of you were in there as well. So it could be that he he approached all of you also for retargeting or to show some banners or to send over some emails because if we scrape them we can also scrape all these email addresses. So this strategy is working still

perfectly fine. And on average if you decide to use it and want to follow up people on LinkedIn with this strategy, it still achieves kind of a 70-75% acceptance rate. I talked about the manual distribution in the early days. And we used a lot of Facebook groups to do that. With people which were actually our targets like agencies, like growth hackers, like

marketers. And one of the things we did similar like we did on LinkedIn was that we see here that I was a visual storyteller due to a lot of posts I did in specific Facebook groups. And then we asked always people to leave a comment. And if they leave a comment, we followed up them all manually. So it was a very very time-consuming. And I know there were some automations at that time

point, but maybe I was a bit too scared for for Mark himself to to ban my profile over there. So I never used a Facebook automation. Maybe strange from a founder of a third party app on on LinkedIn. But it cost us a lot of time. But as you see here, we on average achieved more than 550 comments on each and every post we did in each specific group on LinkedIn. It was a very targeted audiences we

used as well the LinkedIn post which I just covered. But also platforms to distribute our content like GrowthHackers, Indie Hackers. And we used different VPNs to access it through different IPs and upvote all these articles to get a much more reach. And here you see an overview of of how we did it and where actually our audiences came from. And as you see it's it's it's it's from

LinkedIn due to these posts. It's from the GrowthHackers but also a lot from from Facebook. So all these audiences were very targeted and our articles at that time point were not even SEO optimized. The most interesting thing here is what you see is that this is the result of calls we did due to the fact that we approached a lot of different micro influencers.

On the left side you see a screenshot from a call with Ilya Azovtsev. At that time point he was the growth marketer at at Lemlist. And due to all his knowledge about that tool we really took advantage of that and each and every post on LinkedIn we boosted that up to 100K views due to this guy. He became our friend. He worked for Lemlist as well because Lemlist at that time point was was part of Lemlist.

And we teamed up in terms of a content how you could scrape these pieces of content with Expandi and boosted with Lemlist. So it attracts a lot of extra engagement for for Expandi. In the middle you see us in a call with with Houston Golden. He was using GrowthLeads at that time point. He became our friend. And it this friendship ended up in in uh in a video testimonial on our homepage. On the right side, you see uh Max

Makarenko from DocuSign. He's from Ukraine. And he became also a good friend. He became our best performing affiliate in Eastern Europe. Maybe a funny story to tell is that uh my wife originally comes from Ukraine as well. And as a company, we have a very warm bond with all Ukrainian people. I think half of our colleagues are coming from Ukraine. And due to the war and the good friendship I had with Max, he gained

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,

building out relationships and try to become friends with a lot of people and just providing value without asking a lot of things in return helped Expandi really a lot and this I think are really really nice examples with the magical story behind, especially in uh in the approach with with Max. Um we spent a lot of time to grow our Facebook group. It was not a public

group, so we made it closed and a bit more exclusive because we did not want competitors in there. We did not want people which only use our group to spam. We really want to use it to get our feedback and this was a funny approach of a sequence we used on LinkedIn to uh to to bring people in. And of course people could apply and we could manually ask them or decide to approve. And uh that worked really really well.

So uh if you plan to grow your Facebook group and you want to attract people or go after people on LinkedIn that's uh I bet this one really will still works with a nice with a nice results. We also used the pop-ups on our website. Um our blog became kind of a CNN for LinkedIn lead generation. So everybody who's using or on the lookout for performing better on LinkedIn in terms

of outreach, they came to our blog. So in every article we put banners for people to be part of our exclusive LinkedIn outreach family where we provided tons and tons of value all free. And uh pop-ups on the website, you see the banner as well uh uh left uh uh above. And all these things together they helped to gain qualified people for our group. We grow it super super fast for a closed

community. And uh the challenging part of that was to keep it active. So we constantly posted and it resulted in time I think a 60 65% activity. Um we're still spending a lot of time in that but as we grow we also discover new ways to distribute content, to build out communities. But it performed for us in

the last 2 years really really well. I hoped I showed uh a couple of valuable but definitely practical examples which helped Expandi a lot to grow in the past 2 years to our 7 million run rate. Again, if you have any questions about the things I shared, feel free to to catch me up uh at for example. My account is Stefan. Send me a DM. You can also send

me an email at [redacted email]. And if you really like this presentation just show some love. Give it up for