r/LinkedinAds

Ok so, I can’t retire just yet 😅 but getting a business off the ground and attracting customers is the hardest part in my opinion.

There’s still a long way to go but considering it’s only been 3 months since launching ZenMode, I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

I get asked a lot about how I get customers, so thought I’d give more info on how I do distribution, in case you might find it useful.

1. Make sure your website is set up for success

Before sending people to your site, make sure you’re confident it has good CRO potential. Your mission statement and objective needs to be very clear, along with clear incentives for people to try the product out.

2. Offer free trials, but only behind a payment info gate

Now this is just my personal opinion, and I know a lot of people disagree, but the proof is in the numbers. I get fewer free trial signups, but significantly higher conversion rates into paying users from people who provide payment info at the start.

Yes, a few of them are people who simply forget to cancel, but mostly I get people who are more engaged in the free trial and actually using the product.

I actually did an AB experiment where I did offer completely free trials to people (no payment info needed), but the overwhelming result was that people barely even tried out the product and were mostly tire kickers that never came back. I did convert some but not a meaningful number.

3. Create a waitlist before launching

Try to generate interest in your product before it launches - build in public and try to ensure that you’re not scrambling to get customers through the door on day 1 when you launch.

I had 3 customers on day 1 from this, who took higher paid tiers as well.

4. Post and comment everywhere

Social media is free, so there’s no excuse not to leverage it. Post about your product and what you’re building on Reddit, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Facebook etc.

I posted a simple screenshot on LinkedIn recently, of someone using a low quality LinkedIn automation tool message to contact me, and me offering my own much better tool in response, and that post generated 90,000 views and led to several signups and demo calls.

I’ve also had some posts on Reddit go into hundreds of thousands of views, mostly just posting about what/why/how I built ZenMode.

5. If you have competitors, make “alternative to” inner pages

If done in the right way, this type of inner page can be useful for SEO. It won’t be picked up automatically but usually if you work in a competitive industry, this will sometimes attract customers who had a bad experience elsewhere.

6. I actually use my own LinkedIn automation tool (dogfooding) to do LinkedIn outreach

So it’s always important to practice what you preach - I use ZenMode to actually promote ZenMode.

It’s a great way to get buy-in for booking demos, as when someone replies, I simply tell them I used my tool to get a response from them, so it works.

Obviously I’m biased but if you are looking for a way to automate lead generation on LinkedIn, you might find ZenMode useful.

Anyway hope you enjoyed reading the above, and good luck on your journey if you’re building anything, or growing your business 🙌

Last Christmas I was at my parent’s place, pretty bored just watching TV on the couch, and realised I wasn’t satisfied with my life.

My career wasn’t going anywhere, and I felt like I really had no direction or anything interesting going on in life.

I had spoken with a friend around that time, who had vibe coded his website for his business, and it looked really cool.

So I spoke with ChatGPT to see what i could possibly build that could be interesting, but done in a more innovative way to what already existed.

As I worked in sales already, it suggested that I lean into my own experience, and build something for my own use case.

I’d been using LinkedIn automation tools to help generate leads, but I kept getting warnings from LinkedIn from the tools I was using, so I wasn’t using them regularly.

So, after a lot of back and forth conversation with AI, I realised that there was a big opportunity to create a tool that was safer than anything else out there;

Every tool I’d been using operated either on the cloud or used plugins - there were almost none that simply operated on your desktop, and this would most likely remove my issue of getting warnings and appear natural to LinkedIn.

So, I decided to build something with this architecture for myself primarily, in the sales job that I was in - could I build something that would help me generate more leads, without risking my account as much?

Turns out, I could.

It definitely wasn’t easy, there was a very steep learning curve in terms of learning how to build something with AI, as well as making complex design and architectural decisions. I also made a lot of mistakes at first, especially building new features without testing.

As a result, there were tonnes of errors and bugs initially, but I spent a huge amount of time on hardening the backend, to ensure that it’s now highly unlikely to break, and even if it does, it’s quick/easy to diagnose and implement fixes.

It was a complex build as it’s essentially two code bases - a web dashboard where people can control their campaign settings and messaging sequences, with an inbuilt CRM, unified inbox, analytics etc., along with building the software itself, which automates LinkedIn in a dedicated browser on people’s desktops.

Aside from building it, I had to make sure it actually worked effectively. So I used it on my own account throughout the testing phase, and still use it every day until now for dogfooding ie using the tool to promote the tool - this is how I mainly generate new customers.

I made sure that the tool had strict daily limits on actions, randomised delays between connection requests and follow up messages, along with effective messaging, written by Claude Sonnet via API.

And it worked - in my first campaign in my old job, I got a 40% acceptance rate and a 25% response rate.

What I realised along the way though, was that working on the tool itself was much more enjoyable than my sales job, so, I decided to quit my job and go all in on building and working on the tool.

I made it into a business and took a leap of faith.

Now, the tool has had 300 signups to free trials, many of whom converted into paying customers, and so far hovering around $4k in total revenue since launching in April, completely bootstrapped.

Not a life changing sum yet but the first few months have been very promising, and there’s clearly a demand for a tool that’s safe for LinkedIn accounts and effective at booking meetings.

Anyway, I hope this story inspires people to follow your passions and keep going!

Here’s the LinkedIn Automation tool itself in case you’re curious - ZenMode