As pure bootstrappers, my 2 co-founders (Vianney & François) and I decided to launch a side project in December.
After our team retreat, we decided that December was a good time to launch another project while keeping growing lemlist and Talkus.
The goal
We wanted to create a project that was solving a real pain internally and that didn't exist (at least to our knowledge). Why? Because if it doesn't work, at least it is useful for us. The objective was simple, be able to code fast - ship it and test the market without any marketing spendings.
The pain
For everyone in B2B here, we know that LinkedIn is THE social network to find your target audience.
Since LinkedIn is heavily competing with Facebook regarding advertising and content, they need to reward as much as possible their users (us), which is why a lot of people focus on producing content directly on LinkedIn.
In essence, you can "easily" reach 10s of thousands of people with your post on LinkedIn without spending any money. However, to get such reach, a lot of persons have started creating engagement PODs.
The goal is pretty simple. You create a group of persons who are creating good content. Once they post something, they also post the link to their post into a chat group where everyone will like and comment on the post.
By doing so, people help each other out to create a little engagement boost for each post which ultimately leads to a bigger reach. The only problem is that it takes a lot of time and energy to do it manually for each post and often people lack consistency in those groups. Thanks to lempod, you can do that automatically now!
The product
For those who don't Vianney & François (my 2 co-founders) let's say that they are a hybrid between a robot and a human. I've been working with a lot of different programmers and agencies but those 2 brothers are really waaaaay better than anyone I've met and worked with 😍
The advantage of that is - when they code - everything goes suuuuper quickly 🚀
Monday evening, after 6 hours of hardcore programming, we had an MVP deployed & live. The Chrome extension was live and we were able to create PODs, join them, post links, auto like and auto comment. In essence, all the main features were there.
Tuesday evening, After the MVP, it was time to design the app, create the onboarding and also make the interface extremely easy to use and straightforward.
Wednesday, Now that the app was almost ready to go live, we simply needed to gather more data on how to track the performance of each post. We also decided to switch to pink... Because pink is beautiful 😍😂
Thursday, we started onboarding the first users around 2 pm. The goal was to spend time on fixing some small glitches and see if everything was working fine for those first users.
Friday evening, thanks to the first user's feedback, Vianney & François decided to become robots again and lempod V2 was launched with the options to disable auto comments, be able to provide your own comments when you post and also kick/ban members of a pod when you're the admin.
The launch
As I mentioned, this was a real pain for us because every time I'm posting on LinkedIn, I put the link to my post into our Slack and Vianney & François support it with a like and comment.
To quote them "if we have to do the same thing more than 3 times, then we must automate it" - well you got it, that's exactly what they did!
What I realized is that a lot of my friends were having the same issue and as soon as I mentioned lempod, things went "viral".
In 24 hours we had already more than 50 users and a looooot of feedback. After sharing those feedback with my co-founders they started the "machine mode" and delivered a V2 of lempod including all the updates in less than 24 hours.
Less than 1 week after the first line of code we had 100+ users on lempod...
And also 16 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ reviews on the Chrome store 😍
Because I think this project is really about helping each other getting more visibility using our respective network, I've created an Indie Hacker Pod where we will help each other.
To join it, simply install the Chrome extension on lempod.com and type the secret code 7257.
Feel free to ask your questions if you have any ❤️
That was so fun to develop. don't hesitate if you have questions
Now the only question I have is: how to join the most active pod created? :-)
Hi! Love the idea.
An unpopular opinion: What do you think LinkedIn thinks about this?
There is immense scope for benefit but it could be misused as well similar to a click farm. How do you plan on ensuring it's not abused for spammy and click bait content .
I know linkedin has a team devoted to blocking automating things like this. It is always a cat and mouse game and fun on both sides.
I think it's very complicated... people have been doing it for ages we're just automating it... The goal as I mentioned is to create pods with valuable people who share interesting content.
Regarding spammy and clickbait content it's very difficult to say... My initial idea is to create a power index for each user. It will be based on 2 things:
1- SSI (Social Selling Index)
2- The number of views you get to your posts compared to the boost you get with lempod.
That way, each user will have a ranking. I also give full rights to admins to kick people out. Each admin should be responsible for his pod.
But if you have other suggestion @BlueLobster I'd be happy to hear them :-)
As you've noticed, we've just started this as a side project so there is still a lot of room for improvement :-)
Lemlist remains my number 1 outreach tool. Mind sharing your numbers, Revenue, number of customers, what marketing channel works for you?
Will start using Lempod as well. looks very promising. Good luck
Thanks a lot for your kind words Emeka!
I'll actually write an article here about it very soon ;-)
The product I was really waiting for! Thanks a lot for your work, Guillaume.
Thanks Andrei! Happy you like it ❤️
@guillaume_lemlist, do you use Adwords for Lempod as a paid channel? I have a Google Sheets Add-on for what I use it and Google allows us to track installs with events 'START_INSTALL' and 'FINISH_INSTALL' but Google Analytics doesn't record UTM_SOURCE it's just 'direct traffic'. So I can't track which words convert.
How did you hack the conversion tracking issue if you use Adwords?
That's awesome!
Is it also possible to use this extension when I share a link to a blog article (on LI) of someone else (or is this only for people who have psoted their own blog article? Thank you for your feedback :-)
Hi all, I have installed the extension, logged in into linkedin, tab is on linkedin site and the extension still claims "Sorry, I don't know you, It seems that you're not logged on linkedIn."
Any solution to this? @Vianney
This is just helping spam. Is "growth hacker" the next sleazy progression from "SEO expert"?
Very cool! I posted 3 blog posts on lempod. Can't wait to see results ;)
Might be nice, but does not work for me. Installed the extension, logged in into linkedin, tab is on linkedin site and the extension still claims "It seems that you're not logged on linkedIn."
Hey, Really strange, can you contact me in private or give me your email?
I keep getting the same message like what @jens got.
Any solution to that?
@Vianney Can you help him out plz?
I like the approach and is really useful for growth hacking.
I liked some posts but still shows with zero.
Any reason?
Maybe because I did it from linkedin?
Everything is done automatically so no need to do it from LinkedIn ;-)
That's cool! Cruise control!
Any worries about automatic behavior?
We automate but really slowly and using lot of randomness so in the end, it's pretty hard to detect anything automatic
Awesome inspirational guide to creating a side project that becomes real and viable! I always tell my students that side projects are THE way to demonstrate your Product Management skills to a potential employer, and this is perfect example of exactly how to do it.
Thanks a lot for your kind words Carlos - I'm glad you find it useful :-)