Every business person who posts on LinkedIn shares one dream: to go viral. Going viral on LinkedIn is not just something you do, however, but a path with steps you must follow.
To follow these steps towards creating viral content, you and your posts have to be quite a few things:
Creative.
Informative.
On the cutting edge of trends.
Engaging.
Consistent.
Aware of the algorithm.
These may not come easy to you, but with a little help they can be learned.
On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with Anton Dobrzhanskiy, co-founder of the AI sales start-up Epicbrief, to walk through all the steps you need to take to successfully create viral content on LinkedIn.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Meet Anton:
Anton Dobrzhanskiy is a co-founder of Epicbrief, a Finnish tech startup focused on AI. Epicbrief aims to put the focus of salespeople back on sales by automating more administrative work like call notes, CRM syncs, and more.
Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!
Jonathan Fischer: [00:00:00] Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Fisher. When you're trying to get a startup off the ground, your biggest challenge is in figuring out features and benefits. It isn't even figuring out your go-to-market model, your messaging, your sales process, or any of that. It's the fact that nobody knows who the heck you are.
Well, what if you can go viral on the worlds? The largest and most influential social media platform for business owners. None other than LinkedIn. Well, today's guest did just that, and if you're a fan of the show, he's no stranger to you. You, we have with us today, Anton Dobrzhanskiy. And he is one of the founding members of the tech startup Epic Brief, which is a very powerful tool, which is being designed to support outbound sales, make the human workers selling far more effective and far more enjoyable.
And recently, Anton and his team achieved an amazing level of success with their content-based outreach strategy on LinkedIn and managed to go viral. And Anton is about to share with us. Step by step exactly how they did it and how we can do it as well. Anton, we're excited to hear from you today.
Welcome back to the show.
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for having me. Excited as well.
Jonathan Fischer: Well, I mean, going viral is kind of the gold standard of a of a successful outreach campaign on any platform. First of all, did you, did you set out to even go viral or were [00:02:00] you just trying to put together a good overall content-based strategy?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: I mean, I think everybody who wants to do any content marketing or, you know, on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram you know, it's sort of like a wild dream. Like what if, you know, I do, we can do like a one. One post and it just goes viral. So you, that's obviously like, it's a goal, but when you start reading about it online it, it does sound like an not achi not very achievable goal because it doesn't happen very often.
So yeah, I think for, for us it was, it was definitely something we, we really wanted to achieve is to get as much coverage as possible. But you know, it was like two months in, nothing's going on. I was happy if we get 12 or 16,000 impressions. And to get 12 to 16,000 impressions was like me trying to design the perfect post.
Get as much value there as I could. And yeah. And then when one day, you know, you, you make a post and in, in, in about two days time, there's an almost three and a half million views or impressions. Sort of go like, wow, this is pretty cool. So yeah, definitely was, definitely dreaming about that because it's, you know, it's a good goal, but it's.
Jonathan Fischer: Well it is, but on the other hand, now that you've done it, perhaps that can be back engineered and I hope we can help our listener do that today. Before we jump into sort of the nuts and bolts and step-by-step, quick reminder to the audience, Hey, we're here live. We'd love you to share your questions, for us to tackle those at the end of our half hour conversation.
No need to wait. You can go ahead and post those questions right in chat at the moment. We'll bank 'em and circle back to those at the end. So, Anton, when it comes to putting together your strategy, I guess first of all, did you map it all out in advance in, in detail, or was it more broad?
Tell us a little bit about how you began before this whole thing. You know, hit, hit the ceiling like it did.
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: [00:04:00] Yeah. I think for I'll start from the very beginning. I think for us, the. As, as you Jonathan said, epic brief. We are building epic brief and what we our target audience or our main user is a salesperson, so account executive or sales manager.
And, and the first thing we had to do is to just, it wasn't that hard, but I think in some many other cases it might be more hard, like harder than, than for us. But for us, it was very clear that where salespeople live, Majority of salespeople leave on LinkedIn because that's one of the, that's one of the channels you know, reach out to people or gather information.
So a lot of salespeople are on LinkedIn. So for us it was very clear where, where should we kind of put our efforts into. And the second, the second step was really about Just trying to see how things actually work on LinkedIn. I think we've been, at least I was posting you know, before epic brief and and I couldn't really figure it out like, because it wasn't very intentional.
But once you start kind of, you know, that this is where our audience live, that Then it started being more intentional. And then the second step was to figure out what am I actually going to talk about? Like, what am I, is there some theme or something what maybe I know or MI knows and what, what is our shared knowledge, what we can then share with people or maybe opinions?
And that wasn't very clear because if you, if you look at amount of sales content, Or B two B sales related content on LinkedIn. It's very crowded space. There's a lot of voices. So for us it wasn't very clear that any type of sales advice or or opinion would be received because there's just so many people who already have a massive following.
And for us it was kind of a split. We first decided [00:06:00] that we'll talk you know, about AI and sales and, and occasionally we would we would say something about, you know, B two B sales and give some advice or some frameworks. For us, the AI and sales didn't really work really well. I think it was, again, we, we kind of started posting what AI and sales were.
There were, again, a lot of hype. Chad, g b t just came out. Everybody was talking about AI and, and it was very hard to break through. Especially, I don't have any background in ai. I have background in sales and, and all I could share was experience of building Epic brief. And at some point we just, I, I just decided to focus on sales or just B two B sales advice and Or experience about my personal experience or my admirations towards salespeople, you know, comradery, you can say, you can call it.
And yeah, so, and then it was just, I think there was one important point I wanna share with people is like, if you, if people, if you are intentional and, and you really want to, to, to use the platform to reach your audience. Don't go. It's almost like, don't go to, like, if you're going to gym, you bet you you might as well do it.
Right. And, and, and one of the things which, which helped me is, is to understand what, what is the game about? Like what is this to think, what is the, what are the rules of the game? And one of the resource which really helped me is actually the book, or, or it's called LinkedIn Influencer Playbook, I guess, if I remember correctly.
But it's by Samantha. Samantha Kena, I think, I don't remember the name. Sorry, Samantha. But She has that book and she used to work in LinkedIn. So she, she kind of broke down what are the main components, like how the algorithms work and, and give you like, actionable advice on how to think about posting and, and how to structure it and, and all that kind of stuff.
It's not like she gives you all the answers, but she kind of explains the [00:08:00] rules of the game. And that was really helpful because you are kind of not, not going to play poker without knowing the rules. You're at least going there, knowing the rules and, and all you have to do is just figure out your, your way, your way to win the game in a way.
So that was very helpful to understand the rules of the game.
Jonathan Fischer: Well, and so I'd like to go deeper on the rules of the game. One insight that I, I think it's worth highlighting is you started by posting content that was I don't wanna say it was hyped. I think it did become a little bit hyped, but it was a of great interest.
And I think it's a very natural intuition that when people are buzzing about it, that you want to take advantage of that buzz, get into the conversation and, and there might be some leverage there, but it sounds like your experience was a little different, the buzz. Was maybe a distraction because there were just so much of it, you couldn't get heard through the clutter.
Instead, it became a lot more on the ground really, where your target audience is feeling interested or concerned in a more pragmatic, personal way. That's pretty, that's, that's probably a good takeaway. Would you agree with that? You wanna riff on that a little bit more?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Yeah, I think, I'm not sure if that's something sort of like unique to the. I think there was one sort of direct talking more about,
we found study from Univers, which one, but basically the study and say, and what they found is that Salespeople who are overkilled get actually no benefit, but from using ai. So that, that was very interesting kind of to us to, it was kind of breaking some of our hypothesis initially, that like, you know, that AI can help basically any salesperson.
But the study showed that people who have lower skills, And who are maybe lower, like at the end, at the bottom of the performance or even in the middle, they actually get no benefit at all from using ai. And then only top performers who have high skill [00:10:00] already they get like two, three, I think there was like 280% increase in their performance.
So it's, it's, it's a crazy number. And, and well, what we sort of set out to do is, is, is in a way, okay, how can we. Kind of share what we know. Maybe it'll help people and maybe it will increase the overall level, which basically indirectly helps us to prove the value of Epic brief and, and, and say like, okay, if you increase the level of salespeople, and, and we try to do that through, you know, social media, through LinkedIn maybe give some advice and there's a lot other people doing that We.
Push that narrative to help salespeople improve, then, you know, they will benefit from AI tools in general. More, more than than, than they would. And yeah, and that's sort of why we, and I mean in the beginning also, you have to remember like I just started probably my copy wasn't great and my understanding wasn't.
I would have maybe figured out how to do, how to copyright, how to do post and about like AI and sales and stuff like that. But yeah, it's, it's, I think there's a lot of factors which came kind of together and pushed us more in the direction of speaking more about fundamentals in, in sales and, and rather than going into AI and sales because, People, I, I don't also feel that people are maybe not so ready yet, even today, maybe not so ready to consume ai kind of content.
Just because it's, yeah, it's sort of still kind of vague. And, and, and a lot of people probably tried a lot of tools. And at least to our knowledge, a lot of tools, AI tools which are built now for salespeople are, they're popping up every day. They're just not providing the great experience or results which you'd hope to.
Jonathan Fischer: Yeah. Right on. Well, so walk us through then. Antons you, you you [00:12:00] realized you needed to pivot a little bit and, and have a different core. Genre of content, if you will, to be more relatable to your audience. So how did it happen? Like, tell us, you know, post one, post two, post three, and then when did you realize it was going viral?
What did you do next? So, you know, walk us through all that if you would.
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Yeah. So I started just I think one of the things I. So I, I'll start from the moment once I started kind of reading the book or under, once I understood the name of the game or the rules of the game I'm not sure if the audience knows this, but there are, there are literally two.
The most important things you have to know when you're posting is if you ever see on LinkedIn you know, this that it shows like a part in the beginning of your post. The first very important button is see more. So if you, if you design your post in a way where people click, see more, LinkedIn algorithm picks it up and, and shows it to more people.
So that's the first kind of check you have to achieve. And the second check is if they comment. And this, so comments increase the engagement and give the algorithm to know that it's, it's more, it's valuable content. And the third one is, is the, like, so likes actually don't matter that much in in the end of the day they, they, what matters is like, see more and comments and then likes are, are sort of, like they sit lower in the ranking.
But, but yeah, I think the, the, the beginning was just religiously posting on LinkedIn every single day. So, and, and trying to understand like, I think the number one, so, so it's religiously posting, and then I had to make sure that before I do anything, before I even attempt to do anything big.
I didn't know at the time what that would be, but I was thinking that we could come up with the killer content, but before I do anything big, I needed to make sure that even the, even those like 2000, [00:14:00] 3000 impression posts that they were going into, right audience, that I wasn't talking that, that my content wasn't consumed by, you know, software engineers, but was consumed by salespeople, by sales managers, by CEOs, by, by.
So that was sort of the first goal I wanted to achieve is to break through somehow into the audience. I wanted to, to I wanted to reach, then step number two was to figure out the locations. Because sometimes, like I live in Finland, so, and majority of our customer base is actually in us. So, How does the algorithm, like, does algorithm even care that I'm in Finland or is it about the time of the day I'm posting, or, or, or how does that whole thing work?
And unfortunately, there's no, there are no rules to that. So you just have to figure it out by, by just kind of following the, those metrics. And thanks God, nowadays, LinkedIn has all those metrics, so it's, it's, it's pretty easy to to figure that out. And then, and then there was a time when I was like, okay, I'm, I'm actually in the right audience and I'm inside the right geography.
So then, and it was around the time I had a friend who posted transfer pricing cheat sheet. And I just randomly, I just don't know how I ended up in his profile and I was like, wow, that's actually pretty cool. And, and yeah. And then I was like, I, you know, I called Mira and I'm like, dude, we have to do like a cheat sheet.
You know, we, we have all the content, so we just try and put something together and then we, you know, we decided which would be the categories and then put them in, you know, in Canva and Figma. Just prepare the cheat sheet. And yeah, like once it was ready, I was kind of looking at it and I was like, this is actually pretty cool.
Like, I would like to have this chit sheet. Like, and and yeah. And then we [00:16:00] just did the post and yeah, it blew up.
It was yeah, I remember, I think it was about like 10 30 in the morning. I'm kind of clicking the post. Well, the story was not that, not that smooth. I, I, I first did a post. It's like I, I'm using some software, which kind of gives me a way to see like how the post will look like. Mm-hmm. And, and it wasn't working, man.
Like, it just, it just wasn't working. And I'm like, oh gosh. Like I don't even know how it's gonna look like because I never posted a a p d.
I knew that LinkedIn somehow,
I was like, man, I, I really need to post now because this is a good time. It's Tuesday, like 10 30, whatever, I can't post later. And then I had to figure out, and then I figured out a hack. Like I, I created the private LinkedIn group for myself and like that nobody could see. And then it just posted there and I was like, okay, now I know how it looks like.
Nice. So, and then I, and then I do the post and literally first, I think first. 30 minutes. Nothing happens. Like nothing. And I'm like, oh my God, what's going on? Like, it's, I shouldn't have posted in this, in this group. I, I, I, you know, I, I, I totally did the wrong thing. This is not gonna work. And then I went and then I just went for lunch.
I'm just like, I'm literally start eating my food and I'm looking at my phone and it's just buzzing. It's, it literally doesn't stop. It's just like every second, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Wow. And I'm, and I'm just like, okay, I'm not gonna eat. I, I'm running back to the office. Because I know that, that, at least from the book, there was like, once you start getting comments, just reply because you need to kind of start warming up that algorithm.
You have to reply to everybody and you have to kind of address it, whatever, like you have to keep up the engagement. And by the time, I think it was about like 15 minutes for me to run back to the [00:18:00] office, yeah. It's, it's already like you could see clearly just, it just exploding. So we had nothing set up, like absolutely nothing.
I was just looking at my LinkedIn my, my screen was frozen because people were not just commenting and liking, they were actually sending me messages to get you know, a P D F version of the cheat sheet. And it was just like buzzing, like those, you know, like when you get a message, it just opens up.
And, and I, and I couldn't do anything. I was, it was all just frozen. So I somehow, through my phone, had to figure out that, you know, at least those, those messages don't pop up. Yeah. And then, yeah, you just grind like you have, because I promised that I'm gonna, you know, reply to everybody and, and give them a P D F.
So you just, we just were trying to grind it out. I was replying by myself until I think 3:00 PM. And then Miro was, I think it was, they were working on some design stuff with with Antonio. And then, yeah, he is just like, yeah, dude, you, it doesn't look like you can handle this. There's like 1,500 comments.
He is like, you can't handle this. This is not, this is not, this is crazy. And then, yeah, he just jumped on my card as well. Yeah, we just started kind of punching it out and it was about, I think two and a half weeks of no sleep, just answering people. I'm still by, by this time. I don't, I think I miss maybe hundreds of people, but I, I can't, I can't get to the comments because there's.
10 and half thousand comments. Oh, wow. I, I don't think I can get to everybody. I just don't know because if I click see more it just, it just kicks me out and then you have to do all over again.
Jonathan Fischer: So, That's amazing. Bad. That is very cool. So, I mean, come on, 10 and a half thousand comments. That's not many.
You could get to 'em in a day. Easy. No, that's pretty amazing. So, Were there some memorable comments that stand out to you? Like it sound, I mean, obviously there was quite a conversation going on. What, what kind of sticks in your mind, just as we're [00:20:00] talking today, that was notable or funny or especially insightful?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: I think, I think one of the learnings, I was actually quite impressed, like. Just from the maybe competence like, like salespeople competence perspective is, I'm sure everybody's getting messages on LinkedIn. You know, when salespeople are reaching out and, and, and, you know, offering their products or, you know, whatever.
And, and typically those messages just, they're just bad most of the time. But when people were reaching out for a p d. Of their personal interests and they were really interested in this. The messages were extremely good, like really, really good. Like it wasn't, you know, it was, they were very brief.
They, some people explained why they needed faster than anybody else. Like it was, they were, people were getting very creative. And, and I, and I just realized this one thing like when people, when salespeople think, or when salespeople really want something and they put their minds to that, they actually, messages are, were really, really good.
Like I, I, I was not expecting people to be, you know, So straight to the point, at the same time, very polite at the same time. Some even did like a research like, Hey, you know, whatever, I, I follow your post. I like epic brief. Can you gimme whatever? And, and, and that was pretty impressive, like for me because the messages you get every day are, are pretty bad.
But the message people were sending were, were actually extremely good. So that's really cool that that's one takeaway.
Yeah.
Jonathan Fischer: Did you do anything else to, to keep the engagement going other than just responding?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: No, not really. I was, I was, I was really I was, I was just like, Miro and me, we were just heads down. I remember we split the task. I was, I was doing comments, so when people comment and ask for p I.[00:22:00] Like it, send it and then reply. Mm-hmm. And then he would be on emails because there was, it was just, yeah, there was enough.
I think there was like, whatever we have in comments, there's probably the same amount of in, in emails where people did not comment or like they just straight up shoot us a message. So we kind of split it this way. Yeah, it's What else? Well, I think if, if it just personally, it's not like we didn't have even time to like, celebrate, for example, or just to acknowledge anything.
You're just kind of grinding it all for, for, for, you know, for, for all those weeks. And yeah, it's sort of like maybe, I think what was very, very interesting is the fact that maybe all the pre-work we've done by getting to the right audience and to the right to the right geographies was that it, it, it resulted in, in huge amount of inflow of like inbound interest for our tool.
For example, I think we have about one close to 2000 people on wait list. So, so that was like, I, I know at least the, the experience I have of when I was researching viral posts that, that a lot of posts would go viral and get a lot of eyeballs, but then it doesn't really translate into anything for, for the business the person is in or for, for anything of, of kind of value in return.
Right. So, so I think that's also one of the good learnings or, or tips is like not all. Viral posts are equally beneficial for the company you're working in or, or whatever the goal you're trying to achieve. If you're just trying to, to get viral, you know, people could post something very controversial.
I think there was a guy who posted something about Formula One, something very controversial, went viral, but literally got no business outta it and Right. You [00:24:00] know, so yeah.
Jonathan Fischer: Yeah. That, that would, that was gonna be my next question for you is what kind of, of real, tangible return business-wise is there?
And that can, that may be a direct r o I may not be, you know, ideally you're, you're getting targeted prospects to the top of your funnel though, right? For future business, it looks like. That sounded like that's happened. Have there been some other payoffs from this campaign, like even strategic connections or things like that?
Yeah, I think there was,
or your personal brand as well. Maybe it's affected all those areas as well, perhaps.
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: No, I think the, so, so there are two things really. And I don't know if people are gonna look at it, but I'm, I'm just gonna share it with the audience. Maybe it's not, it's not very good to share this, but, so it's, it's, we get a lot of advice.
So once we went viral and people were kind of watching at us like, why are you guys just sitting and replying it by hand? Like, just, you know, put it in the Google Drive, share the link, everybody's gonna get it. And so one thing which, which is very important I feel is, is that personal kind of connection with another person who you, who is in your target audience.
Because everybody who got their PDFs they're on my LinkedIn. You know, it's not a, whenever I will maybe need help or need advice or ask them for a favor or whatever it is I'm already connected with them inside of their message, inside of the, inside of the inbox, right? So, so that's a huge value for somebody who.
Knows how to do sales, for example, that, that you are not, you are not reaching out to somebody via email. You already sort of had that conversation with them. They said, thank you. You provided another value. A lot of people also came back for some other posts, et cetera. So there is conversation, ongoing conversation, and that's sort of very, it, it's priceless from that end.[00:26:00]
And then, yeah, so that's, that's kind of a good outcome is even if we don't have. All those 20,000 or 30,000 people who signed up on the wait list. But we do have you know, we know where they live in a way. So, yeah, so that's, that's a tangible, at least from our perspective, that's a very tangible sort of then obviously, wait.
It's pretty, I think it's also quite interesting that, I don't know if it goes along with a personal brand, but I, I do ask people like, why did you sign up for the wait list? Because obviously the, the first kind of step was the content. And then, you know, it's not very obvious that that content translates to ethics brief.
But a lot of people I asked this question, said that, Hey, you know, like I, I see all these other tools on the market, but you see, you guys seem like you know what you're doing. You know about database sales. You seem like, you know, you seem to understand it on the fundamental level. I agree with your point of you.
This, this content already helped me and I'm just excited to see what kind of tool you're building because, you know, you know what you're doing. So I trust in, in that you're gonna you know, build the tool, which helps me because you already helped me. So, so that was a good finding that it's also translates, maybe it's a personal brand, which you're saying, but it's sort of people start trusting me and, and that trust sort of, Transferred to Epic just because I'm a co-founder of Epic and that's the tool we're building.
So that was also quite an interesting finding.
Jonathan Fischer: Cool. Cool. Well, I'll tell you what, we've had a very fast conversation here, Anton. I think it's been very informative to the listener. It sounds like you're not hurting for wait list members, but you can always take a few more, right? What's the best way for folks to follow up with you?
And your team there@epicbrief.com. And first of all maybe tell us a little bit more about what Epic Brief is. I shared a bit in the intro that it, it's a, it's a powerful set of tools to kind of take care of from you. You [00:28:00] talking to me about it, it sounds like it's gonna take, hopefully take care of some of the undesirable aspects of doing sales, record keeping and helping track your results and recordings.
And it's all, all, all in one to do all the, the stuff you don't like to do in selling unless you do what you do enjoy about selling. Is that fair? You wanna expand on that a little bit?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Yeah, I think, I think yeah, what, what, what we're all about and what is, is, is built for, I think it's good to know it's built for salespeople and and for sales teams.
And the salespeople have specific jobs to do and they have specific activities they're doing especially, and there, there are some activities which they know they should be doing, but they don't do them for multiple reasons. When I was sales rep there were things like preparing for the calls.
I almost for two,
They might not show up or it's sort of not qualified opportunity, whatever. So you actually don't put the effort, but a lot of times that hurts you really badly when you are in the call and it's actually a qualified buyer and you're unprepared. That's, that's quite hurtful for, for your deal.
Then there are a bunch of activities which help you keep up momentum, like sending a full recap email, for example, or, you know, Doing like a call debrief just, just having great notes so that you can prepare for the next conversation. Some of those things are just, were, at least for me, they were living in my head most of the time.
I know there are, you know, 10 to 15% of salespeople who I'm, I'm really I'm really jealous about that. They can focus on the conversation at the same time, do great notes, but I was never one of them. So I was typically having either bad note notes or I had to go back in the night and watch the gong recording or whatever the tool you guys are using and then just type my notes and, and that's just, that was horrible experience.
So, and then one of the aspects any salesperson hates is filling in their c r m. So that's also one of the, one of the burdens we, we wanna take away. And that's very, it's very important to fill in your CM because that's [00:30:00] the information for your organization, but actually, Filling it in is very anxious activity because you, you can't just put your bad notes there.
A lot of people will read them, so you have to put them in somewhat good format. So yeah, doing those activities after the call is something which you know, we want to help salespeople achieve.
Jonathan Fischer: Right on. Right on. Well, so we wanna give a little time to our audience to ask some q and a here, Anton.
So let's take a look and see what we've got in the the hopper. Here's a question from Lavy ak and he's asking, how has the experience of going viral influenced your content strategy moving forward from here?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: It's a very good question. I think, I think one of the rules we. As founders, founders, and as entrepreneurs, and also salespeople is once you, once you hit gold you know, keep digging.
It's, it's, it's sort of like, you know, a lot of people would like, you know, I don't know how much you know about the gold rush, but like, when, when you find gold, like you don't go to another spot, like you have to go and you have to go and start digging deeper. So I think for us, The content in a format of something visual, something valuable, something what people can And maybe implement that's valuable.
So for us it just going down the line of what kind of content we can create. So another for example, we, we had this B two B cheat sheet. Then we had a content, also quite successful, B two B calendar. Then just recently I posted B two B sales hiring cheat sheet. They didn't go as viral, but actually it's, it's pretty interesting to see.
It, it gets a lot of engagements and, and we get a lot of you know, people reaching out. So, so we will just continue doing something similar you know, cheat sheet, toolkit, whatever you call it, but, but something visual, something actionable, something what people can just take away and implement. So that's, [00:32:00] that's, that's the direction we'll go.
And, and that's what we've been doing for the past month.
Jonathan Fischer:
Oh, here's a good question. For LinkedIn user viral content has a short shelf life, often true. How do you plan to capitalize on the momentum generated by your viral post?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Well, I think for us, The main, you know, the main kind of capital was was kind of achieved. So it's, it's, you know, I, I, I think before the post I had like 2000 followers. Now there's, I think 15,000 or something like that. So. We basically what it means is that, you know, we, what if we hit the goal another time and there's another post which people see as valuable as that cheat sheet?
Then it'll just reach more people. I think another one is just the fact that it seems like people just know, you know, about those chit sheets. Like they just know. People reaching out, people are correlating Epic brand. With, with the cheat sheet or with the content. It's, it's much easier to be someone who, you know, to have some sort of recognition than to be like an unknown person or a non startup and, and, and, and try and get, get, get interest.
So for us, like capitalizing on momentum just means. Keep doing what we're doing maybe do some stuff even better. And and yeah, and I mean, having almost 2000 people on the wait list, we have so much work to do to also onboard them. Mm. And I think it's, it's a good head start for us. But yeah, keeping on the momentum is very important.
Don't in. You know, beating the drums.
Jonathan Fischer: Yeah. Right on. So, here's a question back from Lavy. So was there any negative feedback, and if so, how did you handle that?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: There were, I think two or three people who would so there was like feedback around the content itself where somebody [00:34:00] just said that I think it was a. Person. He said that he doesn't understand.
You know, what's there and why is it what it is, that it's just like super not valuable. Like it, it, and, and I, the way I handled it, I, I just said thanks, thanks for feedback. I'll try to make it better next time. I don't, I don't believe that, you know, people have opinions and that's totally fine.
It just doesn't work. It's not worth kind of engaging in the, you know, in the fight or conversation if somebody just has negative feedback. And I did my best and I had my best intentions. So, it's, it's on them in a way. I think couple people also just said that that cheat sheets are great, but people typically don't treat them or they don't, whatever.
That's not something I believe in. I think if people, maybe there is percentage of people who don't, didn't never read it or didn't get any value out of it, but there are people who at least have it as a cheat sheet. You know, they can, they, they know that information, so they could put it on the wall.
Like for example, I have it, I'm not in.
Every time I'm in doubt, I'll just look at it and, and it, it just helps to have it all on the same page. So I'm, I'm using it not every day, but when I'm in doubt or I need the reminder, I do use the cheat. Yeah.
Jonathan Fischer: Well, I mean, Naysayers are gonna say, nay, what do you, what, what can you do? Right? It's just, it's part of the deal.
Some people get some perverse pleasure from that, but when you look at the overwhelming response, I guess that's, that's a big part of it too, isn't it? Here's a question from Juan. Let's wrap it up with this one for today. Then, Anton, in a nutshell, so maybe just kind of tie an ice bow on this. You've had some time to think about this.
What is it that came together in a nutshell? Why do you believe your post went viral?
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: I think there's, there's an element of timing. So I did research after the post that, you know, I think it was about two or three weeks before there was a [00:36:00] first cheat sheet. And that first cheat sheet was something like finance cheat sheet. If I'm not if I remember correctly. And that's when like, You know, there are, there are sort of like those trends, like either on LinkedIn or Twitter where somebody comes up with concept like cheat sheet or then on Twitter there was like these things where investors or VCs that would create like a.
Like a list of all the, all the VCs in the world that, and would share it with people. So, so people come up with those concepts and I think if you are in the beginning of that wave and you catch it that's a great timing because people are not yet tired of those cheat sheet. Now. Now for example, you can see on LinkedIn quite a lot of cheat sheets.
I've seen also some sales cheat sheets and they don't get. They don't get that engagement because people are just, you know, they've seen enough of those cheat sheets. Yeah. So there's definitely timing. I think another, another one is that we, we did not sort of, it wasn't a controversial cheat sheet.
It wasn't something which people would need to study in many ways. It was just something. Visual, simple simple visual framework would what people just, it, it was almost like validating what people already knew. And that would, and, and the reason, and it would fit with the concept of the cheat sheet, right?
Like when you. When it's not something you need to learn, but it's something you use. It's cheat sheet, but you just never put it together, so, so it's not like we blew up people's minds of like, Hey, this is, you know, this all the methodologists, or this are all this kind of framework. Like people knew about them, but they never could visualize it because.
Putting up frameworks or finding them or researching about different frameworks is just time consuming. But you probably know about challenges sale, you know about buyer personas, you know about all that stuff. But, but having it in the visual format is really valuable because sometimes you, you need to explain yourself or, or remind [00:38:00] yourself something.
And having that is, is very good. And then third element. It is just knowing the rules of decay. I, I don't think that if, if, if I would have written that post in, in, in another way or if I would, if we would reacted to the post in a way, like putting the link instead of just replying and, and, and kind of feeding the algorithm with all the engagement.
I don't think that it viral because. I think after like three days it started to slow down and, and it was like 2:00 AM I still remember that moment. It was slowing down and then we still had like thousands of comments and thousands of emails to, to reply and then we just decided with mirror that we're not gonna sleep because we can't slow it down.
We have to, we have to wait until Australia, Australia wakes up and picks it up. So we, we just doubled down and until 5:00 AM we had to keep going. And then we, we saw that it spiked again. So, so there are, it, it was fun experience to see that you can kind of revive it and then it spiked again for I think another like half a million impressions because Australia picked it up.
Then India woke up and it kind of went back to the US Europe. So, so yeah, a lot of things came down together. Yeah.
Jonathan Fischer: That's very cool. Well, it's been really great to hear your story, Anton. There's a lot to learn. I think it, it's a case study worth even digging deeper into in terms of how it played off the algorithms.
But I think we've got a lot, a lot of great takeaways for the audience. So thanks for joining us and adding a ton of value to the Evolved Sales Leader today.
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Thank you very much, Jonathan. Alright. You're welcome. Back was a pleasure.
Jonathan Fischer: Yeah. All right, we'll talk to you soon.
Anton Dobrzhanskiy: Cheers.
Jonathan Fischer: Well and to our audience. Wanna thank you for being here and helping us have such a successful ride here at the Evolved sales leader. And I do have a bit of a bittersweet note to share with you. We are gonna be sharing our final Evolved sales leader live on September the first. We'll be sunset the show at that time. I'll be back.
We'll be talking about ways to advance your success and hone your skills and [00:40:00] grow in a future format. But we'll definitely be taking a pause and that will be our last. Evolved Sales Leader live on September the first. I got some fantastic guests coming here between now and then, so don't miss it. Bring your friends, help us.
End it on a fantastic big fat boom. And we'll have a great time together once again when we see you on the next Evolved Sales Leader Live episode. I'm gonna sign off for now. Thanks again for being here, everybody. Take care.
