What's up, party people? My name is Sunny Ray. This is the Sunny Ray Show. Today, we're going to talk to Evan Chi about the playbook behind 48 million LinkedIn impressions. Oh my goodness, I can barely contain myself. How you doing, Evan?
Fantastic, Sunny. Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, I'm excited. so you're in the valley, right?
That's right. Silicon Valley, Bay Area.
So I guess take me right into the deep end. what are you building? Why should the world care? What is Regenesis?
Regenesis is a company that was born about seven and a half years ago out of frustration more than anything else. I was a CMO at an AI company at that time. And you know I was charged with a large department. We had a nice budget. and you know I jumped into social media content creation and almost immediately you know it was kind of frustrating and disappointing to see that you know we were kind of spending a lot of time and resources and kind of not getting anywhere. And so we started to just kind of tinker with social media and kind of figure out where the lines were drawn, what we could and couldn't do. and eventually we came out with the version one of a tool that we simply call the organic post booster. it's just a simple tool that helps brands solve distribution for their LinkedIn content, right? So, you can think of that as like an alternative to paid ads. A paid ad will typically say sponsored or promoted. this comes directly from your feed or your company's feed and is completely organic. and so that's an interesting tool and we didn't quite understand how interesting it was until we started to use it more and more long term. but what we found was not only does it basically solve distribution for your LinkedIn content, what that actually does is it solves awareness for your brand on LinkedIn, meaning lots of people are going to see your brand and your message on a consistent basis. So, that's very important. number two, if you're able to do that, what that actually means is you're able to solve trust in your brand. Let's say if you're getting your content right, okay, like there's all kinds of wrong content out there in the world as well. but let's just say if you're getting your content right, you know, then what that means is not only are you solving that awareness piece, you're actually solving that trust piece as well in the brand, which is, you know, it's critical if you're trying to find customers, partners, investors, etc. So, that's kind of what it came down to. and from that we also notice a number of other really interesting things that happen. So number one is as you have your content kind of permeate through LinkedIn a number of things happen. So number one increased amount of followers. So over the years we've been able to build pages with millions and millions of followers, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of newsletter subscribers. and it's also allowed us to solve a few things, right? So number one is as any good marketer knows, it's all about funnels. So making sure that people are landing in the right places, seeing the right message, and then understanding which way to go from there. And so this is a really effective tool to drive traffic to your LinkedIn profile which is a huge part of you know funnels these days for people to get to know who you are obviously it's your online resume your business card and everything right so that in effect also creates another really interesting effect and that is that what we call LinkedIn in SEO. So, making sure that particular profile, that particular brand shows up on the top of searches when certain keywords are being keyed in, right? So, that's all of those things kind of encapsulate what we were able to solve with this very simple tool called the organic post booster. And so, now the interesting thing we've done around that is we've created a SAS tool out of it. So now anyone can go to the site, they can jump onto what looks like a calendar and if for example you are going to publish your next post on Monday at 10:00 a.m. you could just schedule a boost for Monday at 10:00 a.m. And as long as you publish your piece of content on time, it will be boosted. I know the looks on your face. it's all a little bit different because it's not something that any marketing agency out there necessarily offers. It's kind of something unique that we're able to do. And I see you have questions.
Yeah. How I guess like that's my question. So, how are you boosting it? Like what do you mean like because like I see all these platforms they obviously kind of promote themselves, right? They're like, "Hey, we'll boost your post or whatever or this post is not boostable." And so when you say you guys are doing it, I'm just trying to figure out kind of like Yeah. Like what do you mean exactly? Is it the same kind of boost or is it a different kind of boost?
Well, there's different things going out there going on out there. Let's just say for us it's very simple. For us it's sending early algorithms.
Do you mind if I take a bite of my pizza while you're talking?
Please.
My wife just delivered. I kind of work throughout the day, so if you don't mind. yeah. Okay, cool. Keep going. I'll mute it for that reason. Yeah, dude. It's so good. I'm going to not interrupt you. I'll tell you at the end. It's this place here in Toronto. It's great. Keep going though. Keep going. I'm gonna I don't want to throw you off.
Please, so yeah, I mean that's So what we're doing is we are sending early algorithmic signals from a high authority network, right? So, we're just making sure that we're sending those algorithmic signals and those in turn tell the algorithm to do certain things with your content. So, to give you an example of what that all means, okay, if you posted a piece of content and for example, you know, Steven Bartlett or Alex Hermoszi comes to your piece of content and says comments on it and says, "Wow, this is the most, you know, interesting thing that's happening, you know, here. I'd really like to be a part of whatever you're doing etc What that tells the algorithm is that there is this very high authority network right there's a profile with a lot of followers that you know a lot of people are interested in what this person or this brand has to say or is doing. And so what they're doing is they're saying well this particular piece of content is very interesting and that means it's likely interesting to my community and beyond. So algorithmically what happens is that LinkedIn says, "Well, gee, this piece of content is probably important. There's probably a lot of people who are interested or going to be interested in what's going on here. So let's make sure to show this to a couple additional people here. Whoa. What's going on here?
UFO.
Yeah. Maybe that camera flickering thing earlier wasn't u a glitch in the Matrix. What is going on here?
Yeah, remember I was saying it was called flickering. It flickered earlier. It might be a camera, but I mean we can fix your camera, but we can also keep going because I guess the audio is the main part. I mean, I'm eating pizza.
At least they got to watch you eat pizza, man. I'm sorry about this. I don't know what's going on here.
It's okay. happens.
All right. Well,.
Makes it more fun.
Time to time to get a new camera. That's what time it is.
Yeah.
Anyways, yeah, so that those are some of the fun things that we're doing on LinkedIn. I mean, we also have additional tools as well. so, yeah, I'm happy to share more. but how's that pizza, man?
Pizza's phenomenal. hey, you know, just to slow down a bit.
Yeah. I mean, and we can by the way, if you feel uncomfortable, we can also kill the stream and just redo it again, part two or something if you want. I'm okay with that. But, yeah, I kind of had a bunch of questions I wanted to ask you, right? So, what do you feel like? Do you want to just keep rolling and people can stare at my ugly face or do you want to do you want to maybe punt and do it maybe next week or something? Man, you know, I'm I would love to continue, but this just, you know, it seems kind of.
I mean, you are paused in a very, I would say, thoughtful position.
I will I see a blue screen, so I don't see.
Oh, do you? Okay. You look like I don't know. You look good. That's all I'm going to say. but it's up to you. make the call.
I mean, look, I'm happy to do a few more questions and if you wanna, we can always continue next time as well.
I think today Yeah. Okay. Let's keep rolling. Yeah. I had a I had an interview today. It was an amazing interview, but the guy's audio was terrible. And that in my view is way worse because I can't talk. Okay. You built brands before and you can't. You built brands before you built software. Like what did the retail years teach you about attention that the software people get wrong?
Oh man. I mean, what it taught me was really that it marketing is the driver of everything. if you have the right tools to bring that awareness to whatever it is that you're doing, that's basically the key to everything. I mean, if you have a hundred brands that are all, you know, building the same piece of software, all trying to solve the same piece of problem or all selling ice cream, you know, what's going to differentiate you from the others? I mean, you can have a better tasting ice cream, you can have a better scoop, you can have a prettier store, but at the end of the day, if people aren't aware that you're there, then they're not going to be able to find you. And it's really the whoever is going to be able to solve that awareness piece, at scale that's going to win. And so, even in our brand building days, even when I was building dessert shops, it really came down to marketing. And even then, we were doing things on Facebook. you know, it it's kind of all the same foundational stuff we're doing today. Oh, someone over here, you know, commented on ice cream or it's, you know, they're it's they're commenting on the weather. Then we're just going to go and subtly jump in there and say, "Hey, like it'd be a great time to have an ice cream. you know, you should check out this shop over here or whatever it might be." So, I mean, it's really all kind of the same stuff. It's all brand building, awareness building, you know, kind of like letting people letting as many people know about you as possible.
Yeah. Hey, when did you realize that organic reach could be engineered rather than hoped for? Was it that story you started with or did it sink in like kind of throughout time?
It well we just kind of happened across it. I mean, we were really we were looking for ways to achieve reach and then we realized that the way that the algorithm works is that once you send these algorithmic signals, it actually sends your content to up to 20% of your own network, right? And so that's much more of your network than you're able to get typically through an unboosted post. So that basically unlocks the network that you've built, you know, on LinkedIn for you. Otherwise, you know, even though they're your followers, they're your connections, it's really hard for you to like have a piece of content that actually permeates through all of your network. That's like really difficult to do. but what we found is that algorithmically we could do that 20% at a time. and so that was basically the unlock for, you know, getting content out to the right people. Just making sure that.
If you have Yeah. If you have a curated audience, if you have a curated, network of followers, then we're we have ways to get your information out to them.
So, can you walk me through like on a selfish note, so I'm doing LinkedIn and YouTube and Twitter. I'm doing these streams like too many times a day. so how would I use something like a tool like this to get more than just my mom watching?
It's very simple actually. There's a number of ways to do it, but the simplest way is to just go to the SAS tool which is on the website. it again you just click on, you know, boost my post and it'll take you to what looks like a calendar.
Can you screen share? I mean, we're not there's not much to look at in terms of Facebook or are you is that too much to task for?
Is my screen even sharable now?
Yeah, it is presenter or I'm just saying is because I mean I'm curious myself. I'm sure. Yeah, that would be interesting to see how you actually Yeah, this is cool.
Yeah. sure. Let me just pop this open really quickly.
There's a presenter invite thing at the bottom or in the middle, I guess. Hey, maybe while you're pulling it up, I'm I'll ask you maybe the next question. Yeah. So, you and Steo built this together when the two of you kind of want different things. So, how does that get settled? Like when you guys have like a I don't know, a disagreement, arm wrestle,.
You know, luckily for us, we've been super aligned on everything. Stavo's awesome. he and I are pretty aligned on everything. We just have very open channels of communication. And am I is my screen on? There we go. Is my screen on?
Okay, cool. So, this is our homepage right here. There's this big orange button here, schedule a boost. You would just click that. Take you to this very handy dandy tool. come in here, pop in your info, including most importantly your LinkedIn URL. Going to go to schedule. It's going to take you to what looks like a calendar here, right? So, if for example, you wanted to post something or publish something Friday. we could see what boosts are available. And we wanted to do one right here at 9:00 a.m. We could do that for September 18th at 9:00 a.m. If I wanted to do a additional one on the same day, I could also do 10:00 a.m. And I could also do the next Friday, same thing, 9:00 a.m. As long as I go and then I'll go here and I can go ahead and check out. It's $65 per boost. once you check out, then as long as you publish your content on this day and at this time, we'll take care of the rest. And it's as simple as that.
And you'll get how many views?
That really depends.
49 million.
That that depends on the profile. So there's kind of young and inactive profiles. So is if you are an active profile and you have a good number of followers it will do its thing like it will definitely 2 to 10x your reach like on the very first goaround and get better from there. I've hit 48 million impressions with one LinkedIn boost before. that's like the equivalent of like $1.5 million in ad spend. I know.
It's kind of gnarly.
Okay. Interesting.
Okay. So, you sell reach. Where's the line between amplification and manipulation? And like how do you police it? So, it's really again just kind of algorithmic signals that's going to help you unlock your own network, information to your own network. but through this tool, we've been able to build these large communities. And so, what we're doing now is we're kind of taking these large communities and we're doing more with them. for example, we have a community called Founder and Co. has got about 360,000 followers on LinkedIn today, I believe. and we're essentially taking that and creating podcasts, writing and publishing articles, on founders and investors. we are hosting events. and we've partnered with a number of interesting companies out there to kind of host our events. For example, the city of San Jose and Tesla were some of our latest sponsors where essentially we bring together founders and community and investors. we've partnered with the Silicon Valley Economic Forum which is an event that's been running since about 2009. It's kind of like the Davos of California. It's kind of where kind of policy institutional investors and founders come together once a year to talk about the future of California essentially. and so we've partnered with ventures like that, events like that to essentially bring the best founders and investor stories to our community. Got it. Wow. Can you explain Re Genesis the way you would to someone who's never, I guess, posted on LinkedIn in their life?
Yeah. So, Regenesis is a set of tools that are essentially there to help you help brands solve LinkedIn. Okay. So what that means is you know LinkedIn like any other social media there's really kind of three components to that social media. There's kind of your profile or your landing page. There is content and then there is messaging or DMs. So what we do is we'll take a brand and through that tool that I was telling you about a little bit earlier we'll solve awareness and trust in that brand. Okay. And then the second tool that we have is a social intelligence tool. So as you're boosting your content, you're going to have tons and tons of data, like millions and millions of impressions. So we'll take all of that data and we'll score and map your prospects against your ICP. So say okay out of this 1,000 people you know 300 of them have commented on more than one piece of your content and have come to your visit your LinkedIn profile more than two times. Okay so we'll take this people who have kind of shown this warm set of signals we'll put them into a a group and then we will agentically outreach to all of these people across LinkedIn plus email with our other tools. So we have the distribution tool and then we have the social intelligence tool and then we have our outreach app which then just automates agentically automates the day-to-day motions of connection requests and all of your daily campaigns.
Wow. Cool. Hey man, we don't have too much time left. I guess last one for you. Five years out like does distribution still run through platforms or does it move somewhere the platforms don't control? the distributions will still move through platforms via human brands. So, we're seeing that change more and more these days where podcasters like yourself have the ability to sway presidential elections. So, more and more that personal brand is going to be important and relevant in more and more ways. We're even seeing in politics now. and so while those brands still will need distribution on certain platforms, they themselves will also be centers of distribution. So, the personal brand will be all the rage, everything the cool kids are doing.
Yeah. that's what it feels like to me as well. Cool. Let's bring this one to an end. Evan, stick around for one minute. thank you all for tuning in as well. I really, appreciate it. This is really fun. except where I couldn't see you, but that's okay.
