Founder | 2x exits. Current: Social media management for agencies and teams → https://xitter.cf/t.co/hfpXynvS6L | SaaS founder mastermind → https://xitter.cf/t.co/YNNefrjpvt
Portland, OR
Joined April 2012
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- Followers239
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As we grow DemandBird through the ranks and take market share, I know how this story goes. It's not my first time bootstrapping a company from nothing to a widely-known B2B brand. We're doing it yet again from humble beginnings.
Each time, there's one group of people that I NEVER FORGET to appreciate:
Those who believed in us - and especially, those who bought from us! - before we were a well-known product.
If you did business with my marketing agency in 2017, or with Aware in 2023, or with DemandBird in 2026, you are identifying an up-and-coming product and a hungry team that will serve you with gusto, and I'm forever thankful to you for it.
Thank you to the 75+ active DemandBird customer users who are with us now.
Honored to serve you.
-AB
I read 40+ books every year.
I read history, philosophy, spirituality, business, anthropology, biography, memoir. (Not a lot of fiction, I grant you.)
I like to learn.
Reading also helps me be a better writer.
Writing has always been a good skill for business. Not just on social media.
I will always write.
I write posts, memos, emails, poetry, cards to my wife, post-its, product updates, DMs, customer support Slacks, and Reddit rants.
I recommend you read. And write.
Not just because it'll make you better at social media.
But because it'll make your mind better.
You'll carry that with you for the rest of your life.
I've accrued an estimated $29,772 of earned media value (EMV) from my LinkedIn content in the last quarter.
And I'm currently getting a 3.2x ROI on my EMV. I expect that to rise to 7.8x by this time next year.
My philosophy is simple:
1. I create content only when I have time
2. My priority is serving existing customers
3. Word of mouth and social drive growth
4. As @DemandBird gets better, leads go up
5. Most of the magic happens in the DMs
6. Our post coach helps me be a clearer writer
I'm coming up on my 10-year anniversary of generating revenue from LinkedIn... that's a LOT of wisdom :)
If you're growing on LinkedIn, or managing LinkedIn for clients?
Consider giving our product a try → demandbird.com
I wrote 282 LinkedIn comments in September.
Zero of them were AI-written or assisted.
In 2023, I began talking more ferociously about the importance of commenting. But today, the common 'wisdom' is that you should engage publicly for the purpose of getting more eyeballs on *your own* posts.
Sure, that's one benefit. But if you think of it like a self-serving exercise in gaming the system just to benefit yourself, you won't have the effect you're going for. So if a LinkedIn guru tells you they write 500 comments a day, and you should too, just think twice. That advice is much more likely to overwhelm you than to help you.
Before you buy an AI slop spam cannon tool to spew out 50x more comments per minute, remember what you are actually DOING when you engage with people on social media. Don't hurt your reputation in the process.
The REASON to engage with people is to build actual connections both in the minds and hearts of people with whom you may want to do business. And also to learn and keep a pulse on your industry, for *yourself*.
And that right there is the ultimate argument against automating your comments, with AI or otherwise: regardless of how 'good' the comments are (and let's be real, they will NOT be well-written):
If you automate engagement, you won't remember what you said or who you said it to. Let's hope that comment thread doesn't come up in a real follow-up DM conversation, cause you'll just have no idea what's happening. Oops!
To be clear, automating rote admin tasks with AI is an AWESOME use case for this technology.
But when communicating with customers, friends, industry peers... leave your GPT at the door, please.
One of many things I have in common with @Manderovic is that we're a little bit old school.
We like to ask people when it might be the right time to follow up. What they love about their current vendor. When their contract is up.
We think curiosity and active listening are unsung heroes of the world of sales and marketing, lost arts in an AI-obsessed world.
And yet, those might be the skills we need more than ever.
I've been 'closed-circuit selling' for most of my career, without calling it that. And then Adem and George gave it a name, filled out the system, and it's one of the best breakthroughs in revenue generation I've come across in a while.
Thanks for having me on the pod, guys <3
Ok this is surprisingly annoying to do in 2026: GTM folks, what is the best way to build a list of B2B social media agencies (i.e. they focus more, or even exclusively, on B2B vs DTC)?
Do I need @Oceandotio or is there something I can PAYG and plug into Claude Code? Right now Claude Code is trying to run this by rephrasing different Google searches which is capping my list functionally at <100 entries.
I just want an API-based way to build this company web domain list, such that Claude can check each record to ensure based on its website that it indeed matches my criteria.
Help!
Alex Boyd retweeted
When you try to cancel @typefully, clicking on "Cancel" closes the cancel confirmation modal. Not cool, as I almost thought I canceled and didn't understand why it didn't reflect it?
You can click outside of the modal OR on the "X" icon on top right anyways, so this looks like a sad dark pattern case to me
I get +41% more FOLLOWERS from talking about my industry, than when I post about my personal life. Even though my personal posts get 2.6x more REACH.
Doesn't that make sense, though? Work discussion creates more 'business value', whereas feel-good personal updates - while nice to read - don't cause people to dig deep.
Personal posts make people go "Aw yeah nice Alex, great to hear it was your anniversary" but nobody is following me AS A RESULT of that. I mean, most likely not, at least...
But here's the best of both worlds, if you can swing it: can you weave your own life experience into your industry commentary?
*That* is where the magic happens, IMO.
And by that I don't mean that you should add "P.S. I have a cat" at the end of your B2B Saales posts. But then again if you do want to hear about my cat, I'm always game. (Just wait until we have a kid, amirite??)
Work is part of life and vice versa. You may as well develop the art of tying the two together.
About to migrate my second MagicPost customer of JUST TODAY ALONE onto @DemandBird, this is pretty fun
The VC world amazes me:
1. “We are only funding AI agent companies that can run your customers' whole life, sorry SaaS losers”
2. ”If a founder uses their AI agent to email me, I will block them and mock them mercilessly on X. We want to get to know YOU... ”
Dang am I glad to be a bootstrapper.
So I spent 8 hours manually migrating historical client performance data from AuthoredUp for a new agency customer.
The AU export format is, to put it diplomatically, janky. Thankfully after enough of my own time went into bashing my head against the keyboard doing this myself, we were able to implement a custom import tool just to allow our customers to bring in data from any current analytics platform.
Could I have waited for us to build the connector? Maybe. But because I wanted to make sure there were zero delays getting this customer onboarded, I just did the vast majority of it myself vs waiting. It was satisfying in the way that tedious-but-real work tends to be. The chop wood carry water kind of customer success/implementation work you gotta do as a SaaS founder.
And thankfully we came out of it with a generalized import capability that works for customers coming from any analytics or scheduling tool, not just AuthoredUp. Off the roadmap and into the product. Woohoo!
(Before you ask, "why didn't you make Claude Cowork do it?!" - I thought of that obv. But I did not want to use Cowork on my LinkedIn profile. Seems like it might set up an alarm bell on LI's security algorithm. No thank you. I'll save Cowork for other sites, not LinkedIn.)
Now, I'm onboarding a whole-ass B2B social media agency and all of their clients in 20-30 mins. (Not that they even need to have us do onboarding for them, it's easy enough to do oneself, but I just like to offer it as a free white-glove service).
Oh, and the rate this agency is paying is ~60% LESS than what AuthoredUp had been charging them. Even on our highest pricing tier.
Boom.
P.S. Teasing some brand new INSIGHTS features dropping to @DemandBird soon...!
