Breakeven Brothers

Bennett Bernard (00:11)
Cool, welcome everybody to the 10th episode of the Break Even Brothers podcast. I can't believe we made it to 10 episodes. Quite a milestone. My name is Bennett, of course, and joined by me as my co-host as always, Brad. How's everything going, Brad? How was your week?

Bradley Bernard (00:16)
Woohoo!

Pretty good, week two complete at Snap. So things been pretty good. Honestly, this period of my life has been super busy with wedding, move, job. And I think I'm finally coming out to the other side where things are looking pretty good. So kind of like settling in, doing all the onboarding stuff, like financial accounts, insurance, all that kind of boring stuff. But yeah, honestly, pretty good. I can't complain too much. How about you?

Bennett Bernard (00:50)
Good, yeah, good. Had a Halloween earlier this week, of course, so that was fun. It's weird having Halloween on a Thursday, but yeah, it was great and a busy week with everything else going on with work and stuff like that, but you know, sometimes it's gonna be busy, so we'll take it. But yeah, happy to get recording again. I like it's been a minute, I think, with everything going on. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (00:57)
Mm-hmm.

It has been. When's our last episode? check. October 14th. Okay, so what, three weeks ago maybe?

Bennett Bernard (01:10)
Yeah, I don't know. Okay. That two weeks. Yeah, two weeks ago or so. Yeah, something like that.

Bradley Bernard (01:16)
Two weeks? Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. What did you dress up as for Halloween?

Bennett Bernard (01:21)
I'm ashamed to admit I didn't dress up this year. So my kids did, of course, but wife and I just didn't get around to getting costumes. And she was traveling like right before that. So that was my excuse of like just being like not ready to put on a costume. It really isn't the reason, of course, but that's what I'll go with. But yeah, didn't do one this year. My kids told me they wanted me to be Mario, you know, from like Mario and Luigi. But yeah, but, you know, didn't ever get around to it. So we'll make it up next year for like a all out costume.

Bradley Bernard (01:24)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

that would be good.

Okay. Well, yeah, I was waiting for you to ask. So I had this great idea to dress up as myself, for the stay at home era. So I went into the office and sweatpants and bucks bite attire. And I kind of talked to people around my office. I was like, what do you think? And they're like, it looks good. And I was like, no, no, this is like me work from home, Brad. is work from home Brad for the past 12 months. So it was fun.

Bennett Bernard (01:50)
What did you do?

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (02:13)
you know, wearing comfy clothes and like wearing all the Vox Bites flags. That was like my mini costumes. I also wanted to get something, but just with being busy, I didn't have anything. And there's like the full out costumes where you're wearing like the inflatable or there's like the minor like wearing a headpiece or anything. I think I saw one guy in my office is wearing like a full space suit, like an astronaut. That was super cool. I was like, wow, that's like a full send and it looks really good. hopefully next year we'll put more effort into it and make something fun. Cause it's, I don't know, fun day to just do whatever.

Bennett Bernard (02:20)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, my favorite costume probably ever seen. This is a couple of years ago when they were not as common as they are now, but like the inflatables and it was like where the aliens grabbing the person from behind, you know? Yeah, and the guy, the guy that was wearing a camera where you were, but the guy that was wearing it could like sell it so good, like you'd like run backwards and look like the alien was pulling him back. It was hilarious. So those are some of the best ones. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (02:54)
yeah, like the chasing them? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, those are awesome. I think they got a little bit, you know, tiring, but seeing them like on TikTok or whatever, I'm like, those are like, be kind of fun to be in one of those.

Bennett Bernard (03:16)
Yeah, yeah, like I don't I maybe this is just the accountant in me or just being like frugal but like I don't want to spend that much money on a costume and only wear one time or once a year if I reuse it. So it's like some of those are like, you know, whatever 6070 bucks. I'm just like, can't stomach paying that much for something I want to wear for four hours. You know, it's just it's not me. Yeah, like I'm just I'll do something easy. That's probably the most I'll get out of it. So.

Bradley Bernard (03:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, Amazon next day.

Bennett Bernard (03:40)
But yeah, no, it's still still fun, but definitely we're ready for Christmas now in our house. So everyone's getting excited for that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thanksgiving. So a favorite of mine just for the food and everything. So, yeah, looking forward to it all. But cool. Let's let's jump into something I want to kind of catch up with you on. I actually wanted to catch up with you on this for a while. And it's about socials and meaning like Instagram, Twitter and now TikTok and LinkedIn.

Bradley Bernard (03:40)
Yeah.

yeah, Black Friday shopping too.

Yeah. Nice.

Bennett Bernard (04:07)
And the reason why I want to kind of get into it specifically with you is because you actually have a lot of history and building in the socials environment. So I thought it'd be interesting to talk about some like similarities and like differences we see with like modern social networks, or is it like how it was probably back maybe 10 years ago, eight years ago, and some of the products that you have built around those. So I wanted to kick it off by saying

Bradley Bernard (04:13)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (04:32)
I think we've touched on this in the podcast before, but right when I graduated high school, I had opened or kind created a quick like MMA apparel business. It's called Southpaw Industries. And part of, know, when you're trying to run a business and grow is like socials was very much like a thing that you needed to grow on. Right. Like that's kind of it was probably 2010, 2011. So, you know, Twitter was around. Facebook was around. But there was a lot of.

Bradley Bernard (04:50)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (04:58)
kind of noise made about like getting really active on those platforms and like promoting your product. And I remember talking about it with you and we'd talk about like this concept. don't know if you remember it or if like we would, if you'd kind of call it something differently, but do you remember we kind of tried to think about like a ratio of like where it's good to have a lot of followers, but not follow too many people. Like do you remember that, right? Like in kind of

Bradley Bernard (05:18)
Exactly.

I remember that distinctly. Yeah. I think when you looked at brands online, it looked really bad if it was like a one to one ratio where they're following like thousands of people and they have followers that always look good when you're following maybe under 500 and then have like 10,000 made you look established. I think at that time when you're creating your company, there was a huge opportunity there because you wanted to look established and the fast track to do that was like, how do you get followers? So that was like the big ticket item.

Bennett Bernard (05:50)
Yeah. And I don't know. Like, I feel like that's not as important now or we can kind of touch on like now a little bit more. But, you know, I don't know if there's any truth to that, but I do feel like there was like an intangible of like, yeah, like you said, looking established and like as weird as it may sound, I like that was just the era back then. And so that kind of segued into you and I discovering a certain tool that basically like would

Bradley Bernard (05:56)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (06:18)
how do you call it, like friendship or follower share, where you would basically pay for like certain tokens on this platform and you could like get followers quickly that way, but you had to also follow a lot of people, therefore disrupting that ratio that we just talked about. And it was a great platform. You know, it worked really well. Again, this is probably 2010, 2011. I won't say the platform's name because it's probably name change and all that kind of stuff, but it was basically just a tool where you could

Bradley Bernard (06:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (06:47)
gain a lot of followers by following a lot of people. But there, you know, it disrupted that ratio. And so I want to kind of kick it over to you because that turned into, you know, that problem of, okay, it's great that I have this tool that gets me a lot of followers. And these are all very low quality followers, of course, because they're not really interested in your products, you know. And so that's kind of all the stuff that you learn when you're going to business for the first time is it's not always quantity over quality or it's always quality over quantity. But that kind of ratio

Bradley Bernard (06:56)
You

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (07:15)
problem create an opportunity I think for you to kind of create something and so why don't you kick it off first by like this was your very first product and kind of what it was and You know how it solved that issue

Bradley Bernard (07:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, it was exactly as you described coming from, I want to get a lot of followers, but I don't want to follow a lot of people. And using that tool that you mentioned, that was the first step. So you could not pay any money and follow a bunch of people. Once you did that, you got credits on the system and then people then followed you. And so that worked out well. But once we started using it, I think we quickly realized that these followers didn't last that long and the ratio didn't look good. So was thinking in my head.

How can we get a ton of followers and then like unfollow these people? Cause everyone else felt like they were doing the same thing. And I think back then there wasn't as many bots, wasn't AI like at the forefront, people were real on Twitter and you could buy Twitter followers. So, you know, in 2010 you could Google like buy Twitter followers, like exactly that query. You land on a page, some company from somewhere would have a bunch of bot accounts and they would follow you.

And that worked out well, but you wanted like real people. You wanted people that had profile pictures, had real names, had some tweet history. Not like anyone would actually look through, but it felt so much better. And so, yeah, it was kind of the journey of yes, we can get followers. They're maybe one tier above what you get if you actually paid for them. And two, how do we keep them, but also make our kind of follow to following ratio better. And so I think...

This started out being, I'm just going to make something for Ben because I was interested to see how we could solve the problem. And I think I had done some coding before and like visual basic and kind of messing around with things, but I had went to Twitter's API page. I don't even know how I got there. mean, there's probably a few steps missing in the whole story, but ended up there. think the top SDK for Twitter at the time was PHP. So I selected that one, not knowing PHP at all. And then it kind of went forward with this.

kind of super basic script that you log in with Twitter. Once you do that, you get a token that basically manages your account. You kind of enumerate everyone that you're following, and then you can make an API call to Twitter to say, unfollow that user, unfollow that user. And so essentially automating unfollowing in a massive amount. And then I think from there, we had used that platform that you were talking about, got a ton of followers from it, and then we ran this script and...

Bennett Bernard (09:30)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (09:38)
I kind of iterated on what that should look like. And ideally you put in the minimal amount of effort and that would unfollow the maximum amount of people and that work. But I was like, is there anything else I can do with this? And so I think over the next maybe two or three months, like I slapped some UI on it, wanted to allow other accounts to log in through Twitter. And ultimately that became kind of the first rendition of I unfollowed.com. So this is probably 2010, 2011 era, something that came out kind of scratching my own itch to unfollow all these people. And then it.

turned out to be like a really, really simple product that I think I charged $2.99 for one year and like put it online and got my first purchase through PayPal IPN and like was like, holy crap, I can make money online without knowing anybody. And they're just gonna come to my site, unfollow a few people, hit the limit that I had, like the daily limit, and then they're gonna go pay me on PayPal to unlock that limit and then keep going. yeah, it was, was fricking awesome. I loved it.

Bennett Bernard (10:31)
Yeah, that's cool. Do you remember like where you were? Is it one of those moments where you remember like where you were when you got that PayPal notification for the first time? Like, or is it kind of just a blur at that point?

Bradley Bernard (10:38)
You

No, I think I do remember, I think I was at the parents house. I think I was like sitting on my bedroom and like the email comes in through PayPal. And I think I did like a double take like 2.99 for IonFollow and I had tested a bunch of purchases myself and it wasn't a subscription. So it was 2.99 a year. And after that year it expired. Then you had to rebuy it, which is almost in this day and age kind of what's preferred now because people hate subscriptions. So I guess I was a little early on that.

but yeah, I got the email checked. It was like, no way. So then I ran to our dad and was like, someone paid me money for $3. I know it's not a lot, but someone paid me money for this, more or less simple PHP that I hacked together, to make this kind of front end and jQuery HTML, know, HTML five CSS, all this fun stuff. And the main method I had for learning at that time, at that time, since I was in high school was just YouTube videos. was Googling things, how to set up PayPal payments in PHP.

Bennett Bernard (11:21)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (11:34)
how to access Twitter API and PHP, Googling, YouTubing, everything. Through all that piece something together that someone paid me $3 and just kind of fed that money into SEO. And that's how I got customers. So yeah, it worked out well.

Bennett Bernard (11:44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, it's super cool. And let's I want to be super clear with this, too. I mean, this is probably 2010, 2011. So you are in high school at this time as like a freshman or not. You weren't even in high school yet. If it was 2010, it was around that time. Either you were brand new to high school. Yeah. Or like at the end of middle school, because you were not a computer science graduate that you are, of course, right now. And it's amazing to me. It's always been amazing. And I think this is one area that

Bradley Bernard (11:53)
Mm-hmm.

Around that time, yeah.

Bennett Bernard (12:13)
computer science and like just tech does super well. Just how much information you can just learn for free. Like you said, just going on YouTube and Googling. And it's just remarkable that, you know, as a, I don't know, you must have been 13 or 14 year old. You can go out there, find that information, have a problem that people have. And in this case, the problem was near and dear to you, which it was, you know, me and trying to figure out how to do South Park industries. But then you take that problem, learn some skills online, create a product and sell it. I mean, that's just.

Bradley Bernard (12:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (12:41)
You know, it's an easy get overlooked because it's like, OK, that's just three dollars. But like still, that's you know, that's incredible. And it's awesome that it's that easy. Not easy, but like it's you can boil it down to something that's simple, you know, where it's just like, see a problem. need some skills to solve that problem. Let me create this solution and see people will pay for it. And people did. Did you have any? You know, it's funny. I think I know the answer. But like, did you have any thought behind the three dollars a year or were you just purely throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck?

Bradley Bernard (12:52)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (13:09)
when it came to pricing.

Bradley Bernard (13:10)
Yeah, I don't think I did any price testing. didn't do any indie hackers stuff. Like I didn't, I don't even know if that existed, but I didn't do any price testing. I think I just put it up there and moved on with my life and thought no one would buy it. Once people started buying it, I was just like, okay, I, the minimal amount of costs I think I had every month was like a HostGator server, which at that time it was like a shared server. You were just kind of slapped on with other people, shared CPU and memory. think it was maybe $20 a month.

Bennett Bernard (13:12)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (13:39)
And I think at the end of the day, once I unfollowed got rolling, it probably made like five or six grand a year on autopilot. I would just have the PayPal app on my phone and in school, both, you know, in high school and college, I just get random notifications of like 299, 299, 299. And it was really cool at first, but then I turned it off because it was so insignificant that it just built up over time. So I like muted the notifications, but would log into the PayPal account every

Bennett Bernard (13:56)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (14:05)
I don't know, three or four months. Like it was completely autopilot. Didn't have to touch it. And it was just fantastic. Like, I don't think I really understood the power of like online payments reach through SEO and making something that's so approachable and low costs, but also makes money at that time. I just kind of, like this is the first product I made. did well. Like, I guess, you know, that's just how things are. But yeah, I think looking back on it, I slapped together.

A decently good code base for the knowledge that I had. then I think the best thing I ever did was investing money into SEO and pushing that pretty far because you know, there's a few funny stories at the time. Probably won't go into all of them, but I think the first iteration that I made was you could press you on your keyboard to unfollow people. at the twitter.com, like I guess a little bit more background on twitter.com, you could go unfollow people, but it was kind of like an infinitely scrolling list. You couldn't have your cursor in one position and just like spam click.

Bennett Bernard (14:39)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (15:00)
That literal UX was the opportunity that I used to make money, which is kind of odd because I guess on Twitter side, they don't want people to unfollow, so they shouldn't make it easy. But for people who do want to mass unfollow, I want to make that as easy as possible. So when I started out, it was, think, three users were grouped together in the UI, and you could press U on your keyboard to unfollow all three. Don't ask me why it's three. That's just how it was.

Bennett Bernard (15:05)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (15:26)
And then it evolved to be only one user because I think someone from Twitter reached out and said, Hey, this doesn't follow our terms of service or whatever, some document or community standards or whatnot. So then I changed it to just be one person, but I still kept the keyboard shortcut. So in theory, you can log in through my app takes you directly to a list of. You know, all the people you're following, would do a set difference between people that are following you and you're following. So you could see like who's there and who's not, you just hold down you on your keyboard.

Bennett Bernard (15:53)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (15:55)
and it would just unfollow the people in the list. You'd see a little loading spinner unfollowed, they'd get removed. And that was it. That was like the whole product. People would get in and get out. They'd pay for your access and probably only use it once. And so I think it was the perfect utility to just get in, get out, pay your money. And like, I didn't have any support. No one complained. It was so cheap. know, it was great.

Bennett Bernard (16:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny because it kind of touches on again. think I don't want to say like, like toxic, that's too strong of a word, but like kind of using the system of that other platform where you end up with too many people that you're following, which probably isn't the way that Twitter intended for Twitter to be used, of course, like the follow me, I'll follow you back, but I don't really care about your content at all. I'm just trying to get my own followers. And then you build this other tool.

Bradley Bernard (16:35)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (16:42)
That's like kind of still it's not like outside like the terms of use, but like it's kind of like, Hey, this is over here. It's not like, I'm sure Twitter doesn't, didn't like love the, the ability. I think they wanted people to obviously be able to use a platform easily and unfollow easily if they needed to. like the pair of those two things, it's funny, like you get all these followers that you don't really care about. They darn interested in, and then they have you over here that comes over and you can just clean up all that action that you did on the other platform. And you know,

Bradley Bernard (16:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Bennett Bernard (17:11)
The end result is you have that ratio for a little bit until, you know, people start kind of unfollowing again. But yeah, it's just funny. And I think to kind of tie it back to socials back then, you know, and again, you and I, you know, I'd say for me with Southpaw, like I didn't know what I was doing with marketing at all. You know, it's really about like the content and like what you're putting out there versus like just how many followers you have and like what you're, you know, how reputable you look online, you know.

Bradley Bernard (17:28)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (17:39)
But I remember using Facebook quite a bit too, aside from just Twitter. And that was actually where I had gotten like more like interaction, just because it's a lot of like friends and family. And so like Southpaw, most of your early sales, it's an apparel brand, right? So like, you know, most of the early sales kind of come from family and friends first. You know, it's like, hey, you know, start my own business. Okay, yeah, I'll buy a shirt, you know, or like our parents, friends like buy a shirt or two.

Bradley Bernard (17:58)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (18:03)
So, but Facebook was a place where I got a little bit more actual activity, but the place I had the most activity from was actually a forum, like an MMA forum that I would like post on and be like, hey, this is where you can get these kind of cool shirts and like actually kind of like crowd source some ideas for some designs to there. so, you know, being in a community, like getting feedback and like actually like hearing from people and like posting that community was actually way more beneficial than just putting random stuff on.

Twitter and Facebook that didn't really do anything for anybody, you know, but, you know, it's

Bradley Bernard (18:36)
Yeah. It's funny to say that because I think at that time, Facebook and Twitter were relatively new or I don't know what the right word, maybe not new, but they were the main social networks. wasn't many others. There was, if you ran a business, you had a Facebook and you had a Twitter. That was it. And on Facebook, it wasn't

Bennett Bernard (18:43)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (18:57)
It was different. Like he had friends and family back then. Like the Facebook of today is groups and videos in short form. It was way different back then. You actually had a smaller network that fee prioritized friend posts and all those sorts of things. So it didn't feel like a business area. That was kind of your social area. Twitter, at least, you know, how it was back then was very much kind of the business and like casual side and people you didn't know. And I think Twitter was like the perfect spot for business to come in. I think the success of Ion Follow was that.

It was the right place, right time where, you know, when you were creating your business and going through how to look established online, Twitter is the de facto spot at that time, at that era to look good. And so, you know, it wasn't just you, it was everybody else going to this platform, doing the follow train is what, you know, some people called it where I follow them, they'll go follow me back. And that was what everybody did. And then today it's just different. Like, I don't think people put as much emphasis on it.

I think there's bots, there's AI, there's multiple social media platforms. Like I don't think Ionfollow would do as well today. And just to kind of put, you know, the end story on that is when I had graduated college and joined PayPal out of college, I had sold off Ionfollow. I kind of, you know, having it since 2010 to 2017. And it made me, you know, plenty of money that I put in, you know, a decent amount of work, but it autopilot it for many, many years.

Bennett Bernard (19:55)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (20:19)
Then I sold it off and wrote a whole blog post on it. So if you want to check that out, it should be BradleyBernard.com slash blog. think it's one of the early ones. You might have to scroll down a bit, but yeah, I kind of posted about selling that to a new person, them running it. And I'm not sure who runs it today. I don't really stay on top of it, but I think it should still exist at Ionfollow.com with minimal code changes as far as I know. But who's to say maybe it's vastly, vastly different now, but it was kind of a fun process.

Bennett Bernard (20:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's a it is there right now. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

Bradley Bernard (20:50)
Yeah, that domain kick butt too. I really stumbled on a good one there because you'd search Twitter unfollow and that was it.

Bennett Bernard (20:54)
You know.

Yeah, and, you know, it has the old, you know, I in front of it like again, that was a perfect timing where everything was, you know, like iPhone, iPad, you know, it was, you know, there's all kinds of like abbreviations you can find from all kind of brands and names you can find from like those early 2010s to like late 2000s era where you can see the prefix of I on everything, you know. So, yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's still there.

Bradley Bernard (21:05)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I think even like the about page and the FAQ page, think like those might even be like my original content. I'm not a hundred percent sure. don't want to take credit for it if they had changed it, but more or less, think it's like the same exact tool that I'd written back then. And yeah, I think one of the interesting stories, I had dropped the production database one time. So I'd logged in to my database kind of like administrator trying to fix a bug.

And unfortunately I had tried like exporting the data, but I accidentally truncated the tables. And so I went to HostGator and was like begging them, you know, this is shared server editing files or FTP, nothing like we have today or anything that I would follow today. It just wasn't around at that time. So I begged them, I was on HostGator support, please do you have a backup of my data? Because I just made a big oopsie. And I think it took them 24 hours, but they recovered a snapshot that was maybe a few days old.

Bennett Bernard (22:00)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (22:14)
I don't even think I had backups on, like it was very, very, you know, rudimentary. And then I'd restored my database, emailed a few people who had purchased, but you know, they weren't purchased anymore since I had truncated the date, the data and then brought them back into the system. It all worked. And so it was like a, you know, an crap moment. And then I recovered because host Gator had my back. So yeah, I was really loyal to them in the 2010s, 20, don't know, 13 era. Then finally moved off once I kind of picked up Laravel.

DigitalOcean, Linna, and all that kind of stuff.

Bennett Bernard (22:45)
Well, that's a, you know, it's just saying so Twitter, you know, it was like that kind of business tool, like you said, where Facebook was a bit more like social and like your actual friend feed, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And I think it's a great transition into, I don't know how soon after I unfollow, but you know, in terms of being at the right place at the right time, Instagram kind of came out and became this, you know, really popular tool. This is before Facebook had acquired it, of course.

And you being able to see your friends content with like images and all that kind of stuff And I think it was again at the perfect timing because I feel like Influencers were kind of coming around a bit more like having a big Instagram following like could actually mean something and so there I had shut down Southpaw like right when I actually started getting really serious about college So I only had it for probably like around a year and then just figure let's just focus on school and try and get a good job after college

But, you know, so Southpaw was done. But I think with Instagram coming around, you saw another opportunity to kind of like play in the social sandbox, if you will. And kind of if you if you can describe how that was for you and kind of the story there, because I know that one is a bit more of a roller coaster in terms compared to I unfollow. So might be, know, again, and Yang with I unfollow being super easy, you know, made some made some money and got to sell at the end versus.

your other one that is a bit of a different story, but I will I will let you tell that.

Bradley Bernard (24:12)
Yeah, that one was super fun. I think I unfollow was the start of my kind of web development career and projects. again, being attached to the social space, it makes it a bit easier because I have a product if these social platforms are doing well, and if I can fit my product into their life cycle, whether that be plugging the hole and making unfollowing easier or being kind of that platform to do the follow for follow. So I unfollow was maybe 2010. The second project I'd worked on, which

we haven't talked about is kind of that follow for follow platform, but for Tumblr. so Twitter was popular, Tumblr was popular. What I tried to do is essentially recreate that platform that we use for Twitter, but on the Tumblr platform. And it worked out pretty well. I think I'd spent three to four months, which is kind of the high school summer, as you could put it, writing code, you know, six to eight hours a day. I loved it. So that was like my hobby, my passion, building out a better website and PHP.

And taking all the mistakes I had made in Ion Follow and applying that. So, you know, you write code in one year, you go look back at it the next year. It looks terrible. You you think, how did I write such bad code? And so I think in 2011, I had kind of picked up writing this platform. I think I called it mother fumbler at the time, just kind of a play on words. think maybe that was even your name, provided. So, yeah, so I've written that. That one, did pretty well. It launched.

Bennett Bernard (25:16)
Hehe.

Bradley Bernard (25:33)
got some kind of steam under it. I can't remember how it ended up. Maybe it got shut down. I'm not exactly sure, but I had spent a lot of time building out this core logic of you sign up with a social account. You have a list of people you can follow. Once you follow them, you get credits and the system also sucks away at credit. So for example, if you're on the list, you offer five credits. It was a slider between one and 10. If you clicked on following that person,

you would maybe get four credits and the system would take one just to kind of swallow a credit away. So it's not equal. And it worked out pretty well. The biggest thing to note was it was directly integrated with Tumblr's API such that if you click follow, the follow happened. There's other websites that were the follow for follow train, but you had to do it very manually. You click follow and open up a new tab. You'd have to manually click follow while you're logged in, then delete, like close that tab, come back to the original website, said, yes, I did that.

You know, completely sucked. was like, why can this not be fully integrated so that the system knows you followed, which is kind of a check. then if they did that reward them. And so, yeah, that was maybe 2011. It did. Okay. I can't remember how it finished, but I've written a ton of code. Then Instagram was popping off. Everyone had an Instagram in high school. People follow each other left and right. The Instagram follower account made you feel more popular, kind of a social.

Bennett Bernard (26:28)
Hehe.

Bradley Bernard (26:53)
Dynamic the same thing with Twitter. You know, your brand looked good if you had a bunch of followers. So this time I had already written the core system in Tumblr. What I needed to do is take that all the mistakes I'd made in kind of developing, launching, iterating on that, bring it to Instagram and same thing. I think maybe 2012, it was my full summer project, spent three to four months building it. You logged in with your Instagram. You saw the same sort of UI. You clicked follow. It would go use the Instagram API to officially follow.

You get credits and that was that. And then I think at that time I had put pricing together. So essentially you join the system, you had no credits, you could follow people and get credits or you could pay me money. What that could be is $20. That could see maybe 50 credits or $1,000 and that could see you like, I don't know, a thousand credits. And at that time I made the critical business

Bennett Bernard (27:34)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (27:48)
decision to have these large packages that I thought no one would buy. thought, I want to put these large packages because why not? Literally it's a number in my database. When people pay me money, I go to their, you know, user's table. I look at their credits row. I increment that by whatever they paid for. And if they paid $50 and got 50 credits or a thousand dollars, I got a thousand credits. It's the same amount of processing. I literally, it's just so simple. So I added those packages, launched into Promote.

Bennett Bernard (27:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (28:17)
I don't know, maybe September 2012, October 2012 era. And the big thing that I added, which just got hockey stick growth, was doing referrals. That was the second best thing I added where you could share an Instapromote link. So it'd be instapromote.com slash refer slash some code. If people join with that, you'd get credits. So you'd sign up for the platform. You send it all your friends. Say, Hey, you know, you can actually get followers and you're going to get

know, referral credits off of that. And so it just blew up. think in October, if I were to visualize a chart, it'd be hockey stick growth of people just joining and using the platform relentlessly. And you can only follow so many people. And so if you followed everybody, if you went to your following list, it would be empty. Like you followed everyone on the platform. And when it started out, you'd run into that. But as it kept growing, there's just like, felt like infinite number of people joining. And it was super, super incredible. I think it was the

perfect timing because I had done something in Tumblr. I'd used that one in Twitter. Like I knew what the experience should look like. And I ran into so many mistakes that when I executed on Instapromote, although I didn't know anything compared to today, I think I knew enough to get to where I needed to be and built out a pretty robust system. And I think when you're mentioning like the roller coaster story is everything that I've told so far sounds great. I was making maybe like a thousand or $2,000 a day, which

Bennett Bernard (29:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (29:43)
is mind blowing. Like at that time I was in high school again, kind of had the PayPal app open and logged into my like sales at instapromote.com PayPal account and people will just buy these like $400 packages. And I'm sitting there on my phone, like, you know, in third period in high school, like, that's cool. You know, like that's, that's awesome. But like, I don't think it really hit me to be quite honest. didn't, the amount of money on autopilot, it did not hit me in the way that it should have or would have today.

Bennett Bernard (29:53)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (30:11)
and so things were going super well, but the site was getting so much traffic that it actually would crash from time to time. So, you know, I had to get off Hostgator, which I loved. Hostgator supported me in my endeavors for a long, long time. And I thought, this thing is making $2,000 a day. think I can afford a server that's, you know, $5,000 a month or whatever. So I went out shopping, went to liquid web at the time. This was end of October.

I went to their pricing page, just like I do on apple.com choose like the most expensive thing, scale it up, know, give me all the, all the memory, all the Ram, all the storage, all best CPU. I think it ended up being like $2,000 a month that I was renting from them as a dedicated server on Intel. So I purchased that, was migrating all my code and server and database, everything to this new server they provisioned for me. And then the bad news came. So I think.

Bennett Bernard (30:47)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (31:05)
I was running on the server for five days. My CPU usage in the graph was 1%. So I had plenty of room to grow. The load that was killing my HostGator server was a spec on the dot on a chart for my current server. So I was sitting pretty, growth was hockey stick. Everything was great. I was loving life. Then a fateful day came, I think late October, early December, a mere five, six, seven days after I'd purchased the server and things were looking great.

Bennett Bernard (31:11)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (31:33)
Instagram shut down my API key. So this was a huge problem. You know, the whole system that I created was built through Instagram's API in official way such that someone couldn't say I followed that person, but they didn't. Once they clicked that follow button, they were logged in with their Instagram account through my service and I followed them. You know, a hundred percent, you know, no questions asked. But since my API key was shut down, I thought, crap, like what is going on here?

The first kind of plan of action is to get a new API key. Let me go to the developer portal, just request a new one and see what happens. So I think the first day I did that, it worked and I was like, okay, maybe, you know, crisis averted. I think 24 hours later, same thing, API key shut down. I'm like, crap, like this is not looking good. And so I think a day or two after that, I got an email from Instagram legal. I'm not sure what the exact name was, but it was like, Hey, we've looked at your site.

it's generating a lot of API traffic and we don't believe this fits with our community standards. I think that was the term they used. And then I was like, shit, like this, this is not good because the pocket stick growth, the amount of payments I was getting like receiving and the server that I bought. All would put me in a very financially lucrative spot with a long-term kind of growth plan. But Instagram saying that this ain't it, really put like a damper on things. So I.

Bennett Bernard (32:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (32:55)
I remember the moment where I got that email and thought, okay, I don't think I can get a new API key, you know, by seeing something like this. So I was like, super sad, went to our dad and was like, go take a, like, take a look at this email, like, tell me what you think. And then he's always telling me like, I'll never forget that day when you walked into like my room and like, you had this look on your face that you were extremely sad. And I don't think I was crying or anything, but I think it was the realization of like the four months, five months of effort, the crazy growth. kind of had.

Bennett Bernard (33:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (33:25)
You know, sparkly eyes of like, where's this going to go? You know, is this, is this going to be like the next startup? Like, am I going to be rich? Then boom, just immediately went to nothing. Instagram shut it down. And honestly, that was history. had to process a ton of refunds, had to put out communications saying, Hey, Instagram wasn't about it. Nothing I can do. Tried my best, the platform people love. But yeah, at end of the day, that one was making a ton of money. I was super proud of the work that I did and it just came crashing and burning. And I get.

Bennett Bernard (33:42)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (33:53)
You know, they don't really want a platform that encourages following. That's not really real. but I had, you know, eeked out a decent chunk of change and learned a ton along the process. wouldn't trade it for anything, but yeah, it was pretty disappointing. I think I was pretty sad and frustrated that that's the way it would end, especially after all the effort I'd put in and like the week or two beforehand that I was like, this is going to be a rocket ship.

Bennett Bernard (34:17)
Yeah. Yeah. I remember, I remember a few things from that time. I mean, I was in school and I was living at where I was going to school at, but it was close by. So I still would like come by the house and all that. I remember it was crazy. Like, you know, I can't remember like what the exact conversations were, but you know, it's like, you know, do you like focus on that instead of school? Like does, you know, there's like mom and dad, did they buy that off you? Like, it was just like crazy. Like what do do for taxes and all that? because you obviously you were a minor. I don't think you were even 16 at that point.

Bradley Bernard (34:37)
You

Yeah.

Mmm.

Bennett Bernard (34:46)
So, you know, it was crazy. And I think it kind of goes to show to like just platform risk. You know, it's great to build on these these networks and these, you know, these ecosystems like like those platforms. But, you know, they at the end of the day, if they decide no, you don't really have much recourse. I do feel like now, like maybe in modern day. I don't you know, I don't know if there might be a tool that has that like right now, like I feel like in modern day, they might not be as opposed to that, but it was so

Bradley Bernard (34:54)
yeah.

Bennett Bernard (35:16)
like you were like, think the first on the scene for that with Instagram that it kind of like, you know, and that tool was growing so much that I feel like maybe that would have been allowed in today's world, especially with like how many bots and everything are all around the place now with AI. But also too, I think if, know, if you were, you know, you today and that had happened, I thought you'd probably like have some conversations with legal and like kind of maybe hire own like council. It's like, hey, like, can we get around this? You know, but as a kid,

Bradley Bernard (35:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (35:44)
If they say no, you're just like, okay, well, I guess I'm, I guess I'm S O L. You know, like I don't really have much, much option. and there's great irony because you ended up working for that company as an adult. You know, I mean, I was obviously it was different. You know, this is again, before Instagram had gotten acquired by, by Metta, but of course, you know, some years later you worked at Metta, which is kind of funny, but yeah, I mean, it was a crazy, I remember that time when it was, what was the like start to finish that it was operational, like live.

Bradley Bernard (35:49)
Yeah.

yeah.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (36:12)
for like, because I remember it being like a couple months, but the way you made it sound, it seemed like it was less than a month. Like what was like from launch to shut down? How much time do think it was was active for?

Bradley Bernard (36:21)
Yeah, that's a good question. I wish I had more logs. I could probably dig through my email and toss it to AI and ask since I had tested so much stuff like sending myself emails when I bought credits. But if I had to guess without looking, probably development in the summer of 2012 and probably officially launched maybe early September, late August. And again, it started out slow, but it really picked up fast. And I think by October time, it was just kind of

going crazy and that's when I was like, we got to do something. The server's crashing. you know, our data helped a lot at the time, like designing the database schema, making sure it was efficient because that was kind of the core logic behind it. I can slap some UI on it, put some PayPal purchasing, but the core system and PHP and my SQL, that was like the bread and butter, but yeah, probably three months, four months max. So again, it was.

Lot of effort to put into it. I was very well prepared and knew what was coming since I've used the previous iterations and built my own. So that's why it was right place, right time. I had the skills. surprisingly enough, I had the right timing because being in high school, everyone talked about it. And I just thought, why is this not exist? And kind of a fun fact from that is in the high school era, people would follow me on Instagram. They'd be like, why do you have so many followers? And honestly, I didn't really tell people about the stuff that I did on my own, like in high school, cause

Bennett Bernard (37:30)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (37:43)
was like, I don't want to get made fun of or like, you know, I'm kind of like the coding guy. Like I played a lot of games and talked to lot of friends, but a lot of the coding work, I didn't really share too much. And so people would ask me, like, do you have so many followers? And I was just like, I don't know. You know, like, just, just, just a lot of people. Yeah. And people were always so confused. I think like at my peak, maybe had like 3000 followers, which probably could add a lot more. I would put myself at the top of the list because I own the site. I have infinite credits and so could do what I wanted. And that was kind of my testing period is I would.

Bennett Bernard (37:55)
Yeah, I'm just cool.

Bradley Bernard (38:13)
add credits to my own account and then immediately like just get a ton of followers. And that's when kind of nodded my head and satisfaction of, wow, this system is like built and ready and you know, it's firing on all cylinders. And I think that's what kind of hurt the most when it shut down was it's just, yeah, like you said, I was a kid. didn't, wasn't going to fight back. Felt very like, legal's coming after me. You know, they must be right. I mean, you know, they probably were, but I think today would have been.

Bennett Bernard (38:23)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (38:40)
vastly, vastly different. But yeah, I wouldn't trade it for anything. think that one was like going out on a high note. I had to do a few thousand in refunds, but when I look back on the amount of effort I had spent and the growth and the money that I made from it, I was like, that was a huge win. The best project I had for sure.

Bennett Bernard (38:54)
Yeah, I remember a funny thing is I think I came home one time again, because I live probably like 20, 25 minutes away from, you know, our home and our family home. And I remember I came home one time and you had you had like a new TV. You had like a new big desk. You had like a giant like air filter under your desk, like a giant like air purifier. You know I'm talking about, right?

Bradley Bernard (39:16)
Probably.

Bennett Bernard (39:17)
It was like a big giant like white like mini fridge and I was like, what the heck is that? And it was like, you're like, it's like the filter or something like that. So had all this new stuff and I was like, this must be really doing well because yeah, just like I know mom and dad didn't buy all this. I know you did. So yeah, it was you're spending.

Bradley Bernard (39:30)
Yeah, I had money that I didn't really know what to do with it. Like it was good for the time for sure. It wasn't like I could, you know, retire and not work at all, but it was something that I wasn't really familiar with. was like, I'm just going to buy a few things. And then after I started buying a few things, I was like, that's kind of nice. You know, what else can I buy? And then I kind of ran out and was like, whatever. think the biggest thing I bought was like a home speaker system from Best Buy, like the Magnolia kind of thing. I think I maybe dropped like $2,000 on it.

Bennett Bernard (39:45)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (39:56)
so cool. Played like Gears of War and like surround sound super loud. I was like, nice. I could do this because I coded something right place, right time.

Bennett Bernard (39:59)
Yeah.

just so funny because now everyone plays games with headphones, know, it's like that speaker system, you know, yeah, I mean, of course, again, eight or probably 10 years ago or so. But, you know, it's it's funny because all the social like tools that, know, that you built really that became profitable, I think it goes to show that like companies will throw a lot of money at trying to get eyeballs, you know, and that hasn't really changed. think today, you know, there's still those platforms that's, you know, of course, X now it's still Facebook.

Bradley Bernard (40:07)
Yeah, I wouldn't do that.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (40:31)
Instagram I think it's still around. I don't yeah Instagram's around I haven't been on those platforms to be super clear if it sounds like you're like dude You don't know that I haven't been on Instagram or Facebook probably since 2016 2015 like as a personal like account I do have X although I really can't stand it to be honest with you and you know, so like I'm not the most like Online person, but I do have a linkedin But you know, and of course, there's some new players like tik-tok now

Bradley Bernard (40:34)
Mm.

You

Bennett Bernard (40:55)
And I think it's just interesting this show that like, you know, companies will spend a lot of money just trying something, trying to get those eyeballs. I mean, some of the bigger orders you have from Instapromo, you know, people were just, you know, they're probably businesses or people would want to make a business that were like, Hey, I need to grow my Instagram page. I don't know it's going to work, but let me throw some money at it. you know, people, they spend a lot of money on those kinds of things. And, know, it's still true today, of course, you know, but I just always found it interesting that like,

Bradley Bernard (41:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (41:22)
You know, the ROI might not have been there. So I'd be curious if like you had, if it's front was around long enough, if you would have had like repeat customers, you know, cause what kind of quality, you know, followers are you getting through that kind of system, you know, but would they find out that everyone, you know, eventually just unfollows them like with I unfollow, you know, it'd been cool if you could, you could have built your own I unfollow and just gotten gotten both bars. Yeah, that would've been awesome. A good flywheel.

Bradley Bernard (41:38)
Yeah.

I thought about it. As far as I can remember, there definitely were people that bought multiple packages, like that came back because I was kind of getting those notifications on my phone and like seeing the email. And so that was kind of the satisfaction that was, this system, like they bought trying something, they saw the results and it's pretty damn near immediate, which is great. And then, you know, reinvested in the product and the company and got

Bennett Bernard (41:57)
Okay.

Bradley Bernard (42:10)
the same results. So everyone was very supportive when it shut down to you. I sent out like a massive email apology letter and everyone that didn't get their full credits worth like refunded all of them, which was painful, but I had logs and database queries to make that happen. But people were like, damn, like this was, can't believe Instagram shut this down. Like it was so good. And I think that part felt really good too, cause I'm sitting there like, well it's the end of the road for me. I'm sad, but I'm not going to do anything and hearing the users of my platform, like

Bennett Bernard (42:30)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (42:38)
complain to Instagram or just post about it. was like, so heartwarming, like appreciate that so much. I think, before this call, I was kind of Googling like insta-promote.com or other things like that. If you do that on your own, you might run into a few referral links where it'll say like, get more followers on Instagram and then space the referral link. And so those things like still exist. It's kind of funny looking at it. but yeah, like the links won't work.

but yeah, was, was a core part of the experience and that really paid off like so much. So yeah, I think there's a lot of decisions I had made that I thought would be good or I didn't care for. And it turned out to be a huge win and the culmination of all those things and the experience of the failures I had before made it to promote like the best product, right place, right time. So I do keep my eyes out. you know, like you mentioned, TikTok is, you know, pretty popular.

People like getting followers on these platforms. I've done it before. could do it again. However, I think a lot of these APIs are a little bit bolted down. Now the follow for follow thing is it's not on the radar, but it's not unheard of. so I think when companies see something like that, they're a little bit hesitant. so for me, platform risk is there. I'd be happy to build something in that era, but yeah, I didn't really do any while I was doing bucks by it. And I think part of that in my head was I could get something successful.

But if it got shut down overnight without my control and I couldn't fight it, that sucks. And I think I could eke out some money, but I'm not sure it'd be in my best interest for like a long-term product.

Bennett Bernard (44:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you know, I so I'm trying to kind of grow just like I don't have like anything I'm selling, but just trying to kind of grow my own online presence. I just feel like in twenty twenty four and onward, it's important for people like as individuals to kind of do that. And so I do have a tick tock account. I honestly I feel like such a boomer. I really haven't done anything with it. And, I just follow like random stuff. But that one I.

Bradley Bernard (44:27)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (44:36)
Maybe eventually we'll kind of get around to like investing some time into learning how to use it to my advantage. But I do hear that that's one that people can find some really big success with. Yeah, I just don't know if I'm creative enough to do that. But one I have been posting a lot on actually recently has been LinkedIn. And it's been a pretty mixed bag, actually. So and it's funny, we keep talking about all these companies that you've worked for in the past, which is kind of I didn't think about that when we started this podcast episode. But here we are with LinkedIn.

Bradley Bernard (45:02)
Yep.

Bennett Bernard (45:04)
But you know, so I'm posting on LinkedIn a bunch and just for some context I already had a pretty high amount of connections now like the quality of the connections can vary, you know the some people of course that I Connected with because I worked directly with them or I'm associated with them But then of course you can have some people that you're connected with that are just kind of you know Completely cold outreach. They just asked you and I would just you just had accept for the most part I've been I've been getting more picky about who I accept with but you know when you're in school and you're trying to

especially in accounting, you're getting recruited and all that kind of stuff, I would just accept whatever. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Bradley Bernard (45:36)
You need that 500 plus that is the metric of when you're new in college and you don't have 500 plus you add everybody the second you cross that threshold. Nope.

Bennett Bernard (45:43)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's where sometimes I feel bad if I like reject something that I don't know. I don't know why I would feel bad. But so I but I am more picky now. But anyways, I already have like, you know, a good amount of like connections on the platform. I don't know what exactly it is. I think it's like a thousand. And so I've been posting a bit more and just things that I think are relevant for like accounting professionals or like, you know, business owners and.

Bradley Bernard (45:51)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (46:09)
It's been interesting. It's been super interesting. The kind of responses that I've gotten. You know, one of the things that I try to do is, you know, be useful. Because I think there's so much noise out there with with, you know, just general social with tweets and LinkedIn posts, all that kind of stuff that, you know, it's important to try and be useful to try and make like your your inside or whatever you're posting actually, you know, insightful and not just like a regurgitation of something that you've seen before.

And so some of the things I've been posting, I've actually gotten some pretty big hits as far as like impressions and like, you know, reactions, I think is what LinkedIn calls it. And it'll be completely surprised me because I would have thought that video would have done would do way better than just like text, like like long text pieces. And, you know, so far in my experience, I've been posting, you know, occasional videos, sometimes snippets of this podcast, sometimes other kinds of media.

And, they don't get nearly the impressions as like long form text, which is crazy to me, because I'll be honest, I'm more likely to click on a video than I am to read a whole essay on LinkedIn. Just that's my own personality. But there was one post that went super, I don't want to say viral. That's going to make it sound more than it is. But way more impressions and reactions than anything else I've posted. I'm trying to find it right now. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (47:27)
Alright, well you gotta share it. Over 5,000?

Bennett Bernard (47:32)
Let me see. Okay. Let me get the filter for the last 365 days to get all of it. So there's a post I did about basically what makes a big difference in your accounting career. And so I went on about how, you need to know the business. It's one thing to just know the debits and credits, but like you will not be as good of an accountant unless you kind of know like how your business operates, like the ins and outs, not just from, you know, again, like a transaction standpoint, but just like talking to your business partners, understanding the pain points that they

feel all that kind of stuff. So I won't outline it here on the podcast, but I did a post on LinkedIn for that. And as of now, it's just it's like 250 shy of 35000 impressions. Yeah. And I would have never guessed it when I posted it. And then it has like 82 reactions between like likes and insightful celebrate, you know, and it has four comments to them are from me, like replying to people.

Bradley Bernard (48:12)
Wow, that's pretty good.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (48:30)
and one repost from someone I'm not connected with. like really, yeah, was, and it was just really interesting to me because, you know, again, I do feel strongly about that. Like when I wrote that, I was like, you know, I don't use like chat GPT to come up with any of this stuff. So if there's like grammar mistakes in there, like I own that, I, every now and then I do, if I feel like I'm having trouble like getting something out, I'll kind of say to like chat GPT or Claude, like, Hey, can you just make sure there's not anything obviously wrong? Like me switching tenses or something, you know?

Bradley Bernard (48:33)
That's very good.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (48:59)
But yeah, mean, it was surprising because I've done other posts, of course. yeah, consistently the text tends to do way more than the video. And so stuff like that has been really surprising. yeah, LinkedIn as a platform has been really good for the most part. There's some spam.

Bradley Bernard (49:15)
It's, it's pretty hard though. I think, yeah, I think when you think of Twitter, it's like casual business that you could write whatever you want. When you think of Facebook, it's posting photos or liking groups. LinkedIn is the professional input or side of you. So it feels like you need to say the right thing. You want to be professional. Like you want to put on your best foot forward, I guess. But I think you do kind of get a lot of like junk posts and

Bennett Bernard (49:34)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (49:44)
things like that in your feed. like, there's this pressure to look good, but also you see all these other people just like posting. And so I don't post too much. I think we post about the pod. I posted like job updates and I posted a little bit about like building my apps when I was, you know, doing my solo printer journey. But every time I post, I think I have like a small fear of like, what am I kind of like professional network? And I think of this, cause when I post on Twitter, there's a thousand people that follow me. probably only know.

You know, a hundred and they're not professional connections in a different capacity. LinkedIn. Right in front of your previous managers, directors, you know, you name it. Will they see it? Who's to know? You know, will they, will they scroll past and read it? Who's to know? But I think the audience and the professionalism feels like a high stakes environment. But I truly think if you can block that out, post your best content, like you were talking about.

That's like the right way to do it. It is just another platform. No one cares that much. Like just, if you have good content, you got to post it there. think it has like the 35,000 impressions is huge. And if you were too scared to post that, you wouldn't get it. And I think people will kind of struggle with that a little bit because LinkedIn feels like a high stakes professional network.

Bennett Bernard (50:53)
Yeah, well, and it's interesting because I don't know how the algorithm works at all. But like just based on like the responses I've gotten and like the reactions, like more than half of the reactions are people that are from not in my network. So I'm sure like someone from my network must like it or like, you know, celebrate it or whatever. Then it must show up on other people's feeds that I'm not directly connected with and must say like, you know, Jane Doe liked this post or whatever. And it's my post. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. It was definitely

surprising and you know, I've done some I've done a lot of posts since kind of again that long kind of text and they've been again doing better than the video but not as much as that one in particular. So for whatever reason that one like struck a chord with the right people that and they got put on their feeds somehow which is cool. You know, I'm happy to get all like the positive reactions. I it's you know, I don't want to it's dopamine hit because I don't try to try to subscribe to like the vanity metrics and all that but

You know, it's great to see that people find like alignment with like things that I think, you know, like it's kind of goes to like that, that sense of tribalism that's like, yeah, there's lots of other accounting professionals out there that, you know, think that knowing the business side of things is just as important as, you know, knowing the debits and credits of accounting. So, it's pretty cool. And I'm going to try to continue. try to post every day this week. and, and, you know, I think I still have to do some more stuff here, but.

Bradley Bernard (52:15)
It's a lot of effort though. mean, posting one post, I feel like I reread it four times, make sure it's right, still miss something. Every day is a lot. I mean, it's definitely like, it's good putting yourself out there and it's good to have the trust and confidence to speak your mind on things that are important to you. And it kind of goes back to like what Aaron Francis says, like if you're interested in something, just do it, post about it. You might find people are interested. If not, they're not, and you didn't lose anything. I think people find value in someone who's

Bennett Bernard (52:17)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (52:43)
deeply passionate, sharing cool stuff, either they're building on it, working on it, learning it, whatever, doesn't really matter. think as long as you're passionate about something, you share that. Hopefully there's an audience on the other side. And I would also like to post a little bit more on LinkedIn, even my VoxBite socials, kind of just like reshare stuff I post on my personal account, which I never liked because I think the company socials look very dry and there's like no activity there. Even like on Twitter or Facebook, whatever. But I think

LinkedIn is pretty untapped right now. think people should spend more time probably posting. It's the 80-20 rule. If you don't know what's going to do well, you are going to post a lot. And the one that you mentioned that did well, you probably didn't have the intuition or foresight to say this is going to be a huge knockout. You probably had others that you thought, this is maybe even better. And it didn't do well. Because I've had those moments on Twitter, especially, where I spend 30 minutes writing something.

Post it, I'm not looking at the vanity, but I'm kind of sitting there like, you what's the initial reaction of the algorithm? And as it kind of dwindles and has 20 views, I kind of scratched my head thinking, I should not put more time into this. It's kind of a negative loop of if you look at that too much, you're going to say I'm over it. If you look at it, you know, too much and things go well, you can be like, I need to keep making content that's like this. And that might not be the template that's successful. So it's kind of hit or miss.

Bennett Bernard (54:04)
Yeah, I echo what you say on Twitter because I've tried to post like content and like interesting stuff on Twitter. And like, I think the last time I really tried was like probably, probably beginning of this year. Maybe I did like a Python and Excel kind of primer with like creating some stuff from Canva and like doing some examples. And I put a lot of effort into it and I posted it on LinkedIn, which it got some good responses. then I posted it on X.

Again, I don't have that many followers on X so like I know my expectations should not be as nearly as much as LinkedIn but like it was basically crickets on X and I think I had like 13 impressions or whatever whatever Twitter calls it and like I'm sure 10 of them were from me just refreshing to see like I don't I don't know if that counts or not, like it wasn't anything impressive and I think ever since then I think it's still my pin tweet to be honest with you because I heard that's what you're supposed to do is pin pin stuff to your Twitter page, but

Bradley Bernard (54:57)
Haha.

Bennett Bernard (54:58)
I can't stand Twitter. mean, I think it's it's just I like it for like news for myself of like sports and like, you know, I guess politics, even though right now I can't stand all the politics stuff. But like as far as like content for like growing my own personal brand, I just haven't seen it like pay off for me. Like with the stuff I've posted so far and like honestly, I don't know. I'm also a pretty like private person in general, and I know that sounds like an oxymoron. It's like, hey, you're trying to grow your

personal brand, but then you say you're private person. Like I feel like X and like Twitter, it's like so much easier to be like, you know, like a weird and on like random post person following you. Like there's so many spam accounts that follow me on X every single day. I get like a new follower and it's like, who's following me? And it's just some random, you know, clearly a bot, you know? And I feel like LinkedIn there, there is a definitely a problem with like bots and all that kind of stuff on LinkedIn still, but like, it's not as persistent and like there is real.

Bradley Bernard (55:39)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (55:54)
value and the connections you have on LinkedIn. So I just haven't really and I don't think I'm going to as of now, like put a lot of effort into X like for my own, you know, personal online growth. But yeah.

Bradley Bernard (56:06)
Yeah, I do think there's some value in being vulnerable on any platform. think Twitter is a good one to do it. I mean, maybe not good, but it is a place to do it, but it is a little bit frightening to like post your thoughts, maybe a bit more raw than it would look like on LinkedIn and like post progress photos or whatever you're working on, like, you know, kind of work in progress. I think people like real people and if it's very formulated and I don't know.

professional, that's one different category of people that are interested. But on Twitter, almost like the raw and real, because the AI and the bots are so prevalent, that gets more eyes. It's kind of hard to come up with an example, but I think you could, you'd understand it when you see it where, that's a real person, they're either struggling or doing something cool. Like, that's why I'm going to click the follow button. I don't click it very often, not because I don't like people, it's just, I feel like I have kind of my Twitter network built up. And so each person I add to that needs to be kind of vetted and I'll see their tweets for a while.

after a certain amount of time, I'll add them, but I'm kind of like looking for the real people, you people I'd want to hang out with, talk to in person, not like the one-off funny threads or viral threads, that kind of stuff. I'm not really interested in that. So I think there's been a transition. We've talked about in the past podcasts of being real, being authentic, not using, you know, some of these AI tools. Although when you tell me daily posts on LinkedIn, my first thought is kind of would be nice to pre-write some of that stuff, schedule it and...

Bennett Bernard (57:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (57:29)
You're off to the races, because it's a lot of work.

Bennett Bernard (57:32)
Yeah, I've done scheduling. Usually I try and think of the content the day before. Then I'll just pick a random time during the next day to schedule something. I've tried to do the mornings, but it's interesting. You think that the mornings always do better, but it's not the case. Again, I don't know the LinkedIn algorithm, but I'll just pick a random time. It's usually like whatever. think it's like on LinkedIn, it does like a set number of hours ahead of when you're like scheduling the post.

Bradley Bernard (57:40)
You

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (57:57)
But if I'm writing it at the night before, then I, of course, don't want to post it at night. But yeah, scheduling is definitely a big, you know, like, you don't want to do that all live, like off the riff. I think it's better to try and get like three or four things, these ideas kind of down. And then you can kind of work from those that way you're not kind of having to sit and organically think through each time you want to actually post. That would take too much mental drain, I think.

Bradley Bernard (58:07)
Yeah.

I think one opportunity here, a small call out, if anyone's trying to build an AI product, there's been a lot of people that are also writing lots of content to LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera. They have their own voice, but they want to spend less time writing. And so I imagine there's going to be something in the future that spans across all these platforms that's able to take kind of the writing that you've created, either blog posts, LinkedIn posts, Twitter posts, et cetera. It kind of captures your voice style, you know, how you speak or how you write.

And then it's able to generate maybe an 80 % blog post where you can maybe on the go, you know, record a voice memo that'll then be like summarized or transcribed. Then it gets fed into this is what my writing looks like. And you generate like a scaffold of a blog post. Then you could go edit and touch it up and make it better. Cause I think the speech to text is incredible. Now you can talk at full speed and make mistakes and like,

it'll figure it out. Like it's really, really darn good. And then two, think the AI context window, so how much stuff you can kind of put in front of the AI's face is growing exponentially. So you could take all your blog posts, you could take all the emails you've ever sent in your entire life. I'm not sure if that'd be a good data set, but you get the point. You have a lot that you can throw at it. It can then look at all that and say, based on everything I've seen Ben say in the past three years, if I were to emulate this as best as I could, this is what I would write.

And I think that can help speed up that workflow. Although again, like you want it to be human content, the ideas and the thoughts are like that, but making it easier to get done faster to output. That would be a nice game changer.

Bennett Bernard (59:59)
Yeah, think I think I don't don't quote me on this, but I've mentioned him a few times on the podcast. A fellow named Jason Stats is a big like accounting tech proponent influencer, if you will. I think he's done something exactly like that, where he like gave it all the content that like he's made over the years. And he's done a lot of videos and a lot of like newsletter writing and stuff like that. And I think he made.

I think he made like a video avatar of himself and like it sounds like him. It looks closely like him. You can tell it's fake, you know, but like it's still pretty impressive. So yeah, I think there's something I can't remember what he used and all that. But yeah, that's definitely an option. You know, it's the AI kind of side of things with like socials is interesting. So I remember seeing I might have been on Twitter. It was like there was clearly like a reply that was like AI like generated.

Bradley Bernard (1:00:51)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:00:51)
And a real user could go and be like, just ask it a random question completely unrelated to the actual post that they were replying to. And the AI would answer the question, because it would take the user input of the actual person saying, OK, I can tell your AI how many bananas grow on banana tree. And the guy would answer the question, even though it was completely unrelated to the actual post.

You know, it's interesting. You can definitely smell a bot. I think when you see one for now, you know, maybe that'll get better over time. But yeah, I try to avoid using any kind of like AI as much as possible other than like, you know, touch up on grammar and stuff like that, because it does take away from, you know, the genuineness and what we talked about before, like being authentic. So, yeah, it makes a difference in today's use of socials.

Bradley Bernard (1:01:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I'm excited to see kind of like what your LinkedIn future will look like. I turned on creator mode a while ago when I started my own business and it gives you a lot more insights. also got a decent reach for posts, probably not as high as you, but you know, I think that comes with finding the right audience and it's nice like making those posts day in and day out, looking back on things after a year and being like, yeah, I did the hard work.

Bennett Bernard (1:01:47)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (1:02:02)
of putting myself out there and you never know when those things are going to pay off. That's, that's kind of the hard part is the whole marketing side of things is you spend effort, you wait, things happen. You can never fully trace it back to, I wrote this blog post that did well, but it could be, you know, a piece of the puzzle. I think for me, like doing my indie hacker approach, every time I spent time on marketing, I did a poor job because I didn't feel the validation or success of writing a blog post. can't translate that into.

how many people paid for my product, how many people visited it. So I would just encourage you to keep going. It's kind of like for our podcasts, you know, who knows where this will end up, no clue, but it's something that we put an effort in and, we kind of see what happens. so for anyone out there who's trying to post more content, definitely do it, spend time, make it intentional, but also you never know when it's going to do well. So if things aren't looking that good and you have 10 views on Twitter, we've been there and I still, I'm still there. So, keep going.

Bennett Bernard (1:02:57)
Yeah, yeah, totally. All right, Brad. Let's see. Let's wrap this up. Anything else you want to kind of chat about as our 10th episode before we kind of close it up?

Bradley Bernard (1:03:05)
I know I think that's it. can kick off with my bookmark. So on X or on Twitter, Javi posted that he set up an automation to turn off his iPad every day. And so I think this is slightly important for people to work on iOS or mobile apps or Mac apps because you have these devices are laying around ready for testing, but they're always dead. Always, always dead. When you need it, you need to go charge it and

His kind of tweet talks about if all the iPads had this where they turned off every day, because, know, people, a lot of times people buy iPads, they don't use them that often. I'll be the first to admit it. If all these iPads were turned off, he did some calculations saying it would save like 4,500 megawatts of energy because people wouldn't have the device die, need to recharge it to full. So I thought it was kind of cool. He's talking about the environment impact and kind of the own productivity.

for your own workflow because there are certain software elements of your phone and even on Windows where they'll download software updates. But people do the math of if you download a software update every day, you're using this much energy or network over like a year time using this much like resources from the environment, which you don't really think about, but like doing it out in plain math with this many iPads, this many charges, it's kind of a staggering number. So I'll probably integrate this with my iPad soon, charge it up to full.

enable us Apple automation to turn it off every night. So then, you know, I'd have to think it's just, I'll turn it back on. should have like a, least a 50 % charge.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:36)
Yeah, it's cool. I'll make mine pretty quick too. So I have a couple of things, but the first thing I'll kind of lead with is a company called numeric. They raised, I think it was like a seed, a or a round, whatever you want to call it, $28 million. And it's like a financial data platform. So basically it kind of, you know, I'm not a user of it, but it was interesting because they kind of touched to a big problem that's accountants deal with regularly of

you know, having to look through financial data and like kind of put the context of like what's happening with the business and so what you're seeing on the financials. So, you know, I'm just reading from their kind of quick pitch here about how they used AI to analyze fluctuations and trends and pulled together sophisticated financial reports in seconds. So it's very interesting. That's a problem that, again, I think people have had to do manually. It's great to see that there's a company out there trying to solve for that and do it in a much more, you know,

efficient, automated way. So we'll see if that platform ends up taking off, but it's cool to see them get some fundraising. I'm sure, you know, AI products right now are, you know, very ripe for fundraising. But I mean, as an accountant, it definitely, you know, they have some some runway for sure to like make it make it better than what it currently is. And I'm sure I'm sure they're not the only ones trying it, but we'll keep an eye on them. Two other quick things I did read. I've been reading more books. I've been using a Kindle, which is let me read away more than

Bradley Bernard (1:05:53)
Yeah, that's cool.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:02)
thought it would. I used to think I was a pen and paper guy, but I've been using the Kindle, which has been cool. So I read a book called The Franchise MBA, MBA, not NBA, by Nick Neonakis. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that right. It was a really cool book. It's about, you know, running a franchise business and like how being a franchisee is a great kind of hybrid into entrepreneurship, but without all the risks that come from like a pure, you know, ground up startup or ground up business.

So it's great book is really interesting lots of cool things there to kind of take away That's kind of inspired some of my linkedin posts, you know earlier this week and last week. So In case you're seeing where all the franchise contents coming from on LinkedIn. It's from that book You're inspired by that book I would mean and then the last thing I'm currently reading which has been really insightful We could talk about this on another podcast. So about halfway through it is called building a story brand by Donald Miller and it just talks about

you know, current marketing in today's environment and like how important content, but the right kind of content is for growing a business and, you know, kind of talks about like the inherent value of like a story, which like humans have, you know, told stories for thousands and thousands of years as like a way to kind of share ideas and all kinds of things. So kind of tapping into that.

in using it for your business to kind of make sure your customers see the value in what you do. So really cool book. And again, about halfway through it and looking forward to finishing it probably this weekend here. So, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:34)
That's cool. I need to read one of those. think that is a very useful guide. I think I could have used that a while ago for sure.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, I got out a recommendation and I've been blown away. I've been highlighting nonstop in my my Kindle app. So, yeah, I would highly recommend even again, just being halfway through it. It's been really a lot of good insights there. Cool. All right. Well, good stuff. Episode 10 in the books. And yeah, we'll get it all cleaned up and come back at you with another podcast episode in a week or two.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:49)
Mm-hmm.

That's cool. Nice.

Sounds good. Bye.

Bennett Bernard (1:08:05)
Thanks everyone. Talk to you later.