Alex what's your backstory?

From an early age, I became intrigued by wealth building as a means to find freedom in the modern world. It started with the idea of an "easy, tenured philosophy professor job," which eventually turned to "What if I went into hedge funds, learned the ropes, and became a professional algorithmic day trader?" Then it morphed into, "Dang it, I guess I'll just start a business on the side," which turned into, "Whoa, this business (my agency, RevenueZen) is actually taking off!" Eventually, I exited that agency business through a sale to Onfolio, which led me to shift my focus to Aware, my current project, going from part-time to full-time.

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My underlying mindset is very finance-forward, but my training is in sales. Along the way, I learned marketing. Content creation came from my high school and college English and Philosophy training, which I later refined into a marketable skill, successfully using it to grow my company from 2017 onward.

So, my approach to sales is balanced by a cool financial perspective. My approach to marketing has been honed by a sales bent and my approach to business is focused on building assets that allow me to live a good life and provide for my family's future, without sacrificing while staying true to who I want to be and what I want to do along the way.

How did you build and exit your agency business?

I started RevenueZen because the other guy who had invited me to join him in his business abandoned the idea and then threatened to sue me after I'd worked with him for a few weeks. High and dry, I was left to deal with a lawsuit settlement and a mortgage payment, and RevenueZen was born from a back-against-the-wall NEED. Originally, it was focused on sales and lead generation consulting. Later on, it became focused on content marketing and B2B SEO. The decision to exit was based on the differing goals of the four partners (including me) who eventually became part of the business. One wanted to leave entirely, one (me) wanted to stay on as an advisor, one wanted to work part-time, and one wanted more responsibility and career growth. So, through the sale of the company to a new home, we were able to realize those career outcomes for all.

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My biggest learnings have been: 1) to set expectations early, carefully, and on the low end; 2) to charge double what you think you should for your product because it will ALWAYS take you more time, effort, and cost to deliver than you planned in advance; and 3) that your personal brand as a founder is one of the best, cheapest, and most effective forms of B2B organic growth that I can think of.

How did Aware come about?

Aware started as an "alerts" tool back in 2020. The concept was simple: you’d input your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) criteria, then add other lists of people—like your customers and competitors. We’d then notify you whenever your ICP engaged with those name lists. It was cool, but ultimately, it wasn’t usable or functional. People had fancy data, but it just sat on their desks. So, we burned it down and rebuilt it from scratch as a functional workflow tool, first and foremost.
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The processes we really wanted to help our customers with were engagement and analytics-gathering. It’s tedious and time-consuming to do the necessary, rewarding work of engaging with certain people’s posts,  compiling a record of how you're doing, and using those metrics to improve. Our flagship features have been the custom and dynamic engagement feeds, along with premium profile and content analytics. Later on, we added Post Scheduling, the Top Engagers feature, CRM integrations, and more.
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One thing that hurts us as much as it helps is the fact that Aware was designed with effective business growth in mind. On the one hand, this is helpful because our product is "smart." It's focused on things that actually drive revenue growth on LinkedIn. On the other hand, it’s a challenge because we didn’t launch with flashy, ineffective features that might entice people to pay but don’t actually help them. For example, we still don’t have a feature that lets you copy someone else’s post or writing style to recreate content in their “voice.” While this might feel satisfying to a LinkedIn newbie, it’s not an effective way to actually grow a brand and a business.
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Along the way, we've made some tradeoffs that felt tough to me. We've created features that I personally don't use and don't encourage people to use, but that people are willing to pay for. I've had to admit that people often want to use our product in ways I disapprove of, and I make peace with that.

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How do you approach distribution?

LinkedIn has been our primary acquisition channel, which breaks down into two main strategies: 1) my content, and 2) sponsored and lightly sponsored influencer and affiliate content. Podcast appearances and the content are part of this.
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We thought that just cold emailing the bejeezus out of everyone and their mother wasn't a great strategy, and people would be better off if they heard about Aware from a source they could get to know and trust (us, a friend, someone else personally - not a cold company name). By being involved in "their world" aka their ecosystem, we've been able to source hundreds of free trial signups per month and over a hundred new subscribers per month with minimal marketing spend.
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The next channel we've pursued, thanks to our acquisition of Analytics, has been Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Before acquiring Inlytics.io, the only traffic we had coming to our website was branded search—people who already knew our brand and were just looking for the website. But now, we’re starting to see people come to us who don’t already know about us, i.e., non-branded search. For example, people searching for terms like “LinkedIn analytics tool.” This has shifted our focus from brand awareness to direct lead generation.
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If I had to pick just one channel, I’d probably go with LinkedIn organic. However, I have a strong affinity for SaaS SEO, so that’s a very close second.

How do you leverage content for growth?

I try to make sure that people first hear of us, then like us, then think of us as good at LinkedIn growth, and then be in the consideration set for when they're looking for a tool to enhance their growth on LinkedIn.

The content that drives the most customer acquisition is influencers talking about our product, plus our own product and tutorial-oriented video and image posts.

While my "personal brand" is at the center of this, I've become known as someone who is good at, well, the thing our product helps you do. So there's a high overlap between my personal brand and the thesis behind our product. That essentially is how you make a personal brand profitable for company marketing purposes.

How do you build and leverage relationships?

We've practiced what we preach when it comes to approaching advocates. While most of them come to us inbound, based on the media we publish and my own personal brand, I often ask current partners for referrals to potential new ones; we advertise our revenue share program in some of our email sequences and LinkedIn posts; and sometimes I just straight up ask people if they would consider the program as an income stream for them.

We've struggled to get a huge volume of our own average users to post about us, but we're releasing some more "highly shareable" features that we hope will change this. As of yet, we haven't done any kind of formal testing other than trial and error.

How do you think about pricing and customer success?

Some people have said our pricing is expensive. We're priced right where our competitors are, for analytics, and we're priced below the most expensive product on the market for engagement (but we think we do it better). So, we're not concerned about being the cheapest. Again harkening back to my financial mindset, it's important to recognize our worth. We have a great tool and phenomenal support, and we go above and beyond for our customers.

Eight to twelve bucks per week to help them achieve all of the wonderful outcomes we drive for them (4x faster engagement with your ecosystem, better analytics than you can get from LinkedIn natively, a clean CRM integration like nobody else has) should be very worth it.

Right now, customer support is all done by my cofounder and me. So customers are getting tons of extremely high-value consulting from us, without that even being incorporated into their price point. Our goal is to minimize the needs of our customers to even send support requests (the product should be easy to use on its own!) but when we do get them, we try to document the request to make our help center easier and more informative, we try to create multimedia including video on that topic, we try to figure out how to debug or improve our UX such that the request doesn't even need to come in, in the future.

As far as our pricing tiers go, we recently made a change. We historically had a "Teams" version (3rd highest rate) that few people picked unless it was part of an enterprise proposal, but we realized that the dividers between our 2nd and 3rd highest price points were minimal. So we combined those, and now we have just 3 plans. We target about 2/3 to 3/4 of people going with the middle plan, the Pro plan. Our goal is to add more features to the higher-priced Power User plan, such that it becomes more and more attractive over time.

What's your approach to product development?

We prioritize product development based on a combination of projected MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) that we could gain or retain from building something, the effort it takes to build it, and the seriousness of the impact if we don't build it. While the projected MRR helps guide this decision, it’s not the only factor.
For example, we anticipated that selling many-user CRM integration deals would bring bigger returns, and that has, to some extent, proven true. However, we misjudged the market penetration HubSpot had among the lower end of the midmarket and built Salesforce first, when we should have built HubSpot first.
The engagement feeds have had the biggest impact on growth, but we believe that as we approach parity with, and eventually hope to surpass- AuthoredUp on the post-scheduling and content creation side, it will significantly boost our growth rate. People know that scheduling posts and creating content are tasks they need to do, whereas engagement can sometimes feel like a chore to many.
Our current and prospective customers tend to ask for similar things, but if I had to choose one, I’d prioritize building for our highest-spending current customers.

What are your biggest learnings from building Aware?

I would have started SEO much sooner, I wouldn't have hesitated as much to build the highly functional and useful features that are really going to draw people to the app every day, and I would have started with influencer marketing from day 90 instead of day 1000. The most surprising thing has been how fast and powerfully our word-of-mouth has grown.

What advice would you give to other founders?

First, figure out your Why. Not your 'personal why', but your professional. Why did you build the product that you did, and what professional beliefs and experiences underpin it? For example, I built Aware because I noticed that doing LinkedIn the right way was extremely effective but was tedious at times. So, I created a product that lets you do it in the right way while simply being more fun, more targeted, and less tedious.
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Think one level below the features. Start with the business Belief/thesis, then the feature, and finally the Benefit. Don't skip the first or second part and just talk about benefits - that doesn't work very well because it makes people skeptical.
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What I know now that I didn't know before is JUST HOW MUCH of a huge volume of trial signups, demo requests, and brand awareness you can build on LinkedIn. It's much higher than I expected in the beginning.

What's next for you and Aware?

Apart from the boring stuff—key usability and performance improvements that I won’t be able to "demo" but will still make Aware feel and operate better—we’re excited to enhance our post-scheduling features and create more tools around influencer discovery and AI-driven post repurposing. Our engine is getting better and better at two key things:
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1. Finding people we think you may want to follow.
2. Using your own top thought leadership to write brand-new copy for you that reflects your own belief system.
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In general, the LinkedIn tools space is kind of seedy. It’s not collegial, and it doesn’t always attract the most above-board types. The leaders in the space are mostly really great people, but the sheer volume of fly-by-night "automation tools" is off the charts. It’s nuts.
My goal for the coming years is to have our product help people not only do LinkedIn the right way but also make it more habit-forming and fun to use.

Where can people find you online?

Visit us at useaware.co, sign up for a free trial, connect with us through the in-app chat. We also have a Youtube channel at Aware Software.

Any promotions you would like to add for Founderoo readers?

Use code 'FOUNDEROO' to get 98% off your first month after the 10-day free trial.

Your links + socials

Alex Boyd LinkedIn
Aware Youtube