Building a Business with Linkedin & AI
If you’re like me, AI is a topic that you’re seeing too much content for in your feeds, but at the same time, you think to yourself, wait, let me see that…
Once you’ve sifted through the generic, bad, non-human AI responses and content, you do see that there are a lot of benefits to AI and it’s changing how we all operate, especially for knowledge workers.
One of the people that I’ve found after sifting through the bad AI content is Isabella Bedoya. Isabella, or Izzy (because we’re friends now as she says 🙂), has used AI in ways I didn’t know were possible and put a human touch into AI.
Izzy isn’t using AI for automating responses on her LinkedIn posts or any of the other crappy ways to use AI. More on that in a bit.
What she is using it for is for video editing, for content ideas, and for helping her create first drafts of content. All ways that help lessen time on work she doesn’t necessarily want to do. That then increases Izzy’s time to, as she puts it, build relationships because “people buy from people”.
Here’s a summary of my conversation with Isabella Bedoya. You can watch the full interview on YouTube or listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Isabella’s business before AI
Before diving into the world of AI entrepreneurship, Isabella had an impressive track record. Prior to starting her AI company and being a creator on LinkedIn, she was the founder of Fame Hackers, a company dedicated to helping musicians and creators grow and monetize their audience. Through coaching and a TikTok video editing service, Isabella realized the power of AI tools in her workflow. In a lot of ways, it was an evolve or this is going to end soon moment as a business.
Isabella's first encounter with AI tools came with the discovery of a video editing app called Captions.ai. This app allowed her to edit TikTok videos efficiently and cost-effectively, compared to hiring video editors. It was $55/year for Captions AI and $55/hour to hire editors on Fiverr. Captions AI was able to shorten hours of work that Isabella was doing to just minutes.
Starting her AI business on LinkedIn
As Isabella started using these new AI tools, she began sharing her experiences and processes on LinkedIn, which quickly gained traction among her small audience at the time. In March of 2023, one of her posts hit over 1 million views. People were leaving her feedback, DMing her, and there was clear traction in what she was working on.
Encouraged by the positive response, Isabella decided to leverage her marketing and sales expertise to explore AI-driven solutions for businesses.
Transitioning from Fame Hackers to AI entrepreneurship meant building a new network from scratch. They are different target markets and Isabella didn’t have this new target market in her network for AI work.
Thankfully, because of the early traction she had on Linkedin, she’s been able to rely on it. 100% of revenue for MarketingPros.ai has come from LinkedIn. Posting valuable content, engaging with her audience, and giving things away for people’s emails has been Isabella’s main method of growing on her business on LinkedIn.
How Isabella is using LinkedIn today to grow her AI business
Isabella's current method of growth revolves around a laser-focused approach on LinkedIn. She will be adding YouTube videos to her growth strategy, but as she mentioned, she has limited bandwidth and LinkedIn is driving her traction right now.
Even when Isabella has new ideas, she can test them quickly through LinkedIn. For example, Isabella tried to launch a membership for her business and quickly realized it wasn’t going to work. A lot of website visits came to her landing page from LinkedIn, but not a single person purchased the membership.
This method of experimentation on LinkedIn allowed her to test an idea for a week rather than having to build for months and find out in a week that it wasn’t going to work. It’s a great example that you should start with distribution first and product development second.
When posts on LinkedIn go well for Isabella, she’s able to then give away free tools or resources in exchange for people’s emails. Just off one LinkedIn post, Isabella can add thousands of people to her email list.
When and when you shouldn’t use AI for LinkedIn
What caught my attention at the end of my conversation with Isabella is her approach to when and when not to use AI.
Isabella brought up that you shouldn’t use AI tools to create responses or engage with others on Linkedin. First, it’s a crappy experience for those on the receiving end of them and two, it’s actually against LinkedIn’s terms of service to use AI tools on LinkedIn.
The way Isabella approaches using AI is to use it on tasks she can save a lot of time on. That might be content ideation, editing videos, or as giveaways, especially with the ability to create custom GPTs now.
With the time Isabella is saving by using AI tools, she then uses that time to build relationships because as she put it, “people buy from people”.