A big Visto announcement and LinkedIn achievement

A very exciting week for a few reasons. Let's jump the heck in...

Happy Monday folks,

Back for another quick update and some motivation to kick you off for the week.

Let’s jump in:

Update: A big week for Visto and my LinkedIn profile

Holy moly, usually I keep my updates and lessons focused on one topic for the week, but too much to mention in this update.

First, as most of you know, I cofounded an immigration tech company called Visto.ai about 4 years ago. Well, this week we finalized another round of funding from our previous investors!

Here’s why it’s exciting:

• we’ve had a really great last 6 months at the company, and we know that with our current product, we’ve definitely “figured something out”. Happy to continue to grow it!

• our previous investors were impressed enough to put even more money into the company, a great sign for us (as they’re much smarter and more experienced than us)

• more money means we can hire, increase the size of the team and grow the company even faster

Overall, great news for us and our users can expect even more awesome features in the near future!

Second, most of you know I’ve had a big focus on building my presence on LinkedIn over the last few years.

For a few reasons, but I think it’s arguably the best platform to build a following these days (depending on the business/industry you’re in).

Well, this week I crossed the 15,000 follower mark… honestly not something I ever really expected to do. I knew I was a pretty good writer and was convinced I could post interesting stuff, but didn’t really have big numbers in mind when I started.

Anyway, it’s something I’m pretty proud of - not because I hacked any systems or did anything special, but because I committed to posting 5 times per week and never quit (for years… this did not happen in just a few months!).

I’m thinking of putting together a quick guide on how I got to 15k followers, including my story, why I got started and key tips to how I got there - is this something you’d be interested in? Let me know by hitting reply or leaving a comment…

Key takeaway(s): The ultimate hack is commitment and consistency

Here’s something that has probably taken me 5+ years building businesses to learn:

The sooner you stop looking for the next hack, tip, secret or shortcut, and the sooner you realize that committing to consistency following key principles, the quicker you’ll improve.

What do I mean by that?

Take LinkedIn growth as an example:

• there’s no way to hack a big following

• there’s no single tactic that will get you to magically attract (and keep) 10k followers

• instead, learn the basics on how to write a good post, and post every day for 2 years (not 2 months)

Learn key principles, understand how business and marketing works, create a plan, and stick with it. For a long time. Grind it out.

And one day you’ll wake up and realize you’re well on your way (or already there…).

This is probably the one thing I wish I knew 7 years ago when I was starting out…

Content for the week:

I’m getting into a really good content creation groove, and here’s the good stuff you might want to know about:

• I’m now vlogging each week on Youtube, where I go into even more detail on some of the stuff I discussed above. Check out this weeks video here":

• you can also listen to just the audio on your favourite podcast platform by searching for “Josh Schachnow” (or let me know if you can’t find it)

• I’m still in the middle of reading two books: Crushing It! by Garyvee and $100m Leads by Alex Hormozi. Both are awesome, and I’ll share more of my thoughts next week when I’m done!

And that’s it!

Make sure you’re subscribed so you can continue following along (or share with a friend if you think they’d enjoy following/learning from my journey) and have a great week,

Josh