Today I am reviewing Taplio.

Deep down, I knew the odds were this product was for sales people, but I was hoping I could find an individual use case; after all, LinkedIn is a multi-sided marketplace. If individuals on the platform can better express themselves, everyone can better connect - recruiters, networkers and sales people.

What I Liked

• Seems to help you schedule posts on LinkedIn

• Leverages LinkedIn Specific Behaviors

• Helps people who post daily

What I Don’t Like

• I don’t believe in daily posting

• I don’t like the TikTok style : riff on someone else’s ideas style

• Like most AI solutions in 2023 it encourages reposting of the same ideas just written slightly differently

In short, this is great for sales people but not worth the money for building your personal brand.

To build your personal brand, you need more product specific content. You can just as easily ask ChatGPT or Bard to generate some ideas for you to play with. What you get from Taplio isn’t enough to pay $50/month.

If you were in sales or recruiting, I could see it being fairly helpful. Keeping things generic probably works well.

Looking to the Future

Once again, I was excited by the potential of GenAI but disappointed by the rewording of other people’s ideas to repost. If this keeps up, we will stop listening or their will be an AI-generated filter and these posts will get blocked.

I would love to see LinkedIn adding these features for individuals to encourage better posting behaviors to keep the platform healthy and build brands.

Since this is in the interview prep blog, let’s look at how I can now use this review to improve my next product sense/design case.

This is great. How would you improve LinkedIn? Or how would you improve _____ social media platform?

Let’s stick with the high-level assume LinkedIn is the prompt:

High-Level Divide: Professionals with Profiles vs Recruiters/Sales People

• Users

  • >> Looking for a Job

  • Looking to Network

  • Looking to Build My Brand Long-Term

• Pain Points

  • >> Not sure what to post that will lead more recruiters to reach out

  • Don’t want to create too much noise or seem desperate

  • Don’t have time to manage my content schedule

• Solutions

  • >> Provide you with topic recommendations based on what recruiters are searching for with advice on how frequently to post

  • Provide topic suggestions based on what people with the same general profile are searching or liking or sharing

  • As you type a post, provide predictive estimates of reach that change in real-time based on content on how likely the post is to go viral

I have just taken the POV of a job seeker, but imagine I got this prompt from X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook or Instagram, etc. Imagine the question is: How can we encourage more people to post and generate original content?

Now let’s try a more consumer-facing product.

High-Level Segmentation: Consumer vs. Business/Monetization Focused

• Users

  • Influencer (think: pros)

  • >> Creator (think: some revenue but not necessarily any)

  • SMB/Marketing Professional (think: biz goal-oriented)

• Pain Points

  • Keeping up with content schedule is tough

  • need to create (write, record) ahead of time to never miss a day

  • Not getting as many likes/reactions as I used to get

  • not standing out from the competition

  • >> Losing my motivation because feel alone

  • Original Video Content is best but difficult

• Solutions

  • Topics based on trends & niche

  • >> Outline of text or video post, that you can personalize in 3 mins or less

  • Real-time post feedback - predict success

As you can see, there are distinct differences in my outlines of my answers. But you should see show how you can riff off the ideas and problems observed by doing a quick 5 to 10 review of a new AI product.

I challenge you to do the same.