Jonathan Lis

I built ZenMode because LinkedIn warned my account for automation.

I was Managing Partner at a staff augmentation business in the Philippines, doing direct B2B outreach the way everyone does it. A tool that promised to automate connection requests, a target list, and not much thought about what was happening underneath. Then LinkedIn warned me for automation behaviour. Not a ban, but enough to make me stop and actually look at what I'd wired into my account.

So I built the version I wanted to use. ZenMode finds the people you want to reach, writes the messages, sends them a few minutes apart within daily limits, and keeps every reply in one inbox. It's a desktop app for Mac and Windows, so your computer has to be on while campaigns run. The trade is real and I'd rather say it plainly.

What I actually do all day

Everything. I write the code, run the marketing, decide what gets built and what doesn't, answer the support emails, and watch the fleet.

I also use it. My own outreach runs through ZenMode, on my own account, the same way yours would. That sounds like a small thing but it isn't. Every rough edge in the product is one I hit myself, and a fair number of the fixes started with me getting annoyed at something on a Tuesday morning rather than with a support ticket.

That's the other half of it. Every LinkedIn account connected to ZenMode tells me something about what LinkedIn actually does. When it throttles. What a real invitation ceiling looks like. What happens when a pending queue gets too deep. Most advice about LinkedIn limits is people repeating each other. Mine comes from watching accounts, including my own.

Doing all of it myself has one advantage that actually matters. Nothing gets lost between a customer's problem, the decision to fix it, and the code that fixes it, because those are all the same person. Most weeks I find out something is broken from the data before anyone emails me about it, and the fix doesn't sit waiting on someone else's roadmap.

Where I write from

I spent fourteen years in the Philippines before moving back to the UK, where ZenMode is registered. A lot of the product's assumptions about timezones, working hours and international outreach come from having actually done outreach across them, in a business where the prospects were on the other side of the world from the people selling to them.

I write everything on this blog myself. If a number appears in a post it's either cited to its source or it's ours and measured.

If you want to talk about LinkedIn outreach, account safety, or something ZenMode is getting wrong, email hello@zen-mode.io. I read everything.