Jonathan Lis

I built ZenMode because LinkedIn flagged my account for automation.

I was Head of Growth 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.

What I found surprised me. The tool wasn't sending anything unusual. It was logging into my LinkedIn from a server in a datacenter, on an IP shared with hundreds of other people, while I was sat at my desk logged in from my laptop in Manila. LinkedIn didn't need to read my messages to know something was off. Two sessions, two continents, one account.

Almost every tool on the market works that way because it's easier. The company runs the automation on their infrastructure, you never have to leave your browser open, and it scales. The cost is invisible right up until it isn't.

So I built the version that doesn't do that.

ZenMode runs on your own machine, in your own browser, on your own IP address. LinkedIn sees the same session it sees when you open the app yourself, because it is the same session. The trade is real and I'd rather say it plainly. Your computer has to be on while campaigns run. No cloud tool asks that of you, and that's exactly why they're cloud tools.

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.