We’re building something in the outbound/growth space, and like everyone else, we started with the usual playbook:
scrape leads → send 100+ cold DMs per day → follow-ups → hope for replies.
It… kinda worked, but honestly felt terrible.
Low response rates, random conversations, most people didn’t even need what we were building. And the last one hitted us. It’s definitely a solution that we’re building, so why people saying they don’t need it? Because they didn’t have the problem we are solving!
And another bottleneck?
Acceptance rate!
Even before replies most people just weren’t accepting requests or even opening conversations. We were trying to force our way into inboxes where there was zero context.
So we tried a different approach.Instead of reaching out to people, we started paying attention to people already looking and of course leaving hints around us that they need us!
Like:
“any tool for this?”
“alternatives to this?”
“how do you guys solve this?”
Mostly on Reddit and LinkedIn.
One example: Someone posted:
“Is there a simpler alternative to Clay for this?”
Normally I would’ve ignored it or maybe saved it.
Instead I just replied: “what are you trying to do exactly?”
No pitch. No link.
We went back and forth in comments → moved to DM → booked a demo next day.
Another one: Saw a comment somewhere:
“We wasted our 3 months on walaaxy and heyreach but 0 outbound”
And I messaged them with:
“Are you doing list based or signal based outreach right now?”
That turned into a proper conversation. Call booked for next day!
After doing this consistently, we ended up getting ~11 demos in a week.
No automation. No list scrapping. No mass messaging.
So we realized one thing, most people try to create demand by reaching out! But there’s already a ton of demand sitting in conversations. You just have to catch it at the right moment.
We’re now building this into our product so we and you don’t have to manually hunt for these signals everywhere.
But even without any tool, this approach alone works surprisingly well.
Anyone else here ever tried this approach or still sticking to cold outbound?