Baz Furby

Something I learned the hard way running outbound for my dev agency:

Everyone obsesses over the first message: the opener, the hook, the personalization. I did too.

I've been doing about 20 linkedin dms a day for a while now and the thing that keeps surprising me is how little list size matters. a few hundred people who've just commented on a competitor's post or moved into the right role get far more replies than a big export filtered by job title.

curious what signals other founders actually use before reaching out. hiring posts, funding news, people following a competitor's page, something else? and has anyone found one that sounded great but turned out to be noise?

I build my app alone after my day job, with no ad budget. So far the only thing that really worked for me is writing short, personal posts on Threads. One story about my family got over 300k views and brought more signups than everything else combined. Posts that explain features barely get noticed.

But I can't tell if that was luck or something I can repeat.