What s worked for us looks very different from spray-and-pray.
We ve learned that outbound works when it s intentional at every step.
A few things that made the biggest difference for us:
Getting the ICP really right. Sometimes the first outreach isn t to the buyer, but to someone who can open the door. Personalization isn t optional. Company context, role, recent updates. Generic gets ignored fast. Channels are chosen by output, not comfort. We double down on what actually converts. The first message rarely works. Conversations usually start around the third or fourth touch, if there s value each time. Timing matters more than volume. Funding news, hiring, social posts. Showing up when the problem is top of mind changes everything. We focus on relationships, not just pipeline. Some buy later. Some refer. All conversations compound. Context before calls helps. If someone engages multiple times, the conversation feels very different. Signals matter. Engagement often tells you when to reach out, not just who.
Watched a launch yesterday. By morning, the founder's DMs were full of pitches from other builders. No questions about the product. Just "here's what I'm working on."
Look, networking is part of this. We all need it. But we're skipping a step. Launch day used to mean something. Try the product. Ask real questions. Then connect.
Now we've optimized so hard for efficiency that we skip straight to pitching. @Mastra a hit #3 yesterday despite this. But think about what that says quality products have to fight through noise just to get noticed.
Here's my take: we're not wrong to network. We're just moving too fast.
This debate often gets framed as Should researchers use AI for literature reviews?
I think the real question is different.
Is it ethical to spend hundreds of researcher hours on mechanical work when that time could be spent advancing actual knowledge?
Think about a researcher spending an entire weekend searching papers, skimming irrelevant abstracts, copying citations, and fixing references. That s not insight or discovery. That s overhead.
Over time, I ve realized how much effort we put into our websites on landing pages, pricing, testimonials, product tours and yet, most visitors only ever deeply interact with one or two sections depending on your ICP.
For developer-first products, that s usually docs.
For consumer apps, maybe it s onboarding or pricing.
For enterprise tools, perhaps case studies or ROI calculators.
I recently had a conversation with a founder building an AI SaaS product. The product was working. Users were active. Usage was growing.
And that s where the stress started.
Every new user felt like a small win and a small liability at the same time. More prompts meant more value delivered. But also more tokens burned, more retries, more unpredictable costs.
Early users wanted simple pricing. Just give me one number. The founder wanted clarity too. He just didn t want to wake up one day realizing usage had scaled faster than revenue.
Not the loud roadmap requests. The quiet idea you built on instinct.
A small UX tweak. An automation you weren t sure about. A default that just made things smoother.
I ve noticed these are often the features users don t talk about. They only notice them when something breaks or disappears.
Those instinct-driven decisions rarely come from surveys. They come from building, using your own product, and trusting that feeling of this should be easier.
