Founders: where do you find leads beyond LinkedIn in 2026?
I've been going deep on Telegram as a prospecting channel and I'm curious how others handle it.
The problem I keep hitting: Telegram communities are full of buying signals — people asking for tool recommendations, complaining about a workflow, looking to switch vendors — but reading every thread manually doesn't scale, and scraping members is spammy and mostly useless.
What's actually working for you?
- How do you decide which communities are worth monitoring?
- What signals tell you someone is genuinely in-market vs just venting?
- How do you reach out without coming across as a spammer?
For transparency: I'm building Leadgram (https://leadgram.io), an AI search tool for finding high-intent leads in Telegram conversations — so I'm clearly biased. But I'd really like to hear how manual, non-tool, or completely different approaches compare. What's your workflow?
Replies
three signals that beat scraping. one. who shipped publicly on the exact pain you solve. two. who signed off on someone else work in that domain, real skin in the game. three. who has the role and the budget right now, not 6 months ago. linkedin gives you signal 3 weakly. telegram catches signal 1 sometimes. a platform built on published receipts with peer and customer signatures surfaces all three natively. that is the wedge i am betting on with tam network.
The thing that's worked for me isn't a channel, it's listening for the moment someone is already frustrated and asking for a fix. People leaving a tool, comparing two platforms, or venting about juggling five subscriptions are way warmer than a cold list. I find those by watching the search phrases, not the hashtags. I build DukieX and most of our useful conversations started from someone else's complaint thread, not an outbound message.