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
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.