How do you actually cold reach without feeling awkward?
When you're pre-launch with zero audience, the generic "hey, check out my product" DM just doesn't work, people can tell it's copy-pasted to 200 others.
What's worked better for me:
Give value before asking anything (a real comment, a resource, actual context on what they built)
Skip broad cold DMs, join niche communities instead (Discord/Slack) and let the product come up naturally
One follow-up max, then let it go
On platforms: X is decent if you engage publicly first, LinkedIn works for B2B but needs to be hyper-targeted, Reddit can backfire if it reads as spam (i got banned on 5 accs lol).
The one I'm most curious about right now is YouTube, I barely use it myself, but unlike a DM that disappears, a video keeps bringing people in months later, but's it's very time consuming.
Still figuring this out though.
How do you get your first users without it feeling creepy or spammy? What platform actually worked, and what made your message land?
Replies
MonoCloud for Startups
For B2B SaaS, I have mostly stopped treating cold email as the first touch. What has worked better for me is creating some familiarity first. LinkedIn comments and conversations, Product Hunt discussions, sometimes moving from a PH interaction into a DM. The person has some context on who I am before I ask them for anything.
I am also experimenting more with giving people a reason to share their email themselves. A useful report, playbook, newsletter, research, something genuinely relevant to the problem they are working on. Then email becomes a continuation of an existing relationship instead of another stranger appearing in an already crowded inbox.
I don't think email itself is useless. If you know exactly why that particular person should care right now, it can still work. But “personalization” that is basically their job title + a scraped LinkedIn post is getting very easy to recognise.
For first users, I would probably pick 30 people I genuinely want to learn from and build familiarity with them across 2–3 places rather than send 1,000 cold emails.