How to make cold outreach work for you
For quite some time I ran a LinkedIn agency doing nothing but cold outreach for paying clients (mostly for SaaS companies, consultants, solopreneurs). To boost our clients' reply rates one of my co-founders at some point had the idea of targeting specifically people who showed activity on LinkedIn through liking, posting, commenting. The hypothesis being that someone who just engaged with a topic is much more likely of being interested in a product related to that topic than someone who happens to have a relevant job title. After a few tests targeting those people who've shown engagement, we immediately knew we were onto something here. In all our tests our metrics (acceptance rates, reply rates, meetings booked) multiplied by 3x, 4x, sometimes even 8x.
Obviously we got a motivation kick and kept going. By now we refined the idea further and built a tool that automatically and daily finds people who recently:
Liked or commented posts of certain companies (think someone who liked a post of a competitor of yours)
Liked or commented posts of certain people (think someone commenting on a post of an influencer in your niche talking about problems of your ICP)
Liked or commented posts about certain keywords (think posts about problems your product solves)
We now use our own tool to grow our company (e.g., 50% of last week's signups came from this very outreach method). Dogfooding at its best.
Check out IbexAI if you want to make cold outreach work for you as well. And let me know your feedback!
Cheers!
This is interesting. AI chatbots are everywhere now, but the sales-focused angle makes sense — most businesses don't need another support bot, they need something that actually converts.
Quick observation: your post is getting decent engagement here, but have you thought about getting this in front of people outside of Indie Hackers? Other founders will give you feedback, but your actual buyers are business owners who need sales — not builders.
I help indie hackers with exactly this.
I distribute products to 50+ active communities on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook — groups where small business owners and startup founders actually hang out. Not dev communities. Places where people say "I need more sales" not "I need to build something."
Simple process:
✅ You send me your product info
✅ I distribute to 20-50 active communities
✅ You get screenshot proof of every post
✅ You pay ONLY after seeing the proof
$30 for 20 communities. $60 for 50.
I can also get 10 real business owners to test Ibex AI and send you honest feedback — what they liked, what confused them, whether they'd actually pay for it. That's $80 for the testing package.
If either sounds useful, my WhatsApp is in my display name. Happy to send sample screenshots from distributions I did this week.
Rooting for this one. The sales AI space
is hot right now. 🔥
Awesome story!!
If you think about it its really just 1+1 added together, but even tough the Results speak for itself
Yes, this is a great way to improve your cold outreach. However, it would cut down on your sample size somewhat so take the conversion data you get, take it with a grain of salt. You'll get more conversions from a shorter pool of candidates so while it will immediately look impressive on paper, there's more to it as you can see.
Makes total sense tbh.
Intent signals from engagement are way stronger than just filtering by job title.
The intent-signal framing is right and more people should internalize it. Catching someone the moment they engaged with a topic is fundamentally different from scraping titles. One thing that's related: even when a warm lead clicks through to your site, a confusing landing page breaks the conversion. They arrived with intent and you lost them in the first 8 seconds. I built PagePulse (pagepulse.page) to surface those issues — takes a screenshot, runs it through a UX review, returns numbered markers pointing at actual spots on the page. Free first analysis if you want to run it.
Most student founders don’t fail because they lack motivation.
They fail because they don’t know what to focus on next.
Over the last few months while building Vaxyro, I noticed something interesting:
Beginner founders spend massive amounts of time consuming startup content…
but still feel stuck.
One video says:
“Learn marketing.”
Another says:
“Build an MVP.”
Another says:
“Do cold outreach.”
The result?
Confusion, inconsistency, and burnout.
That observation pushed me to start building Vaxyro.
The idea is simple:
Give student & first-time founders structured guidance based on their actual startup stage.
Instead of random advice, users get:
clear next steps
daily actionable tasks
startup progression
focused learning direction
I’m currently building it publicly while learning product development, SEO, TypeScript, Python, and startup growth.
One thing I’ve learned already:
Clarity creates momentum.
Would love feedback from founders here:
What was the hardest part when you first started building?
so Try vaxyro
Curious how this holds up at scale engagement signals can get noisy fast if everyone starts targeting the same active users. What's your approach to avoiding reply fatigue on high engagement profiles?