u/1982JAJ1982

Since every outreach thread has someone saying cold email is not dead, here's my actual numbers.

Setup: 6 domains, 12 Google Workspace inboxes, 3 weeks warmup, Instantly, lists from Apollo. SaaS with funding, mostly AI stuff. 3-step sequences, first line personalized off their profile or a recent funding round.

~2,000 emails in 4 months.

• Replies under 1%, mostly "not interested"
• 3 meetings
• 0 clients
• Both domains now land in spam for everything. Dead.

Cost a few hundred bucks in tools. The real cost was 3 months believing volume would kick in eventually.

Why I think it died:

1. Everyone on that list gets 30 of these a day from the exact same stack. My personalized line looked like everyone else's personalized line.
2. My timing was off (I grabbed funding since past 1 year). I referenced funding rounds, but the data was often a year old. Congratulating someone on last year's raise tells them you scraped a database.
3. By the third campaign I was spam before anyone read a word. New domain, same sequence, same list source. The pattern was flagged, not the address. Deliverability never came back.

Same period on LinkedIn, only messaging people who'd posted or commented on my market that week and opening with what they said: 52% replied.

My first paying customers came from that and from people finding me through AI assistants. Zero from cold email.

Killed the Workspace seats last month.

Some persons are probably making money from call emails. I'm not part of that. I do think it's getting harder and harder with everyone getting so much of those typed of mails. Which is why I think I decided to do other ways.

I did end up building a tool around the LinkedIn side because doing it by hand was killing me, but that's not the point of this post.

You know the posts. "Comment GUIDE and I'll send you my framework." "Tag someone who needs this." Ten thousand impressions, four hundred comments.

Everyone thinks it is so annoying. I think comment sections are actually gold leads.

Here's the logic: every person who commented on a post about, say, agency client reporting just told the entire internet three things. They care about this topic right now. They engage in public instead of lurking. And they said something specific you can respond to.

That's a self-selected list of people in your market, timestamped this week, with context attached. For free.

The method:

1. Find the 5 or 6 creators in your niche whose posts reliably farm engagement. Follow them.
2. When a post in your problem space takes off, read every commenter. Skip the emoji replies. Keep the ones who wrote an actual opinion or described a situation.
3. Check their profile fits who you sell to.
4. Reach out referencing the specific thing they wrote. Not the post. Their comment.

I tested this against classic Sales Navigator prospecting over three months: 18% reply rate the classic way, 52% with this method. Same account, same offer.

I got tired of doing step 2 manually, so I built a small tool that grabs commenters from a post. It also watches the creators and keywords for me to automate getting those leads and hands me the commenters with what they said, enrichment and qualification. But the method works with a spreadsheet and 2-3h a day.

TLDR: the engagement-bait guys are running the biggest lead-gen operation on LinkedIn and giving the results away in their comment sections.

Hey everyone

You know the posts. "Comment GUIDE and I'll send you my framework." "Tag someone who needs this." Ten thousand impressions, four hundred comments.

Everyone thinks it is so annoying. I think comment sections are actually gold leads.

Here's the logic: every person who commented on a post about, say, agency client reporting just told the entire internet three things. They care about this topic right now. They engage in public instead of lurking. And they said something specific you can respond to.

That's a self-selected list of people in your market, timestamped this week, with context attached. For free.

The method:

1. Find the 5 or 6 creators in your niche whose posts reliably farm engagement. Follow them.
2. When a post in your problem space takes off, read every commenter. Skip the emoji replies. Keep the ones who wrote an actual opinion or described a situation.
3. Check their profile fits who you sell to.
4. Reach out referencing the specific thing they wrote. Not the post. Their comment.

I tested this against classic Sales Navigator prospecting over three months: 18% reply rate the classic way, 52% with this method. Same account, same offer.

I got tired of doing step 2 manually, so I built a small tool that grabs commenters from a post. It also watches the creators and keywords for me to automate getting those leads and hands me the commenters with what they said, enrichment and qualification. But the method works with a spreadsheet and 2-3h a day.

The uncomfortable part: the engagement-bait guys are running the biggest lead-gen operation on LinkedIn and giving the results away in their comment sections.

Hey everyone

You know the posts. "Comment GUIDE and I'll send you my framework." "Tag someone who needs this." Ten thousand impressions, four hundred comments.

Everyone thinks it is so annoying. I think comment sections are actually gold leads.

Here's the logic: every person who commented on a post about, say, agency client reporting just told the entire internet three things. They care about this topic right now. They engage in public instead of lurking. And they said something specific you can respond to.

That's a self-selected list of people in your market, timestamped this week, with context attached. For free.

The method:

1. Find the 5 or 6 creators in your niche whose posts reliably farm engagement. Follow them.
2. When a post in your problem space takes off, read every commenter. Skip the emoji replies. Keep the ones who wrote an actual opinion or described a situation.
3. Check their profile fits who you sell to.
4. Reach out referencing the specific thing they wrote. Not the post. Their comment.

I tested this against classic Sales Navigator prospecting over three months: 18% reply rate the classic way, 52% with this method. Same account, same offer.

I got tired of doing step 2 manually, so I built a small tool that grabs commenters from a post. It also watches the creators and keywords for me to automate getting those leads and hands me the commenters with what they said, enrichment and qualification. But the method works with a spreadsheet and 2-3h a day.

The uncomfortable part: the engagement-bait guys are running the biggest lead-gen operation on LinkedIn and giving the results away in their comment sections.

Hey everyone

Looking to help some founders here connect with real potential clients.

Drop your website + one line about who your ideal client is.

Within 24 hours, I'll send you 5 people who posted or commented on something on LinkedIn this week directly related to what you offer. Real people, with the context of what they actually said, so you have a real reason to reach out instead of a cold opener.

I'll be using my tool which watches LinkedIn conversations for this. Honestly, this is partly an experiment to see if it's genuinely useful for people here.

All I need from you:

• Your website
• One sentence on who it's for

Works best if you sell to businesses (agencies, consultants, B2B services, SaaS). If your buyers aren't on LinkedIn, I'll tell you straight instead of sending you junk.

Capping at 10 since the review on my end is manual. When the slots are gone I'll close it and rerun another time.

Hey everyone

I'm a solo founder selling to agencies, and I spent the past three months running a LinkedIn outreach test to 1,184 agency founders and consultants from one account, never more than ~30 requests a day.

I ran it in two batches, and the difference between them is the whole story.

Batch 1: 700 requests, the classic way. Decent targeting via Sales Navigator, a personalized-ish opener with their first name and something from their profile.

• 203 accepted (29%)
• 150 got a first message
• 27 replied (18%)

Batch 2: 484 requests, a different rule. I only contacted people who had posted or commented on something in the past few days matching keywords I was watching on LinkedIn, or who were engaging with the creators everyone in that space follows. My opener was "Hi [first name]," then that I saw their comment about the specific thing they said, why I thought the point mattered, and from there into the conversation.

• 221 accepted (45.7%)
• 146 got a first message
• 76 replied (52%)

Same account, same offer, same daily limit. The only variables were who I contacted and what I had to say to them.

Overall: 424 connections (35.8%), 103 replies (34.8%), and 25 of those turned into real conversations about working together.

What I took from it:

1. Who you contact matters more than what you write. Batch 2 messages were shorter and got almost triple the replies, because the person had literally just written about the problem.
2. Profile personalization is dead. Mentioning someone's job title is not the same thing as responding to what they said this week.
3. People reply to being heard. The moment the opener proved I actually read their comment, the conversation was already halfway open.

Context: I build Signado, a tool that finds the people posting and commenting about your market on LinkedIn, with the context of what they said, so batch 2 was me dogfooding it. But the mechanism works without any tooling if you're willing to do the digging manually.

Really happy with the reply rates and what this unlocked for me. Curious what reply rates others are seeing right now.