u/Economy-Mud-6626

I'm going to tell you about the DM I almost deleted before hitting send. Because without it, the company I'm launching today wouldn't exist.

It was October 2024. We were three months into building Drizz and we had nothing to show. Just a prototype that worked on one app and crashed on everything else.

I was scrolling LinkedIn late at night and saw a post from a mobile engineering lead at a unicorn startup in India. He was complaining about Appium breaking his team's tests after every release. Standard pain that every mobile team lives with.

I typed a DM. Something like "hey, we're building something that might help with this, can I show you a quick screen share?" Then I stared at it for 10 minutes. Who was I? Three guys in a room with a broken prototype. This person leads engineering at a company with millions of users. He'll ignore me or worse, he'll say yes and see how early we actually are.

I almost closed the tab. My cofounder walked by and asked what I was doing. I showed him the message. He said "just send it, what's the worst that happens."

I sent it. The guy replied in 20 minutes. We did a screen share the next day. The prototype crashed twice during the demo. I wanted to disappear.

But he got it. He understood what we were trying to do because he'd been facing exact problem for three years. He said "this is rough but the idea is right. Can you make it work on our app?"

We spent the next 4 weeks doing nothing else. We got it working. He ran a pilot with his team. They went from spending 20+ hours a week maintaining Appium tests to writing new tests in plain English that survived their next two releases without breaking.

He became our first paying customer. He's still a customer. He introduced us to three other companies. Two of them signed.

All of that from a DM I almost didn't send.

Today we're launching Drizz on Product Hunt. It's a vision AI agent for mobile app testing. You describe what to test in English, the AI looks at the screen and navigates the app like a human would. When the UI changes, the tests don't break because they were never tied to element IDs in the code.

We have enterprise customers now. We raised a seed round. We're a team of 15. But honestly, I think about that DM all the time. How close I was to closing the tab.

If you're building something and you're scared to reach out to someone because your product isn't ready, it probably won't ever feel ready. Send the message anyway. The worst that happens is silence. The best that happens is your first customer.

Link to Product Hunt is in my first comment. I'd love for you to try it and tell me honestly what you think.

Three months ago we had zero paying customers. Today we have 14 paid pilots and we're launching on Product Hunt. Here's the honest version of how that happened.

When my cofounders and I started Drizz, we spent the first year building in stealth. We had a thesis: mobile app testing is fundamentally broken because it's built on locators. Fragile pointers to UI elements that break the moment anything in the interface changes.

The thesis was right. But a thesis doesn't pay the bills.

Around December we decided to stop building in isolation and start showing the product to real teams. I made a list of 50 companies with large mobile apps and started reaching out. Cold DMs on LinkedIn. Cold emails to QA leads. Mostly just me describing the problem and asking for 15 minutes.

The first few conversations were rough. The product had edges. One demo crashed mid-call. But something kept happening that I didn't expect. People would stop me during the pitch and say "wait, you're saying I write the test in English and the AI finds the button by looking at the screen?" I'd say yes. They'd say "show me that again."

That reaction is how you know you've hit something real. You don't have to convince people the problem exists. They already live it. You just have to show them you've actually solved it.

14 teams signed paid pilots in 3 months. Companies with 5 million plus app downloads. Enterprise security reviews completed. Onboarding calls where the QA lead says "my team is going to cry when they see this" and you're not sure if that's a compliment but it turns out it is.

Some of these companies are in San Francisco. We're in Bengaluru. I still find that surreal. A startup that most of the industry hasn't heard of is selling to teams at companies 100x our size. Not because we have a better sales team. Because the problem is that severe and nobody else has fixed it the way we have.

Drizz uses vision AI to test mobile apps. You write what to test in English. The agent reads the screen like a human. When the UI changes, the tests don't break. Tests that survive redesigns because they were never coupled to the code.

We're launching on Product Hunt today. It's the first time we're being loud about this. A year of stealth, 14 paid pilots, and a lot of cold DMs led to today.

If you're on a mobile team, I'd love to hear your feedback.

*FREE CRedits to use on the occasion of our launch on PH

We’re building something in the outbound/growth space, and like everyone else, we started with the usual playbook:

scrape leads → send 100+ cold DMs per day → follow-ups → hope for replies.

It… kinda worked, but honestly felt terrible.

Low response rates, random conversations, most people didn’t even need what we were building. And the last one hitted us. It’s definitely a solution that we’re building, so why people saying they don’t need it? Because they didn’t have the problem we are solving!

And another bottleneck?

Acceptance rate!

Even before replies most people just weren’t accepting requests or even opening conversations. We were trying to force our way into inboxes where there was zero context.

So we tried a different approach.Instead of reaching out to people, we started paying attention to people already looking and of course leaving hints around us that they need us!

Like:

“any tool for this?”

“alternatives to this?”

“how do you guys solve this?”

Mostly on Reddit and LinkedIn.

One example: Someone posted:

“Is there a simpler alternative to Clay for this?”

Normally I would’ve ignored it or maybe saved it.

Instead I just replied: “what are you trying to do exactly?”

No pitch. No link.

We went back and forth in comments → moved to DM → booked a demo next day.

Another one: Saw a comment somewhere:

“We wasted our 3 months on walaaxy and heyreach but 0 outbound”

And I messaged them with:

“Are you doing list based or signal based outreach right now?”

That turned into a proper conversation. Call booked for next day!

After doing this consistently, we ended up getting ~11 demos in a week.

No automation. No list scrapping. No mass messaging.

So we realized one thing, most people try to create demand by reaching out! But there’s already a ton of demand sitting in conversations. You just have to catch it at the right moment.

We’re now building this into our product so we and you don’t have to manually hunt for these signals everywhere.

But even without any tool, this approach alone works surprisingly well.

Anyone else here ever tried this approach or still sticking to cold outbound?

The conversation on this sub about linkedin outreach tools is always the same loop. someone asks what to use, half say heyreach or expandi, other half say automation is dead, nobody shares actual numbers. So here are mine

Ran heyreach for six months with two reps doing mid market outbound. tracked everthing weekly

Connection acceptance averaged 23%. sounds ok until linkedin started throttling one of our accounts after month three. We were sending 80 requests per day per rep which is within thier "safe" limits but linkedin clearly didnt agree. got one account restricted for a week, killed that reps pipeline for the month

Reply rate on sequences sat around 9% overall. of those maybe 40% were actually interested, rest were "not interested" or "who are you." real positive reply rate closer to 3.5%. booking roughly 6 meetings per month across both reps at $158/mo for heyreach plus time spent managing campaings

What i tried as replacements and actual numbers

Expandi: basically same approach, slightly better at mimicing human behavior. connection rate maybe 26%, fewer restriction issues. Reply rate similar around 10%. costs $99/seat so more expensive for roughly same output. ui is better but its still cold automation and your still playing the linkedin detection game. didnt feel like a real upgrade

Waalaxy: cheaper at $60/mo per seat. decent for connection requests and basic followup. 21% acceptance, about 7% reply rate. the multichannel linkedin + email thing sounds good but email finder accuracy was rough, maybe 70% valid. bouncing enough emails that it was hurting our sending domain. dropped it after two months

Traxy.ai : Warm signal approachthis is where things actually changed. instead of cold outreach to people who dont know us, we started tracking who was already engaging with our linkedin posts. likes, comments, reposts from people in our ICP. tried it manually first which was brutal, then found traxy which automates the monitoring and enriches contacts with email and phone

Completely different numbers. reply rate on outreach to people who engaged with our content is around 28%. these arent "who are you" replies, they already know us. Meetings went from 6/mo to about 14/mo same two reps. cost is $79/mo which is comparable to heyreach but no linkedin restriction risk because theres no automation on linkedin itself, it just monitors engagment data

That said it doesnt scale the same way. cold automation you can blast 200 people a day, warm signals your limited by how many people engage with your posts. for us the quality tradeoff was worth it

What are other people doing about the linkedin restriction problem? anyone keeping cold automation working reliably in 2026 or is everyone moving warmer

Reddit is now working a lot to monetise the platform, and ads rev has grown exponential for them in past 12 months.

anyone here treid reddit ads for their saas?

I really hate my website for it's poor design

Please lend me your hardcore feedbacks

I am about to re-design the website

We are an ai doctor for our customers and we don't charge our customers