u/FormExtension7920

I'm building in the agentic AI reliability space (runtime stuff, catching weird behavior in prod before it spirals) and I've been trying to do customer discovery for months. Not selling, not pitching, literally just trying to get 20 minutes on a call to ask people what breaks when their agents break in production and I cannot get people to talk to me.

I'm doing ~30 LinkedIn DMs a week, CTO to CTO (or head of engineering), no pitch in the opener, just curiosity. Stuff like "saw you're shipping agents in prod, would love to hear what your reliability story looks like." Most get ignored. The ones that do reply usually say "no thanks". I also do reddit, build in public on X, all that. The one thing that's actually worked is in person events. I went to Boulder Startup Week and got 3 real champions out of it, but obviously I can't fly to a conference every week.

My ICP isn't even loose, I'm filtering for CTOs and heads of eng at 10-200 person companies who are already interacting with my competitors. So these are people who in theory should care about this exact problem. But they still don't reply. Maybe LinkedIn is just the wrong channel for this audience. Maybe my opener is too generic even though I'm trying not to be. Maybe people who already use a competitor have no reason to entertain a stranger's DM. Honestly not sure.

So for anyone who's done customer discovery for technical or infra products, how did you actually get people to take the call? Did you filter harder upstream, use a different channel, different opener, pay them? I'm open to literally anything at this point.

Here is the first message I've been sending:

"Hey [name]! [reason im messaging them], not pitching anything, doing some research.

I'm building in the agent observability space and trying to understand how teams actually catch regressions that slip past their eval suites. From your end, are agent regressions in production something that's genuinely costing you, or more of a minor annoyance you've worked around?

Would love 20 minutes to chat just to learn from you. Worth a quick chat?

[calendar link]"

And if they dont respond to that, here is the follow up I send:

"

Hey [name], know calls are a big ask. If you've got 2 minutes, I'd take quick answers to these three over DM:

1. Last time an agent did something weird in prod, how'd you find out?
2. What are you using to monitor agent behavior right now, if anything?
3. Where do your evals fall short of catching real issues?

Just trying to get a real picture from people actually shipping this stuff. Appreciate it either way.

"

I would love ANY feedback at all, I feel very stuck.

I'm building in the agentic AI reliability space (runtime stuff, catching weird behavior in prod before it spirals) and I've been trying to do customer discovery for months. Not selling, not pitching, literally just trying to get 20 minutes on a call to ask people what breaks when their agents break in production and I cannot get people to talk to me.

I'm doing ~30 LinkedIn DMs a week, CTO to CTO (or head of engineering), no pitch in the opener, just curiosity. Stuff like "saw you're shipping agents in prod, would love to hear what your reliability story looks like." Most get ignored. The ones that do reply usually say "no thanks". I also do reddit, build in public on X, all that. The one thing that's actually worked is in person events. I went to Boulder Startup Week and got 3 real champions out of it, but obviously I can't fly to a conference every week.

My ICP isn't even loose, I'm filtering for CTOs and heads of eng at 10-200 person companies who are already interacting with my competitors. So these are people who in theory should care about this exact problem. But they still don't reply. Maybe LinkedIn is just the wrong channel for this audience. Maybe my opener is too generic even though I'm trying not to be. Maybe people who already use a competitor have no reason to entertain a stranger's DM. Honestly not sure.

So for anyone who's done customer discovery for technical or infra products, how did you actually get people to take the call? Did you filter harder upstream, use a different channel, different opener, pay them? I'm open to literally anything at this point.

Here is the first message I've been sending:

"Hey [name]! [reason im messaging them], not pitching anything, doing some research.

I'm building in the agent observability space and trying to understand how teams actually catch regressions that slip past their eval suites. From your end, are agent regressions in production something that's genuinely costing you, or more of a minor annoyance you've worked around?

Would love 20 minutes to chat just to learn from you. Worth a quick chat?

[calendar link]"

And if they dont respond to that, here is the follow up I send:

"

Hey [name], know calls are a big ask. If you've got 2 minutes, I'd take quick answers to these three over DM:

1. Last time an agent did something weird in prod, how'd you find out?
2. What are you using to monitor agent behavior right now, if anything?
3. Where do your evals fall short of catching real issues?

Just trying to get a real picture from people actually shipping this stuff. Appreciate it either way.

"

I would love ANY feedback at all, I feel very stuck.

Building in the agent observability space and trying to get a real picture from people actually running this stuff in production, not the theoretical version.

Three questions:

1. Last time an agent did something unexpected in prod, what tipped you off? Customer report, dashboard, manual review, something else?
2. What's your current monitoring setup for agent behavior, if you have one?
3. Where do your evals tend to miss real issues?

Not selling anything in the comments, trying to understand where the actual gaps are.

Hey all, I'm building in the AI observability space and trying to understand what actually sucks about the current tools before I add more of the same to the pile.

Some stuff I keep hearing:

- Evals only catch what you already knew to look for

- Dashboards look healthy while agents quietly degrade

- Setup is heavy, you end up instrumenting forever

- Pricing scales in weird ways with trace volume

What's actually been your experience? Specifically:

1. A failure mode that slipped through your current tooling and you only caught from a user complaint

2. If you could wave a wand and fix one thing about your setup, what would it be

3. What made you switch tools, or stop using one entirely

Trying to learn what's broken. Happy to share what I find back.