At my last company where I was working, the product was actually really good.  Its competitors are still doing great.We collaborated with platforms like Razorpay. Website was polished. Demos were impressive. And we were not reaching out to random people either.

We weren't spamming random leads. This was proper B2B outreachgood businesses were booking calls consistently. 

But in the last 3 months we literally had almost zero real customers.

Everything shut down last month. I was the product designer and after spending the last few weeks trying and doing marketing work, I realized:

We kept changing our ICP. In just 8 months we went from:

• Agencies
• real estate
• Marketers
• call centers

And every time the ICP changed, the entire company direction changed with it. So even though we were doing outreach every single day:

• cold emails
• cold calls
• lead scraping
• demo bookings

…it still wasn’t working.Because most of the people booking demos were coming out of curiosity.

The product looked cool. The AI sounded impressive. But they were not the right fit.

They didn’t actually have the painful problem we were trying to solve. And that’s when I understood something important:

In 2026 finding the right ICP is no longer about building giant lead lists.

The internet already tells you who needs your product.

People publicly post:

• Frustrations
• Switching intent
• Workflow problems
• Recommendation requests
• Competitor complaints

That’s not noise. That’s live buying intent happening publicly. The smartest founders today are not winning because they scrape more leads.

They’re winning because they understand: WHO already has the problem.

Right now if I had to build an outbound system again, I probably wouldn’t start with Apollo or Clay first. I would start with an intent-based signal tracker as the top layer.

Something that tells me who is actively struggling, who is looking for alternatives,

who is already talking about the exact problem.

Then below that: Apollo / Clay / Appify for sourcing + enrichment. And only after that the outreach.

Because reaching 10,000 random people will still feel like failure. But finding 100 people already talking about the exact pain you solve?  That’s your market introducing itself to you.

Running growth for my previous startup completely changed how I look at “signals” on the internet. In the beginning we were doing what most early stage startups do.

Cold emails going out every day, founder content on linkedin, outbound lists, scraping tools, lead databases, engagement tracking, website analytics, trying to create momentum from everywhere possible because honestly at that stage survival itself feels like growth.

And for a while the numbers looked good. More impressions. More profile visits. More email opens. More replies. More engagement on founder posts.

So naturally I assumed we were moving in the right direction. But after a few months I noticed something that kept bothering me. A lot of the people interacting with us looked interested but very few of them were actually converting into meaningful conversations. Then one day while reviewing campaign data I noticed something strange.

Some people had opened multiple emails over weeks without replying once. The same people were also viewing founder content consistently on linkedin. A few of them had publicly posted about the exact problem we solved. Some were comparing alternatives openly in comments and reddit threads and a few had visited our pricing page multiple times. 

Individually these actions looked insignificant but together they formed something much more valuable. Marketers now call them “intent” . That was the first time I realized how broken most growth workflows actually are. Because almost every tool we were using was optimized around visibility instead of buying behavior.

• apollo gave us databases
• clay enriched data
• phantombuster automated actions
• apify scraped information
• linkedin analytics showed engagement

But none of them naturally connected the most important layer: Who is actually showing intent across the internet before becoming a customer?

So I started manually tracking patterns, who repeatedly engaged, who matched ICP, who interacted across channels, who publicly talked about the pain point, who silently kept showing up over time and honestly it completely changed how we approached growth afterwards. Because I realized the internet is full of noise pretending to look like traction.

Real buying intent is much quieter.

It usually hides inside repeated behavior patterns that most founders ignore because they are too busy looking at surface level metrics. And weirdly enough, some of our best conversations later came from people who never once filled out a lead form. It’s 2026 if you’re still just scraping data you’re already 10 years late.

Quick context: Traxy tracks high-intent conversations across Reddit and LinkedIn, matches them to your ICP, enriches the lead, and helps you reach out while the buying intent is still fresh.

Basically LinkedIn is generating warm buying signals every day. Most founders never see them in time. We built something to capture those moments before they disappear.

Here’s the honest breakdown of how we got traction and what I’d do differently if starting today.

The idea came from frustration.

I kept seeing people publicly talking about problems our product could solve but by the time we found those posts manually, the conversations were already dead or full of competitors.

That was the problem. High intent buyers were literally announcing their pain publicly. No infrastructure existed to catch those signals early and act on them fast enough.

What worked (and what I’d double down on)

1. Launching before the product felt complete

Our first version was honestly very barebones.

You added keywords, It monitored Reddit + LinkedIn conversations, and sent relevant posts to Slack.

That’s it. No fancy dashboards. No advanced enrichment. No workflows.

We showed it to a few founders and agencies doing outbound. Most instantly understood the value because they were already manually searching for these conversations every day.

If I were starting over:
I’d launch even faster. People care way more about solving pain than polished UI.

2. Reddit became our unfair advantage

Most outbound tools fight over the same stale lead databases.

We focused on intent instead.

Instead of scraping random lists, this tool finds people actively talking about the exact problem you solve. That changed everything.

The first users came from simply being present in conversations where the pain already existed.

Not pitching.
Not spamming.
Just showing up at the right moment.

If I were starting over: I’d spend even more time understanding how communities talk about problems naturally.

The wording matters more than people think.

3. Founder led content worked better than ads

We stopped talking about “features” and started posting observations.

Things like:
“Most Reddit leads convert better because the buyer already has urgency.”
or
“The best outbound signal is when someone publicly asks for alternatives.”

That content attracted exactly the people who needed the solutionl.

Then we used our own tool itself to track those conversations and respond faster.

Very meta. Very effective.

If I were starting over:
I’d treat founder content as the main GTM channel from day one.

4. The free plan drove most of the growth

We added a free plan so people could experience the “aha moment” quickly.

The moment where someone realizes:
“Wait… people are literally asking for what I sell every day?”

That realization spreads fast internally in teams.

A lot of users who didn’t convert immediately still referred others.

If I were starting over:
I’d design onboarding entirely around helping users find their first perfect lead within 10 minutes.

5. The ICP changed completely

Initially we thought marketers would be the main users.

Wrong!!!

The strongest users became: agencies, outbound teams, SDRs, founders doing founder-led sales, AI startups validating demand

Basically people who care about speed to lead.

If I were starting over:
I’d spend less time assuming and more time watching who actually gets value fastest.

What I’d skip entirely

• building too many workflow features early
• Trying cold email too soon
• Obsessing over competitors
• Over engineering dashboards nobody asked for

The biggest lesson:

Distribution matters more than complexity early on. A huge percentage of buying intent already exists publicly online. Most companies just never see it.

Someone asks for a recommendation, complains about a workflow, mentions switching tools, talks about scaling problems.

That’s not “engagement.” That's the pipeline.

The entire business is simply capturing those moments before everyone else does.

And honestly, I think signal based outbound becomes way bigger over the next few years as traditional cold outreach keeps getting noisier.

If you’re building B2B and still relying only on scraped lead lists, you’re probably ignoring the warmest leads on the internet.

Happy to answer questions about linkedIn GTM, intent signals, founder led growth or how we’re building Traxy.

Been seeing way too many posts here lately about QBO’s invoice reminders going completely off the rails after the Workflows migration.

And honestly people aren’t overreacting or this issue isn’t even new. It’s actually broken. For always!

The pattern across almost every post:

• Reminders firing at 2 AM, 11 PM, random off hours
• Turning reminders off on specific invoices still sends them
• Clients getting duplicate reminders 3 to 4 times in 48 hours
• Zero visibility into what’s actually being sent
• No control over timing/frequency at the invoice level
• Firms going back to manual follow ups because automation became unusable

This isn't just an inconvenience. It's damaging client relationships, making firms look unprofessional, and forcing people back to manual processes that waste hours every week.

So we built a fix for it. Instead of relying on QBO’s reminder system, we created a layer outside QuickBooks that syncs with your QBO invoices but gives firms actual control over reminders.

Here's what we built to solve this:

Invoice level granularity: Turn reminders on/off for individual invoices, not just global settings

Business hours only: You define the sending window (9 AM - 5 PM, client's timezone, never weekends etc.)

Client specific flows: Set different reminder schedules per client based on payment history

Smart duplicate prevention: Tracks what's been sent and prevents reminder spam automatically

Full transparency: Audit trail showing exactly which reminders went out, when, to whom, with open or click tracking

Custom templates: Brand your reminders properly and adjust tone per client relationship

The whole thing runs on autopilot once configured, but with reliability and control QBO should have had from the start.

Why this matters:

Your clients don't know QuickBooks messed up. They just know you sent them a payment reminder at 2 AM or spammed them with duplicates. That reflects on your firm, not Intuit.

If you're manually managing reminders now or dealing with client complaints about random reminder timing... happy to discuss how this works, no sales pitch, just want to help firms dealing with this mess.

It’s been 10 days pp, first Mother’s Day, sleepy and exhausted 24/7, leaking milk constantly, surviving on depression and emotion. And somehow my husband is still being a shit.

What makes this worse is that this is my first Mother’s Day, so obviously it feels important to me. My parents already sent me flowers and a little care package this morning because they knew I’m really emotional these days

Meanwhile my husband? Nothing. Absolutely an Assholee!!!
He has been actively planning a boys trip with his friends for next month while I’m still wearing disposable diapers and trying not to cry every time I sit down.

And the thing is, I literally made it easy for him because I know this man. A few days ago I told him I wanted this body pillow I saw online because my stomach is still huge and sore, my back hurts constantly and I have got postpartum insomnia.

I even sent him the exact link and this morning he goes:
“Oh shit, that’s today?”

Like sir. I pushed out your child 10 days ago.

At this point I honestly don’t even care about the gift part anymore. I just want ONE comfortable night of sleep without waking up sweaty, aching and wanting to cry.

Has anyone here actually used the U shaped pillow one postpartum? Is it worth it? Or do you guys have better body pillow recommendations for side sleeping/nursing/recovering?

Because if I’m going to spend $95 out of rage, I at least want good spinal support out of it.

Most founders send 100+ cold emails daily, try every growth hack, optimize landing pages but still can't get traction. Because they’re reaching out to people around the signal. Instead, look for people already saying:

• any tool for this? 
• looking for alternatives to X 
• need help with “something” 
• anyone used “this” before?

 

These are not leads. These are inbound conversations happening in public and you’ve been ignoring them all along

We’ve been building around this idea with Traxy. Instead of guessing who might need you, it surfaces people actively searching for solutions that you have!

Drop what you’re selling (or your niche)

I’ll tell you:

• where I’d look first
• what signals actually matter
• and how I’d approach it

My first startup was Windmill Growth.

Like most agency founders in the beginning, I believed outreach was mostly about volume.

So the playbook looked like this:

• build a big lead list
• scrape LinkedIn profiles
• send hundreds of messages
• hope a few people reply

Sometimes it worked. Most of the time it didn’t.

The frustrating part was this:
many of the people we were reaching out to simply didn’t need help at that moment.

Not because the offer was bad.
Just because the timing was wrong.

After doing outreach for a long time, a pattern became obvious.

The best conversations almost always started when someone was already showing some kind of signal.

Things like:

• posting about a problem
• asking for recommendations
• discussing tools in comments
• announcing a product launch
• hiring for a growth role

Those moments meant the person was already thinking about solving something.

But finding those signals manually was painful. They were scattered across posts, comments, hiring pages, and discussions.

So we started building an internal system to track those signals and surface the people who were already talking about problems relevant to our services.

Instead of messaging 1,000 random prospects, we could reach out to the 50 people who were already looking for a solution that is YOU!

The conversations felt completely different.

Instead of:
“Hey, are you interested in X?”

It became:
“Hey, saw your post about X and we actually help with that.”

That internal system eventually turned into Traxy.

That internal tool eventually became Traxy.

And the pattern seems to be working.

Today marks day 45 since launch, and we’ve onboarded 22 paid users so far.

Not massive numbers yet, but it's a good signal that intent-based outreach feels very different from cold lists.

It’s still early, but it’s been interesting seeing how much outreach changes when you stop relying on static lead lists and start focusing on intent.

I’m 32 and currently building a agency startup. Before this I spent almost 12 years working in marketing, so I’m pretty familiar with growth funnels, messaging, and lead generation.

But lately the reachout game has been completely different. Email used to be the main channel but now it feels like it has mostly been replaced by LinkedIn.

Something interesting happened when I started doing direct LinkedIn outreach myself. The theory of lead generation and the reality of getting actual conversations started feel very different.

My typical flow looks like this:

• Send a connection request
• They accept
• Send a short message after 1–2 days

From a product/experiment perspective, this is a simple funnel:

connection accepted
message seen
reply → conversation → potential lead

But the drop-off between “message seen” and “reply” is massive. A lot of people clearly read the message, but just… never respond.

So I started looking at it more like a product problem instead of a sales problem.

Initially I thought the “thanks for connecting” opener is fundamentally broken, or maybe decision-makers are just ignoring most cold LinkedIn messages now.

But later I realized the problem might be that we don’t really understand how people behave inside LinkedIn DMs.

So I started trying a few tools like CommonRoom, Gojiberry, and recently spoke with the team at Traxy to understand the behavior side of outreach, things like message views, reply patterns, and when conversations actually start.

Interestingly, this week I onboarded 3 clients through Traxy tho! The good part is that I dm’ed only 30-35 people this week.

Curious to hear from others here:
How are you getting leads from LinkedIn outreach? Are you doing bulk reach out on LinkedIn or you are doing it more targeted?

Would love to hear how others are approaching this.