I have been DMing people for weeks trying to presell my SaaS. Sent like 400 messages. Got a bunch of replies but most people say they just launched or have no budget.
The people who could actually afford my tool are very hard to find. They dont hang out in the same places as broke founders who are still building their MVP.
How do you guys find leads that actually have money to spend? Not tire kickers or people who want free stuff.
Do you just DM more people? Cold email? Paid ads? Something else?
please let me know if you have any advic!
Thanks for reading.
How do you actually find good leads?
byu/multi_mind inbusiness
Posted by multi_mind
3 Comments
The problem isn’t volume, it’s targeting. You’re fishing in the wrong pond.
We focus on warming up leads first by finding intent signals – posts where people are actively complaining about problems you solve or asking for recommendations. Engage there, then follow up a week later via email. Use some form of social signalling, e.g. Predictent.ai to monitor social channels for these high-intent moments from your ICP.
Also, stop DMing broke founders if your ICP is established companies. Find where your actual buyers hang out and look for buying signals.
50 warm conversations with people who have the problem right now beats 400 cold DMs to random people.
You can get leads via outbound (cold email outreach, social media outreach, cold calls, etc.), or inbound (SEO, LLM visibility, social media marketing, content marketing, paid ads, etc.)
For the best bang for your buck with a limited budget, here’s what to do:
1. Cold email outreach is working well for us and our clients. It’s scalable and cost-effective:
– Use a b2b lead database to get email addresses of people in your target audience
– Clean the list to remove bad emails (lots of tools do this)
– Use a specialized cold outreach sending platform to send emails
– Keep daily volume under 15 emails per address (we do 8 emails per day)
– Use multiple domains & email addresses to scale up daily sends
– Use unique messaging. Don’t sound like every other email they get.
– Test deliverability regularly, and expect (and plan for) your deliverability to go down the tube eventually. Deliverability means landing in inboxes vs spam folders. Deliverability is the hardest part of cold outreach these days.
2. Content marketing for LLM Visibility (formerly SEO). It’s a long-term play but worth it. Content marketing includes your website (for SEO), and social media. Find where your target audience hangs out (ie, what social media channels) and participate in conversations there. Optimize your content for LLMs like ChatGPT to get citations/recommendations from AI.
3. Reddit marketing. Participate in relevant Reddit conversations and add value. Be helpful and give good advice. Use keyword listening tools to find relevant conversations and join in. Do this consistently over time, or find a vendor who can do it for you. Our clients are seeing massive value from Reddit marketing.
No matter what lead-gen activities you do, it’s all about persistence and consistency, tbh.
I feel your pain man I remember when I launched my first app I thought I could just brute force it by messaging everyone it didnt work out.
What I found was targeting the right conversations was WAY more effective than just DMing people randomly. Ads are great but costly and they dont always get you engaged users.
Reddit was amazing for my first app every time someone asked for an educational audiobook app I’d be there in the comments pitching mine if it made sense otherwise trying to be helpful in the conversation and build trust. The thing is it takes forever to do I was glued to F5 bot refreshing all day.
I ended up building a tool for myself to automate that process finding the right conversations for me across Reddit X and LinkedIn. It kinda blew up and turned into its own project its what I wish I had when I was launching my first app it wouldve saved me so much time.
It might help you find the right leads the ones that actually have budget and are actively looking for a solution like yours. If it sounds like something you might be interested in feel free to reach out and I can share it see if it fits your needs.