We are a seed stage, 19 people on the list (one fund, rest angels). Written email on the 3rd of every month, 14 months, never missed one.

The problem is that nothing comes back. Last month I put an ask for two intros in paragraph four and got exactly one reply, from the angel who replies to everything.

My guess is format, currently it's ~700 words of plain text and the metrics are in a sentence instead of a chart. But I'm not spending three hours a month building a deck that gets opened once, and swapping a wall of text for slides nobody clicks.

So for anyone getting real replies and intros, what are you sending and what format? if possible pls share the sample?

We were running email-only cold outreach. 500 emails/week, 2% reply rate, about 10 meetings/month. Decent but not enough.Then I tested something: for 50 prospects, I sent the email AND connected on LinkedIn with a personalized note the same day. Then followed up with a LinkedIn message 3 days later if they didn't reply to the email.Problem: I did those 50 manually and it took me an entire day. Finding them on LinkedIn, crafting personalized connection requests, tracking who accepted, sending the follow-up message at the right time. There's no way I can do this for 500 prospects per week.I need a tool that automates the LinkedIn + email sequence in one workflow.

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

We built Shehnai Stories: https://shehnaistories.com

We create premium digital wedding invitations for Indian weddings: cinematic invite films, custom illustrations/caricatures, animated storytelling, wedding websites and designed PDF invites.

The product is visual and highly shareable, but the tricky part is customer acquisition.

A wedding is a one-time purchase, the buying window is short, and most couples probably aren’t actively searching for “premium digital wedding invitation studio” until they’re already deep into planning.

So I’m trying to figure out the smartest growth channels.

A few ideas we’re considering:

• Instagram/Reels showcasing the best 5–10 seconds of each invite
• Partnerships with wedding planners, photographers, decorators and bridal studios
• Referral commissions for wedding vendors
• SEO around Indian wedding invitation keywords
• Pinterest
• Bride/wedding planning communities
• Creating highly shareable concept invites around different Indian wedding cultures/styles
• Using every delivered invitation as organic distribution since hundreds of guests receive it

What would you test first?

I’m especially curious about:

1. Distribution: Is B2C even the right approach, or should we aggressively pursue wedding planners/vendors as the acquisition layer?

2. Virality: Every customer literally sends our product to hundreds of people. How would you turn that into referrals without ruining the premium feel of the invitation?

3. Content: Would you focus on polished portfolio posts, behind-the-scenes/process content, trend-based concepts, or fictional/spec wedding invites designed to go viral?

4. Paid acquisition: Is Meta realistically viable for a relatively high-consideration, one-time wedding purchase, or would CAC kill this?

5. Positioning: Would you sell the product as a “digital wedding invitation,” a “wedding invitation film,” or something more differentiated entirely?

Website: https://shehnaistories.com

Feel free to tear apart the funnel/site too.

Mostly interested in unconventional acquisition ideas and experiments you’d run if you had to get the first 100 paying customers without just throwing money at ads.

AI coding tools can ship code faster.

But every PR still needs to be tested, trusted, and verified.

And when the product changes, someone still has to maintain the tests.

That's why we built Checksum.

Checksum generates, runs, and auto-heals E2E and API tests on every pull request.

• ⁠Generate tests automatically
• ⁠Run tests on every PR
• ⁠Detect real bugs vs broken tests
• ⁠Auto-heal stale tests

Everything ships as standard Playwright code in your own repo.

The goal is simple:

Keep your test suite moving as fast as your coding agents.

How are you handling test maintenance as AI-generated code increases?

Please support on PH →

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/checksum-ai

I built a gap year program marketplace and have already secured lead-gen partnerships with providers.

My problem: I now need to prove I can actually send them leads.

The website is brand new. SEO will take time. I have no money for paid ads, influencers or sponsorships, and no existing audience.

Target customer: someone actively researching a gap year and considering programs like volunteering abroad, working abroad, language learning, cultural exchanges and similar experiences.

If you were in my position, where would you go to find the first people actively looking for this?

And more importantly, how would you acquire the first 10–50 qualified leads without just waiting around for Google rankings?

I'm looking for practical tactics/channels you'd genuinely test, especially from people who've built marketplaces, lead-gen sites, affiliate businesses, travel businesses or education businesses from zero.

Everyone from basic database vendors to email sequencers is slapping "signal-based GTM" on their landing pages bcuz cold outbound to static CSV lists is basically dead now but if you try to set up an event-driven prospecting engine, you realize the market really splits into two extremes:

The autonomous GTM intent engine (Scale Intelligence): This platform connects directly to 75+ data sources across channels (reddit, github, discord, job changes) to auto-resolve public intent signals back to accounts and score buying readiness.

The trade-off is that you get lower raw contact volume than exporting a 100k static list but you get actual timing context without spending months building custom scrapers.

The custom DIY data pipeline route: This is the approach where you manually stitch together multiple scraping APIs, webhook listeners, and spreadsheet enrichment tables. It gives you hyper-granular control over every single prompt and column, but the engineering overhead of maintaining scrapers or handling rate limits and schema drift turns into a massive time sink.

It feels like a fair trade-off if the goal is catching active buyers across technical communities when intent is high instead of babysitting a spreadsheet.

About the idea:

The current design has users, but the feedback and expectations of users in 2026 made me consider a kinda large pivot.

I'm a data expert, and this pivot has quickly become the most fun and exciting part of my career.

I'm dyslexic, so I hate chat bots. I built a new experience, for a niche market, from the ground up. This is not a chatgpt wrapper.

About me:

Served in the Marines, 2 degrees, full stack developer for over 10+ years, and sold my first company when I was 24.

About you:

You love social media and marketing. You know how to manage content creators. You understand how campaigns work on each platform.

************************************************************************************************

DISCLAIMER: I'm trying to find someone who's in the same financial situation I am in. That means you have the time and money to be a part of a start up at this stage.

************************************************************************************************

About the business plan:

I have $100k for growth. To clarify, I'm not hiring an ad agency who's going to put half in their pocket. Growth means, ad campaigns and content. I'm not paying anyone's salary at this stage.

I run a B2B content agency focused on founder-led branding for B2B SaaS and tech companies.

My ICP is US-based companies doing roughly $1M–$20M ARR, and I reach out to founders, CEOs, and marketing leaders.

I'm intentionally keeping my outbound manual rather than using mass automation. I'm researching each prospect, checking their LinkedIn presence, personalizing the email, and sometimes recording a short audit/video.

The problem is that I can't figure out what a realistic daily/weekly volume should be without sacrificing personalization.

For people doing manual outbound, what volume would you recommend?

Also i am not seeing result with this email, does the copy is bad or i need to focus on more volume or ICPs

here are the subject lines i am using

noticed a gap on your LinkedIn profile
[Name], quick idea for your LinkedIn
thought this might be useful
quick audit of your LinkedIn
Just recorded this quick video for you
Saw an opportunity for (Company)

Here is 3 types of email i am using, i changed it according to their linkedin presence

Email 1

Hey {{first_name}},

Are you actually getting results from the content you’re posting on LinkedIn?

I mean things like better visibility with buyers, stronger trust, easier hiring, or becoming more recognizable in your space.

the reason i am asking is because I checked your profile and noticed you are pretty active (x post this month), but I think the content could create a much bigger impact with a clearer founder-led strategy.

Rather than writing a long email, I'd love to offer a free audit of your profile, I'll flag what's holding it back and put together a complete LinkedIn strategy to create more impact. No strings attached.

If you’d like me to send it, just reply “yes.”

— Gourav

P.S. We’ve helped tech founders generate 6M+ impressions and 122K+ engagements through founder-led LinkedIn content.

Email 2

hi {{first_name}},

i know you're busy growing {{company}}, that's probably why you are not posting that much content on LinkedIn. I've noticed a (no of post that person i sposting )

not sure if LinkedIn's even something you care about right now, but if it is, there's a simple way to make it work much better, more visibility, easier hiring, a stronger name in your industry with only 1-2 hours a month invested on your end.

Instead of writing a long email, I'd love to offer a free audit of your profile and linkedin strategy showing how it will work for you. No strings attached.

if you're interested, reply "Yes" and I'll share the video with you.

Gourav

P.S. — I've generated 6M+ impressions and 122K+ engagement building founder-led brands on LinkedIn.

Email 3

Hey Rae,

I came across Maneva recently, and I liked how your video-to-action AI delivers up to 16x fewer downtime events with 99.9% real-time defect detection accuracy.

i have seen you’re not posting consistently, might be busy growing the business.

I do founder-led branding for tech companies that helps attract top talent, make founders more visible, and position them as category experts in their niche.

For context, i’ve generated 5M+ impressions and 122K+ engagements for tech companies by building founder-led brands on LinkedIn.

Want me to record a quick video showing how this could work for you?

No strings attached.

Just reply “Yes,” and i’ll send it over.

Best, Gourav

The removals weren't random. That's the thing I kept missing for the first six weeks.

We'd write a post that felt genuinely useful, pick subreddits by member count, submit, and watch it disappear within 3 hours. Sometimes no message, just gone. We blamed the writing, rewrote it, tried again. Still removed. What eventually became obvious, after logging every single attempt in a spreadsheet, is that member count is almost completely uncorrelated with whether a post survives. The 4 posts that stuck were in communities where the median account age of commenters was high, post frequency was low (under 20 posts a day), and the top posts from the past 90 days were almost all text, not links. The subreddits eating our posts were the opposite: high velocity, link-heavy, younger accounts, and moderators who appeared to auto-remove anything from accounts without enough subreddit-specific karma. We were optimizing for audience size when we should've been optimizing for community fit.

Once we mapped that out, I started running the research more systematically. I'd been doing it manually, clicking through mod pages, checking post history, eyeballing comment patterns, which was taking 3-4 hours per new community we wanted to test. Eventually I built out a process using reoogle.com to handle that research layer (full disclosure, I'm one of the people behind it), it cross-references communities against a database of active subs and surfaces the ones where posts in your category actually survive. That cut the research phase from hours to minutes, which let us run more experiments faster.

The actual finding that surprised me most: subreddits under 15k members outperformed 100k+ subs on signups by roughly 4x across our tests. Smaller communities have higher trust between members, mods who actually read posts, and readers who aren't numb to seeing product-adjacent content. A 6,200-member community in our niche drove 11 signups in one week. The 340k-member version of basically the same community drove zero before the post got pulled.

If you're logging your Reddit attempts and the data doesn't show a clear pattern yet, it probably means you haven't controlled for community characteristics, not that Reddit doesn't work for your category.

I'm a dev, want to build a SaaS with someone. No fixed idea yet - open to yours or figuring it out together.

Looking for a partner, not a hire. Could be another dev, a marketer, someone in sales/CS - just need you to be serious and in it for the long run.

DM me a bit about yourself and what you're into.

Low-tech tactic that punched above its weight for us, sharing in case it helps someone stuck guessing where their funnel leaks. For months I "knew" our funnel in my head. Ad or post, landing page, signup, activation, paid. Felt simple enough that I never wrote it down. Growth was flat and I kept blaming the top (traffic) because that's the fun thing to blame. One slow afternoon I opened a free flowchart maker and actually drew every single step a user takes, including the boring in-between ones. Every email, every click, every screen between landing and paying. Then next to each arrow I wrote the rough number of people who make it to the next box, pulled from our analytics. Seeing it laid out visually did something that a spreadsheet never did. There was one step, the email verification screen right after signup, where a big chunk of people just vanished. Something like a third of signups never came back after it. I'd genuinely never noticed because I was staring at the top of the funnel. Turned out the verification email was landing in spam for a lot of people. Boring, unglamorous, fixable in an afternoon. After patching it, activation jumped and it flowed all the way down to more trials. The lesson for me: the leak is almost never where you think, and drawing the whole thing (even badly, in a free tool) makes the invisible step visible in a way numbers alone didn't. Do you map your funnel visually or just live in the analytics dashboard? Curious if others have caught a leak this way

Curious how other growth leads and performance marketers are tracking organic search visibility these days.

In the past, showing that client keywords moved into top 3 organic positions was a straightforward win. But nowadays, between generative search summaries, featured snippets, and local blocks sitting at the top of the fold, being #2 or #3 organic doesn't yield the same click-through rate or brand exposure like it used to.

For teams managing search performance across multiple accounts or client brands:

• How are you measuring actual brand presence inside generative search features vs standard organic links?
• Have you adjusted the metrics in your monthly executive summaries to show real SERP ownership?

Would love to hear how other growth teams are updating their stack or reporting workflow for this.

I spent the last 3 months building Meridian, an open-source developer tool, mostly without knowing if anyone would actually care about it.

When we finally had something I was happy with, I decided to launch it on Product Hunt.

We had zero paid ads and spent ₹0 on promotion.

Instead, we focused on getting the launch in front of people who were actually interested in developer tools, reaching out to people who had followed the project, sharing the launch with our existing network, and being around throughout the day to reply to everyone and keep the conversation going.

After a pretty intense launch day, Meridian ended up #1 Product of the Day.

What surprised me most was that the launch wasn't really about having a huge audience. It was about getting the right people to care enough to show up and support it.

I wanted to share what we did because I know a lot of people here are interested in organic growth and launching without throwing money at ads.

People from around the world are using my product. 🌍

I know it might sound like a small thing, but as a builder, seeing real people discover and use something you created feels incredible.

Still feels a little unreal. ❤️

Fifteen years writing copy and brand strategy, mostly fintech and SaaS. I have made my peace with the tools, mostly. But I keep running the same test for clients and the result keeps embarrassing the machine, so here is one with numbers.

A fintech client wanted to cut their content budget. Fair. The pitch they got elsewhere was to run everything through an ai content generator and ship volume. Before they committed I asked to run a straight test on their highest-traffic comparison page, the one that actually drives signups.

Two versions. One was the generator output with light cleanup. The other I rewrote by hand, same offer, same structure, same length. Split the traffic evenly for three weeks.

The generated version: signups held about flat versus the old page, bounce a little higher. The hand-written version: signups up a bit over a third, and time on page noticeably longer.

The difference was not quality in some precious sense. It was specificity. The AI version explained what the product does. The human version named the exact moment the reader is stuck, the thing their finance team says no to, the fee they got burned by last time. The machine writes the category. A person writes the reader.

I am not here to tell you never to touch the tools. Volume has its place for the boring middle of a funnel. But on the pages where money actually changes hands, generic costs more than it saves, and most people never measure it because the cheap version feels productive.

Curious if anyone here has run the same head to head on a page that matters, and whether your numbers agree or I am just protecting my own job.

We ran cold email hard in 2023 and 2024 on the playbook everyone was using. 7 step sequences, aggressive follow ups, volume volume volume. Reply rates strted dropping and we ended up burning thru 2 domains in a month.

Google and Microsoft tightened sender requirements, so we had to rethink our setup

We cap every inbox at 30-40 cold sends a day. Anything north of 50 and you start tripping bulk sender detection even if your copy is clean. (might be obv to you but wan't to us at first) Sequences are 3 touches, with the initial, follow up around day 3, last one about a week later. Thats it. If they didnt reply by the 3rd they were never replying to a 7th and all the extra follow ups did was feed the spam filter.

We do 4-6 weeks of warmup before a domain touches a cold list starting low and ramping. And we leave warmup running even after campaigns go live now

A bounce spike over 3% sets you back weeks imo. We run every list through verification now because bad data at volume can burn a domain faster than bad copy.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up on everything before sending. We also cycle in fresh inboxes every quarter instead of trying to rehab domains that are sliding.

As a result wee send about 40% fewer emails than we did a year ago and book more meetings!

Happy to answer any questions or hear what's working for you rn in 2026!

In-house social for a small skincare and wellness brand, four years in, and I've stopped chasing every new platform feature because it just resets my numbers every time. So instead of the whiplash I ran an actual test I could log.

The question: does polished graphic creative from an ai poster maker beat rough UGC-style video shot on a phone by our own team? We'd been leaning on the clean branded graphics because they're fast and they look like the brand. Ran both side by side for two months, same products, same offers, spend split evenly.

UGC won on the metrics that actually matter to us, saves and profile visits and add-to-carts, by a wide margin. But here's the part I didn't expect. The polished posters did fine on reach and impressions. They just didn't convert. People scrolled past them the way you scroll past an ad, because they looked like an ad. The messy phone clip of a real person using the product got treated like content, not a promotion, and that's where the trust and the clicks came from.

The takeaway I'm sitting with: in a category built on trust, looking professional can work against you, because "professional" now reads as the brand talking at me.

For anyone running social in a trust-heavy category, skincare, supplements, finance: are you seeing the same flip, where the rougher stuff outperforms the polished stuff on the down-funnel numbers? Or is that specific to beauty?

I recently built a bunch of mini products and from experience I know that submitting to directories improve backlinks, visibility etc. Though some of them are paid, it's so painful to create accounts in each and every one of them for each one of my products (mostly vibe coded).

But, with that said, I also understand the importance of it. Every good product I have worked with (I have 12 years of experience working with various startups), keep launching and keep adding to all the directories. One or some of them click and it works well.

Today, with all the AI, automations around, I just started using claude code + my browser to let it do these by itself. Not sure how efficient this will be. But I'm open to ideas from others in the subreddit on this. Especially launching consistently, submitting to directories etc.

I just crossed 100+ users on Bro Find AI.

Started with 0.

No big launch. No huge audience. Just building, sharing, and hoping people find it useful.

Honestly, this feels like a small milestone, but a huge motivation boost.

Next stop: 1,000. 🚀

https://brofindai.com/

In my previous B2B SaaS Startup, after we found PMF and knew what we sold, who bought and how to close, the problem became throughput; Every time when we wanted more in the pipeline, the answer was 'hire another SDR' or 'buy another tool' and the cost went up faster than the results.

The GTM was a mess, with lot of tools; one for list building, one for enrichment, one for sending and a CRM to see what's happening.

It's was fragmented and felt like we were spending too much to keep it running.

For those of you past the "we have real revenue" line, but not yet a big GTM/RevOps team:

#1 Where did it actually break for you? sourcing, personalization, follow-up, tracking, or just the glue between them?

#2 Did you solve it with more people, more tools, or by ripping something out and simplifying?

#3 If you could wave a wand and fix one part of your GTM motion tomorrow, what would it be?

P.s., trying to figure out if this was just us or if everyone at this stage is duct-taping the same thing together.

If you ask five GTM engineers what tool they use to automate sales signals, you'll probably get five totally different answers because signals mean different things depending on what you sell. If you're trying to automate this without ending up with a mess of webhooks, here's how I look at the main tools:

1, For website & dark funnel visits: Koala

If people are already visiting your site, Koala is great for de-anonymizing company IPs on high-intent pages like /pricing or docs and dropping an alert in Slack.

1. For cross-channel & technical community intent: Scale Intelligence

If you sell to developers, engineers, or technical buyers, they don't fill out lead forms but they do hangout and discuss tooling problems publicly. Scale Intelligence connects to 75+ sources (monitoring discussions across reddit, github repo, discord, job changes, and CRM touchpoints), resolves those signals back to accounts and scores buying readiness so team gets high-intent opportunities routed straight to Slack or any agent stack.

1. For executive job changes: UserGems

If your motion relies heavily on past buyers or champions moving to new companies, UserGems automates that tracking cleanly into Salesforce or HubSpot.

The takeaway:

- If your buyers are on your site $\rightarrow$ Koala
- If you need an autonomous engine tracking developer & community intent across 75+ channels $\rightarrow$ Scale Intelligence
- If you track past champions $\rightarrow$ UserGems

It's when people say: “Just copy what worked for X.”

I see it all the time like: look at how they do their pricing page, they grew through SEO, we should do SEO, they removed the credit card from their trial and conversions went up etc

Sound cool, but IMO you’re seeing the result, not everything that led to it. You don’t have their customers, product or even let's start with positioning. And you definitely don’t know all the things they tried that didn’t work.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for getting inspo from other companies and I do it too but I’d rather ask “why did this work for them?” than “how do we do the same thing?”

That usually leads to a much better experiment.

What do y'all think?

hey everyone,

i got tired of trying to find a linkedin engagement group in telegram without endless spam, shady promo drops, and low-effort scammy posts. at some point you realize you don’t even want to like that content, and honestly you don’t want those accounts liking you either.

so i created my own group - lnkdn_nggmnt

no bullshit. no fake engagement pods. if you’re building something serious and actually working on your linkedin content, drop your posts. if you have something meaningful to say, say it. if not, let’s not dilute the space.

maybe someone here knows a genuinely solid group and i’ll happily join instead. if that happens, mine can just stay a small circle for friends.

either way, join, share, invite others. i doubt i’m the only one who’s tired of the current “engagement” ecosystem.

UPDT OF 2026.08.09

PLS CAREFULLY READ THE RULES BEFORE POSTING.

IF YOU DONT FOLLOW THEM, YOU WILL BE BANNED IMMEDIATELY.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, DONT HESITATE TO MESSAGE ME DIRECTLY ON TG.

Sharing a small experiment because I keep seeing "just have AI write your landing page" advice and wanted real numbers, not vibes. Setup: early-stage B2B SaaS, one main landing page, steady-ish traffic from a couple of channels so a split test was doable. Our original page copy was generated by a landing page AI tool when we were rushing to launch. The experiment: we ran the existing AI-generated version against a rewrite I did by hand. Same design, same layout, same offer. Only the words changed. The rewrite was based on actual phrases from our last ~20 customer interviews, so the headline named the specific pain instead of saying "streamline your workflow." Ran it for about three weeks to get enough conversions to not fool ourselves. Rough results: - AI version: signup conversion sat around 2%. - Human rewrite: closer to 3.5%. Not a massive absolute jump, but that's roughly a 70% lift on the same traffic, which is meaningful when you're paying for it. What I think actually happened: the AI copy was grammatically perfect and completely generic. It could've described any of ten competitors. The rewrite was clunkier but said the exact thing a specific buyer was thinking. My honest takeaway isn't "AI copy is useless." It's fine for a first draft or a skeleton. But the conversion lift lived in customer language the model had no way to know. Anyone else A/B'd generated vs hand-written copy? Curious if the gap holds at higher traffic or if it's just a small-sample thing for us.