This story begins as all good stories do - with a cold DM on LinkedIn.
As Andy and I set out exploring, we agreed we’d let our curiosity guide us. We asked ourselves which types of people we were keen to learn about that we would also be happy to build for. We wanted to get to know other founders, so we decided to start there.
We both had founder friends we could reach out to that would happily speak with us the same day, but we knew chasing quick calls was a trap. We wanted meaningful conversations, and when you optimise for quality you often sacrifice lead time.
We chose the harder path because we’d be more likely to get to the truth – that is, a strong signal that something needs fixing. One big benefit of writing to strangers on the internet (unlike friends), is that they don’t particularly care about your feelings [see: Twitter], so you’re more likely to get to the truth faster.
People bash on cold outreach, and understandably so, it adds a grain of static to our noisy digital existence. That doesn’t mean it can’t work – all friends start as strangers.
Enter Jacob of Ploy:
Now things get meta - cold outreach to people who need help with cold outreach.
Jacob fit the archetype of the perfect customer: both the end user and the buyer; personally experiencing the pain; has tried to solve it before; direct financial implications of not achieving his desired outcome.
As a founder of an early stage startup, he was doing cold outreach as one of his acquisition channels. His problem was that the research for cold calls, LinkedIn messages, and emails was taking 3-4 hours a week, and was painfully manual.
As we spoke, Jacob pulled up a spreadsheet with his target prospect list, including an empty column titled ‘research’, and asked if we could find a way to fill it in at scale. Although he understood his problem very well, just as we’ve seen with other customers, doesn’t mean he that knew the right solution.
We dug deeper into his workflow, asking him to show us each step. We found that he wasn’t actually mass outbounding at scale, he was personalising his outreach one by one – in search of meaningful conversations. We realised what he needed then was just in time research. So we had him fill in a config spreadsheet with the data points he searches for, as well as the messaging he uses for each persona type.
Our plan was to surface the most important information he needed whilst dialling the prospect — the hook that he would use that mapped the most relevant value driver of Ploy onto a persona type and their problem set, which each prospect would be assigned given the research.
Two days later, we had built a browser extension that does just that, called Limelight (all naming credits go to Andy):
Under the hood, Limelight does 3 things:
- ingests the profile of the prospect, feeding it to an LLM that researches several attributes
- maps the attributes of the prospect to a persona type
- highlights the value drivers that most resonate given the persona type
If this sounds like it could be of use to you, hit us up and we’ll make something work :) — spikejam.org/contact
Who knows - you could be the next stranger on the internet that becomes a friend in real life:
Learnings
In building for founders we found that they’re no different to other customers in knowing their pain very well, but the shape of the solution is a product of the problem, buried in the pain not the apparent fix.
The product mindset works – focus on the root cause of the pain not the symptoms of the problem. There is no one who understands the pain better than who you are building for. Founders are very aware of how important solving pains are over fixing symptoms so we loved working with founders on this problem.
Cold outbound works – that is, if you’re thoughtful about your audience, approach, and offering.
Andy and Anton come from an engineering and commercial background respectively, they intersect in their obsession with product.
Taking their joint experiences in growth and product — the two areas they spike in — Andy and Anton are working on what their shared curiosity leads them to. To hear where their curiosity led them to next, sign up for notifications on the next post.