Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!
https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/trends/go-to-market-strateg...
Did you have a chance working on small / startup projects; how you balance development commitment?
You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.
The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.
Providing services like virtual machines, managed databases, and Kubernetes clusters wasn't a groundbreaking innovation by the time DO came out in 2011. Even Heroku had been around for four years by then.
Early feedback loops from Joe & friends can be misleading without also stepping back to ask strategic questions like: “How big is this pain?”, “Is this pain widespread or niche?”, and “What are the economic dynamics around solving it?” You’re not truly going from zero to 1 until you’ve mapped those answers and built a clear hypothesis around repeatable product market fit, which involves deliberate strategic judgment calls beyond just refining based on individual user reactions. When we launched DigitalOcean, several major tailwinds aligned perfectly, fueling rapid adoption. Chief among these was the dramatic, yet largely unnoticed, decline in SSD pricing, which Ben and Moisey Uretsky recognized early. Once they explain that change was happening in the world, I was able to understand and explain the whole business: SSD prices dropping allowing us to offer faster infrastructure at price parity (and eventually even lower than traditional providers). The Comp Sci degree was outpacing the MBA handily as an area of study, coupled with the explosive growth in developer focused startups (and startups generally), dissatisfaction with AWS complexity, and a rising wave of DevOps and containerization practices, we positioned ourselves perfectly for the incoming generation of developers. We came to a market with a genuine commitment to simplicity, love, community driven marketing, and API-first infrastructure resonated deeply, creating genuine trust and loyalty that became the foundation for rapid, sustainable growth. I was literally online 24/7365 making sure everyone was happy with everything (except that one time: sorry about that!!!!), just ask anyone here, I was on it.
tl;dr yes, iterate closely with early users, but pair that tight iteration with rigorous market understanding and strategy, if you're unaware of the broder market dynamics, you're at risk of solving only for a handful of early adopters and missing the real market entirely. (I don't like to mention my blog on HN, but I have a most you might enjoy: https://b.h4x.zip/founders/)
I've been reading up on 70s and 80s technology firm histories (including game consoles) and it strikes me that marketing back then was much more strategic, much more about understanding the market, the value customers seek and how to deliver it.
Marketing today feels like a grift.
If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.
This is more market research than business development.
Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.
If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.
Marketing was always a grift when it was done to get rich quick, yesterday or today. Products, brands, businesses... take a long time to bake!
And I can't tell you how many of them are complaining when people complain about cold calling and mass sales emails. I've got a fairly even take on sales, but the absolute entitlement they feel about your time...
Outbound can't die soon enough.
A 'security' consultancy posted an article on LinkedIn on 'critical security vulnerabilities' they found on the web app from a company I worked at. The company hired them to do an assessment. The most critical vulnerability was a bug on a login page preventing registration.
So not only does cold calling work, bad-mouthing on social media seems to be a viable strategy. I'd have blacklisted them.
These people live in a different reality than the rest of us, one they've likely taken steps to convince themselves is true so they don't have to feel bad about their actions. I met someone years ago that was basically a professional email spammer that described his job as marketing and sending newsletters and was convinced that people were OK receiving spam and that he was providing a service by spamming garbage to people who didn't sign up for it.
I posted a job on UpWork last month and probably 60% of the replies were LLM, some of them seemingly automated as they came in moments after I posted. Obviously these were immediately rejected.
Is this something we'll have to get used to?
I got my first internship in 2015 by cold-emailing the CEO of a Waterloo startup that I thought was really cool. At the time, reaching out directly over email with a thoughtful and earnest introduction was a good way to set yourself apart. I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
The problem for UpWork and their customers is what happens when 99% of the replies are LLM generated. The same when everything Google links to is LLM generated or even worse when their LLM summary is generated from LLM content they have been slurping up. The whole sad edifice may well collapse in on itself.
FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good.
My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.
I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?
Just my 0.02.
On one hand, I have potential candidates that I mentor who gleefully tell me how smart they are that they have LLM-backed bots replying to every remotely related job post on every platform. The idea that this approach might not be appreciated is generally met with either profound disbelief or dismissal as "luddite attitudes" or some such. "AI is the new hotness, how can it be bad that we're using it!"
On the other hand, I talk to HR folks, who are just as pleased with themselves that they've deployed ML-driven candidate filtering apps so only candidates that are 'perfect' matches for my job description are even seen by a person. And they do not appreciate it when I point out that must be why the only resumes I've seen from them are buzzword-bingo lists of 'qualifications' obviously included to game the filters, as most subsequent interviews make clear.
So...it seems to be an arms race that we all loose. Get used to it.
A fun thing happened recently. At sales kick off I was having lunch in the mountain skiing and a few young SDRs joined me with their burritos. We were chatting and I got an inbound call from some random numberI picked up and sure enough it was an SDR from some random SaaS that's been trying and failing to reach me. I told that SDR, hey, you got me and 3 of your fellow SDRs here, take your best shot, you will be rated by people who do your job. Ha, he did pretty good! Our SDRs gave him a bunch of sh*t about not using the right call dialer management. It was a "closed lost" opportunity for them.
If someone was paid to kick my puppy, I'm not going to just be OK with it because, "hey it's their job, and we're all struggling."
Yes, low wage workers have so many wonderful opportunities to not get evicted or starve. Don't confuse middle-class and wealthy workers with poorer ones.
Just reminded yourself that they've chosen to remove themselves from the pool of 'real people' by participating scammy activities. They're the ones that have broken the social contract and treating them with respect just lets them continue to believe they aren't doing anything wrong.
Unattractive person walks up to you and asks you for your number - spam.
Company has a thing I need and calls me at the right time - not spam.
Company calls me up when I'm not looking to buy something - spam.
You’re right, of course, timing and fit are the things that work. I don’t think LLMs are going to magically solve either.
The term has moved to other forms of mass unsolicited advertising.
The first spams weren't email but Usenet (notably Cantor and Siegel's "Green Card" spam, which I remember, though that wasn't the first[1]).
We've now got email spam, Web spam, forum spam, SMS spam, phone spam, etc., etc., etc.
The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.
Keep in mind that robocallers (which may have an automated or human at the other end) are dialing billions of numbers in the US per month[2].
Amongst other considerations: spammed networks die as those who find them intolerable defect from them. Phones (and Usenet, and email) were once exclusive, and hence, where intelligent and desired communications were to be found. As costs of utilisation and access fell, that is no longer the case. An instance of the Jevons Paradox as well as Gresham's Law: falling costs leads to increased use, falling barriers to participation makes bad usage drive out good. Direct-dial, universal-access telephony is teetering on the edge of death.
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Notes:
1. Brad Templeton has a history and etymology dating to at least 2001, which makes clear that the term arises from any unspecified "net abuse", with his first instance being in 1978. The phone system is itself a network. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse" <https://web.archive.org/web/20120716231643/http://www.temple...>.
2. See: "Phone Call Spam Statistics (2017 – 2024)" <https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/phone-...>, "How many spam phone calls do Americans receive?" <https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-spam-phone-calls-do-a...> (reported calls only), "Truecaller U.S. Spam Scorecard" <https://www.truecaller.com/us-spam-stats>. Two of the three report 3 billion+ spam calls per month. There are about 331 million mobile phone subscribers in the US (virtually one per person), which would mean over 100 spam calls per month. Some would suspect this is a severe underestimation.
> Spam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator.
If this is also true:
> The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited.
Say I send an unsolicited email by typing it to a businessperson I want to sell my product to. They get my email and didn’t want to receive it. But it wasn’t mass and it was unsolicited.
Was it spam?
Your hypo is utterly unrealistic in that it doesn't reflect reality, or what any business operating a marketing campaign would actually do.
But yes, it is spam.
Yes, that is what I would do as well if I didn't want to answer a clear question.
> But yes, it is spam.
So then you retract this, "The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited." because the only requirement is that the recipient see it as spam?
You know the answer. Only assholes need clarification that unsolicited contact is spam.
And LinkedIn messages don't bother me as long as they follow the rules of the site which don't prohibit cold outreach.
Don't know when that will get here, but when it does (and better AI-powered spam filtering), I think a lot of these problems will disappear, and a lot of sales teams are going to have to rethink.
You're signing up to be sold to when you sign up to LinkedIn.
A company will have radically different sales motions if they are selling a good/service costing:
* < $5k
* $5-50k
* $50-500k
* $500k +
I appreciate all the experience and advice you’re offering on this thread! Take my feedback as a nitpick: as I was reading through your top post, my initial thought was “this isn’t true all the time” because I spent 6 years in 2 separate startups with significant and successful outbound sales where our ADV > $100k.
One company stayed private and profitable while driving revenue north of $80M/yr; and the other company sold enough long-term enterprise contracts to be acquired by a bigger $B company.
Context is king.
I mean, aside from being comfortable with longer sales cycles and taking the time to build more advocates on the enterprise side, I haven't seen a substantial difference across this spectrum (<1K is very different). All are best when the relationship-building is first and foremost.
I've been working on https://humancrm.io to scratch my own itch. A CRM that helps me stay focused on relationships. I'm explicitly not adding any AI or automation to it.
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So there is only a handful of primary entities: Humans, Leads, Deals, Communities (thus no Pets, Contacts, Tasks, Photos, Documents, etc).
I might expand it to capture more data in the future, but waiting to see what users make use of.
Maybe I just live in a bubble, but don’t most people already tune out ads and marketing emails while online?
Who leaves that meeting and starts searching for a solution in their spam email?
The "attention economy" is out, the "trust economy" is in.
haven't we already been doing this since email templating was a thing?
The ability to control their own media presence is what still makes me believe that ActivityPub has a future, but it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it; instead of just sitting on their hands and chasing the audiences wherever they think they are going.
The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content.
This is why I wrote "it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it".
It costs next to nothing to set up a server and configure a bot that mirrors your twitter posts to the Fediverse. If they done just that, they'd be solving their end of the chicken-and-egg problem, and all they would need then is some patience and treat it as a Pascal Wager, where every round of "Here's something stupid that Musk did today" would be a change for them to convert the users to their preferred network, or to just maintain the status quo.
I want the technology to work out, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon. Think of Linux and Firefox; both have been best in category products for years, but neither one has an appreciable market share.
I am not talking about setting up a server by themselves. Managed hosting is a thing. People can get their own media presence without any technical expertise for less than $40/year. (https://communick.com/services/takahe) I am just talking about getting them being curious enough to find a service provider that can do it for them.
I mean, speaking for myself, the fatigue is real and it’s been here for years.
I don’t think LLM content is going to make cold emails seem any warmer. I’ve never opened one and thought “if only this high-volume automated text were slightly more personalized.”
That said, I keep getting them. Seems like nothing can kill outbound, and I doubt LLMs will either.
The number of companies that "Elevate" services/quality/experiences... It's getting so sloppy.
But a lot of these points are recurring ones over the years, it's just like a rubber band that stretches.
At some point, CEOs will go on LinkedIn ...
"We loved the AI boom and it helped us improve a lot of our processes! But we need human connection, and that's irreplaceable - but now our differentiator is that we have humans reaching out to humans. AI will still be here as a sidekick."
If outbound sales becomes ineffective, people will have more opportunities and time to think about their inherent needs, as opposed to being funneled into all their decisions by a salesperson.
It's frightening how much stuff people are buying that they don't need. While there exist stuff which they need that they don't know exists.
So now you have to do all the big things upfront and come to market with a fully polished professional offering to be taken seriously.