I sell LinkedIn Automation APIs. I cold emailed 319 VC deal sourcing platforms that nobody else was targeting.
Here's what happened.
My colleague @AshwiniNK21 runs outbound for my SaaS.
A few months ago she came to me with a list and a targeting angle I hadn't seen before. It was seriously, f***ing brilliant.
The targeting behind that deal was a vertical we'd never touched before.
319 VC deal sourcing platforms across 22 countries.
Deal sourcing runs on LinkedIn, that's where founders announce rounds, where portfolio companies post updates, where deal flow actually lives.
But none of the deal sourcing platforms these funds use connect to LinkedIn natively (they just behave like a CRM) That gap had been sitting there completely untouched.
What I hadn't appreciated until she explained it is how she actually finds verticals like this.
She starts with Discolike, feeds it a company that looks like an ideal customer, and gets lookalikes back.
Half of them make you go "who?" but the AI sees patterns humans don't.
Then she cross-checks on Crunchbase to confirm whether companies are actually alive or just a LinkedIn page with no employees, enriches through Clay to find the right decision-makers, and verifies every email with BetterContact.
The list after all of that is the actual list.
One of the best leads that came through from there was an ex-venture capitalist based out of New Zealand turned founder who was making software for VC firms to source deals.
He replied: "We don't do that, but I am interested."
Two emails in, he booked a call, and we're now helping him set up LinkedIn outreach from scratch.
The reason I am writing this full post is that cold email really works if you have a unique angle and a persona that not enough people reach out to, and a data source that is relatively untouched.
If you use typical database tools like Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you are not going very far because most of the people on those databases get thousands of cold emails every month.
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Bookmark this post so you don't lose it.
Comment "CMO" and I'll send it.
โป๏ธ Repost for priority access.