The search step is shrinking, and outbound got cheap. What is left?

Two things changed under our feet this year.

First, people ask an assistant and do not click. A friend needed accounting software last month and never opened Google. He asked, got three names, messaged a founder he already knew. No search, no form. Every tool in that market waits for a search that never happened.

Second, writing a message became free. Fifty polite emails in a minute, from anyone. So inboxes are full and reply rates keep falling.

What is left is timing. A company signs a bigger office lease. A firm hires ten people in a month. Someone posts that they are moving in September. No keyword, no intent to buy anywhere in the text, but the need already exists.

The engineering part is where it gets ugly. If you try to read those moments from public posts:

• most posts mean nothing, so your filter throws away almost everything
• a lot of "signals" are old, and an old event is not a need anymore
• many authors sell the same service you do, so they look like buyers and are not
• the words people use for their own life are not the words your service uses

I work on ByPath, which does this reading automatically, so I am biased. But even by hand the method holds up: one clear change, five people it just happened to, one short message about that change and nothing else.

If your growth plan assumes a search, it is worth asking how big that assumption still is.