DEV Community: ByPath

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

ByPath — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:57:11 +0000

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.

Buying signals are public. We just read them as noise.

ByPath — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:00:40 +0000

For fifteen years I sold things. B2B and B2C. The longer I did it, the more one pattern bothered me.

Every team I worked with only reacted to one moment. The moment a person already showed clear intent. They filled a form. They searched. They replied to an email. That was the starting gun, and everyone sprinted at once.

But the real decision formed earlier. Weeks earlier, when something in the person's life or work changed. A team outgrew its office. Someone got promoted. A founder closed a round. A tool finally broke for good. The need was real right then. The person just had not put it into words yet.

That earlier moment is not hidden. People talk about it in public all the time. A post about a move. A complaint about a slow process. A photo of a new space. A line about hiring fast. The signal is right there. It just looks like normal life, not like a lead. So everyone scrolls past it.

I started calling this gap demand blindness. A business can only see people who already named their need. The much larger group, the ones whose situation already created the need, stays invisible.

So we all crowd the very end of the journey and fight over the few who raised a hand. Whoever showed up earlier, calm and human, already won that person.

I do not think this is fully solved. Reading a situation is hard, and the line between early and creepy is thin. But once you start seeing these windows, you cannot unsee them.

If you build or sell anything, here is the question I keep asking. What is the earliest real signal you ever caught from a customer, before they searched for you?

The customers you can't see yet

ByPath — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:42:42 +0000

I sold for about 15 years. B2B and B2C, cold and warm. I built teams and I sold by myself. One thing still sits in my head, and it gets louder now that I work with makers.

Almost every company I worked with only reacts to one moment. The moment a person already shows clear interest. They fill a form. They google you. They reply to an email. Sales and marketing wake up right then and start chasing.

But the real decision happened earlier. Weeks earlier, when something in that person's life or work changed. A team outgrew its office. Someone got promoted. A founder closed a round. The need was real right then. They just had not put it into words yet, so no tool could see it.

That gap is what I call demand blindness. A business can only see people who already named their need. The much larger group, the ones whose situation already created the need, stays invisible. They are posting about the move, the new hire, the bigger space. None of it looks like a buying signal, so everyone scrolls past.

So we all crowd the very end of the journey and fight over the few who raised a hand. Whoever showed up weeks earlier, calm and human, already won that customer.

I do not have this fully solved. Reading a situation is hard, and the line between early and creepy is thin. But once you start seeing these windows, you cannot stop seeing them.

If you build or sell something: what is the earliest real signal you ever caught from a customer, before they searched for you?