Nobody wants to say this plainly so i will. the AI SDR experiment is coming back with results now, and theyre ugly. one founder asked this week if any of these tools actually book meetings. the replies he counted: out of office autoresponders and No's. months of automation, thats the harvest.
same week, operators started posting their enrichment bills in public. one did the math on a basic search enrichment and landed on a 250x markup over the raw api cost. thousands a month to enrich the same cold lists every competitor is enriching with the same tools.
the tools arent the problem, the lists are
every one of these stacks points at cold data. export from a database, enrich it, let AI write something that pretends to be personal, spray. the person on the receiving end gets forty of these a day now, half of them from profiles with AI generated faces. cold is cold no matter how much AI you rub on it.
meanwhile the actual buying signal is sitting in public, on LinkedIn, refreshed daily, and almost nobody harvests it.
every post in your niche is a lead list
when someone reacts to a post about, say, cold email deliverability, they just told you three things. they care about this exact topic, they care about it this week, and theyre active on LinkedIn. thats a hand raised in public.
the people commenting under your competitors launch post are not a cold list. they are the warmest b2b list that exists, self sorted by interest, timestamped, with their job title attached.
the manual version, free, works today
- find 3 posts in your niche that pulled real engagement, competitor launches and hot takes work best
- open the reactions list and the comments
- copy out the people whose headline matches your buyer, founder, head of growth, whatever your ICP is
- message them about the topic they just engaged with, not about you
thats 20 minutes per post and it beats a thousand row cold export, no doubt about that.
the automated version
i got tired of doing the manual version, so i built it as an Apify actor: LinkedIn Post Engagers Scraper.
paste post urls, get back the engagers, deduped across posts, with an ICP filter on headlines so you only pay for people who match your buyer. half a cent per matched lead. and it never asks for your LinkedIn login, which matters now that account restrictions are the number one complaint in every outreach thread.
first paying users ran it start to finish in week one, every run succeeded. its new, its small, it does one thing.
the rest of my lead pipelines live at pipelines.trykioko.com.
signals beat volume
the channel isnt dead. the lists are. stop paying enrichment markup on strangers and start messaging the people already raising their hands.
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