7 Underrated Cold Outreach Tactics for Seedstrapped Founders
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The hardest part about building a startup isn’t actually building - it’s selling.
Even more so for bootstrapped and seedstrapped founders, who don’t have the budget for ads, a big sales team or months to wait for inbound leads.
You have to make things happen yourself - fast, personally and profitably.
That’s why I wanted to feature Prateek Sanjay
Prateek helped startups book hundreds of meetings in 2025 with cold outreach using LinkedIn, Apollo, ChatGPT and regular brute force. He shares his insights regularly on Linkedin.
In this edition, Prateek shares how he has approached cold outreach for seedstrapped founders.
Most cold outreach advice online was made for VC-backed founders. But that advice is terrible for seedstrapped founders, raising once and then turning to profitable growth, need to make money now.
VC-backed teams are told to avoid direct pitches and ask open questions instead. They can afford slow learning: collecting insights, testing ideas, and sending investor updates about what they discover. Even without revenue, those insights look valuable.
These campaigns also show who has money and power to buy later, so they can reach out again with a better offer.
Seedstrapped founders can’t work that way. They have no RevOps team or time for long talks. They must find out fast who will buy: by selling directly and learning from what people pay for, not what they say.
I started building a playbook for this in 2025 with Norwegian and Estonian founders, and it’s been working.
Here are 7 underrated cold outreach tactics that worked for these guys:
Find a damn good sparring partner
Start with who already knows you
Blend manual and automated search
Do manual outreach on LinkedIn
Never personalise a message
Follow up with a comment on timing
Avoid CRMs and just use Google Sheets
1. Find a damn good sparring partner
You do not have the luxury of spending 12 months iterating different copies for a cold outreach message. You need to get to message-market fit with way less guessing.
So please have a tough friend play the role of a highly demanding customer and have them ask you all the hard questions they can imagine:
What different parts is your product or platform made of, what does each part do, and how do they connect to each other?
What is one thing that your product or platform does that makes other customers say, “I want this today immediately. Not tomorrow”?
Who exactly buys your product?
What other options do those customers have than taking your help? Including doing nothing or fixing the problem themselves? Why pick you over other options?
What happens if such customers wait too long or never use your help? What is the cost of such a delay to them?
After people buy from you, how do you keep delivering for them and how often do you communicate with them?
If everything goes well for a new customer, what would you be excited to see happen with them and in what timeline?
Let’s say a customer reaches out to you personally for help with something. The product or anything else in their work, business, or life. What do they usually feel is very difficult or impressive for them that is natural, everyday, and easy for you?
Have other customers ever said thank you to for any kind of help?
Do you feel proud of yourself when a customer says thank you for helping them?
Has anyone’s life ever been made better by your product or service? Do you care that you made a difference in their lives? If so, why do you care?
Can you imagine your future self 10 years from now applauding the work you are doing?
Why are you as a human different from most people?
Why should anyone care about what you are doing?
(And any other questions your annoying sparring partner can think of)
By the end of it, every single angle you can come at for a great cold message should be achieved.
I recently did such a sparring session with a Norwegian founder selling construction software. We ended up arriving at a great message.
I had simply asked:
“Why do people buy from you?”
“To manage data and automate workflows.”
“Then say exactly that.”
That single line became his opener.
Four weeks later: 153 DMs → 45 calls → 2 enterprise clients → cash-flow positive.
Fundraising stress gone.
The final message looked like this:
“Hi firstname, cool to meet someone else in BIM.
I am in the business of managing data and automating workflows.
I would love to chat about it if you ever have the time or interest.”
It was that simple and it worked. But it was a result of a 2-hour sparring session.
2. Start with who already knows you
The biggest mistake most founders do is use Apollo to download their entire total addressable market, enrich their total addressable market inside Clay, and send them all emails in Instantly or Smartlead. All after warming up 40 inboxes and 4 domains.
That playbook is for venture-backed teams. Expensive, time-consuming, and overkill.
If you are building with seedstrapping mindset, you do not need venture-scale returns. You don’t need to prospect the entire total addressable market.
You only need to prospect the low hanging fruit: people who know you or people who know someone who knows you. Those people have a higher chance of responding to you because they have a reason to think you are someone they will get along with. As simple as that.
Before buying lists or hiring SDRs, export your 1st-degree LinkedIn connections via Apollo.io or Clay.
Filter for relevant roles, company size (e.g. $1M+ revenue, 50+ headcount), and message them first.
People who already know your name convert 3x to 5x better.
3. Blend manual and automated search
First start with manual search and then move on to AI-driven prospect search.
A manual search is when you go to LinkedIn search bar and search something like “marketing agency owner”. This works the best. Focus on 1st and 2nd degree connections here.
However, these searches eventually run out. LinkedIn works in a way where it maps out what it thinks your “tribe” or social circle is. Anyone outside your “tribe” is not made visible.
There is a simple trick to using Google search to find other LinkedIn profiles that regular LinkedIn search can not find.
Go to ChatGPT and ask something like:
“Give me a Google X-ray search string to find technology leaders in Norwegian construction industry”
and it will give you a result like:
site:linkedin.com/in (”Head of Operations” OR “CTO”) “construction technology” EuropeYou can just put that string into the Google search bar and you will find LinkedIn profiles of relevant prospects.
Also ask ChatGPT something like:
“Give me a trytelescope.io prompt to find technology leaders in Norwegian construction industry”
and it will give you a prompt like:
Find technology leaders (such as CTOs, Heads of Technology, CIOs, Digital Transformation Managers, or IT Directors) working in construction companies based in Norway. Focus on mid-size to large companies (50–1000 employees) involved in infrastructure, building, or civil engineering. Include company name, job title, LinkedIn URL, company size, and a short company description.Put that into trytelescope.io and you have another very broad list.
Merge, clean, and deduplicate them all in Google Sheets.
Now you’ve built a hyper-relevant list for nearly zero cost.
4. Do manual outreach on LinkedIn
You will get better responses because people can see that the message came from a real entrepreneur who owns a legitimate business.
People can not check whether you are real or not on emails, forcing you to send 1000 emails to get the same number of responses as 100 LinkedIn connection requests.
Are you selling to the C-suite? Most C-suite people respect a message that came from an equal who is a fellow C-suite person. And they can check that on LinkedIn.
And the LinkedIn DM format makes you sound more human.
Best to send a blank connection request and then a message after they accept.
This is one of the best message formats I have seen so far.
Why are you different from most human beings?
Why should anyone care about what you are doing?
Why are you doing this?
The answer to #3 - why does that matter to you?
What do you want to achieve for the customer and in how much time?
Use your notes from the sparring partner session to produce something in the above format.
An example of what it might look like:
“Firstname, cool to meet another technical founder.
I am Lina and I see patterns fast and turn messy ideas into clear steps people can act on.
I built Stratiform Labs to help teams decide what projects to work on first because I wanted them to stop wasting time guessing what to build and help them make smarter choices.
I want people to feel calm and sure when they make work decisions. Because I know how stressful it feels when people work hard but still feel lost.
Our tool can help teams make faster, clearer plans within 30 days. Let’s chat next week if this sounds interesting.”
5. Never personalise a message
You are a founder. You are a CEO. Act like one, god damn it.
You are not some errand boy or errand girl sent by a grocery clerk to collect a bill.
Venture-backed teams have sales reps sending cold outbound messages. Most people do not imagine junior sales reps are well-informed or worthy of attention. So junior sales reps use personalization to get attention.
But personalization makes no sense if the founder or CEO is sending the message.
It instantly lowers your status and shows you as someone less worthy of paying attention to. It hides the clarity and importance of your message which is what is relevant.
Never start a message with “Hey firstname, I noticed you-”
Absolutely not. Please do not. Stop talking. Get to your point.
People are not doing you favors by listening to a founder or CEO like yourself. You are there to offer value and a real opportunity. Any personalization is going to waste their time and focus.
Let me show you some examples here.
TERRIBLE:
Hello there [Firstname]! I noticed your post about how tricky it is to get everyone on the same page. Totally agree! I actually looked at your company’s site and noticed you’re hiring a Product Manager. Congrats! That’s always a fun stage.
I built Stratiform Labs to help teams decide what projects to work on first because I wanted them to stop wasting time guessing what to build and help them make smarter choices.
I want people to feel calm and sure when they make work decisions. Because I know how stressful it feels when people work hard but still feel lost.
Our tool can help teams make faster, clearer plans within 30 days. Let’s chat next week if this sounds interesting.”
EXCELLENT:
“Firstname, cool to meet another technical founder.
I am Lina and I see patterns fast and turn messy ideas into clear steps people can act on.
I built Stratiform Labs to help teams decide what projects to work on first because I wanted them to stop wasting time guessing what to build and help them make smarter choices.
I want people to feel calm and sure when they make work decisions. Because I know how stressful it feels when people work hard but still feel lost.
Our tool can help teams make faster, clearer plans within 30 days. Let’s chat next week if this sounds interesting.”
See the difference between the two? The first one is begging, the second one is telling.
6. Follow up with a comment on timing
If they do not respond, send them a message in a week that looks like this:
“Curious what your timeline looks like for exploring new growth options.
If it’s something you might revisit later, I can note it down and check back later, no pressure.”
7. Avoid CRMs and just use Google Sheets
What you need to do is be open to the possibility that you product, sales process, and offer can change dramatically. And hence the way the selling process takes place.
Venture-backed teams can use Hubspot and Pipedrive. When the product and sales process changes, then you can change the CRM structure by having a junior person to do it.
Not possible for you, seedstrapped founder. Use Google Sheets flexibility.
Final word
But most of all, remember. You are seedstrapped. You are not here to make friends and build a relationship. You are here to sell a specific product, solve a problem to the customer’s content, and move on.
Venture-backed teams can do things on a 36-month cycle. You are not on that cycle. You are on a one-month cycle.
Act accordingly.
Prateek
PS: Here are 3 ways I can help:
1️⃣ Fund - Building with the seedstrapping mindset? We’re looking to invest $100k–$500k in 1–2 companies this quarter with Flying Founders. Let’s connect.
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153 DMs to 2 enterprise clients with a dead-simple message. That's the part people will skip past because it doesn't feel like a "hack." The never-personalize advice will make most people uncomfortable but it's right. Personalization from a founder reads as desperate, not thoughtful.
Excellent analysis! You articulat so clearly why the conventional wisdom for VC-backed startups fails for seedstrapped ventures. Highlighting the immediate need for profit and personalized outreach is crucial.