Had a chat with a SaaS founder last week who swore off all cold outreach

She said she replaced 80% of her outbound with a private Slack community and got twice the close rate, has anyone else seen that kind of shift work?

2 comments

2 Comments

irisw732d ago

I ran a B2B SaaS for 4 years. Cold email was a total waste. Open rates under 10% and almost zero meetings. So I built a small private Discord server last year. It took 3 months to get 50 real customers in there. Now I close deals from people asking me questions in the chat. It's way better than cold outreach.

the_derek2d ago

Interesting take but I gotta push back a little. Cold email worked SOLID for me when I tested different subject lines and kept my follow up under 3 touches. My open rates hovered around 25% maybe it was the niche or the offer but I got real meetings from it. Your Discord method sounds great for building a community but it takes WAY longer to scale. I can hit 1000 prospects in a week with email versus months of grinding to grow a server. Plus not every market has people hanging out in Discord ready to buy. I do agree that people asking questions is a better close but that approach works best if your product has a natural "need to talk about it" factor. For simple tools or low ticket stuff, cold email still wins on speed.